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Lurkily

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Everything posted by Lurkily

  1. The thing is, with customizable ranges you could have two tolerances. Or four ranges, with four tolerances. Or Four ranges with only two tolerances. Or eight ranges and no tolerances.
  2. I'd like to hear your opinion over here:
  3. Not everything that is printed is permanent. I have one drone that prints a logic set to control behavior - to change behaviour modes, it'll eject the logic with a magnet, and a piece of tnt is the parent, ensuring it all turns to debris if not destroyed, then it reprints a different logic set. I also have ore couriers that can't harvest themselves, so they move over the hopper, then drop into the hopper to empty the tanks, and set themselves on fire.
  4. I'm not sure having ghost parts that can stick out and float through terrain and other ships make sense...
  5. The fact that it seems correct when you turn it backwards doesn't make it less backwards. I'm not sure how making it round helps. It still has a default up and down that it's placed with, and the tolerance is still going to be pointing down or to the right for most applications - directional sensors are usually sumo center, enemy drone core, or gravity, none of which conform to a natural assumption that the tolerance should be considered "up". It's all meaningless if sensor ranges go fully configurable, though.
  6. So progression is something sorely missing from the game. We need advancement, reward, increasing challenge matched as well as possible to an increasing capability and skill. I've made a small suite of suggestions that form a single picture of progression: however, these are each capable of standing on their own, as one component of some other system of progression. I've posted each of these as separate feature requests. Here, I'm providing links to each. You can discuss whether you like this picture of progression mechanics, whether you think it should be changed somewhat, or something else entirely, but also lend your voice to the individual concepts. Keep in mind, I'm not trying to turn the game into Grindtopia; the goal here is to start a player off with a manageable range of options, expand their capabilities at a pace they can process, and to provide a reward for player investment and mission completion. Costs should be managed so that players don’t have to struggle to make progress. The completion of entire galaxies before moving on should be able to help a player keep comfortably ahead of the curve if they’re not as skilled as other players. Adepts can charge ahead, using their skill or expertise to keep competitive despite being less advanced in their unlocks and progression.
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  7. Get every part into the workshop, such as weapons are, to broaden resource investment into more areas, and extend the appeal of harvesting and customization. I recognize that weapons are inherently different from other parts - but the weapon workshop is fun, and I believe this will pay off in player engagement, and just plain fun. Everybody wants upgrades or modifications to the way all sorts of things work. We want drills that can harvest resources instead of destroying them, we want TNT that has a small AOE, or that applies elemental effects instead of damage, or that pushes instead of damages. We want decouplers that apply force or self-destruct, (Explosive decouplers), distance sensors to detect in an arc and blast shields and blah blah blah. Rather than new parts or new settings, all of these things are prime candidates for additions via upgrade/downgrades. With regards to the UI, weapons and other items both shouldn't be duplicated in the UI; instead, when you click on the basic blaster or any customizable block, you should pop up a list window on the UI displaying all the customized versions you've built. Since they all look so similar, they should also display the name you assigned to them. From what I understand of weapons and upgrades, this is a big ask because weapons are fundamentally different from most blocks. But I think this can contribute a lot to progression, the offering of strategic choices, and fun.
  8. By mission-completion 'points', I refer to the ticks on a planet that indicate how much it contributes to unlocking new pathways. I think these would provide a great source of progression 'points'. They don't mandate you take missions you don't like, but they also don't mandate that you take on challenging missions at a certain strength - you can go complete less challenging missions to open up your options and capabilities first. You can completely unlock a galaxy to gain progression in earlier galaxies, or just forge ahead. I think we need to get every block type on a tech tree used to unlock access to parts. Start the tech tree with the basic core, small thruster, small energy, small fuel tank, 1x1 armor, the if/not/button logic blocks, yellow ore containers and harvesters, and a basic blaster/laser. I think we also need to implement a part count limit to normal missions, and use this tree to unlock increases to the part count you can implement on a mission. Increasing part counts should get increasingly expensive, but they should never stop being available, in my opinion - there should be no limit to how big a player can go. Some parts it should be impossible to avoid progress in, specifically sensors or logic. It's unfair to ask a novice player to choose between unlocking XOR gates or an altimeter, and rocket launchers or armor blocks. It's simply not a fair choice to present until they know the use of those parts. At least some of these should be unlocked at the start, and a player should not have to sacrifice guns and thrusters to also unlock logic. (Maybe logic and sensors use the green resource exclusively, so their investment doesn't interfere with other investments.) We should consider requiring players to recover basic parts, too. For instance, recover and restore three blasters before you can equip three. This would provide an organic way to limit, but also expand specific capabilities. Parts should be relatively common, and there should be a way to seek specific types of parts, or even buy parts to fill out a particular part of your collection that might be weak. The goal isn't to hold a player back, but to provide free expansion as a reward and an accomplishment, instead of a default.
  9. 'Gate' wormholes and lucrative missions that you have one shot to complete. Use the asynchronous competitive game modes Nimbatus uses now; but give the player an advantage in the campaign, permitting active control. Other advantages may also be available. A player shouldn't have to be a competitor to be able to beat the campaign, in my opinion. Like any in-game solar system, provide more than one mission type to gain access. You might have the option to win a race, beat a sumo bot, or fight a battle with a combat drone. (When racing and combat arenas open.) Thus a player who hates races shouldn't HAVE to race. I think that pulling player-designed drones into the campaign will be crucial in forging dynamic and challenging opponents. Right now any scripted challenge can be defeated with specific engineering counters. Pulling drones with a certain range of rankings should provide an increasing challenge. You should quickly dump encounters with very weak drones, but the rate at which the pool narrows will slow down as you advance more and more, so it'll never narrow the pool so much that there's no variety. Rankings for these drones should increase as you progress; every successive galaxy should shave the bottom 15% off the drone pool. (Or whatever percent.) Not taking the upper 85, 70, 55%, but the upper 85%, 72%, 61%, etc. This has the advantage of being mathematically simple: (100 * (0.85 ^ current galaxy number)). Shaving 10% off the lowest-ranked drones each galaxy, you'll be facing the top 10% of ranked drones after 22 wormholes. Shaving 15%, you'll face the top 10% after 14 wormholes. At 20% per jump, you'll get there in 10.
  10. Firstly, it's my opinion that the factory-fuel/energy solution is an error that should be eliminated, and that all tanks should manufacture empty - that shouldn't be a solution at all. Secondly, better engineering will fix that. Keep the heater away from the body of your drone, use a moment of magnetism or thrust to propel it away, or use a brief actuation of a hinge before decoupling to toss it. If you don't want it getting caught in a magnet, don't dump it next to your magnet. There are design solutions to this that don't require custom parts.
  11. I like other solutions for this currently; engineering solutions instead of game solutions. TNT that is configurable - for instance, to set fires in a small radius, to fully self-destruct sections. (A heater leaves behind a heater, immune to fire, though if it is a child of a destroyed part, it will still be debris.) Also remember, if you manage to destroy one part, ALL children become debris, so creative self-destruct solutions only have to ensure destruction of that part.
  12. Tractor beams are not typically represented in popular media as one - dimensional beams. Star trek is the only visial depiction I recall, where it's a fan of energy.
  13. Noice. What's the significance of the parts of the white track that 'tangle up? Also, what's the plan for autonomous racing? Directional sensor waypoints? Track edge detection?
  14. Fuel tanks (oops) fit in there a little better, they're just too big. I want to be ambivalent, but I think I would favor triangular parts. Armor, at least. It would make creating a stylized star destroyer a little easier.
  15. Latin is the root of many other languages -- Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian -- and contributes to many others, including English, and medical/scientific terminology. A grounding in Latin can help you decipher the rudiments of other languages without knowing them at all.
  16. If you're naming it after tilt, then CW and Right are functionally identical, except one requires no frame of reference. I agree that labels are needed, but I think that accurately naming them is also necessary. I'm also in favor of having output criteria for sensors, though, (Instead of 'tilted right,' use a configurable range of degrees as a match criteria) and that would obviate much confusion.
  17. The old adage used by anybody who works with tools is "Righty tighty, lefty loosey;" this refers to clockwise as being right, rotation from the top. I don't know of any standard that trains people otherwise. Pointing the tolerance in the opposite direction of its default may be able to help avoid errors, but it still amounts to 'think of it backwards'. I also think the inputs should be named 'clockwise' and 'counter, but as long as it behaves as expected I'll be okay.
  18. You can put an on/off switch downstream of a splitter, then a wireless connecter, which transmits only to its children, I believe. (I haven't actually used this yet.) The flaw in this is that if you choose to deactivate or reactivate any of them, you can only de/reactivate ALL of them. Mine have a small thrust away at all times, and only activate away from the main drone, or at a certain altitude.
  19. We've been mentioning trackers again lately. I'm excited, in the context that it can let one part of your ship track another part. I've mentioned I want to make formation fliers. Right now my formation gun wings that flank a core are stupid and clumsy; they find the core, and keep it to its left, push in if they can't detect it with a distance sensor, push away if the distance sensor finds a drone part, and I'm using sensors on the drone part to find the companion to guide it forward or back . . . it's slow going. Trackers offer a unique opportunity, with two trackers and two directional sensors, each tuned to a different tracker, to detect not just a ship part's DIRECTION, but also it's orientation. Trackers that can be selected as a specific directional tracker target can change a LOT. They can be very powerful. I'd like to reiterate that I really, REALLY want these, and I really would like them with the following specific feature set: Name a tracker with a specific identifier Select an identified tracker as a directional sensor target, and if altimeters get wider targeting parameters, (Rangefinder) an altimeter/rangefinder target Sensor dots, with configurable icons, on the minimap. Sensors, instead of detecting average position (as with cameras) detect the 'nearest' position. So you can mark several positions, and a subdrone can act on one marked position at a time. And, this would be a luxury, but an offset to the position read by sensors. For instance, an x offset of -100 might produce a sensor target 100 pixels left of the tracker's actual position. This goes back to wanting formation fliers. (Though the previous points make it doable, with some effort.)
  20. Lurkily

    Upgrade bugs

    Just make a factory that only prints a capacitor. Its 'empty' signal is the signal to decouple and reprint. You might need a delay to let it fall away, though. EDIT: Or a thruster, small fuel tank, and a buffer part to blast it away half a second, a timer part to wait half a second to print.
  21. Still . . . I just don't think it would make sense. It doesn't make sense for lasers, it doesn't make sense for the game, it doesn't behave like any reasonable expectation a player should have for a beam weapon.
  22. I usually have a 'core active' signal; it just means my core is alive. It's the signal I use for anything that needs a constant activation. With hinges, one output usually will override another, so you should be able to make it turn back, AND fire, with just the detector alone. Ideally, I'd put a short buffer on there, so that even a brief flicker of detection sweeps you back a decent amount.
  23. Lurkily

    Upgrade bugs

    I think I prefer the potential for spot-failures. Shields relying purely on energy reserves fully eliminates the need for any creative overlap. (Such as making sure shield generators protect each other, as well as just all perimeter parts.)
  24. Problem is, forward/back impulses don't keep things from sliding left/right out of your beam, and you can't swing them around to aim or drag objects and hope to hold onto them.
  25. But you don't need a brain for that. just put a single NOT block on each turret; detection event is "fire guns". If that's NOT active, turn left. That's compact enough for a turret, and can go behind a splitter to avoid crosstalk. (Or bounce right when it is active, however you want to do it.) When I mention scripting, it's because scripting is something the community largely seems to reject in their hopes for this game, thinking it will diminish it instead of expanding it.
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