Lurkily

Pretty sure this is steam-specific; the only way to fix it on this end would be to use shorter descriptions. From the look of it, there's relevant info in each of those descriptions, so that may not be feasible. As Jojo says, achievements SHOULD pop-up the full description on mouse-over.

The biggest damn rifle I have ever seen. (Seen a lot, in the course of my job at the airport.) Their job, in essence, is to snipe for snipers. The one I recall refused to let the rifle out of his sight, and our supervisor let him back into the screening area (pretty unusual to permit) so he could watch us screen his luggage. Huge rifle, optics, ammunition, some of it color-coded, flak jacket and armor plates, and a notebook with the code phrases for that week, which I'm pretty sure I didn't have clearance to read. Checked luggage isn't accessible in flight, so firearms here are permitted with a declaration to the airlines, and by meeting whatever criteria that airline might also impose. (Probably require a license and such.) Ammunition is also okay, if declared and packaged in specific ways to protect it from accidental detonation. (Such as accidental contact with a primer if things shift in flight.)

It's been suggested, but I can't find the post right now. I think the common consensus is that if there were any upgrades left to buy with ore, people just wouldn't use factories. Ore is essentially the experience points that you buy new capabilities with, and nobody seems to be willing to spend it on non-progress parts. (Unless, perhaps, there were an ore type used only for factories.) Another suggestion was to let the vacuum parts suck up dirt, too, and let the factory consume that to make new drones - limited, but not tightly limited, and not limited by a more precious resource. Other suggestions involved using energy, fuel, or both.

Nice to meet you too. Welcome to the community!

I'm sure people would be responsive to a new topic, if you want to open one, about what they hope for and expect from the racing update.

The racing update is in progress. That's probably a subject better reserved for it's own thread, but you can check out some updates and videos from the upcoming update over at the Development WIP thread.

I know. I just wanted to touch on the times that the joke could actually be true. Sorry for the confusion.

To be honest, some of the most interesting stories are less about the procedure and more about the people we meet. I've had to deal with just about everything from Diplomats, to South American farmers, to anti-TSA protesters, to Secret Service countersniper teams, and some of them carry the funniest things.

Nitpick away. That's how vague uncertainties become concrete, addressable issues.

Just hitting the checkpoints in time. The dance would come from changing checkpoints in time with the music, instead of changing checkpoints the moment you reach them. It's a whimsical idea, not entirely serious.

I'm guessing it's not the flavor. If the scanner caught it, then it's probably just a false positive they had to verify. If it was caught with trace detection, by testing swabs, then the flavor is more likely - some things use the same chemicals or explosives that chemicals contain, or just molecules with similar properties in some ways, and they can also cause a false-positive. If it were caught at that stage, it could easily have been the flavoring that did it.

Welcome to the community! It's always good to have a new voice join us. If you have any questions or concerns, we have some mods around to help you out, so don't hesitate to ask.

This is tricky because I don't know the foodstuff in question (plain old goldfish crackers, with cheese flavor-dust?) but we have several methods of detecting explosives. Our scanners operate largely on density, making a vague judgment of what MIGHT be the right density to be something explosive. In order to reliably detect any explosive this way, we do have to put up with a certain amount of false positives on things with a similar overall density. If I had to guess, I'd say that some of them got crushed to powder, with a higher density than intact goldfish crackers. Maybe it caught that bag at just the right position and angle to mistake it for more mass than it actually was, or maybe that cheese flavor really does change it enough to make the difference.

Actually a pretty common occurrence. Dogs, cats, even a falcon once. In short, the same way we do luggage, we just have to take the dog out first. For this, at our airport, we required the passenger to be present and to handle the dog for us. Not all dogs are friendly to strangers, as you can imagine, and it's impossible to guess which are which. Without going into our exact procedure, we tested specific parts of the case where trace residues tend to accumulate - explosive residue is remarkably sticky and transfers to damn near everything it BREATHES near - as well as checking animals with longer fur to make sure nothing was hidden. (So, part of the job description is petting doggies.) It is imperative that we have the passenger there to handle the animal; if they left, we would literally call them back from the gate for it.

Great! Glad you like it. I enjoyed it on Netflix, but the book is always better.

As an FYI, the counts for similar suggestions have been merged a number of times, and the one with the highest vote count is usually kept, (They aren't combined,) so the counts on popular suggestions typically disregard the times it evaded notice and got no response. I wonder . . . we've talked about rigid struts, or added physical parts to connect pieces for stability. What if they also had limited durability, so that if you tried to prop up too much stress they'd begin to break? You'd be able to make something a little more reliably stable and rigid, but also not disregard physics stress, and have to build intelligently. The only problem I see with it is that people would be likely to prop up every part they can reach this way, which would kind of defeat the purpose of preserving the need to build intelligently. Maybe each part could have a setting to tune it's 'hardness' - and just like real life metals, harder (more rigid) materials are more brittle. (You know the old parable about the willow and the oak.) You'd be able to make rigid constructions, but you'd have to brace it with more resilient connections intelligently, and you wouldn't be able to add new struts willy-nilly to complicate physics and wouldn't neuter the reward for designing well. I know the reward of design isn't really an issue for you, as opposed to the reward of design application in gameplay. But as a development concern, any implementation of rigidity will need to consider making the engineering phase both challenging and rewarding, as well as the application.

I have a feeling they're all random die rolls.

Well . . . . . . . they are RABBITS . . . . . . but I pretty much ignored their whole relationship. I didn't mind it so much, but it felt like they had to cut the scenes that made it make sense.

In "frustration" (or "disappointment," if that word feels more fitting) I was referring to your being unhappy with what you viewed as an artificially imposed challenge, rather than a challenge that is rewarding. I also noticed you mentioned lacking quantitative data; every suggestion does have a vote count that you can refer to, which the devs use to gauge the popularity of suggestions. For instance, Dargus' suggestion of rigid drone bodies has a count of +2. A post of my own, suggesting a chassis that can help keep a drone coherent without abandoning physics altogether, got zero, and a post suggesting an 'inertial dampener' to stabilize parts at an energy cost got one. Much more popular are ideas permitting multiple connections (7 on Omega Rogue's posting) but there are gameplay and coding problems at play in that; in particular, physics can get very taxing very fast when multiple connections are permitted -- Michah(Dev) said they tried it when the subject came up during the closed alpha. Markus (Other Dev) stated that they're not sure how they'll address the issue, but rigidity is an issue on their radar.

Always glad to have a new voice in the community! Welcome on board!

That . . . isn't a choking hazard? I'm gonna arbitrarily guess #6.

A lot of people do the satellite thing. I do something similar with the drone brain itself, so my entire drone's active part is disposable. Be aware that logic may get localized in the future, requiring wireless connectors for this kind of construction. I understand the separate UI; I just wondered it you meant to have some kind of network such as the weapon editor had, branching out in some way; I see that's not the case. I have to say I'm actually in favor of logic being targetable - it presents an engineering challenge to protect your logic, and a gameplay challenge if it's damaged, trying to control a ship with a damaged control structure, making logic design challenging and influential on both sides of the gameplay. However, I'm also in favor of logic not being so bulky, and also reducing the part count it consumes so that players are less punished in game modes like Sumo for building smart. I currently like to suggest something like 1x4 and 2x3 processor modules - things that don't perfectly fit into our current array of square pieces - that hold 6 and 9 logic units a piece, which can lose the logic modules they contain as they take damage. It would triple the density of logic pieces and their part-count efficiency, but also permit logic damage if your engineering doesn't protect your processors.

When I say it's an outcome of 'the physics', I'm not saying we can't change it; more that it's not arbitrary. The decision not to alter it isn't arbitrary, but from a belief that the result isn't more interesting. Now, please don't take my objections to be saying that you don't have the rights due as a fan or a consumer. That's not what I mean. I realize that it seems like I'm trying to shoot you down; this isn't the case. In reality, I'm just already prepared for this discussion. I made this suggestion -- a few, actually, aimed at trying to make it possible, (I still advocate some that I think preserve the developers' intent,) and I was eventually argued around by a lot of the same arguments I'm presenting now. In short; sorry if it seems like I'm trying to shut you out. The arguments I offer you were once used against me, and I was frustrated at the time, as well.

I haven't animated in Photoshop in a while; I tinkered with it a while making people animated forum signatures while acting as a moderator on a rather crowded forum way back when; it was part of my "Community Outreach" efforts. Photoshop has better tools than Photoshop, but at the time my student copy of Photoshop was all I had in terms of professional tools.

Should all three of these be merged? Or is there diversity enough that one should remain separate? I'm aware that I'm not familiar enough with Niche to know the difference, so let me know, and I'll merge them up. (Assuming a mod who plays Niche doesn't get these first.)