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Mass, Density and Inventory management


Violet

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How are inventories going to be limited in game?

How much will I be able to store in my ship or my suit?.

 

This has huge implications on game play, on one hand you could make it totally realistic you can only carry like 20kg of anything in your backpack. like in real life or you can go the minecraft route and be able to carry 300 million tones of gold if you fill every slot with a 64 stack of gold blocks.

 

Since you don't control the creation of ships you need to put design constraints on ships, I suggest that items should have a realistic mass and density, want to ship 300 hundred tons of ore? You should have to craft a  sizeable "cargo bay element" that would be big enough to hold the volume and mass of your construct would change based on how much was stored in that inventory at any time.

 

Cargo ships should have to be massive to be economically viable in terms of profit margins versus fuel costs. Slow lumbering ships should be more vulnerable to pirates and when the individual cargo bay elements are damaged they should drop their contents as 1 dimensional sprites a'la minecraft

 

Stations would have to be massive sprawling constructs with huge enclosures for cargo bays that service the market place. Major planetary settlements would have a reason to have large structures apart from vanity houses and public art (not that they cant be both). There could be a mechanic where if you get close enough on foot to a pod you can scan it to find out whats in it, so you attempt a break in or blasting it from space.

 

Refining should be "realistic" in that it should be slow and require massive (and vulnerable) refineries (at least to get the best efficiency), and have waste products that need to be disposed of even if its just dumping slag piles everywhere, similar deal with building elements and other products.

 

 

Really excited about this game, I have enjoyed the Dev diaries. I'm really interested in "systems based" approaches to game design as that is how you create great emergent situations. Two of my favorite games of the last couple of years RimWorld and Prison Architect are based on this idea and I'm really pleased to imagine it in a multiplayer environment. 

 

Balancing this game is going to really tricky, make things too realistic and people will not want to play but make it "fun" in the wrong way and you will have real problems with economics and the individual power of a new player versus an established veteran or everyone would get super rich and not have to do anything

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This has huge implications on game play, on one hand you could make it totally realistic you can only carry like 20kg of anything in your backpack. like in real life or you can go the minecraft route and be able to carry 300 million tones of gold if you fill every slot with a 64 stack of gold blocks.

I think it would be better to have a weight limit on inventories, not something ridiculously small, (so that parts of a ship can be built) but at the same time, not something overly large that would defeat the purpose of the weight limit.

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I think it would be better to have a weight limit on inventories, not something ridiculously small, (so that parts of a ship can be built) but at the same time, not something overly large that would defeat the purpose of the weight limit.

even better, volume limit. Like, you can't carry 2 miniguns, one rocket launcher, 40 missiles and a lollipop. We all know that backpacks can contain many things, but lollipops are topping them off :V

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even better, volume limit. Like, you can't carry 2 miniguns, one rocket launcher, 40 missiles and a lollipop. We all know that backpacks can contain many things, but lollipops are topping them off :V

but in a way, how is that different from weight limit? You've just change one unit to another unit?

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I think it was confirmed in DUE ep 10 that the Dev has already planned this, it isn't finalized but they will not be unlimited but "comfortable" meaning you can store vast quantities whcih will no doubt increase with skill ect as they can be compressed by future tech .. This means you wont be running to containers ect to build large structures but will eventually need more than 1 player to build super structures and so on

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but in a way, how is that different from weight limit? You've just change one unit to another unit?

well, in a way, a rocket launcher may weight the same as 400 lollipops, but you couldn't fit two rocket launcers in your backpack due to  1 rocket launcher taking up more space than 400 lollipops :P I can't math properly I'm not a math doctor :P

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I think the game should restrict onfoot weight only in so much that it effects player fatigue but is still fairly generous. On ships you can put as much mass in ship inventories as you like so long as it fits the volume (m^3) of ships inventory elements (just a number) but the flip side is it makes your ship really heavy and you will need to use more fuel/accelerate slowly/not be able to get off the ground.

 

There is a huge range in densities and there is a fairly (at least there could be) consistent correlation between value and density. Ships that carry ore or water or other common metals will very differently designed to ships transporting valuable parts or refined rare metals like iridium or gold.

 

http://www.simetric.co.uk/si_materials.htm

 

Another bonus is that it will make pirate getaways interesting as your nimble space fighter turns into an overloaded shopping trolly, and jetsoning your heavy cargo might be a good tactic if you could out run them otherwise.

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Could do some handwaving with a magic hand (ha!) replicator. Your on person inventory is converted to energy on stored in your battery (I haven't thought this fully through).

 

Another point in low gravity you can store more mass because the weight is the same. And zero gravity you can store as much mass as you want, acceleration becomes more challengine though.

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Could do some handwaving with a magic hand (ha!) replicator. Your on person inventory is converted to energy on stored in your battery (I haven't thought this fully through).

 

Another point in low gravity you can store more mass because the weight is the same. And zero gravity you can store as much mass as you want, acceleration becomes more challengine though.

 

I think for the suit inventory it should have some sort of multiplier effect, say that if you put 100kg in your back pack it only counts as say 10% so effectively 10kg so you could theoretically lift several tons in 1g but there should be a limit otherwise people will abuse this and transport huge amounts in the suit inventories.

 

This is a balance issue that will have to be tweaked until a good middle ground is found.

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