Rubber: Black, 50 HPs, Neither gives nor receives impact damage.
Docking gasket: Based on the model of the plex-door. Intangible and invisible by default. Activates when in contact with another entity, becoming visible. Remains intangible except to player avatars. Allows Players to pass smoothly between docked structures without falling through the gap.
Variable Block Mass: Heavier reinforced hull, and mass scaled to the space occupied by each block. A Tet of regular hull has no business being as massive as a full block of reinforced hull.
Conduit:
- Decorative: Works like wires in tekkit. A small 2-4px cube in the middle of the middle of the block space, but stretches out to "connect" to any neighboring blocks. All hull colors, and glowing in all crystal colors. Use for poles, grids, antenna, light-bars,
- Functional: Connects two clusters of blocks without adding to their number or connecting to anything else.
- Power: Connects power blocks to power-needing blocks.
Alternate Power (e/sec generation): Current power is free, but space and mass-intensive. What if there were other ways to generate e that were smaller and lighter, but consumed fuel from attached storage units?
- Fusion reactor: Runs on deuterium purchased or mined in game.
- Anti-matter reactor: Runs on antimatter purchased or manufactured by players in-game. Very high yield. Very expensive to fuel
- Alternate Power (Solar): Free Energy.... but only within a star-system and with direct starlight.
- Ion Thrusters: Very low thrust. Most efficient use of e to thrust.
- Coil Thrusters: What we have now... More thrust. Less efficient use of e.
- Chemical Rocket Boosters: Single use. Very high thrust. Mounts to docking ports. Triggerable from flight menu. Auto-ejects when expended.
Separate Shapes and Materials: This would actually take a small game engine change. What if, instead of an inventory far full of different shapes, you just had materials. Select the shape of the block being deposited from a menu similar to how you currently select the orientation. Different shaped blocks use different amounts of material, depleting that material from inventory as you place it on your ship.
Ship purchase, fabrication and repair: Currently, when you buy a ship... "poof" it exists. What I'd like to see is the purchase, not of ships, but of blueprinted ship-blocks. Add a new utility block to the game called a fabricator. A fabricator is placed in contact with inventory storage blocks and associated with a docking field. It consumes materials over time to construct or repair a docked ship based on the blueprint stored in the ship-block. Rate of fabrication (blocks per second) and e-cost are the limiting factors which can be set in server.conf.
Relativistic speed limit: Rather than a hard speed-limit that you can hit within a few seconds, how about a speed limit that you can approach but never reach? How? Do it like nature does it. Mass increases without bound as the ship approaches the universal speed limit. Mass_relative=Mass_static*(Speed_limit/(Speed_limit-Speed_ship)) The faster you go, the heavier you are, the more energy it takes to accelerate.
Warp: Yes, I know the idea has been beat to death, but hear me out. This could be done without breaking the engine or abusing the server. The "Warp drive" just modifies the mass of the ship, allowing it to turn and accelerate faster than a ship of your mass otherwise should. It draws enough power that it's only practical with an antimatter reactor providing e. Mass_static=Mass_unmodified*(1-(X%*number_of_warpblocks)) (X settable in server.conf where X is a percentage between 1% and 10%), and draws e/sec where e/sec= R*(Volume_ship_bounding_box)*(10/(10-number_of_warpblocks)) (R settable in server.conf) Warp blocks should be usable from the flight menu so they are not constantly drawing power.
Yes, this would allow a ship to exceed server speed limits. When that happens, the server stops instructing clients to render the speeding ship. The client of the speeding ship stops rendering the universe except for nearby stars. No collisions occur. Only position of the warping ship is tracked, until the ship drops to render-able speeds.
edit: Alternate warp mechanism. Make it a two-part system like docking or turret ports. Warp field originates from warp drive main block, but the geometry of the field is defined by "enhancers". Geometry could be affected by the number, shape and/or relative positioning of the enhancer clusters with respect to the warp-core. Power draw could be based on the number of enhancers employed. If the whole ship isn't contained in the field, the drive goes offline. If Star-made were trek-specific, this sort of mechanism COULD be used to make a nacelle type design not only reasonable but desirable... but I wouldn't want to make the engineering requirements so stringent that it inhibits any ones creativity.
edit 2: Antimatter is dangerous to play with. Damaging an antimatter reactor should give you a countdown like a ship-core. If not stopped, the AM core should have a percentage chance of: Shutting down cleanly, Exploding like a disintegrator block, OR becoming a 1/10 power star for 3 seconds with all of the damaging effects that would have on nearby structures.
edit: Alternate warp mechanism. Make it a two-part system like docking or turret ports. Warp field originates from warp drive main block, but the geometry of the field is defined by "enhancers". Geometry could be affected by the number, shape and/or relative positioning of the enhancer clusters with respect to the warp-core. Power draw could be based on the number of enhancers employed. If the whole ship isn't contained in the field, the drive goes offline. If Star-made were trek-specific, this sort of mechanism COULD be used to make a nacelle type design not only reasonable but desirable... but I wouldn't want to make the engineering requirements so stringent that it inhibits any ones creativity.
edit 2: Antimatter is dangerous to play with. Damaging an antimatter reactor should give you a countdown like a ship-core. If not stopped, the AM core should have a percentage chance of: Shutting down cleanly, Exploding like a disintegrator block, OR becoming a 1/10 power star for 3 seconds with all of the damaging effects that would have on nearby structures.
Force Fields: Transparent doors, Contain air pressure when ships have air. Passage can be limited by faction.
Bitmap blocks: Like MineCraft "signs" but more-so. User can select from a server-defined list of bitmap logos, or enter text. A contiguous rectangle of blocks operates as a single bitmap block, with the image or text spanning all the blocks. When editing is done, each block remembers only its part of the image so that if the array is later damaged, the undamaged blocks will remain as they were. Thus the user can use the same mechanism to write "Engine Room" as "Enterprise" or to place their favorite faction logo.
Paint/Paint Gun: Consumes paint. Changes hull block colors.
Weapon: Paint Cannon: Consumes paint, no damage. Colors blocks. Will not fire through non-faction shields. Good for intramural war-games.
Faction Combat Notification: If pirates are attacking my spare ship... I'd like to know.
Bedrock: Planets-only: Sheathe the bottoms of planets in unbreakable stuff. Strip-mining a world from below... totally feels like cheating.
Turret Recovery: When a turret is not tracking a target it should return to its resting/ship-aligned position.
Drone recovery: (in which Bobby remembers where he parked). Triggering an unoccupied docking block from the flight menu signals the last AI entity that was docked there to return and re-dock.
Tractor beam docking: Fires like a weapon. Aligns the target ship with the host ship, and draws to in to dock if a compatible docking pad is available.
Manual orientation of docking fields: I'm certain some people would love to launch themselves down or to the side. I'd just like to be able to exit my shuttle bay nose first without attempting a 3 point turn. Forward facing bottom turrets. Rear-facing top turrets. You get the idea.
Turret Limitation: I'd like to be able to tell BobbyTurret what octants in which to track enemies, and how high he can aim. It doesn't hurt... but I'm tired of shooting my own nacelles. Using the same interface You could also set the resting angles for the turret so it returns to rest at an aesthetically pleasing angle.
Bobbies from the flight menu: If I select a bobby-enabled entity from the flight menu, don't eject. Give me the Bobby interface! Then let me eject from there if I need to.
Emitter Turrets?: Energy weapons don't need huge linear accelerators on the business-end. All it takes is a mirror, wave guide, or variable magnetic coil to aim in almost any direction. If I had a turret mount physically touching an AM array, could I have a turret that was just a single block with integrated Bobby capability?
Weld blocks! OMG WELD BLOCKS!: Those of us who build ships based on common components... think about this. What if you could build your warp-nacelle (or whatever) once, by itself as a discrete "ship". Then save it, and either buy another one or spawn it. Place a weld-block where you want the part to go. Now "dock" with the welding block. You are presented with a menu. If blocks conflict should the existing ship or the welded part take precedence? You can also choose whether to reflect the part on any or all of the three coordinate planes. When the selections are made, the new welded part is aligned as requested so that its ship-block overlaps the weld block. Both are replaced with a grey hull block, and any other block conflicts are resolved as the two structures become one. My gods... the nacelles. I've built so many nacelles. ...save me from all the flipping nacelles..
---------------------------------------------
Disclaimer: I am not in the employ of any game company. These ideas are not provided in exchange for or expectation of any compensation whether monetary or non-monetary. (... Although a mention in the credits would be nice) I provide these ideas solely in the hope that I might strike on an answer that the game developer may be struggling with, and thus nudge the final product towards the sort of game I would like to play.
No comments:
Post a Comment