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ATHENA (0.29) UPDATE NOW AVAILABLE - discussion thread


NQ-Wanderer

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• Extra-Small Adjustor: 22kg > 25kg

• Small Adjustor: 42kg > 100kg

• Medium Adjustor: 200kg > 450kg

• Large Adjustor: 1000kg > 1550kg

 

... Perhaps I am missing something here, but it seems like this just encourages spamming dozens of XS and S adjustors in place of using a singe larger one on any size ship (subsequently increasing the amount of loading that need to be done), as now on top of having 4 that fit in the same footprint and match the power of the next size up, and being better able to fit any given space via their lower profile, they now collectively weigh significantly less... What exactly was the purpose of this weight change? And why do you think a bunch of min-maxing gamers wont just go crazy on an L-core with S adjustors?


• Command seat changes • Fittings capacity: 125000 > 175000 • Large weapon slots: 0 > 3 • Element Mass: 158 > 3500


I suspect that this was done to allow hauler-pilots to fly and shoot at the same time if they didn't know about using a remote-controller with a gunner-seat, but if this is the case then I'd suspect that people really would have just preferred to be allowed to configure gunner-seats for flight like hover-seats, it would have given them more decorative options without adding more weight to ships that weren't already going to fit the associated weapons.

 

• Integrated a brand new 3D system map with new interactions. • Overlays and displays for the planets, safezones and constructs on the map. • Improved map performance for large amounts of constructs.

 

I very much appreciate the new map, but there should probably be a slider in there somewhere to enalrge the icon/name sizes for the planets, not everyone is young enough to easily see/read the new map. The "target-plane" setting is a cool feature, but the visual could use a bit of work as well, it would probably look a lot better with sharper/more distinct lines and no color gradient filling the spaces between said lines.

 

• [Rendering] Introduced new skybox background.

 

This needs a brightness slider or something, as some people I talk to find it now too dark to see at night again while others find the skybox to bright. Having a separate slider that alters how brightly constructs/terrain are illuminated may also be worth considering, as anything not made of plastic that sits in a shadow (or even just at a less than optimal angle relative to the sun) becomes quite hard to make out details on.
 

• [VFX] Updated VFX when warping.

 

As the server is actively having a panic attack that prevents my constructs from loading their physics while I type this, I'm going to assume this is the same visual as was in the pts, and re-state my opinion that its opacity needs to be turned down by half.

 

• Some Aphelia hauling missions are now considered "special" missions.

• Players will see only a subset of special missions for a given day. A different player may not see the exact same special mission.

 

Were all of them made "special" or something? None of the missions currently available (to me) involve packages larger than 35kL or traveling any further than between a planet and its moon...

 


The rest of it looks fairly good for the moment, although proper testing and observation of the deployment of other new features will obviously need to wait for the game to be playable again.

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58 minutes ago, Taelessael said:

Were all of them made "special" or something? None of the missions currently available (to me) involve packages larger than 35kL or traveling any further than between a planet and its moon...

Look at the list of mission names, above there, there are two tabs/buttons "Classic" & "Special", you on "Classic" by default. Hit "Special" and you see the goodies list...

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It looks like mission running is now dead? As the trips are too long and the payoffs not worth it anymore. (For the higher paying special ones) 

 

I would suggest adding space stations for mission drop offs (in addition to the planet and moon ones)...so there can be a trade/delivery network that people can run if they want to do that as a profession. Would also mean people could pick up player loads too as the routes would overlap, creating opportunities to buy and sell at different player markets around the system.

 

That way the trips would be shorter and possible to do in a normal nights play instead of it being an afk profession. 

 

High value mission drops could be placed in stations,possibly asteroid bases, in the PvP zone. PvP zone markets could also sell higher tier (exotic) elements to encourage people to make those runs.. you might even get players trying to control space around those markets! More reasons for PVP.

 

At the moment missions are not fun at all and limited to people that let them run on auto pilot over night.

 

Just some ideas really, missions could be great!

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5 hours ago, LeoCora said:

It looks like mission running is now dead? As the trips are too long and the payoffs not worth it anymore. (For the higher paying special ones)

Mission running has been dead since the 14th of April, the wipe announcement...

Why grind/consume energy when the chances of a wipe are now huge?

 

After a wipe missioning is interesting again, but needs a complete rethink by the mission runners. Do you have multiple accounts (after wipe/launch, no more beta accounts)? If so, how many? Enough to regularly have more then one mission available to you? If not, you can probably get away with a far lighter ship to do the interplanetary trips. No more warpdrive, no more atmo stuff, might not decrease your weight that much, you might still do max speed with a smaller ship...

 

You might place small space stations above the planets and use larger ships to move the cargo up and down (they don't need max speed). You might want to use warp shuttles between those small space stations to move to the next mission. You could still do 3-4 high paying missions per day, 4+ days a week (Friday and the weekend gets more dangerous). The small spaceships would be a lot cheaper, you could leave them at the destinations eventually picking them up again... Use a somewhat larger space craft to redistribute them with warp if the distribution is off.

 

If you have a ton of chars, you might have enough of the special pool to do multiple runs with a single ship, even if you're ship is slower, it won't go below 20k, increasing the trip by ~50% time. The longest trips would go from 3.5 per day to maybe 2.5 per day... You could run multiple PCs and you could run a GeforceNow (paid and unpaid are both options) client on each PC, making more and more quanta with each additional session...

 

Issues: how many cores can you place? Workaround: Small ships should be easily disassembled and stored in a box at the space base, redeployed easily from BPC. As long as you hold the BPO of the ship, that shouldn't be an issue...

 

I might do some experimenting in the dead-phase of DU (waiting on wipe) with small ships, space bases, etc.

 

The mission rewards might now seem 'not worth it' but that is in the current quanta saturated market. That will change drastically in the post wipe/launch market. Especially when they kill all the Schematics...

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43 minutes ago, Cergorach said:

I might do some experimenting in the dead-phase of DU (waiting on wipe) with small ships, space bases, etc.

 

I gotta keep saying it -- big updates in advance of an incoming release combined with very low player counts because of wipe angst (or constructs being ruined) is a potentially lethal cocktail. 

 

This is the time NQ needs to actually beta test and find bugs and flaws in their ability to scale.

 

This being the "dead-phase" of DU is not good...this is the time it should be the busiest if NQ hopes to have the feedback it needs to do a clean release. 

 

This wipe BS has gone on for too long. If they wait until right before release, that means Athena will be practically untested at anything close to load. 

 

That's a huge gamble and makes this entire beta program rather pointless...you don't make last minute changes to a rocket 30 seconds before launch and hope for the best. 

 

This is the time DU actually needs a real beta program, but NQ has greatly reduced its effectiveness by delaying this simple decision. Yet again, players are warning them about what will happen, and yet again NQ thinks we are know-it-alls that don't understand the process (as if none of us have released software before lol).

 

Good luck with release, but we already know how this will play out. 

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Also 100% appreciate the visual change underwater its so much easier to see :) 

 

But I am not so fond of the adjuster changes that I have noticed:

1) My ship turns much slower

2) My ship is not turning as flat as before so it angles up or down depending weather I am turning left or right and I'd spent about an hour the other week adjusting them so it would stay flat...

 

Yet to test the speed changes but looking at the video it seems painful (hope that was just the acceleration shown and not top speed comparisons).

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Picking up from yesterday...
-warp needs to have its visual toned down (try cutting its opacity in half), 

-the speed-lines/particles need to have their transitions smoothed out (quickly zooming out in 3rd person results in a very visible transition at low speeds),
-adjustors need some work with the new rotational-speed cap, ships with the adjustor-power to quickly (but not instantly) hit the cap result in a rather sudden stop in acceleration that makes it jarringly visible that they are just hitting the game's rotational cap instead of reaching any kind of more natural limit. (either slow the acceleration as rotational speed approaches the cap to smooth the transition between the acceleration-phase and top speed-phase, or remove the acceleration altogether and just let constructs rotate at their speed cap from start to finish if they have the adjustor-power to do so).
-missiles probably need some love, as they are now not only the shortest ranged weapon, but also possess lower sustained dps than railguns (except at large size) even though you can fit equal numbers of both to a seat at maximum skills.

-alien cores that get renamed should probably still show up via their original designations in the "space resource spots" lists of the people that don't own them

 

 

 

20 hours ago, Cergorach said:

Look at the list of mission names, above there, there are two tabs/buttons "Classic" & "Special", you on "Classic" by default. Hit "Special" and you see the goodies list...

Much appreciated, thank you.

 

9 minutes ago, ADCOne said:

...

2) My ship is not turning as flat as before so it angles up or down depending weather I am turning left or right and I'd spent about an hour the other week adjusting them so it would stay flat...

That isn't the adjustors. NQ altered the weight of several elements, which has subsequently altered your ship's center of mass.

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13 minutes ago, Taelessael said:

That isn't the adjustors. NQ altered the weight of several elements, which has subsequently altered your ship's center of mass.

Thank you for the clarification - I'll still have to move the adjusters again though.

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Not sure if this is intentional but All the bonus ore from the mining unit mini games is spawning right on top of the MUs, which seems like its a bug since it makes them much easier. If its intentional I think its a good change but I might have chosen to place some of my MUs differently.

 

I also notice that the default view when you pilot a ship is now third person view is there any way to make it again start with first person view instead? (Hopefully some lua)

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18 hours ago, Cergorach said:

Mission running has been dead since the 14th of April, the wipe announcement...

Why grind/consume energy when the chances of a wipe are now huge?

 

After a wipe missioning is interesting again, but needs a complete rethink by the mission runners. Do you have multiple accounts (after wipe/launch, no more beta accounts)? If so, how many? Enough to regularly have more then one mission available to you? If not, you can probably get away with a far lighter ship to do the interplanetary trips. No more warpdrive, no more atmo stuff, might not decrease your weight that much, you might still do max speed with a smaller ship...

 

You might place small space stations above the planets and use larger ships to move the cargo up and down (they don't need max speed). You might want to use warp shuttles between those small space stations to move to the next mission. You could still do 3-4 high paying missions per day, 4+ days a week (Friday and the weekend gets more dangerous). The small spaceships would be a lot cheaper, you could leave them at the destinations eventually picking them up again... Use a somewhat larger space craft to redistribute them with warp if the distribution is off.

 

If you have a ton of chars, you might have enough of the special pool to do multiple runs with a single ship, even if you're ship is slower, it won't go below 20k, increasing the trip by ~50% time. The longest trips would go from 3.5 per day to maybe 2.5 per day... You could run multiple PCs and you could run a GeforceNow (paid and unpaid are both options) client on each PC, making more and more quanta with each additional session...

 

Issues: how many cores can you place? Workaround: Small ships should be easily disassembled and stored in a box at the space base, redeployed easily from BPC. As long as you hold the BPO of the ship, that shouldn't be an issue...

 

I might do some experimenting in the dead-phase of DU (waiting on wipe) with small ships, space bases, etc.

 

The mission rewards might now seem 'not worth it' but that is in the current quanta saturated market. That will change drastically in the post wipe/launch market. Especially when they kill all the Schematics...

Most of what you wrote sounds terrible...you shouldn't need multiple accounts to enjoy mission running. That's how broken it is and why it needs revising. If the game is like you have written then it's dead.

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The new VFX for space brakes and space engines specially is terrible, looks awful.
Why is the spacing on HUD elements now so massive?

The warp tunnel is OK-ish.. But at the start, the massive colored blocks is really bad.

Collision detection is still way of the mark, actually it is entirely not needed.

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3 hours ago, LeoCora said:

Most of what you wrote sounds terrible...you shouldn't need multiple accounts to enjoy mission running. That's how broken it is and why it needs revising. If the game is like you have written then it's dead.

Erm... You can do single account missioning perfectly ok. A 5-10M quanta payout 3-4 times per day, 4+ days per week is still very nice quanta (close to 100M), especially after wipe/launch. But flying for hours between planets isn't a good time in my book (wasn't good before, isn't now). I enjoy the puzzle, optimizing, setting up the infra, etc. But missioning itself is grindy as all F!

 

If you liked it before, I see no reason why you wouldn't enjoy it now... You just need to adept a little bit...

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There is a definite nerf on adjustors, beside mass changes. I believe I saw a dev confirm that turning speed was affected on another thread a week or so back.. I can’t be bothered  to look for it though. The few ships I have taken out since the nerf I mean update have all exhibited slower turning. Flying is now less fun. 
 

On the other hand, the auto feature on the harvest tool and the non-scattering of rocks from MUs makes picking up the groundspawn  much more viable.

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3 hours ago, Cergorach said:

But flying for hours between planets isn't a good time in my book (wasn't good before, isn't now). I enjoy the puzzle, optimizing, setting up the infra, etc. But missioning itself is grindy as all F!

 

No one thinks this is fun...it's a huge waste of time and electricity. If I wanted a screen saver, I'd put on a screen saver.

 

There's a not-so-fine line between "hardcore" gameplay and "boring as all F" gameplay. 

 

If the most attractive thing about slowboating is that it gives you time to do chores IRL...well, that's literally the opposite of engaging gameplay because it's forcing you to do anything else while the game plays itself. 

 

There's no rationale at all behind this game design choice. They could have hired some random person from one of those slightly scammy "game design" colleges and been better off than whoever is making these decisions. 

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