Space Engineers - Say goodbye to Starmade and Blockade runner. - Games

[QUOTE=Cone;43130695]thread music [video=youtube;-bNnekk2_Yk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bNnekk2_Yk[/video][/QUOTE] Mmmm... Delicious copyright law.

[QUOTE=Cone;43130695]thread music [video=youtube;-bNnekk2_Yk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bNnekk2_Yk[/video][/QUOTE] Real thread music: [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6jCJZEFIto[/media]

Speaking of CBB, is it any good? One of my friends swears by it, but I'm not a huge animu~kawai-desu sort of person. I do enjoy a decent sci-fi, but there aren't many.

[QUOTE=ForgottenKane;43129431]I swear to god every time I enter this thread you people are getting even more and more off-topic. What is it about space blocks that drive such madness in men?[/QUOTE] I think Firefly sums it up best. "Campfire stories. Men who went savage on the edge of space..." "They got out to the edge of the galaxy, to that place of nothin, and thats what they became." Youtube failed me in my clip search.

[QUOTE=woolio1;43131138]Speaking of CBB, is it any good? One of my friends swears by it, but I'm not a huge animu~kawai-desu sort of person. I do enjoy a decent sci-fi, but there aren't many.[/QUOTE] I'm not a huge anime fan either, but I can confirm that it's absolutely fantastic. Go watch it right now.

[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRpDn5qPp3s[/media] I wonder if the life support in this will cause performance issues :downs:

It doesn't use the vrage engine.

[QUOTE=Tmaxx;43131341][media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRpDn5qPp3s[/media] I wonder if the life support in this will cause performance issues :downs:[/QUOTE] Holy shit, and this was just revealed yesterday. Promising, [B]very[/B] interesting, etc, but immediately comparable.

[QUOTE=Tmaxx;43131341][media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRpDn5qPp3s[/media] I wonder if the life support in this will cause performance issues :downs:[/QUOTE]Considering that trailer is basically all anyone knows about it, you're really grasping at straws. [editline]10th December 2013[/editline] Like, people have seen a really pretty trailer that makes lots of promises, and they're now taking it all like its a finished product about to come out and the greatest thing ever. The entire team consists of, what, six people? For one of the most ambitious projects likely ever attempted in gaming?

Can we stop with the life support debating? All these games everyone is quoting are set up from the start very differently. They may be similar games but they aren't build at the foundation the same. The game doesn't populate the entire space with blocks and load a handful of chunks at a time like minecraft where you're never actually adding blocks, just replacing them. So working on massive builds in minecraft doesn't cause anymore lag than was before. This game is filled with empty space. A vacuum if you will. You create a ship and now the game has created a block grid around that first block. More blocks added the more the grid grows. Each ship gets its own grid. This is why you can't connect two ships, they're separate grids entirely. The game only has three states basically. Nothing. Blocks. Items. So to really do atmosphere on a ship, it would need to set out blocks of air. As has been suggested and compared to minecraft. Problem is, its not replacing those blocks, its creating them. Let's say you create a rectangular ship, that's just the hull that measures 200 blocks long, 100 blocks wide and 50 blocks high. That comes out to 68,608 blocks total. Now you fill the whole interior of that ship with air blocks. You've just added 931,392 blocks to your ship, for a grand total of 1,000,000 blocks total. For comparison, my ship, which currently measures 707 blocks long, and while i haven't measured the width or height is pretty certainly in the 100 + block range, and at its stage of completion is 148,075 blocks and beginning to lag pretty heavily. Without atmosphere or solid hull. I fully believe that when they say the game can't handle the strain of atmosphere, it can't. Can other games? Sure. They laid down a completely different framework that allowed them to achieve this. But they have limitations that Space Engineers doesn't. And Space Engineers has limitations they don't. Because of the way the game was built from the start, atmosphere is probably not going to happen without scrapping the game as is, and starting from the ground up. Which isn't happening, and even if it did, something else will be sacrificed in diverting the resources to calculate air. Bottomline is, just because two games are similar in mechanics, and style, doesn't mean they were built from the same template code. For example, Minecraft built a world full of blocks. Every space is a block. It is possible for atmosphere systems to be viable in that game. But since the world in one giant grid of blocks, you can't move whole structures or ships anywhere (they're snapped in place to the grid of the world.) And you can't get structures rotating for the same reason. Sure there was a mod that let you do that, but severing the ship you made from the world to which it could literally just fly through anything. No collisions. The distance it renders is a fraction of the distance, less than 100 meters, or less than 40 large blocks in Space Engineers. They are different games entirely, built entirely different from the start. Just because the game play is comparable doesn't mean the code the game was built on is too.

The game doesn't need to actively keep track of atmosphere, like a 3D version of SS13. It can do it through a system of checks as needed. That would be the brute force method, and anyone who knows anything about computers is not suggesting that airflow be simulated block by block. That's not to say it would be easy.

Maybe I just kept seeing the arguments that were from people who don't know anything and were suggesting such.

[QUOTE=Mbbird;43131801]The game doesn't need to actively keep track of atmosphere, like a 3D version of SS13. It can do it through a system of checks as needed. That would be the brute force method, and anyone who knows anything about computers is not suggesting that airflow be simulated block by block. That's not to say it would be easy.[/QUOTE] You could probably get away with a compartmentalized, percentage-based model instead of physical atmospheric simulation. FTL did that, because it was cheap. (I know, apples and Alcubierre drives) Couple something like that with some point gravity effects to simulate decompression on physics objects, and you could probably pull it off pretty cheaply. The algorithms to determine what constitutes as a room could potentially be pretty intensive, but you could perhaps just run a check for contiguous enclosed spaces every few hundred ticks or so. If the ships are on a grid system, it'd be checking the states of adjacent blocks. If you were to do that as a 3D array, and just ran coordinates, that could be cheap too. You wouldn't have to run that all the time, either. Scan it once and store the regions instead of the block values. You could have triggers for detecting damage or removal, which would negate the need for a continual scan loop. That level of abstraction could produce a cheap atmospheric system. It wouldn't be as easy just filling with blocks, but it wouldn't be as slow either. A lot of that stuff I've done, though not in this engine. Maybe the modders will have a go at it down the road.

[QUOTE=woolio1;43131882]You could probably get away with a compartmentalized, percentage-based model instead of physical atmospheric simulation. FTL did that, because it was cheap. (I know, apples and Alcubierre drives) Couple something like that with some point gravity effects to simulate decompression on physics objects, and you could probably pull it off pretty cheaply. The algorithms to determine what constitutes as a room could potentially be pretty intensive, but you could perhaps just run a check for contiguous enclosed spaces every few hundred ticks or so. If the ships are on a grid system, it'd be checking the states of adjacent blocks. If you were to do that as a 3D array, and just ran coordinates, that could be cheap too. You wouldn't have to run that all the time, either. Scan it once and store the regions instead of the block values. You could have triggers for detecting damage or removal, which would negate the need for a continual scan loop. That level of abstraction could produce a cheap atmospheric system. It wouldn't be as easy just filling with blocks, but it wouldn't be as slow either. A lot of that stuff I've done, though not in this engine. Maybe the modders will have a go at it down the road.[/QUOTE] I'm not going to pretend like I understand such algorithms entirely, because they have the potential to be more complicated than anything I've worked with, and to be fair I don't entirely think you do either, but point is, since the game is working with only [I]air[/I], and through a binary room system, it would not need to be run constantly. Room atmosphere states would only change after physics changes, and you wouldn't need to bother with any bullshit like decompression because these are space ships of the 2070s. Once a room has been vented through a block removal/destruction, you wouldn't need to check for a room refill should you [I]remove[/I] more blocks, so ship-ship collisions with atmospheres would only have so much going on as they are only removing blocks. bored musing. really comes down to whether or not the devs want to ever at all. What an atmosphere really does though, when it comes down to it, is it grounds the crew to the ship. It turns the ship into a sort of precious container, emphasizing further how much your own life depends on it. In implementing atmospheres and indepth spacesuit/uniforms, the game could achieve a very interesting sense of vulnerability. It's something you don't get outside of space games, yet something that no space game has quite yet captured from the First Person Perspective (the only perspective that really [I]can[/I] achieve it anyway), and that's why I keep pointing out how important it is to consider atmospheres at all. But [B]point is[/B], if the devs can produce a similar [I]anchor[/I] feeling, some similar feeling of vulnerability, desire to stay inside and keep it safe, then I would be perfectly fine without atmospheres. There are several ways they could do that, and I hope they realize this. Quick examples: limited space suits, air/propellant(/food?) resources in space, speed, types of space suits, distances between asteroids, navigation system limitations, beacon/node limitations, etc.

I'll admit, I don't know how space engineers works. I've got some experience with voxel-based game engines, and I know a little bit about how to determine contiguous spaces. Used to work with Source and Unreal, but those are irrelevant here. Depending on how comprehensive the mod tools are, and how open the code is, modding in a primitive atmospherics system isn't impossible. I agree that something should be done to ground the crews to the ship, but I'm sure the devs have something in mind for that. Honestly, I'd settle for jetpack fuel and life support, since that could be almost as effective. I guess we'll have to wait and see.

[QUOTE=Tmaxx;43131341][media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRpDn5qPp3s[/media] I wonder if the life support in this will cause performance issues :downs:[/QUOTE] looks like starbound in 3D with dogfights in space

Has anyone else noticed some unmentioned changes to landing gear behaviour? Instead of completely fixing them to a craft they create a ball-socket like connection. I definitely like this better, but some warning would be nice, considering the shrouds attached to my mining ship with a single landing gear broke off and cascaded through the rest of the ship utterly destroying everything.

Halo Pillar of autumn, really close to getting it done: [img]https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/54374248/SpaceEngineers%202013-12-09%2021-05-57-76.png[/img]

[QUOTE=LoLWaT?;43133007]But is it just going to be an empty shell like usual? [IMG]http://i.somethingawful.com/forumsystem/emoticons/emot-colbert.gif[/IMG] I really hope people snap out of the bad habit of making these giant as fuck ships without giving them a proper inside or anything. From a practical standpoint, that would crumple like paper in a fight over multiplayer unless you gave it a proper interior (or just filled all of the empty space with solid blocks). [editline]10th December 2013[/editline] (still gave you a winner)[/QUOTE] The cruise liner I was building had a full interior, complete with individual passenger cabins. Unfortunately, I never finished it though. Mostly because I can't bring myself to build massive ships unless the interior is fully fleshed out, but I can't bring myself to put in that much effort either :v:.

There needs to be a stacking tool. Sort of like symmetry, where all of your actions are repeated X times in a certain direction Z blocks apart. That way you could build one room in your living quarters and have it repeated down the entire hallway.

[QUOTE=LoLWaT?;43133007]But is it just going to be an empty shell like usual? [IMG]http://i.somethingawful.com/forumsystem/emoticons/emot-colbert.gif[/IMG] I really hope people snap out of the bad habit of making these giant as fuck ships without giving them a proper inside or anything. From a practical standpoint, that would crumple like paper in a fight over multiplayer unless you gave it a proper interior (or just filled all of the empty space with solid blocks). [editline]10th December 2013[/editline] (still gave you a winner)[/QUOTE] With the bridge interior and almost the entire outer shell. My high end pc is getting 9 fps while looking at the entire thing (with graphics settings on low), so its obviously reasonable to add the entire interior (or use it in multiplayer) not so much. I am making its outer shell and the bridge just to show that it is possible to make it with 64bit, not to actually use it anywhere because even with good optimization in the game the fps would be bad.

Also, when making a replica the interior plans are rarely available (or, exist at all)

[QUOTE=LoLWaT?;43133007]But is it just going to be an empty shell like usual? [IMG]http://i.somethingawful.com/forumsystem/emoticons/emot-colbert.gif[/IMG] I really hope people snap out of the bad habit of making these giant as fuck ships without giving them a proper inside or anything. From a practical standpoint, that would crumple like paper in a fight over multiplayer unless you gave it a proper interior (or just filled all of the empty space with solid blocks). [editline]10th December 2013[/editline] (still gave you a winner)[/QUOTE] You make a fucking bigass ship with a full interior then.

[QUOTE=damnatus;43133497]Also, when making a replica the interior plans are rarely available (or, exist at all)[/QUOTE] also they tend to use nonsensical geometry, and as down as i am for non-Euclidian architecture i think that's probably a bit beyond this game's scope

This game looks great, do they have any plans for multiplayer? If there will be multiplayer sandbox, i'll buy this in an instant. [editline]10th December 2013[/editline] No wait they already have multiplayer? Man, i need to buy this. Gotta pay the rent though. Hmm.

They don't have MP yet. [editline]11th December 2013[/editline] [QUOTE=Cone;43133844]also they tend to use nonsensical geometry, and as down as i am for non-Euclidian architecture i think that's probably a bit beyond this game's scope[/QUOTE] There needs to be smaller tile option for large ships so I can actually make the interiors doable. As of now there's no real point, no matter what you do you can't really pull off good interiors minus reactor rooms, etc.

[QUOTE=Cone;43133844]also they tend to use nonsensical geometry, and as down as i am for non-Euclidian architecture i think that's probably a bit beyond this game's scope[/QUOTE] Stanley Parable: Space Opera Make it happen.

[QUOTE=Squeegy Mackoy;43132776]Has anyone else noticed some unmentioned changes to landing gear behaviour? Instead of completely fixing them to a craft they create a ball-socket like connection. I definitely like this better, but some warning would be nice, considering the shrouds attached to my mining ship with a single landing gear broke off and cascaded through the rest of the ship utterly destroying everything.[/QUOTE] Here here. I made a beautiful hangar rack for my TIE fighters, only to watch every one of them swing around and snap in half as soon as the larger ship moved around. I'll need to work around it by anchoring a small ship frame to the large ship, then attaching each individual fighter landing array to it using unpowered motors.

We need procedural rails/tracks. Woudl be great for storing fighters and cargo.

So, the amount of debris generated by mining has been clamped down so hard it might as well not be there at all. I know it was done because a couple of minutes mining leaves you running at 5fps, but surely they could have just stuck a limit of 500 or so on them instead of making them vanish as soon as they touch anything (a maximum debris slider in options, anyone?). You'll see why my jimmies are so rustled when I upload the video I was in the middle of making. [editline]10th December 2013[/editline] [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW7rH3nYrNE[/media] Drills. Weee!