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@NQ - Alioth is growing hair


Daphne Jones

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Since the 0.23 nerf of AGG, everyone is putting up a 1000m tower to build a landing platform for their AGG ships. It's getting damned hard to fly at low altitude on Alioth because of all of the single voxel wide spikes that render right in front of you and kill you ship.

 

I have a solution... let the AGG work all the way to ground.

 

There really isn't any conceivable justification (in lore) for AGG magically not working under 1000m above an arbitrary reference altitude. How does the AGG know that it's OK to land on Thades and Feli but it insists on hovering above all other planets?

 

Considering that AGG can land on those two planets, I doubt there's any compelling game design reason for this restriction either... it just makes the planet hairy - which JC said he didn't want.

 

Please let AGG fly to the ground so I don't have to move my 1100m long runway up to 1200m altitude to have clear access to it. 

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It needs to be balanced tho, you can't just make it work anywhere without some downsides (beside its cost ofc), or it will basically replace 90% of the piloting elements.

Make it use some new fuel like agg-cells or something along those lines.

 

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58 minutes ago, Fra119 said:

It needs to be balanced tho, you can't just make it work anywhere without some downsides (beside its cost ofc), or it will basically replace 90% of the piloting elements.

Make it use some new fuel like agg-cells or something along those lines.

 

Cost and unreliability would be enough balance to make me prefer wings and engines.

 

The current situation is making all of us who aren't using it pay the cost of it by crashing our ships into invisible towers.

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How about we just limit the height at which static cores can be placed? "But what about my flying city waaah" yeah, I get it. Your floating eyesore is special to you. 

 

I frankly don't even understand the purpose of AGG other then to totally be a balancing nightmare for the rest of DU's existence. They should just remove it entirely and that will solve the issue of a reason to build hair. 

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On 1/9/2021 at 7:34 PM, Xennial said:

How about we just limit the height at which static cores can be placed? "But what about my flying city waaah" yeah, I get it. Your floating eyesore is special to you. 

 

I frankly don't even understand the purpose of AGG other then to totally be a balancing nightmare for the rest of DU's existence. They should just remove it entirely and that will solve the issue of a reason to build hair. 

Apparently NQ's idea for AGG was to have floating gun platforms for territory warfare and they were shocked.... shocked when we took advantage of their unlimited weight capacity to make super cargo ships, lol.

 

If they really want floating gun platforms, they need to replace AGG with vertical engines optimized for high altitude hovering, i.e., helicopter rotors. Those would work fine for gun platforms. And sure, we'd still use them for cargo ships too, but it wouldn't be the freeby that AGG is.

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If the intended purpose of AGG is only to allow you to hover at a specific altitude,  why not just make it so that's all they do?

 

Turn it on and you stay at whatever altitude you are at.  Wouldn't even need the 1k height limit.  If you want to go up, you need thrust.

 

Am i missing something here?

 

If they create lift, of course people are going to use them to lift stuff.

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1 hour ago, Atmosph3rik said:

If the intended purpose of AGG is only to allow you to hover at a specific altitude,  why not just make it so that's all they do?

 

Turn it on and you stay at whatever altitude you are at.  Wouldn't even need the 1k height limit.  If you want to go up, you need thrust.

 

Am i missing something here?

 

If they create lift, of course people are going to use them to lift stuff.

that's very  nearly what they do.  It's a little more complicated because it sets a "singularity" at a height that pulls you in towards it to deal with fluctuations, i.e. you don't fall out of it by shifting 1m up or down.  The issue becomes when you move that singularity.  The implementation is that it changes altitude very slowly so it's not supposed to be a good way to gain altitude, just park.

 

even if agg could be used all the way to the ground, or worked as a hard altitude lock, there is still incentive to have 1km towers.  You want to never have to move your singularity height if you don't have to, and you want the singularity to be set as high as you can go and still be able to access your linked container (high enough to avoid low obstacles like terrain and random constructs around markets.)

 

I really don't know what the solution is.  I don't think lowering the height will change tower density or height.  Raising the height might reduce density a little bit but I wouldn't count on it.  Maximum build height might be a potential route, but would you use height above terrain or above 0?  And what if you dig out some terrain, or build up some terrain? 

 

My instinct is the solution would be limiting number of static cores on a tile the closer you get to the districts or a market, so if you want to build something big, it also has to be remote.

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On 1/10/2021 at 9:34 AM, Xennial said:

How about we just limit the height at which static cores can be placed? "But what about my flying city waaah" yeah, I get it. Your floating eyesore is special to you. 

 

I frankly don't even understand the purpose of AGG other then to totally be a balancing nightmare for the rest of DU's existence. They should just remove it entirely and that will solve the issue of a reason to build hair. 

Since NQ are unable to provide the technology to render the buildings in a timely fashion using LOD tiers, NQ should have implemented a purple 10km no build zone around each market place to allow safe landing. But they didn"t... so...

They could add a togglable function that shows core build cubes as a glowing blue ghosts. NMS uses a similar system to depict resources... Then all they need to load is the positions and sizes of the cores on a hex by hex basis: a tiny amount of data... once all the cores are loaded, they then start to render them. That would fix most of the collisions.

Alternatively, they could tweak AGG to just offset some percentage of the weight of the vehicle by opposing gravity but providing no lift beyond that. That would then require vertical thrust to accelerate the mass and offset air resistance.

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Agree that piloting is getting a dangerous job , especially at night and this is with a radar and the cores showing on the hub.

Whilst I do not have one, I thing we kind of should preserve the space elevators as they make sense to me to be there, so no against limiting in height the use of cores as a consequence.

AAG should not be free to use so some form of fuel needs to be introduced, that would however increase the need for the spikes even more if we do not at the same time remove the limit of 1K.

We then need an incentive for people to demolish their spikes, applying a tax or linking it to the future energy mgmt. could be an idea.

 

PS some goes for those abandoned cores at various altitudes, that seem to procrastinate for ever.

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On 1/10/2021 at 1:34 AM, Xennial said:

How about we just limit

No new limits please, stat seems to be the only way Anything is balanced. Please NQ find a solution and not another limitation, even better: remove all other limitations that were used to fix issues.

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On 1/11/2021 at 9:03 AM, Aaron Cain said:

nooo, not another limitation

limitations aren't inherently bad.  Soft limitations by adjusting existing variables would encourage the search for loopholes to do exactly what is already being done with no actual change in behavior happening.  Universal hard limitations are also bad.  Conditional limitations are my proposal, as you can do the exact thing you are already doing, but you'd have to do it places where you don't have to worry about being a dick to everyone else.

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Honestly I see it as being part of the flavor of building skyward.

 

Honestly I dont see why you cant just jump in build mode and put down teravoxels or regular voxels at will unless you have a specific use that requires a static core for like industry and letting a player build skyward to build better looking massive structures rather than forcing me to use x515 L Static cores to reach my 5500m up platform.

 

Regardless the AGG nerf has forced us to start construction of a just under 2km tall pedistal we can launch to space with that is all dirt leveled off. Eventually I will fill the whole tile with dirt and sculpt it to house cores in sockets up along the hex sides to form a base that I dont have to mine 999kt of ore to do the same thing. I basically see the teravoxels as the frame the static core sit in and if you are patient enough you can produce a relly decent sculpt. I have been able to reproduce 1vx thin smooth walls, straight shapes, and a whole host of cool things and it costs me nothing do make it in such a big scale if I collect sediments while I mine. I want to eventually build out the top as well beyond the initial 1.25km tile to the surrounding hexes of the 7 tile flower half way into the surrounding tiles for an airport/defense platforms. But Just under 2km to make the best use of the container range and shorten the round trip flight of hauling 30 L containers up to our high altitude platform which now take 30 mins to get up and 30 down for an hour round trip which to me is a good trade off.

 

Most of all I want AGG to stay in its current format but act like hoverpads in the sense that it should have to fight the weight of the ship and the load and depending on the size of the AGG you own should take grav pads equal to that weight to first be able to move a realistic amount of weight but also that it should dictate speed with a sort of anti grav thrust. I do also think that the 50-100m should stay in the game and makes AGG interesting and challending to land when you are essentially bobbing on gravitation waves that have a near 100m spread which is kinda cool imo since you need to use your brain to land it properly. Or jump out of the pilot seat and have someone catch the ship with a maneuver tool to stop the bobbing.

 

But these are the conditions NQ made that made this whole pedistal AGG arms race possible. IT cuts a lot of work out of the equation if you have an auto pilot script. Nothing more nothing less.

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14 hours ago, mkahmvet said:

limitations aren't inherently bad.  Soft limitations by adjusting existing variables would encourage the search for loopholes to do exactly what is already being done with no actual change in behavior happening.  Universal hard limitations are also bad.  Conditional limitations are my proposal, as you can do the exact thing you are already doing, but you'd have to do it places where you don't have to worry about being a dick to everyone else.

Good point, no problem with "being a dick limitations" It is more the experience from everything seen already in DU and in general limitations or "Incentives" are bad news not to some but to the whole community.

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13 hours ago, Warlander said:

Honestly I dont see why you cant just jump in build mode and put down teravoxels or regular voxels at will unless you have a specific use that requires a static core for like industry and letting a player build skyward to build better looking massive structures rather than forcing me to use x515 L Static cores to reach my 5500m up platform.

 

 

Agree, it would really help to get any civilization started if we can place voxels at will on owned tiles, in the end its needed for massive infrastructures and would help to get a start with cities and more intercollegual contacts. and like you stated, it would be completely logical if free placed voxels are useless for element placing, not even a bench or a light, only voxels.

 

This idea is proposed before in topics about roads, bridges and maglef trains.  it is a nice thing to see added.

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3 hours ago, Aaron Cain said:

Agree, it would really help to get any civilization started if we can place voxels at will on owned tiles, in the end its needed for massive infrastructures and would help to get a start with cities and more intercollegual contacts. and like you stated, it would be completely logical if free placed voxels are useless for element placing, not even a bench or a light, only voxels.

 

This idea is proposed before in topics about roads, bridges and maglef trains.  it is a nice thing to see added.

I just wish there were more biomes for Teravoxels to have a better color palette. The one thing I like about teravoxels vs voxels the most as an alternative to voxels is that most of the textures are mostly mat with minimal sheen vs metals or adding a light and it just glows.

 

This game is missing a lot from a CIV/RTS standpoint. Or even a Sim City type standpoint in which orgs own regions or that there are vast sectors, regions, districts, and polis city states. And that in the city states there is the ability to zone out an area or that the area is already zoned out and has set designations for military, defense, government, spaceport, district headquarters, infrastructure, energy, residential, commercial, industrial, utilities built in for that that district should need based on all the tiles that comprise a district.

 

If infrastructure were a planned thing like there was a tile line in each zoned area that connected to other districts or set aside nature areas between districts that had these tiles set aside specifically for things like roads, bridges, tunnels, tracks, spaceports, ports and there were more means of efficient travel outside of flight and building the infrastructure was built into the mission system for those things or getting an energy power plant built to power a region let alone a single core so that people could focus on doing that and provide a larger utility company type service everyone needs. Or if you want to build a spaceport there are only so many tiles reserved for people who want to build one or they should have to work with others to make a better one. Or if you want to be offensive military there are only so many tiles to build one and so if you want to do that you need to find an open military tile or hellp others. Likewise you need factory zoned areas with enough room to make everything the district needs. To where you join a team of people because there is only enough real-estate to go around instead of having everyone do everything it is a more tailored experience that requires a community to make happen.

 

It would require Static Cores and Dynamic cores to have actual purpose that could only be placed in a zoned out area set aside for that purpose or Dynamic Cores being designated as Military, Defense, Freight, Transport, Speeder or the actual ship classification of fighter/speeder up to capital ship. Where you have to make a choice to sacrifice something to gain something else or that no matter what there are set defined roles for a district that are required and rather than having 100 solo players doing their own thing they only have so much space and makes it easier to work together even if you are doing it solo by putting a core down even if you dont own the tile to help increase production.

 

Flying should not be the only way to get around and if there was some kind of high speed train that took you to districts or a type of freight train type thing, monorail, contained highway or other things it would be nice.

 

Limestone is not ore. Granite is not ore, marble is not ore, stone is not ore. The moment NQ treated teravoxels like voxels they killed teraforming. It should be its own thing with the same tools and power as voxelmancy just teramancy. The world should be made completely out of various stone types like limestone, granite, etc which are harder to get through and make it harder to get ore and requires drill bits and things for reagents to get to other tiers of ore if they actually used the minecraft tier approach instead of the we just need mats and it'll work great. The top layer needs to be sand, tundra, snow and at some point it turns to T1 Stone, then T2 stone, T3 stone, and so on. Its supposed to be that way so you can then have different tiers of mats on every planet with particular ores/stones being more common on some planets/moons then others.

 

Most of all I just need better precision or shapes in teraforming. Flatten tool does a job but its like carving a thanksgiving turkey with a chainsaw. I dont care if it requires talents to get the shapes or to use various sizes to either work on the precision I can produce to slow me down from skirting the voxels. I would wait a month or two of exp if I could just get a fucking square ffs. I dont care if im stuck with duplovoxels that are 3x3x3/5x5x5/10x10x10 squares I just need right angles without having to try and chisel everything with a giant beach ball. It just does not need to be that hard if there was an actual teraforming tool that acted like its own personal build mode for teraforming.

 

 

 

 

 

But say if a planet were broken up into hemispherers, sectors, regions, districts, and polis and there were reserved tiles by say a faction that had missions built into it for new players or people to go there and build a road from your districts space port to s

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The abundance of "fly swatters" on alioth is one of the top 3 reasons we hate going there.  Following 1g gravity and of course #1 "player driven lag".

 

So glad our faction moved to Madis.  IF you put a tower on madis then your just being an egotist, no reason for agg towers on madis.

 

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The solution is at least some kind of structural physics.

It is ridiculous seeing a 2km high 1-voxel "hair" even STANDING let alone holding the weight of a whole building, landing pad + 100s of tons of ships.
That is just embarrassing and it destroys any immersion just seeing that.

 

Voxels and all elements already have mass, weight and volume. So, there should be some static / structural parameters in place, i.e. if you want something to be able to stand 2km high - it must have a certain width and must be made of certain materials which can be able to support a certain weight on top of them.

 

This whole thing is just stupid to be honest: I mean you could build such a "hairline" tower then build a whole factory on top of that and then simply delete the "tower" and voila - now you have a floating building. That is just horribly wrong.

 

You want a structure 2km above the ground? Alright - but then you really have to build some beefy supporting structures underneath that, which will be able to support all the weight and also be stable enough to not succumb to gravity / winds, etc.

 

 

 

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5 minutes ago, sHuRuLuNi said:


It is ridiculous seeing a 2km high 1-voxel "hair" even STANDING let alone holding the weight of a whole building, landing pad + 100s of tons of ships.
That is just embarrassing and it destroys any immersion just seeing that.

I'm not a fan of the towers, but antigrav technology is already in the game. Space  cores reorient the player, the maneuver tool can lift ships and leave them floating, there are specific antigrav components, and we have antigrav generators that allow you to move while antigrav is active. It's not beyond the technology available in game that static cores can float.

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6 minutes ago, sHuRuLuNi said:

This whole thing is just stupid to be honest: I mean you could build such a "hairline" tower then build a whole factory on top of that and then simply delete the "tower" and voila - now you have a floating building. That is just horribly wrong.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, afaik the tower is there to let you go up and down as you wish, but technicality you don't need it, you could just build a floating platform.

I'm pretty sure there's a couple of them around my base on sanctuary.

 

Btw floating platforms are better than towers imho, they are much easier to see and there's no risk on crashing in the "hair".

 

 

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23 minutes ago, fiddlybits said:

I'm not a fan of the towers, but antigrav technology is already in the game. Space  cores reorient the player, the maneuver tool can lift ships and leave them floating, there are specific antigrav components, and we have antigrav generators that allow you to move while antigrav is active. It's not beyond the technology available in game that static cores can float.

 

Sure, but then it should be explained as such. There should be a believable lore. What I am talking about is the general lack of structural physics.
Like when you mine some big chunk of ore on the surface, then you mine out everything underneath and the rest is just FLOATING there. That is stupid.

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20 minutes ago, Fra119 said:

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, afaik the tower is there to let you go up and down as you wish, but technicality you don't need it, you could just build a floating platform.

I'm pretty sure there's a couple of them around my base on sanctuary.

 

Btw floating platforms are better than towers imho, they are much easier to see and there's no risk on crashing in the "hair".

 

 

The issue is supplying the high atmo stations.

 

We put ours up 5.5km. It takes a lot of fuel to get heavy freight up to the station from the surface. For space travel we just land or fly from space so it cuts out nitron. We also have bases on the ground as well. The problem still is that anti-grav only works at 1km up and only with the flight scripts out there that it allows it to be used like a hoverpad. Since NQ nerfed the speed to about 4mps it creates the need to have a pedistal in order cut that time down. To get up to 5.5km it takes 30-45 mins to rise up that high. So we are forced to build a pedistal that uses the container range to your advantage so that you can just put mats from the ground 2km up and just float up from there cutting off roughly 5-10 mins. We are also considering making another pedistal that is 4km up to make that trip even shorter or that at that point we could just direct transfer to the station from the second pedistal.

 

The problem comes when you want to get people up there from the ground base. In which you could easily exploit the rez pads but how much longer until NQ nerfs that so you cant really count on that staying around much longer with some kind of limits like the maneuver tool nerf. Most people spring for the teleporter tower route or the space elevator route and building up Static cores. For us 5.5K will take a min of 515 L Static cores to get there and more like 525-50 if you consider the overlap between cores to be able to add the teleporters. The real issue is the lack of being able to teleport from 1 core to another even within your own 1 tile territory let alone adjacent territories you or your org own.

 

So the only real solutions is towers, pedistals, and space elevators because NQ for whatever reason hates Sci-fi tech in a Sci-fi tech based game.

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