wm46

Your fix isn't working for me Shroob. I don't know if you had noticed this, but in the research screen all items are doubled. Not actually doubled, but indexed twice. When I hit the research button, none of my turrets get researched. I assume what's happening is that because of the double indexing, the auto research function is putting in the same item twice along with one other item. Let's say the last 3 item indicies for my inventory are [33] [34] [35], they show up in the research menu as [33] [33] [34] [34] [35] [35], and I'm assuming it tries to combine "[35] [35] [34] -> not enough items to combine" Don't mind the blank icon for the legendary weapon, it was generated with GenerateTurretTemplate(), but with a DPS value of 10k+ to give a size ~20 turret.

The velocity bar isn't really a velocity bar, it just shows you what percentage of your max speed you're traveling at, and flashes white if you're above it by boosting. The velocity bypass sets your max speed to 30,000,000, aka light speed. Even if you make a ship that's one big engine, you will never go fast enough to light up one blip due to magic space air fiction. The max speed I've gone by giving myself 14 engine modules and one velocity bypass is 500,000, which is not even 2%, and won't even show up on the bar.

You don't even need two ships or the trade system. Just assign your crew while you have lieutenants, sergeants, etc, and then remove them after you have your crew set up.

Burst fire doesn't even mean anything special for chainguns, I've seen burst fire ones that have a fire rate of 2 shots a second, and normal ones that have 40 shots per second. What are you trying to get at by saying burst fire already exists?

Well, a way to combat the load is to make it an instant hit weapon like the lightning turret. It could fill the range role of 3 km for over heating weapons, as there's only lasers there. I wouldn't feel cheated about it not being a bullet weapon though, you can just think of it as the bullets are so fast they rip themselves apart in 3km. The most important part about shotguns is actually the sound I think, nothing in this game has a deep/powerful sound to it. Even the cannons sound like toys...

Thread title. Painting works fine as it is for blocky ships, as the block count is usually manageable. But my ship which I tried basing on an actual boat has tons of corner blocks to simulate a curved underside, it's a pain in the ass to color all of those blocks and then the interiors. Even though I've switched the material from iron to Xanion, you can still see layers of color on my ship where I was building with iron, then with Trinium, and then detailing with Xanion. So it'd be nice if I could just Ctrl + A and apply a standard color before I start detailing.

Well my first thought upon reading this was "crewmen have levels?". The point that I didn't even know that the specialized crew from stations provided any kind of benefit is a sign of a UI problem that must be worked out before you even get to upgrading crew. That could be as simple as including a hover text on the bars in the crew menu (but that doesn't help if you never hover those bars), or maybe explicitly stating in the crew shop that those crew are better in some way. I don't know, I suck at thinking about UI design. Having an XP for each individual crew member is an immense strain on memory though. Right now, keeping track of the amount of engineers on your ship is as easy as having one 32-bit number for all of the ship's engineers. If all of them need to keep track of their XP level, you can maybe store the number as only 8-bit and have them level up once the XP number reaches 255. But then, large ships can have over a thousand engineers, and now you're talking 8kb of memory for just one part of crew on a ship. A solution to that could just be to have a general "Profession XP" for each job on the ship, possibly also divided between the levels of profession. Applying XP would not be done to an individual, but to the group itself, so that if you were to apply 100 engineering XP to the level 0 engineers, 10 of them would be promoted to level 1. Either way, I think this is maybe a little bit out there for now. This is a pretty large scale change that only adds to the theme of a minor part of the game. Factions and weapons that are currently being developed should probably come before this is considered.

I'll bump and add to the topic too with a related suggestion: apply color to selected blocks. I think the only way to do this to your whole ship currently is to use copy/paste, but I haven't tested it (could just be an exact copy aka no new coloring).

Eventually I think I'd like to see loading screen tips for essential knowledge removed entirely, that's the kind of stuff that deserves to be put into the official tutorial once it's been fleshed out. The loading screen tips I guess could be replaced by hints for things like obtaining the artifacts to reach the center of the galaxy.

Maddog, the one problem I have with completely removing the turret hard limit and instead putting in place a generator soft limit is that it further pushes the idea that bigger is always better. I don't know if it's just me, but as my ships get bigger the percentage of free energy I have in relation to energy generation sky rockets. In the Titanium tier, I'm only hovering around 3 GW free from 7 GW generated, but then as I get to Trinium and expand my ship I'm at 20 GW free to 30 GW generated. If you make the cost of turrets in the realm of gigawatts, smaller ships can only have 3 or 4 turrets firing at once and yet are still really weak and have less utility slots for upgrades. The mid tier ships could have 10 to 15 turrets, and still have 7 tech slots to customize their ship with. It just seems like if you switch to purely energy based turrets, small ships will be massively outclassed in fire power. Even a 3 system ship can have 7 turrets and a shield module and cargo module, but making it energy only severely reduces that.

"Look" and "Up" are actually the game's way of describing rotation. Every block has two vectors associated with it, Up being the main vector that describes what direction the top of the block faces with respect to the coordinate planes. The Look vector is perpendicular to the Up vector, and thus the only legal values for Look are values that are not the same axis as Up. So if I make the Up vector +Y (vertically up), I can only make the Look vector +/-X, +/-Z. The coordinate system for Avorion is a bit weird if you're used to graph paper. Positive X is to the left (if you look at the XY plane from the engine side), Positive Y is up (same viewing angle), Positive Z is the side opposite the engine surface (or into the page if you keep the graph paper analogy). The numbers in the XML file correspond to the coordinate directions as follows: 0: Negative X 1: Positive X 2: Negative Y 3: Positive Y 4: Negative Z 5: Positive Z So what does that mean for your directional thruster question? Since it sounds like the Look vector describes which direction the thruster pushes; in order to make a thruster that faces upwards you need to set the Up vector to 0/1/4/5, and then set Look to 2/3.

You can already do simple angles along a plane by using slope blocks. The easiest way to see how this works is to use a cube size like 2x2x2, and then place one, flip it over so it connects at the flat and has the slope upside down. Something like /| |/

I have an extremely inefficient idea for how to do this as I've just figured out how to translate "Look" and "Up" to directions, but I don't know how I would parse an xml file with c++

Reminds me very much of Sword of the Stars 1 and 2, which had several different modular ship command sections that could add energy shields, kinetic, and generic shields. I don't remember getting much use out of them in that game though because you had to sacrifice firepower to only be useful against one type of damage. I think it could work for this game, but maybe dividing up shields would be punishing for people that use energy and kinetic weapons together.

Maybe instead of having folders/categories for this stuff, a tagging system can be used? Tags could be as basic as locked (prevent sell/drop) and mark as junk (allows for functionality to auto sell/research later down the line). Accessing these could be as simple as ctrl+left click to lock, alt+left click to mark as junk. This doesn't solve the problem of new parts not being visible, but many examples of ways to highlight new gear probably exist out there. Just slapping a NEW textbox over parts until you hover over them is good enough.

Would probably require a small redesign of the relation UI right now, as it currently is a gradient that goes through 6 or so distinct colors to go with each relation. Maybe faction relation display can be simplified to red/orange for attack on sight, white/gray for neutral, and green/blue for friendly, and have the detailed relationship color used when you select the ship.