Thundercraft

I appreciate most of what is being said here. I'm especially looking forward to the planned changes for Build Mode. Also, for what it's worth: I would purchase that. :D I've been spending most of my time in Build Mode. But I plan to shift my focus to playing more after I get some ships I'm satisfied with and release the designs I've been working on. If the beta's nerf to thrusters remains unchanged, once that hits the main branch, I suspect koonschi will be surprised by the amount of negative feedback it generates. Already, I've seen some backlash. An example: Vlog #14: I'm Done With Avorion & Small Youtubers Inside! :( Sad to hear. Would he at least consider limited controller support as a DLC? I could understand one player as the pilot and another as the gunner. But squad-commander? How would that be fun? Would it mean leading a boarding action to take over an enemy ship? I can understand wanting to let players use their own classification system. However, it would be handy to hardcode an indication of how many module slots a ship has and the highest-tier material. Perhaps something like an automatic suffix to a ship name, like "[Tr-6]" for Trinium, 6-slots? Moreover, it would be nice if such a suffix was applied to NPC ships, as well. Then we could estimate - at a glance - how much of a threat an NPC ship poses to us.

Coincidentally, when I showed some Avorion ships to a friend last night, he suggested that I should try to build one of those Goa'uld pyramid-shaped motherships. I think you're biggest obstacle in trying to build this is the fact that it's a 4-sided tetrahedron. (When you count the bottom, the Ha'Tak's pyramid has 4 sides.) While Avorion has some edge blocks, there isn't anything that lends itself to a tetrahedron shape. All blocks - including the edge blocks - have right angles like cubes and rectangles. Granted, I've seen some amazing shapes done with these. (Here, Mobyius even managed to create a classic saucer shape.) But a tetrahedron would be difficult, maybe even impossible. May I suggest that you consider a 5-sided polygon (4-sided pyramid) version, instead? That should be quite feasible. You may even be able to add branch-like protrusions similar to those in that image. The Goa'uld ship that we saw in the film (and those in the early seasons) were based on a 5-sided pyramid. They're designed to fit on top of stone pyramids like the Great Pyramid at Giza.

Dropbox is okay, I guess. But, technically, Dropbox is not intended for storing downloadable game files. Actually, what I did not like is that, unlike other solutions like a forum attachment or MediaFire, Dropbox does not tell me how many times my stuff is downloaded. I want to know so I can gauge if players find any interest in it. Also, I felt the signup and software install process was a bit of a hassle.

First, the problem with changing the name of the game is that it is too late for that. It's been released on Steam. Already, there are a whole bunch of YouTube videos - not just Let's Plays, but also guides, build timelapses, and people showing off their creations. Also, the game has been getting reviewed and being spread by word of mouth. Even if it were possible, if the name is changed now, name recognition is lost. YouTube videos and reviews would be referring to a name that isn't even used anymore. Anyway, I kind of like the name and I think it has a lot going for it. The game is named after the top tier material. This makes a certain amount of sense. And, to me at least, material names like Avorion and Xanion remind me of the faction names in the X-series, like the Argon and Xenon. Further, it is unique. The value of having a unique name should not be underestimated. As an example, try Googling "Starport" and you'll get a lot of results for all sorts of stuff. Anyone who uses a not-unique name like that for a game is going to lose advertisement potential and frustrate potential gamers looking for relevant results. Search for "Avorion" and you won't find as many results, but almost all of them are relevant. Also, consider that Avorion is only 7 characters long. That helps make it easier to remember than a really long name. It's also easy to type into, say, a YouTube search or a search engine. :-\ I call shenanigans. I just searched through all 15 pages of Google's search results and I could not find a single mention of the word "abortion". Also, I very carefully examined the first 10 pages of YouTube search results and all of them were about the game - nothing about abortion or anything unrelated. Ovarion - Avorion... I can understand a person making that mistake, but not a computer. They're spelled different and that makes all the difference.

Nice. I like the look of the large clusters of engines and the attention to details. That's very similar to the system proposed in the "Ship class? Frigate / Corvette / Battleship?" topic, as explained here and here. The main difference is that their system specifies the number of module slots. Examples would be {ship name} Na-4 or {ship name} Xa-7. The number of slots instantly gives everyone a clear picture of just how big a ship is. Knowing how many slots a ship has also conveys how dangerous a combat vessel is or how much cargo a freighter can haul, because more slots means more turrets or more cargo modules.

Have you tried compressing it with .ZIP? Unless it's a complex ship with several thousand blocks, it should easily be below the 128 Kb forum attachment size limit. BTW: Have you figured a name for your ship, yet?

Cool videos and nice ships! Any chance you'd share the .xml for the Lightbringer from your first video?

Even if you share your modified templates.xml, I suspect that the number of players who install it will be rather limited. At least, if my own experience is any indication, players often have their own stuff saved in their own templates. And it's far too tedious to merge two template files together. Anyway, there's a much handier and easier solution that you're overlooking. Method #1: [*]Go to Build Mode. [*]Select and click on a part.xml (or ship.xml). [*]Click on "To Clipboard" (instead of "Apply Plan"). [*]Press [Ctrl]+"v" to paste the part directly on to our ship. Profit! Method #2: [*]Go to Build Mode. [*]Select and click on a part.xml (or ship.xml). [*]Click on "To Clipboard" (instead of "Apply Plan"). [*]Open the Build Inventory window. [*]Press [Ctrl]+"v" to create a new template out of the clipboard's content. Profit! Method #3: See my post here in the "Tips for ship building" topic: Basically, you can just open a ship.xml in Notepad++ and replace the <template accumulateHealth="true" convex="true"> </template> tags with <ship accumulateHealth="true" convex="false"> </ship> tags, then paste the tags and everything in between in your templates.xml file. To facilitate sharing your templates, you could paste them in your Creations topic between {spoiler}{code}{/code}{/spoiler} BBCode tags. Example: In case anyone is interested, the above is for an engine glow prop (size 1 x 1), which I use to hide my actual engines behind a layer of armor. This is what it looks like:

While these are all nice scripts, I have no interest in installing all of them. Indeed, certain multiplayer servers will ban players for cheating and I'd rather not take the chance of having some of these installed. Mostly, I'm interested in /price /whereis and /crew, with the latter only to avoid the headaches of a lack of crew in my creative galaxy when designing ships. Is there any chance we can get a breakdown of the files required to install these separately, rather than as an all-or-nothing option? From what I can tell: /Crew requires; crew.lua in the /commands/ folder professions.lua in the /lib/cmd/ folder ranks.lua in the /lib/cmd/ folder ? common.lua in the /lib/cmd/ folder ? (PROBABLY, but I'm only guessing...) crew.lua in the /player/cmd/ folder /Price requires; price.lua in the /commands/ folder ? common.lua in the /lib/cmd/ folder ? (PROBABLY, but I'm only guessing...) price.lua in the /player/cmd/ folder /Whereis requires; whereis.lua in the /commands/ folder common.lua in the /lib/cmd/ folder (DEFINITELY required!) tellposition.lua in the /player/cmd/ folder whereis.lua in the /player/cmd/ folder Am I right?

I did a major update to my lists, trying to keep them current. Among other changes, the formerly offline Apocalyptic Galaxy server is back. And while Just-Look.net used to be listed as vanilla, it's now quite modded. (There are a few others that are now modded or at least "mostly vanilla".) Some servers I moved to the "offline" category because I could not ping them (and/or their site is gone, etc). Also, I've created a separate "mostly vanilla" category to separate them from heavily modded servers. There are now quite a few servers which include /Sethome and/or something minor like a clean wreckage script. I realize that you meant this as a suggestion to server admins. But I like the format. So, I've added [Region] [MaxPlayerCount] as a prefix before each listing. And I put stuff like {Discord} and {Teamspeak} immediately after. (Note: I've not finished updating the "Does Not Specify" category. I'll finish the rest of those... some day. Right now, I've got to eat and take care of stuff.) So far, I've only added a {BETA branch} indicator for Rusty's Galaxy, Clan Maelstrom's, and Bonig's High Performance. However, I've probably overlooked a few. And I suspect that there are more servers which are playing on the Beta branch. Please, do let me know so I can update this.

I'm finding the /crew script very handy to design, build, and test ships in Creative mode. I would hate having to find and hire enough crew for that. LOL! However, why "repair" for Mechanics? Wouldn't it be easier to remember with "mech"?

Okay. But the question remains: How difficult would it be to mod this so they require less?

I've been wondering how hard it would be to change all turrets to require 1 gunner/miner instead of 2. Would that involve changing a lot of code? Or should it be easy? Actually, I'd be okay if only those "Independent Targeting" turrets required 2. But I don't see why they all need 2.

Updated list. Thanks for letting us know. I'd be nice if all servers would specify whether they are strictly Vanilla or Modded.

Have you taken a look at DarkPaapi's Extra Crew Workforce System Moduls? Would you consider something like that? I'd really like to have a way to make do with less crew, even if I have to use a module. Edit: While I'm at it, what about Cypher's AutoResearch mod? Is that something worth considering? Personally, I think it sounds more like another quality-of-life mod. It's about making the game a bit less tedious, isn't it?

No additional info on this, yet? :( Is there a variable for this? Or is it hard-coded? I guess there is Duncan Idaho's solution. Has anyone coded and tested that method?

BACKGROUND MUSIC (Avorion "background" folder) Various music (Free stuff such as Creative Commons) X2: The Threat (See this post for my choices. Though, I've since decided that some of those are too familiar to me.) Eve Online (Note: For "background", I prefer calmer stuff that won't distract me from the game.) Civilization V GreatWallOfChina Ur-Quan Masters HD (Search for the SourceForge project) Master of Orion III (Diplomacy & background) Freespace (Mostly Freespace 1) BATTLE MUSIC (Avorion "action" folder) Ur-Quan Masters HD X2: The Threat X3: Rebirth Master of Orion III (Battle) Freespace 1 & 2 Eve Online Note: If you like the music of Eve Online, you might want to check out: Various Artists - New Eden Logs (Fan-made music for EVE) Sounds of New Eden - A Complete Collection of Community Created Music

Q: How many of you who've successfully updated your ships to fly better for this beta swapped most (or even all) of your regular Thrusters for the new Directional Thrusters? I think this is an important question because, as far as I can tell, Directional Thrusters make regular Thrusters obsolete. Why do I say this? Because: Directional Thrusters only require a fraction of the Engineers as regular Thrusters. With this patch, with regular Thrusters, my small ships required 4 or 5 Engineers (which, for a small ship with only 2 or 3 module slots, seems excessive), but when I filled the same volume with Directional Thrusters, I managed to get by with just 1 Engineer. Directional Thrusters are much more effective than regular Thrusters. On my designs, anyway, I could get more than double the maneuvering thrust with Directional Thrusters (in place of regular Thrusters) by having them face forward on long leverage arms. Doing it that way, they provide lots of Brake Thrust with a very significant added bonus of either Yaw or Pitch (never Roll, though). It's rather easy to end up with more Brake Thrust than Engine Thrust. Only a small fraction of my Directional Thrusters are aimed in any direction but forward (maybe 10 or 15%) and that's mostly to get a bit of Roll. (Yes, I remember that LoSboccacc suggested creating long leverage arms for our thrusters. But it was not specified that this is only very effective when used with Directional Thrusters.) Here's an image of a ship I just finished. You can see that each leverage arm is about half the length of the ship. Oh, and each nacelle is about 90% Directional Thrusters. I only added thin wafers of Engines in each. Over 95% of the Engines are in the main body. Though, I'm still a bit worried about how fragile leverage arms can be (a weak point for the enemy to blow off a nacelle).

Been there. Done that. Even with a small ship and even with thrusters on long leverage arms, to get something that rotates fast also requires something like four times the volume of Thrusters to Engine volume, maybe more. Also, having long leverage arms on all ships looks rather silly, IMO.

I have a Radeon R9 series card with plenty of Anti-aliasing options. But when I play Avorion I see lots of jagged edges. I went to the AMD Catalyst Control Center and added Avorion.exe (found in C:\{steam folder}\steamapps\common\Avorion\bin\) as an Exception to the 3D Application Settings tab. Then I set "Anti-aliasting mode" to 'Override application settings', set "Anti-aliasting samples" to '8xEQ', set "Filter" to 'Standard', and left "Anti-aliasting method" at 'Multisampling'. With that, I tried again. But if there was any less jaggies than before, I couldn't tell. :( I tried changing the "Anti-aliasting samples" with other settings, but nothing seems to work. I also switched from "borderless" to "full screen" in the options menu. But it's still every bit as jaggy as before. Is this because Avorion is a Steam game? Is it because it must be launched indirectly through Steam.exe? Does that prevent my Radeon from detecting that a 3D application was launched and so it never engages Anti-aliasing? I really want to using Anti-aliasing with Avorion. Any suggestions?

Nice! Lots of cool stuff this patch. My favorites: Added a new directional thruster block Added a retrograde marker for ships, enable in game settings Flip 180° and burn in opposite direction works as intended now Improved turning and drifting physics, more realistic and less glitchy Added display for center of mass in building mode I definitely noticed this. My ships now have about twice - sometimes almost three times the acceleration as before. I guess I'll have to install less engines to get a similar performance. Almost every ship I've looked at in this beta has significantly less Yaw and Pitch. Like roughly half. Roll is less, too. Further, Brake Thrust seems identical to before. Edit: Brake thrust may be about the same on certain small-ish ships. But it is significantly less on some large ships. On AstroOwl's Alligator it went from 57.4 to 12.5. I'm thinking that this is because it's such a huge, HUGE ship and that size affects how severely this patch's gimp to Thrusters affects a ship. I say this because AstroOwl's Alligator is a rather large ship and it ended up with nearly zero Yaw/Pitch/Roll thanks to this update. (See below.) This change means that we are forced to add a lot more thrusters than before. That probably means hiring more Engineers and Mechanics. And that probably means many ships will need to be (re)designed with larger Crew Quarters. Thrusters were already slightly nerfed in Patch 0.10.3.7509. You claimed in those patch notes that you increased thrusters by about 10%, but all I saw was a reduction in thrusters. Now we see an even bigger reduction in thrusters with a supposed increase of ~65%. Not in my case. Since Beta 0.10.3.7509 dropped, I carefully designed and redesigned my ships to place all thrusters as far from the center of mass as possible. To do this, I either place them all in the nose, the tail, or (often) way out on the tips of long 'wings' or arms. I've already optimized my designs for best thruster placement, just to compensate for how they were nerfed in the last patch. All my current designs already revolved around maximizing Thruster placement. I can't optimize thruster placement further. Why claim "thrusters are more powerful" when, in fact, the end result is all thrusters are heavily nerfed. Saying that they are more powerful got our hopes up. But then we find out that the reality is quite different. This story still isn't adding up, though. If you did increase Thrusters by about 65%, then we should see Brake Thrust increased from before. But Brake Thrust is either the same or even nerfed. To show how major this reduction in rotation speed is, I opted out of Beta and rolled back to test different ship designs. Here's the Yaw/Pitch/Roll: AR Miner S (From Dead8Eye's Shipyard) Before: 0.29 / 0.28 / 0.79 After: 0.56 / 0.55 / 1.35 Mythis (frigate) (From Arkhangelsk Engineering & Co's Shipyard) Before: 0.55 / 0.25 / 0.39 After: 0.23 / 0.3 / 0.25 Viel (shuttle) (From Arkhangelsk Engineering & Co's Shipyard) Before: 0.53 / 0.25 / 0.32 After: 0.18 / 0.17 / 0.17 Alligator (From AstroOwl's shipyard) Before: 0.11 / 0.18 / 0.31 After: 0.01 / 0.01 / 0.04 CB-13 (From Capnbubs' Hanger) Before: 1.39 / 2 / 2 After: 0.76 / 0.98 / 1.48 CB-30 (From Capnbubs' Hanger) Before: 1.17 / 1.83 / 2 After: 0.82 / 1.34 / 1.56 RebelBlockadeRunner (From MrMaggys SW/Bab5/ST/EvE Shipyard) Before: 0.39 / 0.45 / 2 After: 0.26 / 0.29 / 1.77 Abaxial_Ti (From Zed's Titanium Abaxial topic) Before: 2 / 1.03 / 0.71 After: 0.34 / 0.23 / 0.16 Abaxial_7509 (From Zed's Titanium Abaxial topic) Before: 0.83 / 0.19 / 0.12 After: 0.47 / 0.15 / 0.08 My own, unreleased Needletail freighter Before: 1.71 / 2 / 1.02 After: 0.4 / 0.49 / 0.39 My own, unreleased Superfluity Before: 1.78 / 1.21 / 2 After: 1.37 / 0.83 / 1.96 Oddly enough, I did see an increase in the Yaw/Pitch/Roll for the AR Miner S. Perhaps this was because it's such a small ship? As I said, size seems to make a big difference with how much ships' rotational speed is gimped. Thought: Perhaps when you tested your Thruster changes in Beta Branch 0.10.4.7565, you tested with a small or tiny ship? Perhaps if you had tested with a large or huge ship, you wouldn't be so hesitant to revert this drop in rotational speed. As I said, ship size seems to make a huge amount of difference to this patch's changes to thrusters. I'd say that, to make the game fun again, we really do need both. Please readd the artificial rotation boost. And if we can add a Gyro to our ships to boost rotation even futher, that might be enough to make players happy. As a game, it is supposed to be all about fun. And there is such a thing as trying to add too much realism. Besides, personally, I think it is not unrealistic to have thrusters even 80% as strong as engines. "60%" is hard for me to believe. Thanks to the last patch, I had to install significantly more volume in Thrusters than Engines. So far, with this patch, I seem to need about four times the volume in Thrusters as my Engines to get rotation speeds I can live with. Does that "60%" estimate take into consideration how much you buffed engine acceleration? Engines are about two to two and a half times stronger than before. But instead of buffing thrusters, you heavily nerfed them by nerfing rotation speed. P.S.: When I opted out of Beta, I tried to load my galaxy and... it wouldn't load. I tried again and again, but with the same result. My galaxy must have become corrupted. Judging by my experience: If we opt in to this beta branch, this may be a one-way trip. P.S.: The "Previous Version" in Steam's Beta opt-in drop down list does not seem to be for the previous beta (0.10.3.7509). I think it's the previous version of the current release. If so, I think that should be labeled better. Perhaps rename it to "Previous Release"?

Indeed, that is a nice-looking outpost. :thumbsup: And an .xml would be appreciated.

You should totally call this one the "Arrow" or "Arrowhead" class. ;D Look at your 2nd screenshot from the top and tell me that it doesn't closely mimic the Build Mode green arrow.

You're right, that is a significant increase in HP. Though, I was thinking more in terms of the HP/weight ratio, which makes certain jumps in material tier less appealing. (How many players stick with Trinium for a good long while?) Also, in my designs, I often try to cover the outside in large sheets or blocks of armor. In such, the armor material may be different and that is what's important. Anyway, the HP increase is not nearly as useful in later tiers where many ship designs rely mostly on shields. More hull HP isn't going to make much difference if the design has more shields than hull. In such designs, more efficiency in parts would be more appealing that more hull HP.

I understand this. But even taking such things into consideration, some of believe that a slight increase in HP (emphasis on slight) and/or a slight reduction in weight isn't always enough. Not necessarily. The crux of your statement depends on one's definition of "better". But the word is subjective. I doubt a slight increase in Solar Panel performance is going to break the game. Nor would, say, a slight decrease in the number of required engineers to keep huge banks of thrusters going if made from higher-tier materials. I understand. Indeed, I'd already conceded SageThe13th's point about larger Cargo Bays not wasting as much space with walls. It's also true that larger containers would be more efficient. But as SageThe13th and myself have argued, such differences would not amount to the absolutely enormous differences we're seeing in-game. The difference between several small Cargo Bays and one big one is like night and day and can easily mean the difference between being able to hold 10 and 1000 cargo units. All we're asking is for the game to be more reasonable. The way it is now is almost absurd. Did you actually look at Vorgra's Universal Container Freighter? Wouldn't it be nice to see more freighters like that? Currently, the game greatly discourages us from building freighters that way. Is a game mechanic really okay if it very obviously encourages more simple cube-shaped ships? But for good efficiency it has to be a single cube-shaped block. And to hold a decent amount (100 or more), it has to be enormous. (On my ships with 3 or 4 modules, I needed a Cargo Bay bigger than my whole ship just to hold a couple hundred units of cargo.) And you're suggesting we just hide such a thing inside the ship? :o ::) Also, the player would have to add a huge amount of fake "cargo containers" on the exterior of the ship, merely for decorative purposes. That would add a huge amount to weight and make the ship far less efficient. It's such that it may not even balance the space saved from trying to hind a single cargo container in the interior. The HP increment of 1.5 times more than the previous tier sounds nice and reasonable... in theory. But that is made largely irrelevant by the huge differences in material weight. Please, take a close look at the Material Flavor and Analysis topic. In particular, notice Selenog's "Analysis on material efficiency" chart? There are huge differences in the jump of HP/Mass efficiency from one tier to the next. In particular, Titainium and Trinium both have huge boosts in performance for their weight. But Xanion barely has any improvement over Trinum. And Ogonite is actually worse than Xanion. Yes, but in Avorion while you're using different materials for the casing, the solar panels are always the same. Do you have more of an explanation why fictional materials like Trinium, Xanion, and Avorion can only be used for the "casing" or framework and why they would never, ever work for the n-type or p-type layers that create a depletion zone to generate electricity? Arguing from a gameplay perspective: Consider that Solar Panels are basically a much weaker version of Generator blocks. But using a superior material will have Generator blocks produce more energy. Why shouldn't the same be true for Solar Panels? That's just giving players more incentive to using Generators and less incentive to use Solar Panels. It's not like Solar Panels will ever replace Generators, no matter how (marginally) we improve them. Mostly, Solar Panels are for flavor. But that's no reason to keep them mostly non-functional and relegated to being only decorative.