Force of Nature

I like making automated drones. Making many minor adjustments till I have nowhere to go with the design, then starting fresh with a different idea. The Drone Workshop could have a "Shake Test" button, where a few high knockback, low damage, missiles hit the ship in random places, and the ship shakes around. To test how solid it is, and if there are any big flaws. "Retry Mission" button on fail screen, right now there are too many menus to go through to retry. An "Edit Drone" button on the screen you see right after dying, it would save time to be able to go directly to modifying the drone after a loss. A Camera block that moves the screen to somewhere else so you can see what your detached Drones are up to. Still love the game btw. Super fun. Thanks for the game guys

I was testing a ship in the sandbox, 150+ parts I think. The game crashed and these are the crash logs. If it helps, some enemies just spawned inside of me destroying part of my ship. That may have something to do with the crash. crash.dmp error.log

I found connecting each one to the nearest one makes much shorter "connecting beams". It comes out a little wavy, but not glitchy and fall-apart-ie. But once you go 2 dimensional, a couple zig zag in specific areas deal with sway pretty well.

All good ideas. Some of them are probably already in the works. Yes, yes, very yes. Some more challenges would be INSANE. Imagine a planet with 5 or 6 different challenges. Even larger than current planets. Maybe a heavily defended "Fort" or "Satellite / Station" in orbit that you have to destroy. Don't forget tho, this is pre-alpha, and not really representative of the final game. I doubt they would finish the game with this small amount of missions. Oh, I particularly like the sensors idea. I think this game could do with some more in the detection area.

Hmm, good ideas. But what about also a Radar that scans in a circle and can do 360 degrees once a second, and can rescan in less time for closer, but it takes longer for longer ranges. It won't be overpowered because a lot can happen in 1 second that it wont even detect. So people will run 2 or more radars to get faster updates.

Oh. Yea, I feel stupid. I keep remembering that this is pre alpha, and that you guys probably have a long list of ideas already. :-[

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At the moment you need a dozen sensors to detect the area around your drone, which gets ridiculous because of the bouncy physics and their narrow detection area. Imagine a giant cluster of sensors, all wobbly and destroyed almost instantly. I purpose a new sensor with a 22.5 degree detection area. Not overpowered like a full circle of detection, but it would cut our necessary sensors in half. I also like the idea of being able to rotate the sensing area from a slider and not having to rotate the whole sensor. I could let this suggestion go if we were given an area of detection, instead of just a line. Oh, on another note; I just noticed sensors can detect the Nimbatus. Yay, thank you

Wo hoo. An update. <3

We could do with a mini-game to play when it's loading. A simple space invader would work, like in the old Ridge Racer games. Or maybe the game could just show you a shematic of your drone, so you can think about your build while you wait for it to load. Here is a 2D Pong I've made for fun in a few programming languages. 2D Pong Download Click the red square to start, click to go faster, right-click to slow down. I also made "Mineland" (skip to 2 minutes in the video) I don't know about your computer, but there are several loading screens that take 10 to 15 seconds for me. If you could edit your bot and just restart the mission, without having to reload the World you are on, that would really help.

This would be easy to manage. Add another box, so instead of just the "Assign key" area you also have an "Assign pointer". So if you don't even need a key to activate it, you can leave that part blank.

If I understand you correctly, you wan't the reverse of an IMPLY gate. This is from the Wikipedia article on IMPLY gates; Inputs Output 0 0 1 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 1 1 So an IMPLY gate and a NOT gate should get you what you want.

It turns off the Engines if it is pushing against the Nimbatus, but yes, it does have to touch it to detect it.

I made a "sensor" that detects it and turns off the engines: http://strayfawnstudio.com/forum/index.php?topic=852.0

Here is a sensor to keep your satellite up and a simple digger that can beat the core. If you don't use logic disconnecters, you can put all the circuits on the satellite. The digger works just fine, even that weak. The sensor for the satellite needs to be less sensitive than the one keeping it level. Otherwise the thrust turns off for some reason.

How bout a circuit board block. You can put logic gates directly on the bot, or on a 16x16 circuit board accessible in a popup window. I even like the idea of the main body part having the circuits in it, so when you click it there is a button on the left side of the screen that says "Edit Circuit Board" or something like that.

I love this idea. I sense someone wanting a Death Star, LOL. There needs to be 2x2 block size weapons, but greater than a mere 4x power, and obviously more energy usage too.

There needs to be friction that slows down the movement. It seems any small force adds to all the other forces, instead of being turned into a tiny ammount of heat, like real life. The wobble is, simply put: too efficient.

If I play for around an hour or so, usually when done with a Mission and I click "Return to Nimbatus" the game locks up. When I check the "Windows Task Manager" sometimes it is still using 2.5gb of ram, other times it is only using 10mb ram. If I wait a few minutes, it might let me continue to play, but not very often. If I had to guess I'd say the Garbage Collection isn't optimized yet. If only it could be sorted into categories as it was being made/used, then large chunks of Garbage can be deleted very quickly.

So I would have to Hamachi to play online with my friend 1,000 miles away?

What, we can't make a Death Star?

Autosave - This should happen more often. A little blue or green floppy in the top right corner of the screen tells us when it autosaves. I have lost hours of gameplay because it crashes from time to time, and Autosaving would really help. (Micha said they will, yay!) The "Launch" button should be closer to the center of the screen, because it is the button you press the most often. The "Import Drone" button should be over with the drone buttons, you don't press it all the time like editing the drone or starting the mission. "Total Weight" should be somewhere in the build screen, so you can specifically try to make your ship lighter. Maybe even go by weight not "50 parts or less". Start the game with a cap of 10 part slots when making a drone, then every completed mission you get 1, then after 50 planets, you have about 75 more, so 85 parts so far. No upper limit. Make it so you can buy part slots as well, 5k or 10k sounds reasonable. The World Map should stay cached for quick access, we have enough memory with modern computers. The loading is unnecessary. Allow placing parts directly on the blueprint, not connected to anything. This way you can make the outline of a ship before planning where your mount points will be. Load the game files that are accessed most often into a Ram Disk, then when it Autosaves, put those files on the Harddrive not the ramdisk. Make a "Current Goals" topic in the Announcements section telling the community what is currently being planned for the next patch, so people don't have to ask for improvements that are already in the works. If wireless power is supposed to be in the game, make it only 75% efficient, and require "Microwave Power Transmission Beam", where you need a transmitter and a receiver for it to work. Range Sensors should not have to be rotated to rotate the beam, you should have another slider next to the distance slider, that way you can get more accuracy and not be limited to the number of steps in rotating objects. There should be a "Stress Test" button on the creation screen that shakes the bot around and tells you how many parts fall off. Even allowing the logic gates to run, and weapons to fire, so shotgun physics can be taken into account. Enemy Hives should be detected as "Enemies" with the laser sensors. Much larger planets and co-op missions, where you need more than one person to win, mention TeamSpeak somewhere, but don't make it a part of the game. That way players wont have to communicate, but if they have friends, they can choose to talk. Make a "Space Battles" challenge, where the ships have a little more health and lower attack. Flying around in space would be fun. Try to make Star Wars like battles possible, with Big Ships and small ones, all flying around with blaster fire everywhere. Never make it impossible to be massively overpowered. Maybe make it take some grinding to get that power. Relax. No one here wants you to work your fingers to the bone. This game is amazing, but you don't owe us your peace of mind. We are more patient than we look, and we are very grateful for this experience. Take your time. That said, where do I see whats happening right now in the development? Twitter, Facebook, YouTube channel? Thanks for the Game guys.

I LOVE this game. ;D Keep up the good work! Anyone know where I can see updates? Does someone on the dev team have a Twitter or FB or something? Can't wait till it's all done. I have 1600+ minutes so far. (not counting when it crashes and I lose hours of play)

Oh, but I am curious why they dont get targetted at all.

The solar cells don't get attacked, should this work? ;D Edit: I am mainly curious about if they are not supposed to be targetted at all, or if it's a bug and they will get attacked in a future update.