Lurkily

A mission-based budget? And a global multiplier that increases? Or a global budget that continuously increases? My thoughts back in my progression posts were to use mass as your limitation. My thoughts were, though I may not have explained, that part count might favor certain parts too unfairly, while mass might be more easily tuned both for balanced engineering, (mass and load-balancing concerns) and as a more balanced limit on construction. Mass is also more of a practical concern, and less artificial than a made-up credit or currency that each part 'costs'.

I wouldn't mind heat resistant for covered parts, but it does add a certain complexity to it.

Hmm. Not sure if they would stop heat; preventing damage is as easy as being larger than the parts underneath, so things impact the cosmetic part first. I'm not sure heat resistant parts actually act as a barrier separating heated areas from cool areas, though. Some special-case work would have to be done to make sure that functions as intended.

I was thinking of also cutting loose 'armor' blocks in favor of high-mass armored parts in this layer, instead. Move the whole concept of armor into the cosmetic layer. To be fair, though, armored cosmetic parts wouldn't prevent you from getting knocked around, either.

Nope. There's no "new year, new me" posts coming to my feed. I like me more than I like most people. If you could have any fictional person as a friend or companion of whatever nature, who or what would it be? (And don't go talking about genies who can grant wishes, this is about whose friendship you would enjoy. )

Welcome to the community! Be sure to tap a mod if you need any help with anything.

Welcome, Nyssa! (I remember a Nyssa . . . Green Dragon? Haldor?) We're always glad to add a new voice to the community. If you need any help be sure to let a moderator know.

Either the player is forced to engineer a ship so that its parts are outside the cosmetic parts (I would just not use cosmetic parts) or he is forced to have no information about the health of his shields in combat. I think the only sensible thing for shields, if they have to be either over or under, is for them to go over. Long connections are unwieldy, and can be unstable, and I'd hesitate to mandate a certain kind of engineering, especially for cosmetics. The indicators I mentioned, in my imagining, would be a 2x1 part for the cosmetic layer, meaning you could fit 4.5 indicators over the drone brain alone. Most combat drones would need only two -- fuel and energy -- but mining drones will need a few more, to read their ore contents. Being a more utilitarian vessel, it might meet the players aesthetic to have exposed containers. Meeting the player's aesthetic sensibilities is up to the player. If they don't like the look of the indicators, they don't have to use them. I would prefer this mechanic be something that never HAS to be turned off. If a player CAN turn it off, that's great, but I don't want a player to HAVE to turn it on and off to play.

Time travel is a hell of a drug.

Weapons should be seen because you need to be able to see the source to judge the trajectory a shot's going to take, whether it's obstructed or needs to take gravity more into account because of the angle it fires at. Shields should be seen so you have an indicator of when they are partly or fully depleted. Collectors because you need to know the point that has to get close to a resource. LED's because they're pointless if you can't see them. I can't think of anything else at the moment that needs to be on top. All that is stuff that comes up in the course of normal gameplay, and I would really prefer not to be required to toggle visibility on and off on a regular basis just to play the game normally, especially not while in combat. Fuel, energy, and all three ores would probably be better off with an indicator part made specifically for the cosmetic layer that shows your reserves as a percent of the total on connected energy, fuel, or ore container parts. Showing all of those would compromise the point behind a cosmetic layer.

Well, YOU send them to their death, but whether that's something that Niche encourages is a different matter. I'm not even sure how I found niche subjects coming up in my notifications, since I don't subscribe to those forums, though.

All I meant to say is that we were talking about the same thing; and by digressing, I meant that the exact specifics of what it's named and which pigmentations of cats are specific to which gender and which colorations are mutations of other colorations aren't really relevant to the gameplay mechanics that are being sought(EDIT: Specifically, whether they're realistic). We're just getting further into the weeds having to clarify all this, so I'm going to withdraw.

On the one hand, nature is brutal, but on the other hand, you also have to think about what kind of game and experience you want to present. In other words, do we want Niche to be Zootopia, or Watership Down?

My apologies. When you said 'nope', I thought you were trying to contradict the claim. You went on to talk about the commonality of male or female children, but I had missed the question by Albino, so I was a bit confused. Yes, Klinefelter's syndrome refers to the anomaly I mentioned, though we're digressing a bit. And yes, calico is a variant of tortoiseshell.

Welcome to the community! We always welcome a new voice around here. Have fun, and if you need anything, let a mod know.

Fuel and energy at least need to have an exterior indicator. Shields and weapons would have to show through. Some directional sensors would be nice to see, but that might be up to the player to design the cosmetic layer so it doesn't block it. Exterior indicators even makes sense with the lore, since there isn't an on-board pilot who would just know. Toggling the layer would be enough to troubleshoot logic.

I'm not a Niche player, but I will say that some cat colorations are absolutely linked to gender. For instance, calico coloring is a gene on the X chromosome. It is, as you say, more complicated than that, but at the end of the day, almost every calico is female unless they have a genetic anomaly in which they have three chromosomes. (XXY)

Unfortunately, rebuilding the game for mobile would basically be a complete rebuild of the code. PC Games aren't very portable to iOS or Android, even before you consider that the UI needs to be not just rebuilt, but also redesigned. The devs have stated that they do not have plans for Niche on mobile, I'm afraid.

I would be all for a cosmetic layer. Maybe even shift the 'armor' mechanic to this layer, letting the player use light cosmetic pieces that break away easily, or heavier armored pieces that protect the parts under them from damage until broken. EDIT: Some parts would have to peek through. Weapons, shield modules, engines, LED's, for a start. My main problem with this would be that it would hide all your indicators - fuel, energy, logic. We might need a new 'indicator' part that's part of this layer, and tallies up fuel or energy totals to display here.

Welcome on board, we're always glad to see new voices in the community. Go ahead and let me or any mod know what you're having trouble with, we'll see what we can do to help. If it's a game problem, you may need the developers' help instead, but they're typically very responsive to bug reports.

I enjoy being the one that doesn't make sense, so I lied.

I'm not finding a lot about that error, but my first instinct is to dump your cache, since it's giving you a cache error. Also, make triple-sure your password is correct, though I doubt you could have integrated the account if it were wrong. After that, I'd try logging out and back into the community here, and see if you still have issues. Then signing out of steam from your account settings, and signing back in. Right now I'm reduced to 'turn it off and back on again.' One of the administrators of the forum may be able to better tell you what the problem is, being more involved in the operation of the site itself, rather than just the community, though it sounds like this may be a Steam issue, or a local problem somewhere on your end.

Click your user icon in the upper right corner, and from that menu, click 'account settings'. From there, you should find a 'Steam Integration' section with a 'configure' link. Click that, and you'll be prompted to log in to steam. Steam may prompt you to enter a verification code that it will send to the email registered with Steam. Try all that, and let me know if you still have problems. Also, let me know exactly where it goes wrong, and what happens; for instance, if you can't find your account settings, let me know what you do to reach them, and what happens when you try.

I messed with some of the more obscure stuff. There was one game called Galapagos - it was basically a simulated robot with no feedback except some reward mechanism if its flailing about got it closer to where you were clicking, which had to learn how to effectively move to reach a goal; it took several days of moving around to learn how to move its arms. Another one was something similar to a game-of-life sim with different species that each had genetic traits. They weren't a lot of fun, per se, but it was interesting to watch them develop with time.

Maybe don't crop the hair out. Every face needs a frame. Well, most faces. A FEW people can pull off bald without glasses or anything, but most people need some framing.