EvilTesla

I really don't like factories in racing at all. I don't mind mad-max style racing, the problem is when the enemy, over time, produces fifty attack drones. That tactic quickly becomes so powerful that it is the only viable strategy. I guess I'd be fine with factories if they were nerfed. I think the best fix for factories is to conserve mass, I've suggested this before. Another bug, bio barrel missions don't work anymore. If I deposit a barrel the counter stays at zero. *VENT* I really hate bug 2 above. I like to keep multiple small sub-drones. I am not good at building large multi-purpose drones, as they get very clumsy very quickly. Only good news is that this forces me to make all my sub-drones autonomous, as I can only drive one drone.

two things that seem like bugs to me, but may be features 1) catch allows for factories 2) when I activate a camera tracker, the tracker on the drone core stays active, so the screen adjusts to try to keep both the drone core and my sub-drone in view. I liked the old behavior that when a camera tracker was active, the implicit "camera tracker" in the drone core turned off.

It occurs to me that there are two ways to choose which drone you use in a sumo match. My preferred way is to have one sumo drone that is designed to be the most successful against the largest number of other sumo drones. I find that a large center-seeker works best here. The other option is wait until the game chooses your opponent, then you pick/design a specific drone that is optimized to beat that specific opponent. I don't like this, as it seems too easy to me. What does everyone else do? Do you have one champion that you prefect to beat all others? Or do you keep a variety of minions optimized to beat specific types of enemies?

That's what I do as well. This one example I was giving, what do you do right after you print and send off your hopper drone. If you're collecting a lot of resources fast, then I find I have to wait for the factory to recharge before I can continue collecting resources. The pump could solve this problem. Not that this one little problem warrents an extra part. Mainly I'm hoping that fuel and power tanks will start empty when constructed by a factory, eventually. This is the case where the pump would be most useful.

As Lurkily said. I'd think the mass consumed by the factory would be equal to the weight of the generated part, the physicist in me wants mass conservation. But there are other ways to balance that.

I guess I am making some assumptions about the game engine. If I were to design a game like this, I would try to mimic real life. In real life, stuff breaks because the springs holding the stuff together get stretched too far. In the case of real life, the springs are van-der-walls forces. In the game, I'd think that the connections (note, I'm talking about the connectors, not the parts) don't have a health bar, but instead break when they are stretched too far. Yes, this is an assumption, but it is intuitive and fits with how the game behaves. The problem with connecting objects by springs is that the result is unstable. If the spring constant is too low, things wiggle. If it is too high, the physics calculations need to be more precise. This is obvious I think. I don't see how this instability is desirable, as it doesn't mimic real life well. It is extremely rare in real life that one would encounter the type of instability that we see in the game. Admittedly, games ought not follow real life precisely, but this instability problem doesn't really improve enjoying the game for me, it is counter-intuitive. Why can't I connect a bunch of thrusters together (as long as the thrusters can handle the strain)? Why do I HAVE to connect light parts to heavy parts? This isn't something I'd have to consider if I was building things in real life (again, as long as that light part was strong enough to handle the strain). It seems to me that there is plenty of challenge in designing drones without the difficulty of stability. The difficulty (I'd personally find, maybe this is easy for others) of replacing springs with struts is answering "when does the strut break?", since the strut can't bend or extend anymore. So, I offered a solution that would allow modeling the breaking of struts, without the instabilities. Yes, I am suggesting having shipwide rigidity, as I think this better mimics how such a craft would act in real life, and I do not personally enjoying dealing with stability problems. Reading this forum I get the impression that there are others that feel similarly. I'd like to keep the struts breakable however, as I do find it interesting to still have to deal with fragility of a drone. With a drone build this way, you'd want to avoid piling a bunch of children all on the same parent.

I would like to suggest a resource pump that can pump electricity, fuel, or red/blue/yellow resource from tanks that are below/above in hierarchy to tanks above/below, depending on how they are activated. This will be very useful if fuel and power tanks made by factories start empty (which I hope happens), and are very useful on autonomous hopper drones. On my mining drone I like to have my hoppers held on autonomous drones that then disconnect and fly back to the nimbatus. If I had this pump, I could keep collecting resources when the factory is recharging, then pump all resources to the hopper drone when it is ready.

It is obvious that Factories are awesome, but a little too much so. I like the idea that parts cost resources (right now I have more resources then I can spend, the weapon upgrades are interesting, but not overly so. Seems weird to have an entire resource system for one small part of the game)..... But I have another suggestion. What if we made another resource on top of power and fuel, factory mass. Your drone would have a factory mass tank that essentially holds resources for the factory. When the mass tank runs out, no more building things. I think the mass resource tank should change its weight depending on how much mass it is holding. A mass tank holding 10 units may weigh 11 (tank may weigh 1 unit), and allows a factory to produce 10 units of parts. A full mass tank may start off as your heaviest part, but get lighter as it is used. I think this would make using factories much more difficult, to the point that small important things can be made, but you won't be using factory's to destroy planets, give yourself infinite lives (like I do ) or whatnot. EDIT: Just had an idea, that if the mass storage is added, we could also add a mass-collector. Similar to the resource collector, except that it re-charges mass tanks by sucking in mass from environment, perhaps rock-dirt. One problem is that this may make digging very easy, so maybe it would only work on disconnected drone parts and resources in environment.

I suggest that the physics of the engine can be improved by replacing the spring-like connectors between parts with solid connectors. I suspect the reason that this isn't done is because it is harder to track when the connection breaks. Springs break when they are extended too far, when does a solid bar break? To fix this problem, I suggest that each connection has a health, and this health degrades when there is a significant different of forces on the two objects. That can be calculated easily like so: You have a part 'X', with children 'A,' and 'B', and a parent 'P'. the total forces exerted on 'X' can be summed from F_A, F_B, F_P, and F_ext. That is, force from A, B, P and external forces (environment collisions etc..) To calculate the damage on connection X-A, the game would first calculate the magnitude of the force on connection X-A: dF = sum( F_B + F_P + F_ext) - F_A. If the magnitude of dF exceed a certain amount (so the connection only degrades with significant forces), then the damage sustained would be proportional to dF. In this way, the entire drone could be treated like one part, but we could still have parts break off.