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Lurkily

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Everything posted by Lurkily

  1. Ah, so these emblems are for the tracks, not the racers. I was thinking they might be identifying marks for the participants' crafts.
  2. All flyers. No swimmers? Regardless, they are beautiful work.
  3. Eventually, people will want to import emblems, too.
  4. Details, please. How do you keep them aligned along the path? It can't be just free hinges, even in Zero g.
  5. I should add that it will reduce the punishment inherent in making smart drones for autonomous, competitive challenges, to require fewer sensors.
  6. Add a selection criterion, and "Enemy unit," with the settings for that criteria, appear in the part settings. Add 'terrain,' and a 'terrain' heading appears, with outputs for that detection event. Scrolling may be necessary but can be mitigated by permitting the user to collapse each heading to hide the outputs once they've set them to satisfaction. Alternately, tab each criterion. This is, however, unlike any other part UI, and would require some UI layout, design, and coding work. UI work can get notoriously choppy, so I wouldn't expect it yet. Micah has publicly expressed that he'd like to shift to a UI that allows you to freely add inputs and outputs, so that you could have an if gate that would trigger on two possible criteria, for instance. And here, we have one sensor carrying multiple criteria. With this apparent intent of making sensors and logic more powerful, I'm less inclined to oppose (As I have done in the past) the idea of one sensor being able to handle multiple criteria, with per-criteria outputs. A week ago I might have shied from the idea, but this update seems to show an intent that isn't incompatible with logic/sensor parts that can do more than one thing.
  7. Full autonomy would be ideal, but probably unachievable. The VTOL thrusters only point TOWARD the sensor criteria, right? Even if you can flip them, we need some sensors so the drones don't crowd - they have to push away from neighbors, and cut off opposing thrust so they don't sit stationary when they try to keep their distance. (Or, if the vectors are weaker, just overpower them by using normal thrusters for avoidance. A "Master" drone is one solution to centering, and is sometimes used, but to be really swarmy, even the master uses an average center as a criteria. #1 is the real brutal one. It would take a ton of logic just to get each drone to return vector data, but to average it would be ridiculous. I support this whole-heartedly.
  8. Dead Space was terrifying the first time I played it. In VR? EEEEEESH. I do find I have to scale back difficulty, without having free and reactive movement.
  9. The rift, once you set up the sensors, has you trace your play area out with the controller. This sets up a 'safe zone'. When either controller (Or headset, I think) gets close to this, a wireframe appears, outlining the borders of your play area, so that you can orient yourself and back away from hazards. I don't know if Vive does the same, (I expect it must,) but Steam's VR platform has something called a chaperone which I believe has the same function, though I haven't investigated it.
  10. Hum. I'm thinking of Swarm drones. The simulation to replicate swarming behavior (birds, bats, etc) is surprisingly dictated by a very simple ruleset. 1: Move in the average direction of the swarm. 2: Try to keep close to the average center of the swarm. 3: Keep a minimum distance from any other swarm member. 3 is easy. Four proximity sensors, 90 degree sweep, maybe more for diagonal avoidance and to eliminate gaps. 1 and 2 are harder. You could make the core, or a tracker, the swarm center. But average direction . . . . I'll have to think. You might just keep the planet core on the right, and make the average direction 'clockwise, but that would diminish the resemblance to swarming behavior.
  11. I've got the setup working, and figured that with few having the opportunity to test-run these, I'd share my impressions. If you have questions, ask away. I'll answer any questions to the best of my ability. Oculus Rift and the Vive/Vive Pro are on the pricey side; they're the high end of the market, retailing between $300-$500, so they're not poised to saturate the market quite yet. According to most accounts, the tracking and quality on these two seems to lead the pack by a wide margin, but the cost is high on any system that's very capable. (Oculus has a new system coming out, Oculus Quest, which is more like a console - depending on how that develops, it may be a kinder price point, and more like a standalone console than a PC accessory.) As far as how well it works, I would call this a mature technology, just with a price point that's too high at this point. Given good sensor placement, tracking is extremely good, matching my own nonvisual perception of hand position. (Proprioception.) With a two-sensor setup, you DO have to face forward - some games with archery, if your pull is to the left and you aim to the left, the controller drawing the arrow might hide behind your head. (And thus not be tracked accurately.) Tracking with sensor visibility though is good enough for no-look throws and blind sword swings. The biggest issue currently is that content is limited, even with some classic titles converted to VR-compatible stuff. There are good titles out there, but nothing like the availability of titles on a console, let alone the PC market. With some work, you can get any Direct-X 9, 10, or 11 came to work, though you'll be using a controller or keyboard/mouse. Still, just being able to turn your head helps a ton for immersion, and being seated helps limit disorientation from turning and moving. Dead Space was already pants-crappingly terrifying, but now . . . yikes. Sensor calibration is finicky as hell - but it's not really a calibration, it's more a guide to help you properly place sensors. You can skip calibration to place them with more sense before laying out your play area. This is actually a very good idea with three sensors, as calibration seems to be specifically designed for two sensors in front, and tries to conform to that ideal even with more sensors, when equidistant placement makes more sense. Speaking of which - you trace your play area with a controller, then set the center of it. This provides a boundary that tells the rift when you're leaving a safe space, and it will project a wireframe to show you where your limits are when you begin to stray in-game. Motion sickness is an issue, for some. With Skyrim set to free roam, I found myself leaning against in-game movement while I stood still, and strafing while turning is very dizzying. The divide between apparent motion and the motion I feel (or don't feel) is just too disorienting, though I didn't get sick. Most games default to turning in snap increments and some kind of short-range teleport system for basic movement. With no apparent movement on screen, this eliminates the issue, and some games have made very creative approaches to this, working it into gameplay.
  12. I'm sure you have it under control. But do let me know if you want me to take a look. I don't know your history, of course, but it's possible I may have more experience with very contentious forums. That, and I like to think that I have a half-decent way with words.
  13. Hey, that's great to hear! Do you mean why message forums are good for community management, as opposed to a subreddit or other settings, or just a platform for communication in general? Do you intend to also focus on some of the drawbacks, particularly in large communities? They can be very demanding on developer time and attention, particularly for small teams. Before Aaron sold off Domain of Heroes, I was an admin and moderator over there, and we had 15-20 people on board of varying degrees of access to the system, but only four people on the development team, and only one developer; it was a little crazy over there, and the dev team had to schedule time away from actually developing to keep up with the community.
  14. A small group of friends. If it is large...it just doesn't work. My question: What is your favorite school lunch? Been a while since school, but it was always the pizza boats.
  15. i did decently with something I tried to shape like a velociraptor. But anything bipedal looked weird. It's the roundness. I couldn't broaden the torso without deepening it, so everything had a body that looked like a deformed potato.
  16. I would have been happy with anything that looked like a real living thing, instead of some kind of sculpted potato.
  17. Although it did help answer the question of 'how terrifying would it be if horses were carnivorous?'
  18. Look like spore monstrosities. I never could make something I was fully happy with, in that.
  19. I'm just seeking a longer range than the previous 1D line could achieve. I'll wait for the preview to comment further. Thanks again for all the new toys.
  20. Awwww! You guys WERE listening! Thanks for all of this, we much appreciate it. I noticed at 360 degrees, the proximity sensor had a maximum range of 15 - I'm assuming that's from forum suggestions to reduce range as you increase angle? While you're monkeying with them, maybe we could have an increased maximum range when they're at a 0 degree angle? (Their current usage doesn't always have sufficient range for my liking.) EDIT: I know it's not relevant to racing and the new obstacles, but I figured as long as you were digging into them, it might be trivial.
  21. Not perfectly ideal, but better than we had. Along with the tracker, I also have the core as a uniquely tracked ship part. This should be enough for me to get my ship with companion weapon-pods working. Once it is, switching weapon systems by discarding those pods and having new ones fly to my is just a step away. It isn't ready for micro-fleets, though.
  22. Also, I just want to give props to Markus here for reacting to all the development-related stuff that goes up. It actually helps a lot knowing that something we brought up didn't just sail by unnoticed. As people trying to, in a limited way, participate in development, the divide between what we want and what you guys know about what we want is often pretty foggy and mysterious.
  23. Nimbatus is great for guys with a toolshed full of half-finished projects.
  24. Woot woot! Can it track a SPECIFIC tracker, or, like cameras, do all trackers figure into its targeting? I'm actually most concerned about trackers, the hopper, and things like geopositioning. (Rotate the directional sensor's reading to match your rotation around the planet.) Nearest enemy/enemy structure/mission target/collectible/etc would be nice, but I'm not sure it's crucial. It may be the case that it's not as much fun to provide that information; no exploration rewards. As for autonomy, I think autonomous bots should have to be capable of everything a human is -- like exploring -- so I'm not certain they should get a pass on looking around.
  25. Right now I am rocking Beat Sabers. I just bought two broken VR headsets and managed to make one working set out of them (One had a broken lens, the other fried electronics) so I got them for a steal, and Beat Saber is ridiculously addictive. I think I found my new aerobics regimen.
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