Blastivator! Functional, yet obnoxious.

Here's another attempt at logic based vertical transport.  It works brilliantly, and yet I don't think I'll be using it on any of my ships.

The red blocks and computer blocks in the picture below are individual push-pulse systems.
The activator and delay blocks activate the pulse systems in sequence.

Hit the button and you will be carried quickly and smoothly upward.
The down side is that each pulse sends out a visible pulse sphere 200M wide.   I don't want my ship to look like it's exploding just because I want to use the lift!   If you feel differently, enjoy.

Logical lifts...

A gift for my fellow builders.
Others may have done this before, but I just made what is for me a major advance in StarMade Plex-lifter technology. I have found a way to make plex-lifters work much more like the sorts of lifts we are used to in the real world.

Here's how to build plex-lifters that let you travel one floor at a time, as opposed to cruising all the way to the top, and letting you jump off as your floor goes by, or dumping you all the way to the bottom of the elevator shaft if you miss your jump or wait to long.

(WARNING!  This logic MAY be judged too complex for contest stations)

Dodecaplanets and Logic Gates

I've been playing with the latest Dev release and here's what I've learned.
Don't expect this release next week, there is a LOT to fix.  This is anything but a complaint, just a recognition that there's some hard coding ahead before it's fully ready for prime-time.

Planets:

• If you load the dev version and see disk-shaped planets at a distance, don't be disheartened.  Dodecaplanets spawn in through the Ghosts of their disky ancestors.  You won't see them until you are up close.
• The planetary core looks cool and scary as all heck.
• Sometimes planetary cores just appear in empty sectors with no planetary matter attached.  They are insubstantial and gravity-less without planetary plates.
• In a real planet you can't currently mine down to the molten core,  It seems like the function of the core at the moment is to define a boundary of invulnerability.  The bottom row of blocks on a pentagonal planetary plate touches the core, and can't be mined.

Next Up....

Immediate Plans...

So I've just finished a major rebuild of the Constitution class... What next?  The next step is to knock out a couple variations on the same essential hull configuration.  Those include the
Andromeda, Apollo, Kirov, Slava, maybe one or two others.
Visual references here: Jaynz.trekships.com

Edit: So lets see...
1. Add the upper Nacelle to make an Andromeda
2. Lower the side Nacelles to make the Slava.
3. Remove the upper Nacelle to make a Kirov
4. Remove the secondary hull from the Slava to make a Carlson
5.  Something like that.  I may be tired of this series by then...

I also have some TMP era Miranda  variants that are about 90% complete.  None of these are new projects, but a squadron of new ships for the effort of a few nacelles is hard to pass up.

How to Voxelate Vectors Like a Boss... Part 2

OK, I'm starting to set up for my build of Intrepid, and this seems like a great time to finish my Voxel Tutorial
See Part 1 (here)

Public Service Announcement: As a reminder,  Voxel imports can be abused.  If you see someone flying a glob of hull masquerading as a ship, be a good friend, and talk to them about voxel abuse.  The fleet you save from ridicule might be your own.

(VZZWARP!)

(VZZWARP!)  HA! Have at thee Romulan skum! (clicky clicky of empty guns) DAMMIT!

...That awkward moment, when your ship suddenly has so much thrust that it sucks your capacitors dry, and your guns won't fire.

OK.  Ship-releases are on hold until I figure out the new coil thruster equation.

Bug Report: Ghost Engines and Power

No engines, plenty of thrust.

Not a crash:
Observation: Under pre-0.133, removal of thrusters or power core blocks does remove the block, and reduces the mass, but the removal is not reflected in group calculations. 

I am remodeling one of my ships, and completely removed the engines. All engine blocks are gone, but the ship still reports 54232.6 in thrust.   Mass decrements as normal.

Here's where it gets weird  If I add a thruster where one has previously been,   There is no increase in thrust.  If I add a thruster where one had NOT previously been, thrust increases.

Suggestion: Muster points

I've been thinking about Daves, Dave behavior and Dave on Dave combat.   I think many of the difficulties of free-roaming VIs could be solved with a new block that I have been thinking of as a "muster point"

Captains orders. My hopes and ideas for LUA

There's not much documentation yet about the lua interface for interacting with VIs... so this is just wild speculation while I wait for a meeting to start.  Regardless of the syntax of the language used, Schema will need to program a library of routines and condition flags for the gamers to use...  so let's think about this. Maybe we'll come up with a cool idea or three and maybe they will find their way onto the right screens.

In keeping with the spirit of the voxel sandbox, I'd like the programming to be a fairly low-level thing.  Simple like a cube or half-cube is simple.  I'd wager there are a lot of programmers playing star-made, and we can make and share subroutines to make the process simpler for the rest.  Let me ask enough questions about my environment and I can write a routine to approach and plot a nice circular orbit around a planet.  Then I could share my routine like I share my ships.  Now anyone can incorporate my routines to navigate and orbit by having their dave interface with the navigation station and invoking the following to travel to sector 5,7,9 and orbit the planet there at a distance of 600M.

ship.orbit(600,5,7,9)

Catastrophic Success

I've been experimenting with weapons tuning.

Taking a page from the guys at Mushroom Fleet, I had created my own ballistics gel  It was 100 blocks deep.  Plenty for the sorts of test I've been doing.  So I started playing with cluster formations.  I had been very pleased when I switched from monolithic uber-guns, to horizontal stacks of clusters (5x5x3).  The shots didn't line up exactly following each other like I'd hoped, but without any significant increase in power draw, I had seriously increased my cutting  power against hull.

Mirandoids

The basic Miranda hull is incredibly versatile.  If we ever build spacecraft that (for the comfort of planet-surface dweller psychology) employ artificial gravity perpendicular to the primary direction of travel, I hope we recall the design of the Miranda.

I have already published the base Miranda class and a TOS version..  My current project is bashing the core ship into several of the cool variants for which I was able to find material. The ones that are done are just waiting for SM Beta in order to catch any SMEnt format changes

My Beta Wish-list

It looks like Star-Made will soon be in beta!   That got me thinking about the features and goodies I'd like to see added to the game during the beta-phase of development.


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.

A Darker Shade of DVI

My old and venerable video card (GeForce-8800GT) has been installed in that great motherboard in the sky where IRQs never conflict and power always flows at a precisely regulated +5 and +12VDC.  It processed many pixels, and rendered uncounted polygons in its time... a life well lived.  On this video card I played the original Half-life.  And this was the first card on which I was able to crank every option in "Unreal Tournament" and still play at full smooth frame-rates.   But, alas, Eve Online was too much for its old processor.   8800GT was survived by dozens of sparkly little pixels all over my now-speckly displays, who suddenly had no idea what to do with themselves.

(a moment of silence)

8800GT was succeeded yesterday by it's grand-child 660GTX. Upon powering up for the first time... Um... Wow... Really?... Holy fishsticks that's pretty! (Sounds of distracted clicking)

Yes.. right.. um..  Based on my new frame-rates and video capabilities, large projects like the Galaxy that were lagging me to death have become more possible.  I'll see about getting back to them soon...ish.

I do still have that whole family and job addiction thing.