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DevBlog: The Maneuver Tool and Disconnecting Ships - DUscussion thread


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5 minutes ago, XKentX said:

You talk fuel i talk replacing all elements of the ship as crash means total loss next patch

On that note I wonder what replacement will look like on alpha blueprinted ships with interference issues. Without a direct replace tool or something of the sort.

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1) remove ecu from in game item

2) embedded ecu in each dynamic core

3) no pilot as dynamic core still moving = ecu turn on and brake until somebody took control on control unit

4) no pilot because of destroyed core = ship freeze instantly, P2P roundtable between client in range and server; high latency client exclude from vote; for determined final position => no matters there's some players around, only pilot count ( if gravity> 0.1 , ship is just falling to the ground )

5) extend range of maneuver tool to factor 3 in regards of core size

 

6) end of drama

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The standard range for maneuver tool now is 70 meter without the "Maneuver Tool Optimization" talents trained (adding 10% per level). 

So I guess that talent is going to be deprecated now..

 

Seems a tad off to now make the default range 35 and add 10% of that per level. Although the fact that 50M is pretty much a L5 train with a default range of 35 meters in that scenario and it would mean NQ just cut the default range in half (as said, just dial in a random number.. "half sounds fine" ..

 

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19 minutes ago, Bobbie said:

By fixing rampant crashes and disconnects.

 

Entire game feels like it's being held together with paperclips and duct tape. Both client and server are rickety and clunky as hell.

 

There was supposed to be a massive bout of bugfixing and stabilization for the 6 months leading up to beta. I haven't noticed the difference.

Yea but let's fix the bugs and then remove the duct tape or the thing falls apart

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1 hour ago, Mornington said:

Another variant of this is you land one core too close to a smaller core on a space station landing platform, and when you fly off later you look around and see the smaller core attached itself to you and you've now hijacked it. ;) 

Yea, i once brought 1 ship to my space station and accidentally took back two others as they slapped behind the beautiful non transparent UI boxes.

 

Backward progress.

 

Was really pissed off as I only noticed it when landing.

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So based on what I've read so far here and on Discord, these are my main takeaways:
 

  • Many players are concerned that the Alt+F4-stop-and-login-to-instantly-regain-speed workaround will potentially be used as an exploit piloting maneuver during PvP, giving those that use it an overpowered advantage.
  • While some players are feeling comfortable with the maneuver tool distance restriction, many are requesting an increase of up to ~250m to accommodate bigger elements such as L Cores.
  • There are some concerns about moving unwanted constructs from player-owned tiles.
  • That there are some bugs that should have been addressed before NQ nerfed the maneuver tool.


Please let me know if there's anything I need to add to the list! 

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9 minutes ago, NQ-Naunet said:

So based on what I've read so far here and on Discord, these are my main takeaways:
 

  • Many players are concerned that the Alt+F4-stop-and-login-to-instantly-regain-speed workaround will potentially be used as an exploit piloting maneuver during PvP, giving those that use it an overpowered advantage.
  • While some players are feeling comfortable with the maneuver tool distance restriction, many are requesting an increase of up to ~250m to accommodate bigger elements such as L Cores.
  • There are some concerns about moving unwanted constructs from player-owned tiles.
  • That there are some bugs that should have been addressed before NQ nerfed the maneuver tool.


Please let me know if there's anything I need to add to the list! 

I think it's safe to assume that many players concerned that an unstable state of game that crashes 3 out of 10 market approaches on ANY pc will ruin their ships total-loss post patch due to not stopping it when their game crash.

 

Another note:

If this is to fix Alt+f4 instead of 20 minute braking, we can warp to planet when we are close to it and this will only spend 1 cell and insta stop the ship on landing so this fix doesn't fixes anything IMHO.

 

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First of all: awesome! I really like the idea of stored momentum and wished for it quite some time. But I see huge issues with it that at first feel worse than not fixing it right away. Sorry, I didn't read all of the non-NQ replies here, but I want to add to the list of concerns and apologize if they've already been mentioned.

 

  1. Most of the time I got my AGG ship parked at 1050m above my base at Sanctuary (using the fact that logging out will freeze it in place because the AGG wouldn't keep it there when I'm gone as I understand it). I use an elevator platform (sometimes called magic carpet) to reach it and go down again. The AGG ship can maneuver in atmosphere but not lift without AGG support. Will my design be invalidated by this change? @NQ-Naunet could you please put child gloves on for us AGG captains and explain exactly how we need to prepare and what to expect?
     
  2. If I get disconnected while piloting, along with restoring my momentum, logging in should also restore me in the pilot seat. Otherwise I might crash for not reaching the seat fast enough.
     
  3. The position from where the player entered a seat should always be persistent. Currently you can get trapped in your own construct when you log out while seated, because it resets the position from where you entered the seat originally and the "default position after login" can place you inside the ship's structure, effectively trapping you. If your ship is stationary and frozen that's ok and you can enter build mode to free yourself - but if momentum is restored you might end up trapped, racing against time to get out of the structure before you hit something. You could argue bad ship design, but I feel that would be unfair, as placing a seat in a spot with a low ceiling for example or between flat elements would be a perfectly fine design in reality, but gets you trapped in DU.
     
  4. Remember to restore thrust settings and engine states as well. If you are floating on vertical engines (like elevator platform / magic carpet or heavy hauler with slow starting XL space engines) and need to set thrust and spin up these engines first, it could be enough to get you into a non-recoverable position.
     
  5. Make 100% sure that all game assets have been loaded before you restore momentum. Right after login I remember to experience heavy lag before the game runs fluently after everything loaded. Stuff like that made me fall through the ground and get a "Back to the surface..." screen - or fall through not loaded elements and end up in space (a friend entered another player's construct throug the not yet loaded door and got trapped for thinking there was none). Latter being ok if my ship is stationary - but imagine falling out of your ship when logging in, while the momentum is being restored and your ship shoots away. Ouch. You should freeze players in place until the surface they were standing on has been fully loaded or securely known to have be removed.
     
  6. When I first tried the radar in orbit to lock onto a ship out of curiosity DU dived into some kind of memory leak and made the game unplayable. Other times I was on a perfect approach vector, but the loading of planetary assets (or something else) killed my framerate. In both situations I had to use the emergency exit brake to avoid fatality. Same happened on markets where we already made a habit of landing 1km away and walking the distance to avoid crashing due to market lag.
     
  7. There seems to be a loop that constantly reinitializes all elements on a construct. This loop has a flaw and sometimes skips an element or takes minutes to find and enable it (at launch or mid flight). Just yesterday I was unable to turn right with my elevator platform and kept spinning left until 1-ish minute later DU realized that I had adjustors to turn right too. In the past this often led to situations where the emergency exit brake was the only thing that could rescue me.

 

Given some time I think I could come up with more situation where a logout is the only thing able to rescue me from bad situations that I didn't cause myself. I'm all in on the idea that it should be in the player's control to live or die by being careful and planning ahead - but right now I feel like freezing my ship using logout to brake does more good than it does bad.

 

Further I'd like to know if freezing a ship will be completely gone and if not I'd like to know if an approaching player or running around on your ship will initialize physics, or if that only happens when you enter the pilot seat?

 

Regarding the maneuver tool: 50m is not enough and I feel this should scale with core size. If your ship is 128m, moving it by 50m doesn't suffice, while at the same time it's enough for an XS sized ship. Imagine your L sized ship laying on its back and you can't get it high enough to spin around? Errr... nope. Ok, takes only 3 Minutes to reset, but still rather uncomfortable to stand around watching the clock tick. Maneuver distance should always at least be a tad more than the edge length of your ship's building zone - best make it the distance between the upper left front and lower right back corner (I'm sure there's a term for the diagonal line in 3D space in English, but I don't know it). The constraints about standing on a planet or static construct should be enough to prevent platform-climbing and I don't see any benefit in limiting L cores (or XL later?) to 50m. Also, what happens when I stand on my carrier and maneuver a small ship around on it? Will it initialize physics after maneuvering and fall down on the carrier, meaning no more "docked at the side using clamp-ish force fields to walk over"? Maybe implement docking clamps first before removing the option to use the maneuver tool to simulate the effect.. but I'm not sure if that was even implied. Some clarification would be welcome, but either way it's not that crucial as the removal of the emergency brake :) 

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2 minutes ago, vertex said:

If I get disconnected while piloting, along with restoring my momentum, logging in should also restore me in the pilot seat. Otherwise I might crash for not reaching the seat fast enough.

Your momentum will not stop if you are anywhere near market, from what we understand if there is another player near you, he will calculate your crash right into market trajectory for you.

 

if near means "on the ship" then PVP is broken as you can abuse it to insta stop/accelerate.

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9 minutes ago, XKentX said:

If this is to fix Alt+f4 instead of 20 minute braking, we can warp to planet when we are close to it and this will only spend 1 cell and insta stop the ship on landing so this fix doesn't fixes anything IMHO.

:lol: nice concern! Didn't think of that, but kinda obvious, yeah. Could be solved by making low speed a condition to be met before warp will be available. But I kinda like the idea of going from high speed to warp. I think if warp would keep the momentum and not insta-brake, only suspending momentum during the time of warp, it would solve this and be a nice addition by adding the option to come out of warp flying forward (if your momentum lined up with your warp direction).

 

/edit/ps

Adds to "player responsibility" too I think. I'd like it.

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10 minutes ago, vertex said:

Most of the time I got my AGG ship parked at 1050m above my base at Sanctuary (using the fact that logging out will freeze it in place because the AGG wouldn't keep it there when I'm gone as I understand it). I use an elevator platform (sometimes called magic carpet) to reach it and go down again. The AGG ship can maneuver in atmosphere but not lift without AGG support. Will my design be invalidated by this change? @NQ-Naunet could you please put child gloves on for us AGG captains and explain exactly how we need to prepare and what to expect?


My shift is coming to a close, but I'm not going to forget to reply to this! :) Stay tuned.

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I'm imagining in PVP, people are going to start deploying xs cores and using them as depth charges. Getting chased, dump an xs core, or jump in an xs core, detach from main ship. Stop! ship behind you crashes into you, they explode on impact. 

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2 minutes ago, vertex said:

:lol: nice concern! Didn't think of that, but kinda obvious, yeah. Could be solved by making low speed a condition to be met before warp will be available. But I kinda like the idea of going from high speed to warp. I think if warp would keep the momentum and not insta-brake, only suspending momentum during the time of warp, it would solve this and be a nice addition by adding the option to come out of warp flying forward (if your momentum lined up with your warp direction).

If you don't suspend the momentum after warp then you will crash into that nice huge base someone built especially for you at the warp exit.

 

Those changes are not something we should do by thinking 5 minutes and slapping it on. My point is that as mentioned, this fixes nothing while introduces very big problems that far outweigth the benefits.

 

It's like amputating a leg because you broke a finger.

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If you have a large ship, you & other member of your org. are flying through space,on the way home from a mining expedition.

Your flying the ship and your org. member is in the cargo hold organizing the containers. You both log off for lunch, stopping the ship.

Now the question I pose is , if your org pal logs back in before you do, will the ship return to previous speed even though that player was not in the pilot seat, and because he has returned to sorting out the cargo containers, he maybe unaware of the ship speed & that it may be heading directly for a planet surface. ?

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1 minute ago, XKentX said:

If you don't suspend the momentum after warp then you will crash into that nice huge base someone built especially for you at the warp exit.

 

Those changes are not something we should do by thinking 5 minutes and slapping it on.

But I can do a lot of thinking in 5 minutes. For example I thought about that issue of crashing into a station or a planet after warp and considered what it implied. Now the only thing it means is that the responsibility to stop before warping shifts from the warp script to the player. If you want to be safe on warp exit: just stop before you warp. Not too much to ask for and let's be real - that instant brake the warp does as soon as you activate it feels reeeaally awkward. I found myself sitting there and asking "Why can't I cancel warp and use it as brake? It's much better at the task than my space brakes!" :lol: 

 

In addition, if you've got a scout ahead of you that can tell you if the destination is clear, you can implement nice new tactics - or you take a chance to hit the ground (ehem,...) running blindly, hehe. Again that would be completely in the player's responsibility. Nobody complains that you burn in the atmosphere if you get in too fast -  why should it be an issue when you go too fast into warp? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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I get it, these are game mechanics that are easily exploitable... however they are currently necessary in many situations to get around game breaking bugs also their exploits don't hurt other players in the game.

 

How about spending some development time on something that actually improves the gameplay and makes the game more enjoyable instead? There are so many to pick from!

 

Why not instead spend this development time making the market interface so we can actually filter all the columns? How about getting the power systems in place? How about getting the docking mechanics fixed so people don't need to use the maneuver tool to get ships docked? Seriously I could rattle off a hundred more but you guys already know these.

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25 minutes ago, vertex said:

But I can do a lot of thinking in 5 minutes. For example I thought about that issue of crashing into a station or a planet after warp and considered what it implied. Now the only thing it means is that the responsibility to stop before warping shifts from the warp script to the player. If you want to be safe on warp exit: just stop before you warp. Not too much to ask for and let's be real - that instant brake the warp does as soon as you activate it feels reeeaally awkward. I found myself sitting there and asking "Why can't I cancel warp and use it as brake? It's much better at the task than my space brakes!" :lol: 

 

In addition, if you've got a scout ahead of you that can tell you if the destination is clear, you can implement nice new tactics - or you take a chance to hit the ground (ehem,...) running blindly, hehe. Again that would be completely in the player's responsibility. Nobody complains that you burn in the atmosphere if you get in too fast -  why should it be an issue when you go too fast into warp? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

It can be done but I NQ will not think and try to find a fully working solution they will slap us with some half arsed temporary solution that makes game even worse in my opinion and will be happy living in their "we built the best single shard sandbox MMO" dream about it until even non PVP players ragequit after totaling their ship couple of times. (95% of PVP players already left, they have 0 content)

 

Even from this thread you can clearly see that players already found many problems with their solution in like what 4-5 hours of it being announced.

 

You disconnect or something glitches near market ? Boom, all your L-Core elements are "modified" and should be replaced. 100 more hours of wonderful digging, mine is that way. Good luck.

 

Edit: I alt tabbed from the game, wrote this post and alt-tabbed back. The door of my ship is still loading... (1gbps fiber internet)

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1 hour ago, NQ-Naunet said:

So based on what I've read so far here and on Discord, these are my main takeaways:
 

  • Many players are concerned that the Alt+F4-stop-and-login-to-instantly-regain-speed workaround will potentially be used as an exploit piloting maneuver during PvP, giving those that use it an overpowered advantage.
  • While some players are feeling comfortable with the maneuver tool distance restriction, many are requesting an increase of up to ~250m to accommodate bigger elements such as L Cores.
  • There are some concerns about moving unwanted constructs from player-owned tiles.
  • That there are some bugs that should have been addressed before NQ nerfed the maneuver tool.


Please let me know if there's anything I need to add to the list! 

Please make it so I can get off my anti-grav -ship  and still have it hover before fixingthe freeze exploit. Please.... pretty please.... with cherry on top.

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4 minutes ago, tritan67 said:

Please make it so I can get off my anti-grav -ship  and still have it hover before fixingthe freeze exploit. Please.... pretty please.... with cherry on top.

No. Not until AGG is balanced.  When it requires fuel cells.to run, then they can make it work. Until then it needs to be disabled anyway.

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This movement slap in the face is just that. Ships should stop if you disconnect and not regain speed. This is absolutely absurd.

Have any of NQ played a game like this before? In elite dangerous ships not only stop moving but disappear from the game until the person has loaded back in. You need to come up with a better solution to the issue. I know from elite that it does pose a problem with pvp as people will just pussy out on a fight by logging out. If you think about it, imagine how much server performance would improve if everyones ships dissappeared when a player disconnected. Now this again poses a problem because of air shows, museums, ect. Perhaps having a storage option for ships that players don't want physically to be in the game. Owners of ships could have an option on their ship core to toggle whether the ship stays or stores when the owner is offline. We could have a hangar element that could be used as a ship storage. There are lots of options that I think the devs could think about and how to make it work for this specific game.

Before things like the movement nerf takes effect, specific bugs need to be fixed. I've had ships blow up from just being stationary and using adjustors to turn around on a runway. I've had ships blow up from bumping into things while maneuver tooling them. I've had ships fall through the ground hundreds or thousands of meters after setting them down with the maneuver tool. 

Now as far as I can tell, as long is someone is seated in your ship and your pilot disconnects, the ship continues to move/fall/crash. This shouldn't have ever been a thing. Now you're telling me someone just needs to be in proximity of my ship and it will continue to move/fall/crash. I usually have passengers log out just to keep my ship from crashing when/if the game crashes on me. 

One of my concerns is that now i'll log back into game and my ship will start moving once I log in, or once I get back into the pilot seat? Either way this is a problem as I've had issues with braking not working at times. Sometimes i'll notice the braking just stops working all together and I'll start accelerating as I drop altitude and have to mash the break key until it actually starts to respond. 

There are just far too many bugs for these kinds of changes to be implemented. As someone else said, 'if you make changes like this without fixing underlying bugs first you'll have players leaving in droves' and ultimately your game is going to crash and burn just as quickly as our ships do when bugs, physics, server issues interrupt normal gameplay, which at times are more often then not. 

For myself and many of my organization friends we deal with game crashes daily. Much of the time we'll have smooth gameplay and then out of nowhere we will crash 3-5 times in a row before we get a stable login. This can happen several times a day, sometimes it last so long I just decide not to play that day because of the inconvenience and frustration. This is much of the reason why none of us do any pvp. We want to and we even build pvp ships but its just not worth doing when the game crashes so often and with the current system you'll be blown up by the enemy not of your own fault but by that of a severely flawed and buggy game that keeps your ship ingame to be fodder for anyone else while you try to log back ingame and stay back ingame without issue. 

 



 

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14 minutes ago, Tenchikun said:

if everyones ships dissappeared when a player disconnected.

 

Suppose that someone lands on a market pad and logs out, causing their ship to vanish. What happens if another ship lands there and then the first logs back in?

 

Elite: Dangerous solves this by only having up to x players in a given session. If you arrive at a station and it's full and you can't dock, you can swap to solo, dock, swap back to open, and you're in a new session with a slot for you.

 

DU doesn't have discrete docking bays.

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I like the game, I really do.

 

But these changes along with the permanent element destruction will effectively punish you for playing the game as it is currently. I spent a great many hours building my ships and it just seems like it will all be for naught. God forbid I fly my M core or L core and the AGG turns off and deletes the tens of millions worth of elements on them.

 

I just canceled my auto renew sub. When NQ starts respecting the player's time I might renew, but for now I think I'll just let it go after it expires in a month.

 

It's a game, it should be fun to play, not a depressing job grind to replace elements constantly.

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