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There are no ways to make a good ship (pve)


Gottchar

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This is strictly talking pve.

 

Just like you can not be good at waiting for the bus, there is little to be said about ship building skills.

 

More voxels mean more mass without any non cosmetic benefit.

Obstruction is bad, but easily avoided.

Mass (HUB) to the middle, adjuster to the outside.

Those are the basic rules, as long as you follow them any ship is only a partlist. Give me and 5 other players the parts and we will each end up with a roughly equally good ship, and character (not player) skills have far more impact compared to any amount of thought put into the design, and that is sad.

 

It would be quite simple to fix this without killing any "normal" ships:

-get rid of the "what propels you can not turn you" rule, ships with all wings in the back should pitch forward.

-Wings/Ailerons/stabs keep their current stats, but try to counter any unintentional rotation by increasing lift by up to 50% (or whatever) at the cost of increased drag. So an unbalanced ship still works perfectly fine but may start tipping at high cargo mass. It will also have slightly higher fuel consumption/decreased topspeed.

-Same with engines, if you have most engines high up, they will have to run at reduced power so your ship does not tip forward. Which means you still fly, but less efficient.

So this would allow practical builder to actually shine and at the same time not destroy all other bots, it would just mean thoughtless building is less efficient.

Currently what you see on the pic works, just sort everything alphabetically and smack it on.

abc.jpg

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4 hours ago, Gottchar said:

It would be quite simple to fix this without killing any "normal" ships:

-get rid of the "what propels you can not turn you" rule, ships with all wings in the back should pitch forward.

-Wings/Ailerons/stabs keep their current stats, but try to counter any unintentional rotation by increasing lift by up to 50% (or whatever) at the cost of increased drag. So an unbalanced ship still works perfectly fine but may start tipping at high cargo mass. It will also have slightly higher fuel consumption/decreased topspeed.

-Same with engines, if you have most engines high up, they will have to run at reduced power so your ship does not tip forward. Which means you still fly, but less efficient.

So this would allow practical builder to actually shine and at the same time not destroy all other bots, it would just mean thoughtless building is less efficient.

 

I like this and agree with it in atmosphere. Except for engine placement creating unbalance away from center of mass without an opposing force, in space the rules are different since there is no real measurable drag, thus engines/rockets/adjusters pointed in different directions is a must have or you can not steer. But definitely would make sense that flying blocks with 10 stabilizers on one side, and 4 engines on the other, should have huge flying difficulties, if they could at all.

 

Very nice! @TheTulucan I love where you placed those retro rockets! I think I will steal that idea! *YOINK*

 

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First, in the long run, there won't be any pure pve ships because what you can do in a safe zone is too limited.

 

And you should attended the upcoming expo. Might change your mind about what ship builders can do.

 

If we're going to have engines applying torque, 1. adjustors should also apply linear thrust and 2. I should be able to building functioning lifting surfaces from voxels. BTW, they tried applying torque from the engines/ailerons in pre-alpha and found it made building ships too hard without providing much fun. I really don't see them going back to that.

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27 minutes ago, Daphne Jones said:

And you should attended the upcoming expo. Might change your mind about what ship builders can do.

 

Making really pretty ships, I know. All of them would work better if you took the voxels away and they are still only a list of their parts. I am aware there used to be physics, can we have them back please?

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Getting tired of these stupid builds that stack brakes, wings, etc ... or even hide working parts inside ships. It's a real game breaker to me. If you have to dumb it down so much that people can't conceive why planes work and they can't just make a flying brick, then don't try to apply any reality to the game. Just build pretty things, ignore reality.

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16 hours ago, vylqun said:

But it should also be avoided to overcomplicate things

 

currently the game checks every single element, all the time, lets the client do the math, checks the result, then lets the client move. Which is also why you cant use 300 wings. So tech wise the whole mess needs an overhaul anyway.

About user experience, like I said, crafts should have some amount of auto-help, which would mean all ships that dont look like the one on the pic or are terribly unbalanced in some other way still work fine. They may only dip forwards or similar when carrying a lot of cargo, or have more drag than before. Users would need to adjust to the new rules or have reduced performance of their craft. 

99% of the crafts still work, but there would be good and bad crafts.

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Honestly, I think elements themselves in their current form are a big part of the problem. I'm putting together a post better explaining this, but I think there should be honeycomb voxels, and element voxels, similar to the way the build system in Avorion works. Instead of having a set Engine L that you need to make fit on your ship, engines would be designed the same as you design your ship, and weight/thrust/fuel consumption would all be based on it's size. Elements as they currently exist could still remain untouched for people who don't want to take the time to build their own engines, but elements greatly stifle creativity IMO.

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i agree with all the wing/brake spam on every ship. L ship that can stop from 5000km/h in 5 seconds is just a joke. my biggest problem however is a different one. am i the only one that finds atmo engines SUPERUGLY??? the M engines look okay but L engines are horrible you need so many of them for a big ship it fuckin sucks. no i dont want XL atmos i want good looking engines and i want to be able to change the color of these engines. there should be like 10 different looking engines for each size with different strengths and weaknesses. yea i know we have different engines like military but come on it sucks, they all look the same.

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On 11/26/2020 at 9:25 AM, Daphne Jones said:

First, in the long run, there won't be any pure pve ships because what you can do in a safe zone is too limited.

I know it's an old comment, but I am going to use your same way of thinking (currently it is limited, and I don't like pve) but against you, ready?

First, in the long run, there won't be any pure pvp ships because what you can do outside of a safe zone is limited...
Let's be honest and let's compare the feature inside and outside current safe zone!

Safe zone:
- mining
- Terraforming
- Ship building
- Space station building
- Base building (inc industry)
- Territory control
- Hauling (goods and people)
- Trading 
- Atmospheric flight
- Space flight

Non Safe Zone
- Space station building
- Hauling (goods and people)
- Space flight

Humm I wonder who is too limited in their gameplay ... As for what the long run will bring, correct me if I am wrong, but you have 0 confirmed sources of what it will be for real, just are just expecting the game to move in the direction you want...

 

Quote

If we're going to have engines applying torque, 1. adjustors should also apply linear thrust and 2. I should be able to building functioning lifting surfaces from voxels. BTW, they tried applying torque from the engines/ailerons in pre-alpha and found it made building ships too hard without providing much fun. I really don't see them going back to that.

From the codex in game: Physics scripting, how is your ship flying?
 

...engines are capable to exert a force on the body of the ship. To be more precise, there are two things an engine can generate:

  • Forces: they actually push your ship and make it move in a given direction
  • Torques: they make your ship rotate on itself

To simplify the control problem, we made a first move by defining engines that can do "torque" only, called the "Adjustors", vs engines that can do "force" only, basically the other engines. Hovercraft engines are the only engines capable to produce force and torque at the same time.

You can control the thrust of each individual engine in your ship by plugging them in the Control Unit and using the setThrust method. However, this can become tedious as the number of engines grow, and it is quite difficult to calculate exactly what thrust to apply to which engine if you want to control the overall global cumulative effect. So, we introduce a cool notion to simplify the process of controlling your engines: grouping.

Grouping engines is done via a tagging mechanism, that you can access by right-clicking an engine and setting its associated tags. By default, all engines are tagged with "all" and some other tags indicating their typical role in the ship control. The default tagging is the following:

  • Adjustors: all, torque
  • Hovercraft: all, vertical, torque
  • Vertical Boosters: all, vertical
  • Air brake or Retro Engines: all, brake
  • All the others: all, horizontal

Note that all engines have the option to be used for torque and force, so any ships can have their engines placement to be important if they want to...

 

The core problem of min/maxing, so not using voxel and making ugly mess that don't make sense howver is still existent, especially on smaller ships, as on larger ships (especially cargo one), the voxel mass is very low compared to the element/cargo mass. it also depend on the type of vexel used, my xs cargo hauler have very little voxel mass and still look good to my opinion, and there are many great ships builders out there who do an incredible job without over exageration on the element side!

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"Note that all engines have the option to be used for torque and force"

yes, but why would you?

The game is super simplified to the point that you cannot fail, the fact that you can give yourself a disadvantage if you want to doesn’t mean the game has depth.  Also please not it is an either/or situation, as an engine can not have torque and thrust at the same time.

As long as the craft in the pic of my original post flies perfectly fine, there is something severely lacking in this game and the only "
Technical discussions and ideas about the builder experience in Dual Universe" you can have is talking about how there is no building experience other than placing voxels.

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8 hours ago, UbioZur said:

I know it's an old comment, but I am going to use your same way of thinking (currently it is limited, and I don't like pve) but against you, ready?

First, in the long run, there won't be any pure pvp ships because what you can do outside of a safe zone is limited...
Let's be honest and let's compare the feature inside and outside current safe zone!

Safe zone:
- mining
- Terraforming
- Ship building
- Space station building
- Base building (inc industry)
- Territory control
- Hauling (goods and people)
- Trading 
- Atmospheric flight
- Space flight

Non Safe Zone
- Space station building
- Hauling (goods and people)
- Space flight

Humm I wonder who is too limited in their gameplay ... As for what the long run will bring, correct me if I am wrong, but you have 0 confirmed sources of what it will be for real, just are just expecting the game to move in the direction you want...

 

 

Everything you can do in the safe zone can be done in the (eventual) combat zone. But (final) SZ is limited to T3-.

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16 hours ago, Gottchar said:

"Note that all engines have the option to be used for torque and force"

yes, but why would you?

Adjustors for force, there are good reasons I can think of (translation for precise manoeuvering on landing), Torque en Engines, I wouldn't (It's complicted enough on KSP), but they asked for it, so just saying it's available.

 

 

13 hours ago, Daphne Jones said:

Everything you can do in the safe zone can be done in the (eventual) combat zone. But (final) SZ is limited to T3-.

The keys words here are eventual and final, both in parenthesis because they are not yet in game, making your sentence not correct for the time being, and there is no way for you to garantee that it will be the case in the future! So especially for the beta time, there are a lot of reasons to want pve ships and not so much to have pvp ships. When and If things change in the game to increase the pvp attractiveness by adding more feature in the pvp area, then things may change, yet things will change in the safe area too to add attractiveness into the safe area too.

 

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I'm finding the PVP aspect extremely limiting to my PVE ship.

 

If I build a ship JUST for safe space its built out of carbon nanofibre (looks good, makes RL sense) and basically consist of engines , moderate fuel tanks, and cargo bays, as expected.

 

If I want to factor in surviving being ganked in most of the solar system I have to:

     1)  Build from steel (adds mass:  e.g.  More engines, more fuel, both of which add more mass)

     2)  Build a gold cage around my core and pilot set (adds mass)

     3)  Equip with decent weapons just so that the ship LOOKS like it might fight back (adds mass, huge expense, and if I want to actually defend, a huge number of talent points)

     4)  Invest in an entire tree of talent points to boost the HP of my ship

     5)  Wrap cargo containers and other critical items in air-gapped shielding (adds mass, seriously increases frontal cross-section, meaning more wings, more engines, more fuel, etc.)

     6)  Somehow design this massive beast so that I can go from 0 to 29999 within the safe zone of a planet, and stop in that same range.

or

     A) Add a warp drive (only available mid-game) and buy warp cores (can't afford, and with 0.23 can't make until end-game)

     B ) Never EVER make a mistake like going to the bathroom when approaching a planet and overshoot the safe zone

 

PVE's need a defensive option:  Something like radar jamming which decreases a PVPers range by 90% (perhaps skill based)

 

I want to get back to building slick looking ships, not having to build a tank to survive.

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The best factor in surviving getting ganked is not getting caught adding on weight in weapons and armor for ship not purpose built for combat impacts your performance and increases the probability of getting intercepted in the first place.

 

Making your hauler a tank only makes sense if you are flying with escorts to give them time to destroy attacking ships, flying haul tank solo is designing for failure defenses buy you time if however you have nothing to change the circumstances in that time you are only delaying the inevitible and making a ship loss more expensive. 

 

The best defense a hauler has is proactive measures scouting the route taking the less traveled path.

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Now for making ships require voxels IMO there should be a structural integrity aspect, for a given weight and acceleration there should be a certian strength in voxels required so products stuff like carbon fibre should have good strength to weight ratio which would be a different stat to HP etc. So stuff like lithium voxel would be for a fuel efficient ship but would have to limit acceleration while high performance ship would need to be built strong. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

I miss how it was done with SWG, You would have to create the parts you needed for your Starship, then have the shipwright skill/profession, and put everything together, then you had your ship. Made hings a bit easier I would think. 

 

I am new to the game and look forward to the challenge of this game as well. From what I understand it is better to start small and build up. 

 

Question and this might be the wrong place for this question: Are you able to build mines like to mine the different ores and such? 

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On 12/31/2020 at 7:45 AM, StarCrusher said:

Question and this might be the wrong place for this question: Are you able to build mines like to mine the different ores and such? 

Right now all mining is done on land using a handheld tool on your player character. Asteroid mining and automated mining have been mentioned as possible future updates, but they don't exist yet.

 

There is a territory scanner that you can add to ships that will identify the nearby ores available to mine by hand. That is the only ship component we have that is related to mining right now.

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On 11/25/2020 at 12:59 PM, TheTulucan said:

True words !


200 hours of construction time for M ship and only one L container payload.

 

And why should you jump with it?

dualuniverse_2020-10-22t00h02m19s.jpg

what do u have if  u can only carry one l container. I can carry more then one with a M ship.

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  • 1 month later...

In my opinion the things that hold ship design back the most are: 

1. Voxels being comically weighted.  carbon fiber weighs almost the same as concrete,  Titanium is heavier than steel  and this list goes on and on 

2. Engines and other elements are so weak we have to stack 100s of them just to get off the ground or land them safely 

3. lack of xl atmo engines make every ship have to have a huge flat are on the back just for 20 or more engines 

4. Not having hybrid engines.  it would be so great to have hybrid engines that can do both cutting out the need for a ton of elements 

5. why are we using wings  9000 years in the future ?   wings seem to be one of the things that cause ships to lag the most.   Make a Lift Module that provides lift and can be stashed away inside the ship. 

 

Little off topic  AGG should work from the ground cutting out the need for all the 1000m platforms. The speed of AGG is slower than my toon can run all this is just silly please fix. 

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  • 1 month later...
On 2/15/2021 at 8:35 PM, Fembot68 said:

In my opinion the things that hold ship design back the most are: 

1. Voxels being comically weighted.  carbon fiber weighs almost the same as concrete,  Titanium is heavier than steel  and this list goes on and on 

2. Engines and other elements are so weak we have to stack 100s of them just to get off the ground or land them safely 

3. lack of xl atmo engines make every ship have to have a huge flat are on the back just for 20 or more engines 

4. Not having hybrid engines.  it would be so great to have hybrid engines that can do both cutting out the need for a ton of elements 

5. why are we using wings  9000 years in the future ?   wings seem to be one of the things that cause ships to lag the most.   Make a Lift Module that provides lift and can be stashed away inside the ship. 

 

Little off topic  AGG should work from the ground cutting out the need for all the 1000m platforms. The speed of AGG is slower than my toon can run all this is just silly please fix. 

the whole thread, including everything you said prior to going off topic is already off topic.



When I made my post I wanted to express that the skill ceiling for practical building is super low. Building ships is far too easy and there is neither the ability nor a point to excel at ship building.

And before answering to this this post, please read the original post again.

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On 3/27/2021 at 6:59 AM, Gottchar said:

the whole thread, including everything you said prior to going off topic is already off topic.



When I made my post I wanted to express that the skill ceiling for practical building is super low. Building ships is far too easy and there is neither the ability nor a point to excel at ship building.

And before answering to this this post, please read the original post again.

It's not off topic, - Ship building - you're asking for torque, they're asking for more unique elements for making ships purpose built. All torque does is force everything to be roughly centric/balanced - that aint skill, its just tedium trial and error.

 

The lack of a reason to "good" at ship building is because the only gameplay loop is hauling, so every ship is designed to haul unless someones and hauling isn't hard. Does it go? Does it fly? Cool, done.

 

- Mechanics for PvP need to be developed in, there needs to be incentive for specific unique ship utilities.

- Space needs to properly developed with reasons to be in it so that there's a reason to have "space only" ships.

- Number of engines/breaks/adjustors/wings etc... per construct needs to be limited so that rockets actually have a reason to be used can be more integral.

- Atmosphere re-entry/burn could be a bit more punishing.

 

To me, the lack of gameplay loops/restrictions/reasons to build ships is a bigger issue than whats in the OP. There's no meaningful design decisions to make, only what looks nice.

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  • 3 months later...

A lot of good points here. One root cause many are overlooking is the fact you really should not be flying battleships solo nor having a mining ship that can handle millions of liters of ore. There would be no wall of engines or stacked elements if there were some limiting factor to stop me from trying to see just how many large engines I can fit on the backend of an L Core build box. 

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Which of course translates to:  "Don't even think about playing this game solo... its only for those wanting to join a corporation and be its slave or to recruit all your friends and try and make them slaves".  Stupid premise.

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