Cornflakes

i'd be behind that :V but thats no prison thats fun for the inhabitants lol

he wants the D

and why would anyone want to pay extra to make a prison facility /fun/ for the inhabitants?

not in this thread. and direct stat manipulation completely removes the interesting part of the design system the interesting part in the whole system as i advocate is that you have to think and tinker around with the sliders to get the actual gameplay relevant stats you want. to reuse my gauß cannon again: there is no single part that affects efficiency, muzzle velocity, damage, or most of the stats that actually matter. a bigger barrel isnt just "moar damage". its heavier projectile, higher ammo needs, more size, more mass, more recoil, larger, less efficient coiling (which subsequently causes the bullet to be even slower than it would be from the increased mass), lower refire rate if you are power limited, and (if its a turret) lower tracking speed due to the increased mass and size. and that was /one/ tweakable of /at least/ 5 or 6 that a gauß cannon would have. there is no "one slider per stat" thing as you claim. your system is the shallow and boring one because you can directly chose what you want, instead of tweaking the whole device to do what you want.

I'd have nothing against an object that can be used to play audio streams from external sources (IP radio, soundcloud, blah). As long as i can turn it off and extract the link to the origin of the sound fils. But the important part is turning off others noise. Doesnt need any copyrighted data to be uploaded to NQ servers.

Use the RDMS for maps as well. With individual constructs/asteroids/planetary hex sectors being the smallest unit and the rest being handled by sub-/groups and access rights. With whole planets or systems being available to the whole faction but the positions of that surveillance ships not. Or any other combination someone finds useful.

Good luck getting mods into an MMO without any private servers What does a pretty chill drum and bass band have to do with alien appearances?

What does that have to do with how detailed/complex elements are? All you described are features of the ship you mount elements into, the ship you build from voxels and the mesh elements. What "physically based upgrades"? There are only sliders. Heater strength [---|-] Propellant pumps [--|--] Accelerator length [|----] But theres no "thrust", "efficiency", etc sliders. You'd have to mix and tune the design to what you want and need, and not just crank the sliders as far to the right as you can afford

And why should other players bother to build a prison that would be fun to be incarcerated there? Players are players, they'll do what is the least effort to archieve something. Especially when its a big project like a prison facility.

Build a big spaceship, label it a city. Done. :shrug:

and no travel time to anywhere makes the economy homogenous and boring and removes large parts of strategic gaming for larger alliances. because when everything is (very) close theres no strategising in war nor localised, diversified markets that make any interesting trade gameplay.

UI options -> show streaks [x] (hotkey shift+S):shrug: I'd not think of it being visible in normal space. Its something your sensors can detect and show you when asked to do so.

Well, i wasnt saying that you chose /stats/ directly but /design features/ which affect the stats of the device. There is no "efficiency" slider you crank up. for example with a thruster: When you want to increase propellant usage efficiency (specific impulse) you give the drive a longer/stronger acceleration stage or more powerful heaters which cause the drive to use up more power but to produce more thrust with the same propellant mass flow. It now needs less propellant for the same thrust, at the cost of needing more power.

Seems like my thoughts didnt arrive at your end lol. With the spool-up and spool-down i meant that a stargate would slowly create/desroy a wormhole or similar phenomenon that could be used by anybody and anything that reaches it. so once a connection is established anyone who makes it to the wormhole can fly through. "Usage permission" would be that the defense systems of the gate dont actively try to keep you away from the wormhole (shields, webs of tractor beams, old fashioned cannon to the face, etc). A civilian or friendly ship would ask for permission to jump to prevent any negative reactions from the gate owner. A military force wouldnt give much of a shit when the gate denies access unless the gate itself is a fortress. But vs civilians or neutrals a few area denial systems would be enough. Depending on the exact time it takes to spool down it would lead to hour to day long delay fights while the wormhole slowly collapses. Or to the defenders cutting themself off ahead of time but by doing so they more or less abandon the area behind. Im not sure about the "one-man-scoutship" because ten flight minutes at FTL speeds are at least 1.25 times the distance earth-sun. (In a realistic system, at 1c)Depending on how fast the drives are it could quickly become the best part of a solar system thats monitored with that single sensor. Im not sure that that'd be balanced if you could fit such a sensor in a single seater. I'd associate such detection ranges more with a big, dedicated surveillance station or system defense center than with tiny picket ships.

Kinda sorta, yeah. With the sliders also affecting the physical shape of the object in the game world.

As i already said, the streak would go for a "long" but limited distance. A few hours to days of flight forwards and backwards. Enough that defenders have time to detect incoming ships and organise something. well, the streak would vanish if the ship drops out of FTL. Maybe some measurable effect could travel through the streak when you actually drop. (If it takes a few seconds to go sublight) And yeah, it cannot tell you the emergence point because neither the game, nor the player controlling the streaking ship have to know it at the point where you can detect the streak.

Define room? Define breach? You need to do a lot of flood fills to determine if theres a way to space from a given voxel. No, that wont work because its no different from the problem that prevents fluid mechanics from being in the game. The thousands of ships dont need cellular automatons or expensive flood fills to move. The moving is just done the same way as with a normal modeled object in any other game, with local coordinate systems and movement of those.

You definitely said dynamic oxygen, because that is what you need for local concentration changes Search for "atmosphere" (ctrl+F) on the page, because i cant figure out how to link individual posts https://board.dualthegame.com/index.php?/topic/22-devblog-multiplayer-ship-crew/

I'd like to think that the streak changes with the drive causing it and its load state (big drive, small mass, like an empty freighter). So with a database of hyperdrives and ship masses you could take a guess to what kind of ship is coming towards you. And from what i know about the ftl drive is that it'll be a very free type of movenent, without any fixed emergence points. Kinda like an afterburner on crack, or similar to the cruise drive of the game freelancer if you have played that. With you being able to change course and dis-/engage it largely at will. The streak wouldnt mark the designated exit point but only the path through which the streaking ship would fly along if it kept its current heading. (and where it came from if it didnt change its heading)

Of course it would be limited, maybe with some point system or similar. Also a lot of the sliders wouldnt be a purely better/worse choice. To reuse my gauß cannon example Larger bore means more expensive ammo and lower rate of fire and muzzle velocity but gives you a harder punch with less armor penetration. Longer barrel means higher maximum muzzle velocity, but more energy per shot and flat out larger gun. More space for ammo feeder means smaller capacitor banks which translates to lower muzzle velocity and damage per shot. Bigger support section means its simply a larger gun, which you have to fit into your ship somehow. And so on and so forth. A gun with all sliders to one side isnt an ubercannon, its a very special cannon with a certain usage field.

Regardless: in terms of the OP's idea: Maybe all elements could be generated based on rules and the parameters being tweaked by the player (with the magnitude of modification determined by player skills and used materials). Kinda like the face/body editor from the sims, but for engines, weapons, etc. With the model not being hardcoded but generated with parametric modeling and the stats being affected by the parameter tweaking as well. For example a gauß cannon could have the amount of coils, the number of windings in each coil, barrel diameter, space dedicated to the loading systems (how fast it can be reloaded with projectiles), space dedicated to its capacitor systems (maximum energy stored), dimensions of its connector block (and thus volume available to caps and loading system), space for power electronics (how fast the caps can ideally recharge) and so on. When done with enough tweakability a fighter rapid fire cannon and a capital artillery cannon could be the same "part" but with differently tweaked numbers. No dedicated modeling tool needed for individualised parts, no multipart system either but it allows players to adapt equipment to their needs/preferences and would also allow visual identification of "custom" parts.

erm... no it doesnt. Too many degrees of freedom in the designs, in the equipment and in the ships as a whole. People will try, as they always do, but theres always something that can defeat you.

gates dont need to be hard-linked to provide limitations to travel, but dont need to be instant dial-anything to avoid a billion-and-three jumpgates in every system. Have them take time to connect and disconnect stargate connections. Important and high throughput connections will rarely or never shut down. While the odd out of the way system would be dialed in on request or on a schedule from a secondary gate.

[Citation needed] Flight time and whom i take with me arent much of an obstacle when i can just log off with that character and play with another for the duration of the flight :shrug: It definitely is "suddenly, fleet" for the destination. because they dont have any information about the big blob of ships incoming before it is in interplanetar-ish range. So when they are already in the system. If you look at the context im saying there that spool-up and spool-down times make it impossible to just switch off gates. Not that NQ said they wouldnt be able to being just switched off You definitely need some other form of interdiction for interstellar space: Example: Say you can detect a ship up to ten minutes away in FTL from your position and maybe two minutes of that range are interdictable. from your own statements lets assume that a system is roughly 1 hour in radius, 2 hours in diameter. thats about 1/12 of a systems diameter scannable from a single ship, which seems about right for me for large sensors and in-system play. to guard a systems borders at the 1-hour-radius mark you'd have to keep an eye on 45000 square minutes of surface area. a ten minute detection radius would have a cross section of about 314 square minutes (the volume of the detection sphere doesnt matter because the intruder has to fly through your cross section to be detected). so you'd need 144 ships, which is bit higher or lower because you cant fill a surface with discs but you can let your ships patrol which closes the gaps. so lets assume that the 144 is a valid number. which is the ratio of system radius to scan radius times two squared so you need (rsec/rscan)²*4 ships to cover a given system from intruders from outside it. which gets highly highly uneconomical very fast for 1h+10min warning time you need 14² ships or 196 for 1h+20min you need 16² = 256 ships and so on. its not economical to prevent any incursions into a system from the outside without any extra trickery. when writing this i had an idea about how to statisfy both of us: what if active FTL drives would produce a "streak" forwards and backwards along its current orientation, a streak you can detect "long" ahead of the actual ship (hours to days) when it passes through your sensor range? it would keep the free movement and give defenders time to react to incoming fleets from outside their systems without making sensor ranges in general gamebreakingly long. and for travelers into unsettled space it doesnt matter because theres no limitation on movement. for traders it would introduce a game of deception and a bit of luck to avoid being ambushed in unsafe areas, as fling just straight ahead could lead you to an ambush of someone who already came across their streak, but changing course could lead to you being detected in the first place when you wave around that beacon. maybe with a bit of an opening angle that aiming-a-bit-past-your-target is unfeasible.

You can dig down, how far is not yet clear. Last number i remember was "a few km" Below that theres anyway not much of a difference gameplay wise but bragging rights.