1) Remove the regeneration from batteries and add power generators. That will allow the player to more finely tune their ship power handling. A ship with enough generators to run everything will be heavier, but batteries will run out of power. Any power from the generators not being used would be put back into the batteries.
2) The same thing could be applied to the fuel system.
3) The dampening on the ship physics needs to be increased a little. I had a ship design that would instantly vibrate itself to pieces as soon as some engines turned on. The thing was that even though the engines and/or logic sections would immediately be destroyed, the ship vibrations at times would keep increasing.
4) Cleaner handling of the terrain wold be good. What I mean by this is that there have been numerous times where I've destroyed the land, I can't see even a single pixel left behind, but when I try to fly though the area the ship gets caught on something. I spray weapon fire back and forth and sometimes I can clear it up, but often I just have to jiggle back and forth until I can go back the way I came.
5) It would be really useful to be able to slow the speed down and even pause it in the drone test mode. When trying to debug some autonomous circuitry I was building I found that when it went wrong and the ship flew apart, it was all to small and fast for me to be able to see the circuits indicator lights and without that that I couldn't work out where the failure was coming from.
6) Finally, the big one, logic circuits. How can a simple inverter be the same size as a full sized rocket engine? :-) I built what was a fairly simple control system and it took up nearly half of the ship. Additionally, once you've rearranged all the gates to fit neatly into the ship it makes it really hard to them find a particular gate if you need to tweak it. Also, when your ship is half logic gates, as soon as a single one is damaged the whole thing tends to fail. I'd like to suggest the following additions.
a) Allow the player to build their own logic units using a logic unit workshop, in the same way that there is a weapon workshop. This would allow the creation of control systems and autonomous controls that could be easily reused in multiple drones and updated as needed.
b) To build a new one the player picks small (1x1), medium (2x1) or large (2x2) or huge (2x3) box. The size could affect the number of input/output's available and/or the number of items that can be put in it, but personally I'd not do that and only use the size to prevent recursion by only allowing user circuits to be used inside other user circuits if they are smaller than the one you want to add them to.
c) In addition to the current logic items available there would also have to be an input and an output objects added. These would have two parameters, the name (which is used to label the entry when its used in another design), and a tag/key pair that turns on and off inside the circuit to match the outside signal for an input and is used to set the output value on an output.
d) All tags and keys used inside a user circuit would of course be insulated from the outside. So, for example, if you have an AND gate in your circuit that uses the letter A as an output, the only thing that would see that A would be inputs on other gates in that circuit. The inside of other circuits used would not see it, nor would controls outside on the actual ship.
e) I'm not sure if sensors should be allowed inside a circuit or not. I think that maybe you should be able to, though perhaps it'd be worth saying that they can only go in circuits that are larger than the sensor, and maybe the same size too, to prevent sensors being shrunk by placing them inside a small circuit. I think that it would probably take some play testing to sort that out.
f) The Logic Workshop could either reuse the drone editor, just with the non circuit items missing, or with a little more effort you could make something more circuit looking by not using tags and keys for signalling, but rather add small connectors to the gates and then have the user connect them by simply drawing a wire from one connector to another.
g) It would also be nice if the Logic Workshop also had either a mode toggle, or a small window you can turn on and off that would display the circuit's grey box and allow the user to place black wire and large and small lights on it. The lights would then be connected to whenever signals the use wants, allowing a custom circuit to have the same sort of indicators that the built in ones do that show the current gate status.
Post
Ian S
Hi.
I have a couple of suggestions -
1) Remove the regeneration from batteries and add power generators. That will allow the player to more finely tune their ship power handling. A ship with enough generators to run everything will be heavier, but batteries will run out of power. Any power from the generators not being used would be put back into the batteries.
2) The same thing could be applied to the fuel system.
3) The dampening on the ship physics needs to be increased a little. I had a ship design that would instantly vibrate itself to pieces as soon as some engines turned on. The thing was that even though the engines and/or logic sections would immediately be destroyed, the ship vibrations at times would keep increasing.
4) Cleaner handling of the terrain wold be good. What I mean by this is that there have been numerous times where I've destroyed the land, I can't see even a single pixel left behind, but when I try to fly though the area the ship gets caught on something. I spray weapon fire back and forth and sometimes I can clear it up, but often I just have to jiggle back and forth until I can go back the way I came.
5) It would be really useful to be able to slow the speed down and even pause it in the drone test mode. When trying to debug some autonomous circuitry I was building I found that when it went wrong and the ship flew apart, it was all to small and fast for me to be able to see the circuits indicator lights and without that that I couldn't work out where the failure was coming from.
6) Finally, the big one, logic circuits. How can a simple inverter be the same size as a full sized rocket engine? :-) I built what was a fairly simple control system and it took up nearly half of the ship. Additionally, once you've rearranged all the gates to fit neatly into the ship it makes it really hard to them find a particular gate if you need to tweak it. Also, when your ship is half logic gates, as soon as a single one is damaged the whole thing tends to fail. I'd like to suggest the following additions.
a) Allow the player to build their own logic units using a logic unit workshop, in the same way that there is a weapon workshop. This would allow the creation of control systems and autonomous controls that could be easily reused in multiple drones and updated as needed.
b) To build a new one the player picks small (1x1), medium (2x1) or large (2x2) or huge (2x3) box. The size could affect the number of input/output's available and/or the number of items that can be put in it, but personally I'd not do that and only use the size to prevent recursion by only allowing user circuits to be used inside other user circuits if they are smaller than the one you want to add them to.
c) In addition to the current logic items available there would also have to be an input and an output objects added. These would have two parameters, the name (which is used to label the entry when its used in another design), and a tag/key pair that turns on and off inside the circuit to match the outside signal for an input and is used to set the output value on an output.
d) All tags and keys used inside a user circuit would of course be insulated from the outside. So, for example, if you have an AND gate in your circuit that uses the letter A as an output, the only thing that would see that A would be inputs on other gates in that circuit. The inside of other circuits used would not see it, nor would controls outside on the actual ship.
e) I'm not sure if sensors should be allowed inside a circuit or not. I think that maybe you should be able to, though perhaps it'd be worth saying that they can only go in circuits that are larger than the sensor, and maybe the same size too, to prevent sensors being shrunk by placing them inside a small circuit. I think that it would probably take some play testing to sort that out.
f) The Logic Workshop could either reuse the drone editor, just with the non circuit items missing, or with a little more effort you could make something more circuit looking by not using tags and keys for signalling, but rather add small connectors to the gates and then have the user connect them by simply drawing a wire from one connector to another.
g) It would also be nice if the Logic Workshop also had either a mode toggle, or a small window you can turn on and off that would display the circuit's grey box and allow the user to place black wire and large and small lights on it. The lights would then be connected to whenever signals the use wants, allowing a custom circuit to have the same sort of indicators that the built in ones do that show the current gate status.
That's it for now. Thanks for listening :-)
Ian
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