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DevBlog: The Maneuver Tool and Disconnecting Ships - DUscussion thread


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When I originally heard the terms "anti-gravity generator", I thought it would make a ship fly in a gravity environment as if there was no gravity, with no speed restrictions, horizontal or vertical.

 

The reality was extremely disappointing.

 

The proposed changes? Even worse.

 

I think that antigravity pulsors should negate gravity on the axis they're facing, and have a hard limit of 6 S/12 M. Max? Full negation. Half max? Half negation. So one could choose to partly negate when horizontal or on the tail, or full negate when horizontal.

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25 minutes ago, Bobbie said:

AGG was never meant to allow permanently floating fortresses. They were always supposed to come with a significant power cost, but power isn't implemented yet.

 

Its intended purpose is to allow big heavy space ships to dip into the atmosphere for maybe a few hours or so, without having to add walls of vertical atmo engines and burn shittons of fuel just to keep it afloat.

 

Typical use cases include military support (for atmo PvP and territory warfare), and getting cargo off-planet in bulk.

 

I dont think anyone stated a permanent floating anything..Problem is...IF you cant lock AGG it falls out of the sky often while loading or unloading....Getting cargo off planet in bulk is what I believe most, if not all are specifically speaking of. Im all for a power cost....Just dont remove being able to lock the ship in place until after its intended abilities are fixed! ATM only way to insure it does not fall out of the sky is to log out and back in.

 

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It is fairly interesting how many people are complaining that their Alt+F4 cheat (yes it is), is going to be taken away from them. I'm playing almost the entire beta time and have never, not a single time, used the Alt+F4 "emergency" break. I never had to, and yes, I also suffer from lags. I'm playing on a laptop, which is not super high end so you can imagine...

However, few people mentioned that NQ must find a way that a ship can be "parked" in space, be it with the ECU or the AGG. When a player "parks" the ship with AGG, they must make sure that it does not fall down to the planet or moon. If AGG is on and the "pilot" disconnects, the AGG needs either stay on or the ship needs to stand still. When control is taken over again, the AGG has to kick in if it did not stay on when the DC ocurred.

Otherwise, a ship should actually never insta stop on disconnect. By all means, implement the ECU thing with emergency brake, if a player sets that up, and otherwise, just let the ship move on. If NQ still lets ships insta stop, it will be abused in PVP situations and therefore create another, not indended, misuse.

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On 11/25/2020 at 10:29 PM, XKentX said:

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.

 

Sorry to correct you, not "ANY" PC. I played almost the entire beta and had maybe 4 crashes in total. All of them were happening in the build menue after pressing the "undo" key. Other than that, I never have crashes. And no, I'm using a laptop to play, no super duper high end ultra PC. From what I've heard, the crashes seem to be connected to the internet connection of each player and not to the PC they use.

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7 minutes ago, MarkusT said:

Sorry to correct you, not "ANY" PC. I played almost the entire beta and had maybe 4 crashes in total. All of them were happening in the build menue after pressing the "undo" key. Other than that, I never have crashes. And no, I'm using a laptop to play, no super duper high end ultra PC. From what I've heard, the crashes seem to be connected to the internet connection of each player and not to the PC they use.

My game crashed 3 times just yesterday.In one cases I had to resort to freezing the ship when it was really close to the ground  to prevent a crash.The other two were remote buy crashes.

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19 hours ago, Rimezx said:

I think AGG ships that never land should be nerfed. You can make the ship at least be able to land itself without any cargo load.

Hmm... I wanna say I strongly disagree, because I feel that having to build another construct and carry it around all the time just to go up and down 1km from surface to carrier is a very interesting trade off for not having to carry around too many atmospheric elements on a ship that's mainly designed to travel through space. But I'm curious why you'd think otherwise?

 

19 hours ago, Rimezx said:

AGG should start at your current altitude instantly on activation and then you can change the base altitude for it to move you.

YES! Definitely.

 

6 hours ago, NQ-Naunet said:

First up I'm here to respond to this, as promised! @vertex

I'll paraphrase the answer I received from JC: "Having a ship 'parked' and frozen above your base is not the intended use of AGG. A ship using AGG should ideally be parked in orbit or on the ground, as AGG's true benefit is in allowing ships to navigate at ~1000m in the atmosphere. For future missions that require altitude consideration, this is where AGG will shine."

So 1) your design will be somewhat invalidated by this change, yes, and 2) if you still plan to keep your ship parked above your base, equipping it with powerful engines and carrying a lot of fuel will be the thing to do.

I hope this answers your question!

Thanks a million for that follow-up ❤️ 

 

Even tho I'm really sad about losing this since I kinda loved my carrier hovering over of me. But parked in geostationary orbit doesn't work, as that's still within the gravity well of the planet and planets don't spin - even if they did, that orbit would be considered movement, which stops when I log out and... I kinda fail to align this part of the response with DU physics..? So I guess orbit must refer to "far far away where there's no gravity anymore" (meaning not in orbit) which translates to "Dock at a space station!" and "Forget about docking an L core at all, btw." and I feel ships like that don't need an AGG in the first place.

 

Leaves only surface landing AGG ships and for these I don't understand what "missions that require altitude consideration" means. I'm sorry, but after reading this it feels like I can kick my AGG in the bukkit and forget about that technology, as I don't see any real advantage of carrying that weight around anymore :( 

 

I'm trying to find an application for it, but..

  1. Vertical engines don't work properly to jump to 1km altitude and go down again in a comfortable way. (at least not vanilla (meaning without some serious Lua scripting))
  2. If my ship got enough airfoil and is powerfull enough to lift with a full haul, I'm not going to wait an hour for the AGG to climb to 15 or 20 kilometers altitude and just use those engines to get away.
  3. If my ship is parked so far away that I need several hours to either take it down to fill the cargo, or need even more hours to load it going back and forth with a smaller hauler, I can just as well do multiple jumps between planets and not use a big hauler in the first place.

It already hits diminishing returns when going big on a hybrid and the only thing that makes large AGG haulers a good investment is dropping the hybrid tag and going for the fact that you can skip the weight of most atmospheric elements to reduce the hours long chore of "hauling up and down" to one trip that takes approximately 1 hour down, park, load and then 1 hour up again.

 

I guess I may go for option 1 above.. add some vertical engines, sweat through the awful period where your binary inputs shut down the engines completely, so they need to spin up first before braking your fall, carry 10L containers as dead weight with me to mine into them, then launch empty and vertically to 1km to transfer cargo once AGG kicked in and then use my elevator 10 times to get all the dead weight L containers back into my carrier.

 

...

 

Wait a second... that doesn't sound fun at all. Especially considering the price I paid for the AGG, I think I should sell it while at least some people remain who think that element is worth anything? :P 

 

...

 

Okay, given some more minutes of pumping crocodile tears... maybe it just means that we need to establish a base of operations on every planet and have atmospheric mining carriers ready while the AGG carrier only comes down for a short period to load up and be gone again. Okay, I guess that might work out too.

 

Still, I will dearly miss that carrier hovering over me, making me feel like "YES! You did it!" all the time - and the amazing feel of using my own elevator platform that worked so incredibly well in tandem, taking visitors up, talking about tech, just having everything working perfectly and showing off while inspiring, explaining and giving advice how to do it.

 

To me this decision takes away much of the awe that the AGG brought us and leaves a rather shallow feeling. Sure it might clear up the sky a bit - but I always loved the sight of massive carriers up there, dreaming about being one of those captains once. Luckily I did it and was able to experience this time before that bubble got popped ;) 

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6 hours ago, NQ-Naunet said:

I'll paraphrase the answer I received from JC: "Having a ship 'parked' and frozen above your base is not the intended use of AGG. A ship using AGG should ideally be parked in orbit or on the ground, as AGG's true benefit is in allowing ships to navigate at ~1000m in the atmosphere. For future missions that require altitude consideration, this is where AGG will shine."

JC seems to not realize how most people have been playing this game with AGGs. That answer really doesn't make much sense.

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40 minutes ago, vertex said:

Hmm... I wanna say I strongly disagree, because I feel that having to build another construct and carry it around all the time just to go up and down 1km from surface to carrier is a very interesting trade off for not having to carry around too many atmospheric elements on a ship that's mainly designed to travel through space. But I'm curious why you'd think otherwise?

 

Vertical engines don't work properly to jump to 1km altitude and go down again in a comfortable way. (at least not vanilla (meaning without some serious Lua scripting))

About the first part what i meant was not to land the full haul which would make having the AGG pointless as everyone is saying. If you read my post again what im saying is that AGG ships should be able to float for a while (enough time to go down with your elevator platform unload/shop/whatever and go back up safely), but not permanently park in midair when you log off. You would need just enough atmospheric elements to land the weight of your cargo empty ship (honeycomb-elements-fuel). Thats what i mean.

 

About the vertical engines with a fast and easy lua workaround they work perfectly fine. And by vertical you propably mean the 45 degrees tilted ones everyone uses. It took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to achieve this with lua, but then again im a software engineer ?. If you want more info about how the engines work contact me on discord ill explain. RimeZ#1455

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@Rimezx I see, thanks! Seems you got the recent announcement on your side and I'll lose this one, but in that case I still disagree. I think using the AGG for parking is awesome. If that was an option for "just any ship or static construct" I would agree with no-parking, but since you need at least an M core to fit the AGG I feel that's big enough to be something I'd like to see up there as part of the scenery.

 

However, the new perspective makes me ponder if this could lead to issues... like creating a permanent carpet of ships above an area. I don't think that would happen too often and if it did it would be quite the sight and story. Hrm. I'll probably take some more time thinking about implications before I reach a final conclusion. So far I just feel sad that it's taking this route, but I'll cope ;) 

 

Regarding the Lua part: yeaah, from dev to dev - welcome to the club! I could do it, that's not the issue. Thing is I kinda don't want to. I feel something like this should be part of any SciFi setting anyways and come "out of the box". I'm leaning more to the arcade side of SciFi and I realized that's not where the road took us long ago. Still I just need a long time to accept things like this and then finally work around it in the end after I lost hope that the stuff I think is cool will come on its own.

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Don't really know much about AGG as I don't need it but I am more worried about even more mushrooms popping up as people will build elevators(at least up to 1km to park AGG ships) and with current load times flying in atmosphere will be a death wish :(

+ Element destruction - omg

 

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On 11/25/2020 at 11:02 AM, sysadrift said:

Maybe you should actually fix the AGG ships falling out of the sky before you introduce this change.  Some of us use this as a workaround to that particular bug, and this will make AGG more or less worthless. 

I'd also like to note that the maneuver tool wouldn't be needed as much if your would fix ship landings.  Can't tell you how many times I'm just scooting my ship bouncing between territories doing tile scans when my ship decides to arbitrarily flip over.  e.g.  I'm stopped, zero motion, leave my seat, and the ship nose rises up and falls backwards...

 

Please PLEASE focus on fixing basic bugs before making ANY other changes to the game.  Equal focus on staffing Zendesk so detailed bug reports don't get 10 week turnaround with form letters would be good too.  

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On 11/25/2020 at 1:26 PM, NQ-Naunet said:

I'm curious - I've been seeing a lot of chatter about the 50m restriction; some players really want this increased, and others are saying "no, please leave it at 50!!".

What are the arguments for/against having the 50m restriction?

Well... for starters, a large core ship is much longer than 50m.  I can easily see this hampering flipping over ships since parts of the ship will move much farther than 50m...  Likewise if a core was at one end of the ship and you limited based on core measurements (e.g.  Not all cores are in the center of their ships).

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18 hours ago, blazemonger said:

NQ has always said they does not want to interfere in the game and prefer a hands off approach to let players figure stuff out. It was a selling point on the KS pitch actually. On several fronts now, NQ has actively manipulated and limited the way we interact with et sandbox and there is more to come (Industry is next on the list)

Yep... remember "Player run economy"?  We understood bots in Alpha, but what are they doing in Beta?  I think we are still feeling the impact of T5 ore sales from that fiasco after the wipe.  We pleaded with NQ not to have bots after the wipe, but they didn't listen.

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11 hours ago, NQ-Naunet said:


I'll paraphrase the answer I received from JC: "Having a ship 'parked' and frozen above your base is not the intended use of AGG. A ship using AGG should ideally be parked in orbit or on the ground, as AGG's true benefit is in allowing ships to navigate at ~1000m in the atmosphere. For future missions that require altitude consideration, this is where AGG will shine."
 

AGG's do indeed turn navigation into a mostly 2D exercise (and would be 2D if pitch control would be implemented).  Its key to searching for T4 & T5 ores which I'm finding taking 20ish and 40ish scans to stumble across.  A Vertical Booster based cargo ship using the VBs to do that surface skimming have a real limiting issue with fuel consumption, even with talents.

 

Guess the action now will be to use AGG while searching, then land and mine your 2K of T5, then abandon your search area while you regain altitude and start over?

 

Note this is incredibly tedious as is.  I basically have a to book a day of play per vein of T5 - a VERY VERY boring day consisting of:  Enter territory, start scanner, wait for 15 minutes, move, rinse and repeat 40ish times per vein of T5 (on planets, ore seems rarer on moons) - so yeah, typically about 10 hours of searching before I even start digging.  Yeah, I can put 3 scanners on a ship and straddle territory boundaries - if I have an AGG capable ship, but that is rather impractical until you get to that later game stage (and off course, you need many veins of T5 in order to make that first S AGG for you M core cargo that either has a warp engine or risks getting blown out of sky - but hey, what's a month or two of a PVErs time... nothing so long as it gives a PVPer a 5 minute thrill).

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8 hours ago, Emptiness said:

It seems that the intended use case for AGG ships is to always have one player with the ship while others ferry cargo to or from it.

And if that is the case, then even fewer solo players will play.  I've managed solo so far, with a L core space station for all my manufacturing and some trading, and working on an AGG for my L core cargo ship.  I'm about a week away from having my Warp Beacon go into its 30 day bake cycle (need 2 or 3 more Niobium veins).  Finding T5s at the current 1-vein/10 hours is burning me out rapidly.

 

Many have told me to just quit, this game isn't intended for solo players - but I hope that is not JC's vision, because if we can't survive, it will die.  The "Call all your friends" approach to driving membership is about as successful as, well, the "free beta codes for friends" was.  Lots of people joined, lots of people left.  Too much competition for peoples time for a game in this shape. Heck, I was spending 10+ hours a day, wrote the 30 page FAQ pinned to the Discord #Help channels, and even I left for awhile after getting burned by the PVP imbalance.  I'm back, but at a fraction of the time spent before.

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6 hours ago, vertex said:

 

Okay, given some more minutes of pumping crocodile tears... maybe it just means that we need to establish a base of operations on every planet and have atmospheric mining carriers ready while the AGG carrier only comes down for a short period to load up and be gone again. Okay, I guess that might work out too.

 

Except those bases will soon need to be maned full time since atmospheric PVP is coming soon.   At least except for bases in the safe zone - and JC was a bit fuzzy on all those except the ones on the Sanctuary moon.  Space stations in the safe zone appear to be the only really safe place to be other than on the relatively high gravity sanctuary moon.

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15 hours ago, NQ-Naunet said:

I'll paraphrase the answer I received from JC: "Having a ship 'parked' and frozen above your base is not the intended use of AGG. A ship using AGG should ideally be parked in orbit or on the ground, as AGG's true benefit is in allowing ships to navigate at ~1000m in the atmosphere. For future missions that require altitude consideration, this is where AGG will shine."

 

Serious AGG nerf incoming.. I'm afraid this answer is very vague and does not really provide a clear objective for AGG but it does show NQ is not happy with how AGG is being applied so based on their historical way of handling this, they will nerf the mechanic to force their envisioned use case into it.

 

If you use AGG and park it as described I'd suggest you start finding an alternate option..

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I know this is slightly off topic but it is connected to the reason we need the destructible elements.  I stopped making stuff because, I can make more money selling ore. 

One of the main issues with the economy is the ore loss.  It will be more expensive than whatever is produced because of loss.  Loose some mining, loose some refining and loose some more when making different materials; yes even if you had max skills. More materials go into these things than whatever comes out.  Everyone would rather start with the ore.   Refined materials and elements "should" be worth more on the market than raw ore IMO. 

 

The second thing is people don't know what things are worth.   They sell them for under ore cost. The only reason I can figure is that they don't know the ore was worth more than whatever they just made.  

 

Again skills have been taken into consideration here ;)

 

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