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Element collision detection is still not good enough


Zeddrick

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I built a brand new ship this week.  It worked fine and then the next day I logged back in and got into the seat and it said 'elements have been disabled because they are overlapping'.  For a freshly built ship with no tricks used, just placing elements next to one another.  The element being complained about was an adjustor and there seems to be no way to know which adjustor it is.  Nothing is highlighted anywhere except on the element list.  So I had to spend a miserable 20 minutes just moving adjustors around randomly to try and make the error go away, which it eventually did (although not immediately so I still don't know what was wrong.  There was nothing obviously overlapping.

 

So today I'm trying to make one of my existing ships work.  It was purchased from a well known ship-builder who does not use any sort of Janko on their ships.  I have the 'overlapping' error on one or more of 36 wings, 6 vertical boosters and 35 atmos airbrakes.  And no obvious way to see how to fix it.  I don't even know where all the elements are because I didn't build the ship.  And isn't that the whole point of buying a ship, that you don't have to mess about with this stuff.

 

This sort of thing might fly in a beta but, franky, this is not good enough for a release.  My pre-existing ship will, admittedly, be wiped so that will be a solved problem but a lot will not be and the ship I built fresh was a post-wipe ship I intend to use.  Brand new players are going to come into the game and build ships and this is going to be their first experience (after the dodgy element placement which is a lot worse than it used to be and errors about clashes when the item is blue, forcing a miserable trial-and-error which sometimes ends with the element jumping a few voxels after you place it. 

 

I understand why this was added into the game, but after all these months it still can't tell the difference between 'our game is broken and put something an imperceptible distance inside another element' and 'Sneaky Snake put 57 engines on top of each other to make his Rifter go really fast'.  This is not rocket science and should be really easy to code, erring on the safe side rather than making some flaky thing which tries to be perfect.  Then just permaban people who deliberately stack elements.

 

Frankly, either get it right or get it out of the game before release because this is a terrible experience.  And right now it seems pretty far from being right even after all the time which has been spent on it.

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I have discovered by chance that if I hit tab, bring up the element list, mouse over the element type I want and then hit tab again the overlapping ones go red, making them easier to find.  So that's useful but not really very discoverable for a new player.  Why don't the overlapping ones just go red when I enter build mode given that the game obviously has the ability to do that?  My radar went red because it is obscured.

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image.png.b0aab7d0e53a179a8214ccd4abdb2bdd.png

 

This is getting really miserable now.  I have to move about 20 wings.  I have absolutely no idea what's wrong with their placement as they don't look like they're overlapping.  Every time I move  or move an element the red highlighting disappears.  I tried spacing one out.  The top right one above.  I moved it until it went blue, clicked and it placed.  Then when I went to move the next one I made them go red again and the wing I moved is still red.  I waited a few minutes just in case but still red.

 

This is a terrible experience.  Building used to be one of the things that the game really got right and now it's just a frustrating waste of time.  This collision stuff has been in the game a while now and it just doesn't work.  Remember that this started out as a way to catch cheaters who used multi-boxing to place elements right on top of each other.   And now it's just ruining the whole experience for everyone.  Whoever wrote this obviously lacks the ability to deliver something which balances usability with the required level of correctness checking.  Take it out now NQ before you end up with a huge list of negative steam reviews complaining about the building experience.

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I finally got it working and OMG what have they done to this game?!  A ship which used to fly smoothly is now getting a single digit framerate (which I never had when I played last except when things were broken for big mission ships), the ship moves forward in jumps, the controls are laggy, the ship itself flies like a brick, constructs don't render until I get soo close I have no hope of avoiding them except, so far, dumb luck.

 

It's a perfect time to bring the game to steam and re-introduce element damage.  Nothing can go wrong!

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Unless i missed something, the last communication we had from NQ was that they were working on the algorithm for the element detection.  And they were going to release a new version for us to test.  That was several updates ago though and i haven't seen it mentioned since.  And it hasn't changed or been fixed in any way that i can see.

 

 

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I suspect NQ has two different systems checking element placement that don't talk to each other or get triggered in the same way.  They have mentioned several times that one team makes a change that impacts other teams, and this is likely one of those instances.

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Yes, this is a super annoying issue. It is not just on ships where this is a problem. You can place new industry elements, turn them on, and they will begin production and then a day later you can come back and the machine is stopped with an error due to overlapping elements.

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54 minutes ago, Deathknight said:

Yes, this is a super annoying issue. It is not just on ships where this is a problem. You can place new industry elements, turn them on, and they will begin production and then a day later you can come back and the machine is stopped with an error due to overlapping elements.

I was not aware of that.  I still get issues on cores I placed before the updates for overlapping elements.  Even after correcting them.  I haven't had the slightest issue with new cores but I've been focused entirely on dynamic cores.

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8 hours ago, Wyndle said:

I suspect NQ has two different systems checking element placement that don't talk to each other or get triggered in the same way.  They have mentioned several times that one team makes a change that impacts other teams, and this is likely one of those instances.

I think you are probably right.  But when I'm trying to fix a ship I don't really care and neither will all those steam reviewers.  Keep it simple.  If the element is blue when I place it then it works.  If it's red I can't place it.  If the two teams disagree then bang their heads together until they come to an agreement.  Or fire one of the teams.  Or whatever.  Just do it consistently and simply in a way that makes sense and can be explained in a single short sentence like I did above.  Or steam reviews will be filled with the howls of frustrated spaceship nerds whose ships were fine yesterday when they built them.

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4 hours ago, Deathknight said:

Yes, this is a super annoying issue. It is not just on ships where this is a problem. You can place new industry elements, turn them on, and they will begin production and then a day later you can come back and the machine is stopped with an error due to overlapping elements.

Yesterday I tried using my factory for the first time since the madness was implemented.  I had to move some boxes before I could open them.  I'm struggling to see how it relates to the original 'sneaky snake and the engines' problem.

 

It's like they let a developer obsess over the perfect solution and deploy it without letting usability people review the changes or something ....

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