MrFaul

Those are not an enemy those are a weapon projectile and they are not what I would call a particle system I have something like this in mind: Well this is clearly overkill but it looks nice and unity has support for particle systems so it would be possible that they stick to surfaces.

What magma motes? do you mean those "firefly" particles emitted from those small hammer heads?

Oh it was just a list...

what enemies do you talk about?

That is exactly point one I made...

No no I think you misunderstood me, I'm talking about a swarm like thing, like a flock/swarm of Moskitos near water. Not a actual creep that attaches to you. So technically they are harmless but are annoying as heck. So you would have to make being by your side rather un-hospital.

So I made a mock up to demonstrate the current logic: The Arrows/Lines show the different connections/networks. Each color is a separated network. The Letters are keys pressed. And yes the big red arrow shows a wireless connection that shouldn't be there. I agree that this is a confusing behavior. I would prefer if we had a "wireless transmitter" and a "wireless receiver" that would allow us a fine control over what is connected to what. There are several design choices here: A emitter -> receiver connection this would be a on way connection of one or multiple inputs send to receiver, basically a button that is pressed "remotely". This is the most simplest and straight forward form. A bidirectional connection, basically all things with the same network name are connected as if they where one construct. Almost how the receiver works at the moment the only difference he would also be a sender for logic. A remote control that switches completely and acts as virtual drone core with the ability to take over controls also a "return control" function. This would also needs two blocks the pseudo core and the trigger block to take control of it. This also makes it far simpler to distinguish what is debris and what not. The pseudo core could also have a "next" function that gives the control to the next pseudo core with the same name. Each has it's own advantages and disadvantages, your pick.

Actually I would think of them as a particle swarm, invincible to weapon fire and not colidable. They should half your generation rate. The only way to defend against them would be shields that continuely get drained or to use the heater / cooler to chase them away. You may survive one swarm with enough energy/fuel rate or saved reserve but you don't want to be in more swarms since each of those should half the rate separately. A interesting variant could also be one that feeds of your mining containers.

Isn't "Your drone core has a limited a mount of Resources to use equipment, to use more you must upgrade it" a reasonable and valid explanation? You could even aid that with mission rewards that expand the cores abilities for free with something like "You found component X and you gain slot X"

My goal is to improve the usability of logic connections and make it more intuitiv / less confusing. I really like to use games like this to explain the concepts of logical connections to old and young in a fun way. Right now we have some powerful tools to do some amazing stuff, but it isn't very accessible for novices. Of course it is fun for people to experiment, but that is only true for those who have already interest. For people who are curious the "entry barrier" is currently to high to generate interest so they simply brush it off as "to complicated". They need that "aha moment" for them, and a clean, easy and consistent UI is one of keys for that. I tutored somebody with very low self esteem in class on that topic who was bend on "I can't do that it's to complicated" with byte 😉 sized information pieces and she began to get the gist. Then my stupid teacher made one smart ass comment to her and she went immediately in denial just seconds before she would kept that knowledge for years. Damn I really wanted to skin that idiot in that moment... It is the same with the UI as long it isn't streamlined to aid peoples confidence a lot of them would never try to build something smarter. How this is archived are design questions and I highly value this form since it allows really good results. I'm not hell bend on this solution it's just something that works very well 😄

You would be surprised what madness entails if the people have restrictions that they have to circumvent :-D

No not really, it is more like a additional tab that only allows you to set the logical conditions. But it would require to separate the logic system from the direct input system. This maybe the case already so it would mostly a UI problem.

Hm first off all game should always be "what the devs think whats best" trying to cater everything to everyone ends up as some mess without any clear goal. Second the concern that it may ends in a grind fest. I don't think that is what will happen but to be completely honest mismanaging your resources is your own fault not that of the game. (better in game as with your real life bank balance)

maybe but figuring that out what works best is still somewhat trial and error, so testing some ideas is well worth the time 🙂

It's really not, since you made already progress so it is expected that you already have a resource backlog. Since the diminishing return is very cheap to begin with it is at this point just a matter of button presses.

You do realize that the first statement kinda invalidates it self? And it seems you still have some misconceptions about my suggestion, to put it like a statement it would be: "Crap, I'm missing one thruster slot and can't afford the next slot. Let's go mining then" But there is one thing that is very delicate about a system like this, finding the right balance between gain and required work for the first 50 parts.

See this is where you completely misunderstood the my concept, it was never my intention to block anything. This is just a means to require work in order to build bigger drones. As long you have enough resource to buy the next slot/part there is no limit. You keep those slots/parts forever you can only gain. This also doubles as a reward system for the work you put in. Besides restrictions, rules are the things that make games fun.

🤣 R.E: Space Engineers, I'm just grateful that the "new producer" they got put a stop to that weekly updated madness and favored to make it playable again. The heat they got from the community for being a broken game was very toxic and I don't want see StrayFawn to experiencing the same.

Well there is no hard limit it's eats just more resources down the line, since that should scale up with each new galaxy I don't see a problem there. Honestly I find the "overall" limit is a very bad metric, there are numeral suggestions to not count logic parts. So people will simply start to build massiv rams out of those and then there will be a new wave of complaints. Sumo should completely free of those restrictions anyway, a better matchmaking system would solve those problems automatically in a natural way.

Woa dude you are on a completely wrong train of thought if you call that sacrificing. Refining and optimization is something that should always come before any new feature. Look at Space Engineers feature creep and how long it took to get finally and slowly out of it.

Slots are essentially the part count you mentioned. You are on the same track. I'm down for massive constructs but you shouldn't be able to do that from day one in the campaing.

Oh you moved it, and as stated it is immigrated. I believe this should be checked at run time and not on generation.

Oh I do realize how much work is necessary, but that is nothing to be scared of after all it is a alpha. Now is the time to tryout different things reverting at this point is still easy. I'm sure the game will greatly benefit from this change. I watched my little nephew playing the game and seeing him struggling with the logic gates is one of the reason for this suggestion. The current state is not transparent enough for the younger audience, however showing him the logical connections on paper helped him quickly to realize what needed to be done.

Oh boy OK where do I start to get my point across. The current method to control your drone is very simple and intuitiv and I really like it, but it is the same simplicity that hurts more advanced logic builds since it gets really complicated to keep track of all your tags. Hence I suggest a complete revamp of the logic system to make it more distinct from the direct input methods and much more intuitive. This can be archived by visually connecting the logic parts I/Os with a linking tool and showing those connections. All button presses that logic would use comes from the drone core (or wireless receiver). This could also solve a lot of problems regarding the event propagation through a drone, since those links would depend on a physical connection. If something breaks off, so do the logical links. This makes "sub drones" much easier to handle. I attach a screenshot from the wiremod for gmod to demonstrate how something like that could look like: This can get very cluttered too, but that is easily solved with dynamically setting the alpha of the connections by length and highlighting those you look at. Since wiremod grew basically to a standard for the game and was completely community driven we archived a very high grade of usability and I really like to share those achievements and experience we gathered over the time if you are interested. Cheers Faul Please insert input below 😄

As a member of the wiremod team for gmod I'm clearly against it. We introduced scriptable logic gates and it quickly resulted in the death of all other logic gates since it made them simply obsolete. True, there are amazing builds with it, but having wonky drones with unexpected behavior when some logic is missing is much more fun to watch.