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Extra Large elements needed


Dakanmer

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I know I'm far from the only person to suggest this in the last few months or few years. I know NQ has heard it many times. We need larger flight elements. We have XL space engines, and we have tiered atmo/space engines and hovers/vboosters, which is great. We don't have XL atmo engines. We don't have XL atmo brakes or retros or adjustors, nor do we have tiered brakes/adjustors.

 

We need:

  1. XL atmospheric engines
  2. XL atmospheric brakes
  3. XL retro-rocket brakes
  4. XL adjustors
  5. XL hover engines
  6. XL vertical boosters
  7. Military/safe variants of atmo/space brakes and adjustors
  8. L and XL wings
  9. L and XL ailerons

 

It is beyond ridiculous how many L brakes and adjusters have to be loaded down on a ship to make it flyable. Even simple and lightweight designs can require a ridiculous number of each, making designers have to find ways to hide them under voxels so that the designs don't look like something a Warhammer orc would throw together. But looks aren't the only problem. It's also the element count. When you need hundreds of flight elements to fly a ship, the lag generated by those elements can get pretty intense, and that's not even looking at scripts that get info from/about them for display or use. When you need hundreds of flight elements to make a ship capable of flight that the achievements call for (100k m^3 of material, fly 1kt in atmo, haul 10kt in space at max speed), or even for normal high-capacity hauling, you stop caring about making a ship that looks good (they're already constrained to the volume of a square, rather than having the option to have a longer/wider/shorter build volume) and focus only on making sure you've got enough brakes, adjustors and engines.

 

These demands for bigger flight elements have been made over and over by many people for the past several years. It would be great if @NQ would actually listen and take action on an issue that is this old. Ships requiring >100 L atmo brakes and >100 L space brakes and >10 XL space engines and >10 L atmo engines and >50-100 adjustors are butt-ugly lagmonsters, but people make them because they need/want what they can do.

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I think they should go the other way and put an element type limit on cores. At a certain point you have to go AGG or go home, and heavy haulers shouldn't fly like fighter jets.

L hover engines are too week though, and since we have L stabilizers already there's no reason not to have L wings and ailerons.

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The point is to stop this sort of thing from being necessary, NOT to make fighter jet/hauler hybrids.

 

It's nothing but a shell made out of 128 L space brakes, 144 atmo brakes, 176 L adjustors, 16 XL basic space engines, 34 L basic atmo engines, 20 L basic vertical boosters, , 12 L stabilizers (because there aren't any L wings or ailerons), 18 M wings, 10 L space tanks, 8 L atmo tanks, 24 L containers, and a few other things. It's a heavy hauler that needs far too much crap to haul, and even without any cargo turns really slowly. The voxels are mostly just a wire frame to mark where elements go for symmetry, with a very small amount for "looking cool." Tiered engines and the like are too expensive in time/resources (worse because of the schematics) at this point, especially since T2+ deposits have become more rare than in beta (a guy scanned a large number of contiguous tiles and found none at all. On Thades), and getting asteroids is a pretty big competition, so we have to work with what we can.

 

This is why bigger elements are necessary. Tiered brakes/adjustors/airfoils would be nice, but those are more "tweaks" to the basics than realistic replacements for larger sizes. And yes, sadly, NQ will probably just continue to limit everything. From day 1, creativity in anything but voxel work has been stifled by NQ constantly saying "that doesn't fit the direction we want to go" even as they advertise the whole game as "player-driven" etc. That whole approach to development is ridiculous, and it's seriously making me think I wasted the money I spent on 13 months worth of subscriptions.

Hauler.png

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2 hours ago, Dakanmer said:

From day 1, creativity in anything but voxel work has been stifled by NQ constantly saying "that doesn't fit the direction we want to go"

 

Biggest creativity-stifler: having to possess the objects you want to incorporate into a Construct before you can start. I know NQ want people to be "in the world" when they're designing Constructs, but I'm no more "in the world" when I'm fiddling about with voxels than I would be if my avatar was stood in front of a "design console" element that let you build your bloop from specs and drawings, not actual items.

 

It's the biggest reason my wife doesn't play: she likes the idea of ship design, but the requirement to have your paws on everything before you can even try it out for size is a stopper.

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  • 2 weeks later...

That ship is beautiful: a beautiful

kernel Space Program, eat your heart out. 
 

if said for years and years this game needs to fill in the gaps in the inventory. 
 

Well, at least we got XS Space Fuel Tanks and corner windows in only five years, so NQ are clearly listening. 

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How about the large and extra large refiners, smelters, chemical, glass, and transfer units too. Just saying, this game needs to let the players scale up and out, and not make everything a chore because the elements are too limited by their size.

 

I don't care if they make them more expensive, that's a fair trade off. 

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On 10/15/2022 at 1:31 PM, Dakanmer said:

The point is to stop this sort of thing from being necessary, NOT to make fighter jet/hauler hybrids.

 

It's nothing but a shell made out of 128 L space brakes, 144 atmo brakes, 176 L adjustors, 16 XL basic space engines, 34 L basic atmo engines, 20 L basic vertical boosters, , 12 L stabilizers (because there aren't any L wings or ailerons), 18 M wings, 10 L space tanks, 8 L atmo tanks, 24 L containers, and a few other things. It's a heavy hauler that needs far too much crap to haul, and even without any cargo turns really slowly. The voxels are mostly just a wire frame to mark where elements go for symmetry, with a very small amount for "looking cool." Tiered engines and the like are too expensive in time/resources (worse because of the schematics) at this point, especially since T2+ deposits have become more rare than in beta (a guy scanned a large number of contiguous tiles and found none at all. On Thades), and getting asteroids is a pretty big competition, so we have to work with what we can.

 

This is why bigger elements are necessary. Tiered brakes/adjustors/airfoils would be nice, but those are more "tweaks" to the basics than realistic replacements for larger sizes. And yes, sadly, NQ will probably just continue to limit everything. From day 1, creativity in anything but voxel work has been stifled by NQ constantly saying "that doesn't fit the direction we want to go" even as they advertise the whole game as "player-driven" etc. That whole approach to development is ridiculous, and it's seriously making me think I wasted the money I spent on 13 months worth of subscriptions.

Hauler.png

Element limits could fix this.  Some things should be too big to fly in atmo. 

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