EdTheRabbit

Here it seems a defense cannon has been spawned at a point where it's projectile starts inside a wall. The projectile explodes as it meets the wall from the other side, digging 'backwards' towards the gun. Due to the AOE, the terrain didn't save my drone

the element would provide a temporary adhesive affect (similar to contact range magnet) that could build up adhere enemies to terrain or other enemies - kind of like the bio gun, but a temporary effect. With enough impact force, it might push enemies into things to adhere to, and hold them in place for slower weapons - Or be a double-edged sword for players with less manoeuvrable drones.

how about instead of using lots of energy, it uses resources (not from your stash, but collected and still onboard your drone)?

How about a fuel powered generator, or a battery powered fuel synthesizer? key here would be significantly faster generation, and need to be activated by an input fuel:power ratio would have to be tested, and maybe have it inefficient, so you lose a little when transferring back and forward. say a reversible 1 fuel = five power, but lose 10% each transfer

random thought for that: -zero storage power generation/fuel synthesizers -weapons and devices can only be powered by stored fuel/power, not the generators directly -storage cannot be filled until it is empty, or used until it is full (a charge/discharge cycle) to offset a virtual direct usage - so if you want to avoid brownouts, have at least two batteries along with your charger.

Have an option on the directional sensor that point to the closest resource node - you could automate miners to find and collect resources - of course if anything's in the way, that's the drone designer's problem!

Yes! as some sort of block with a dock/undock keys - as long as both are active with 'dock' at once, they connect and remain connected until undocked, sharing all power, fuel and resource connections when docked - also would be nice to have the option to make resource collection go one way only - you could have your courier dock with an automated harvesting drone, take all the collected resources and return them to the basket whilst the harvester keeps going.

I like this, but to be worthwhile, I feel you'd have to nerf power/fuel generation, whilst upping fuel/storage capacity for non-generating blocks - right now, it seems to me that it's almost always better to have four small fast recharge fuel canisters vs the large tank, and solar cells over the other batteries.

Rather than change the major functionality to any of the blocks, just allow more inputs/outputs to do the same thing. This could prevent the user from having to chain multiple AND/IF/NOR etc. blocks: if A AND B then X If C AND D then Y if X AND Y then Z 3 blocks - compared to 1 block of if AND(A,B,C,D) then Z in the same way, you can have multiple outputs, you can more easily create logic to move your drone - you can for example, share thrusters across several functions - have all your rearward facing thrusters fire for forwards, and still have the appropriate half of them used for left/right so instead of: if A then X if A then Y if A then Z have: if A then (X,Y,Z) You could enact this in your interface by just having a 'plus' button on the input and output sections that adds another row, and as additional rows appear, so do 'minus' buttons to delete existing rows. At the moment, I'm using dozens of blocks for complicated thruster sharing movement routines, where I could be using 6 blocks, one for each of the cardinal directions, and two to rotate.

It's still possible to create satellites, and while fuel/power sharing is not possible, you can still offload your logic blocks and even your drone core! All thanks to the camera block - while the appropriate input is active, the camera is centred on the camera block, in the same way as it is usually done on a drone - if you have multiple camera blocks active at once, the camera zooms out to see both blocks (useful for huge drones). with clever logic, you can set it up with a toggle so the same controls can be used with different drones. I have a large hovering drone, with several other drones docked to it with decouplers (usually a couple of identical combat drones, and a harvester) The volume saved by the lack of a core is usually enough for fuel and power, with the added bonus that if it's destroyed, you can still continue as the core is elsewhere.

I'd really like to see the changes from the initial demo...

fix sprawling logic and the myriad keys required. I recently used the in-game logic to combine several features within a drone: + ripple firing of eight long reloading weapons - 3 clocks, 3 not gates, 20 and gates + a thrust 'efficiency' package that lets me use every thruster on the ship for multiple purposes (it can turn on and off main, side and retro thrusters for turning, and strafing - 2 not gates, 16 and/or gates) plus minor things like: + a shield toggle - 1 switch + an afterburner button - 1 not gate While i'm sure I could have made this a little more compact, at this point I had used almost every key on my keyboard for the input and outputs. So how about a computer block (wishlist): a 2x2 or larger block that you can double click on (or otherwise enter) that expands to a screen that lets you place logic gates within the block, and drag inputs and outputs of these gates to connect them to each other. You could also maintain current functionality by dragging the gate input and outputs to a keyboard key field. You could keep balance by requiring the block to be powered (maybe usage based on how many gates it contains) plus of course, it's destruction would completely destroy your logic functionality rather than just maybe part of it. alternatively, for a quick fix - how about allowing us to assign inputs to a 2 digit hex value in addition to keyboard keys - that gives an additional 256 non-key possibilities (I would love both this and computer blocks, you could build incredibly complex drones!)

should you be able to use external fuel and power? I've been playing the demo for about ten hours now, and one thing I came on pretty quickly was the potential of a decouple block. I started with a droppable drone to carve it's way to the planet core hive while I mooched about on the surface, and later decided to have some offboard weapons (homing missile launching satellites for arena mode.) I accidentally forgot to put any power or fuel on my main ship, and realised that I was still flying and firing my onboard weapons, whilst powered by the detached modules. following this, every drone I've made since leaves a large satellite by the mother ship containing all the power, fuel and logic required for the drone, and the only thing headed towards the planet is a compact design of thrust and firepower. This feels like an exploit to be fair, especially as the enemies prioritise your core over everything else. What I'd like to see is having physical linkages being required for fuel and power transfer, and maybe a requirement for a wireless transceiver block for offboard logic. This could lead to some interesting emergent gameplay, such as players designing drop tanks for fuel, (though some way to choose the priority for which tanks being drained first would be useful) Alternatively, if an additional module that allowed docking was created, you'd be free to use small tanks that you could dock with a floating unit to refuel.