Thundercraft

Well, it seems most of my problem stems from trying to use an atypical size of root (core) block. The default that we start with is a 2 x 2 x 2 iron cube. (lowerX="-1" lowerY="-1" lowerZ="-1" upperX="1" upperY="1" upperZ="1") However, I followed this How to Make Tiny Ship Cores & Upgrade Your Ships Materials tutorial to create smaller ship cores. And when I used a core of size 1.6, I frequently ran into this issue with overlapping blocks. I would imagine that some non-typical core block sizes are okay and some will cause this issue. I've tried all of these. But none of them fixed my issue. Though, it was a good suggestion. In the end, I started my design over from scratch using a default core size. That pretty much solved this issue. (Though, I still wish there was a 0.025 grid size...)

Whenever I'm building stuff at a small scale like 0.1 or 0.05, I often find that the blocks I'm trying to place stubbornly refuse to line up. That is, they tend to overlap by half a 0.05 block, or 0.025. But there's really not much I can do about this since the Grid Size scale only goes as small as 0.05... :( This is even more of a problem when I'm trying to copy and past arrays of small (0.1 or 0.5) blocks. Those will overlap by 0.025 almost every time. Maybe this is a bug? It seems like I'm always having to set my Grid Size to half of my Scale Step. Because, if I don't, then stuff tends to not line up properly. So, if I'm building with the default 0.5 scale, then I have to use a Grid Size of 0.25 to make it line up, and with a Scale Step of 0.4, I find myself using Grid Step 0.2... :( Am I the only one experiencing this?

Heh, heh! ;D I think you should call your ship "Nasty Rammer". Nice looking ship with those angles. This begs the question, though: If a ship has a lot of shields, would those shields take the brunt of the damage from collisions? Would making an intentional 'shield rammer' be feasible? For that matter, I can imagine managing a fleet of ships and reserving a relatively compact and cheap "Rammer" class of ship just for intentionally ramming a boss or big enemy ship. It could be pretty much all armor and engines. I read somewhere that the only real use for stone blocks is to absorb / prevent lightning damage from lightning weapons. There is a certain enemy which uses those... Color me surprised if stone blocks are practical for anything else. Let us know what you find out.

I just read the Avorion Trailer Ship topic where someone asked for the ship design as seen at the end of the official trailer. And that got me thinking: Why doesn't Avorion ship with a few ship designs? For that matter... should it? One of the main features of this game is the ability for us to design our own ships. If we rely on someone else's ship design, isn't that "cheating" or at least bypassing this feature? Then again, players are already sharing their ship designs and I imagine this will become a big thing once this is made possible via Steam Workshop. Anyway, it's already possible for players to let the game design their ships for them. To do so, all we have to do is dock with a Shipyard and choose the "Build" option. This allows players to choose from three different ship "Styles" based on the ship styles of the faction who owns the station. And each style can be massively scaled up or even altered (very slightly) with a randomization "seed". (BTW: I think that this is a neat feature. Though, I would also like to have a [Randomize] button to get completely random styles.) Another thought: Perhaps koonschi should hold an official Ship Design Contest, with the possibility of some winning ships being selected to become a part of the base game and their name added to the credits? At least a few games have done just this. Planet Explorers, for example, had a design contest. And a couple of the winning vehicle models were adopted into the base game. Edit: If not complete ship blueprints, I at least think Avorion should come with a much larger variety of "templates" or predefined shapes. Looking in the Build Inventory in Build mode, I find only 8 shapes. And in addition to simple shapes that we could use to build our ships and stations, it would be wonderful to have some basic ship templates and basic station templates to use as a starting point to flesh out our own designs.

I agree, this would be useful. Indeed, considering how broken thrusters currently are, I wonder if it would be better to replace the way thrusters work now with a single-direction thruster. Players would have to learn to use "R" to rotate the block and get in a habit of placing enough thrusters in each direction. Then again, replacing the current thruster block with this would break all available ship files. I think players would grumble about that, even though we don't have Workshop ship sharing yet. I will agree that the way armor blocks work really needs adjustment for balance reasons. But then, the same can be said for how material affects HP, and how certain block types work or scale with size or material. See the Figuring out block stats topic for details. (Also, see the Material Flavor and Analysis topic for how weird material progression is in terms of the HP increase compared to the previous tier.) It's not just thrusters that are broken. The way frame blocks, solar panels, cargo capacity and other things are figured is... weird and unbalanced. Anyway, on using armor blocks vs hull blocks: Armor blocks do significantly increase HP and they're much cheaper than hull blocks. However, I believe that you're incorrect about Hyperspace Cooldown. (The red and yellow change indicators sometimes suggests that a change is "+" when it is actually worse, or "-" when it is actually better.) In my experience, transforming iron hull blocks into iron armor blocks will increase the hyperspace cooldown - meaning the use of (iron, at least) armor will have your ship take longer before being able to jump to hyperspace again. Here's how I see armor blocks vs. hull blocks. Armor gives: More HP Reduces the cost in both credits and materials Reduces Req. Energy (slightly) Possibly reduces the number of required Mechanics (1 less mechanic in my case) Adds a lot more tons of weight (esp. iron) Reduces Thrust (significantly) Reduces Brake Thrust (significantly) Reduces Yaw / Pitch / Roll (significantly) Reduces thrust (significantly) Increases Hyperspace Cooldown (slightly) At least with iron armor, the huge amount of added weight and the massive reduction of thrust, brake speed, and maneuverability usually makes it not worth it. In one test, changing cargo space on my ship to iron armor reduced my brake thrust and maneuverability from high (8.8) to abysmal (about 4 or less). I got the flashing warning about my brake thrust being too low. Then again, I'm talking about iron armor. Higher tier materials makes armor much more appealing.

I've not had the experience of building with Avorion yet, but I wanted to ask: With access to Avorion, which systems would you make out of Trinium and which of Avorion? Would you make your armor of Ogonite? Would you use Trinium for integrity field generators and such (where material doesn't seem to make much difference), while using Avorion for power generation?

Very nice! 8) Indeed.

Yes please! Perhaps this idea should be posted in another thread so it doesn't get lost and forgotten?

I agree. It seems odd that we don't get a faction relationship boost - not even a tiny one - in addition to the money. But then, I haven't completed many missions yet. Perhaps there are a few that will? It would be appreciated if it was changed so doing missions would give a boost to relations for the faction. I think there should be more incentive for completing missions, versus just mining, salvaging, or straight out combat.

Well... It seems the garbled noise problem was my own fault - sort of. The songs won't even play in VCL Media Player. Maybe Audacity saved it in a sample rate or something that it won't recognize?

I really like this idea. I'm sure that we're not the only players or server admins that would appreciate options to adjust faction aggression and such. Fantastic! But, I do hope that diz's suggestion (on editable settings in server.ini) isn't simply overlooked simply because constant faction aggression won't be bugged anymore. Indeed, I would imagine that some players like the constant aggression and the constant supply of new wrecks to salvage it brings and may be a bit sad when the patch comes out. ;)

It's easy enough to code an exception to the rule with an "if ... else" statement or similar. The rule should be that the closest ship gets the loot. And it's unlikely for two or more ships to be exactly the same distance. (I imagine that the game keeps track of distance and coordinates with more than 1 decimal point of accuracy, even if that accuracy is hidden from players.) In the incredibly unlikely event that two or more ships are the same distance, one of them could be picked at random. But that seems like overkill since player ships are almost always in motion and they won't be the same distance for long. As I pointed out, though, starter ships tend to be limited to 3 module slots. Now that I think about it, starter ships are also typically limited to 3 or 4 turret slots. That doesn't leave much room for an "item pickup range" module or a "tractor beam" turret - much as in none. So, I've changed my mind. Perhaps having an item pickup range of more than 2 km should be a module or turret. But the current system feels flawed in that we have to constantly fly around and run into stray ores, credits, turrets or modules to pick them up - merely because the pickup range is just a bit short of being ideal. That's tedious and gets old very quickly. It feels like a game flaw, so it should be addressed as such by tweaking it.

Agreed. Integrity generators should scale well with material used, for the reasons you've stated. The fact that it doesn't feels like a glaring omission. I can think of a couple reasons why nobody replied: [*]The forums seem busy and not everyone can read every new topic, let alone bother to reply. Playing Avorion is more fun than replying to forum topics and incredibly distracting. ;) [*]Perhaps readers agreed with you, but had nothing constructive to say? [*]There were other threads either started on the subject of integrity fields, or which brought them up with suggestions. For example, there was the Integrity fields topic in the Gameplay Discussion area and the How do you make a well armoured ship that isnt a cube? topic in the General Discussion area.

Update: Some music plays great in-game, while others... don't. After converting a bunch of songs, I found out that some of these come out sounding incredibly noisy and scratchy in-game - like ear-bleeding WTF noisy. It's like the sound amplitude is somehow being processed by the game's sound engine as if it was extremely clipped, when in actuality it's not. I'm not sure what the cause or common denominator to this issue is. But it may have something to do with the software I used, the settings I used, or maybe how I normalized the .mp3's with MP3Gain before converting them. The X2: The Threat files I converted sound just fine, though. Yes. And yes.

Let's be more specific: For a small-ish ship that would require up to 2000 or so iron - without a turret upgrade module - it would only support 1 armed turret slot, 1 unarmed turret slot, and 1 arbitrary (either) turret slot. But I will allow for 1 or 2 extra turret slots from turret modules, bringing the total turrets allowed to 4 or 5. (Your ship may have 3 module slots, but I don't think it's wise to use all 3 for turret upgrades. There are more important modules.) One could outfit such a ship with 3 mining lasers plus armed turrets, or 3 salvaging turrets plus armed turrets. Or, instead, one could outfit it with 3 mining lasers and 2 salvaging turrets (or visa versa), but then it would lack any offensive ability. However, with the low tier mining and salvaging turrets that one might be able to afford or find starting out, having only 2 mining or 2 salvaging turrets makes it seem too slow to be practical. I found it takes at least 3 turrets to get the job done fast enough not to bore me - unless I install higher grade turrets, that is. And having just 1 mining laser or 1 salvaging turret would be ridiculously slow.

Yes, it is! Check my How to mod the music in Avorion topic for details.

I just wanted to share my findings in trying to mod the music in Avorion. It's really easy: Just make sure that the music you want to add is in .ogg format and put it in the appropriate folder. Since most music is .mp3, you'd probably need to either use a software program to convert them, or find a website that will do an online conversion for free. (Try searching for "mp3 ogg batch online convert".) Myself, I used the free Audacity audio program because it allowed me fine control of quality and file size. (I used a quality setting of "4", which is good enough for me. But "5" may be slightly better.) But doing it that way was tedious. There are sites and programs that can batch convert dozens of songs at the same time, which is obviously much faster. Background (ambient) music is located here: {Steam folder} \steamapps\common\Avorion\data\music\background Action (combat) music is located here: {Steam folder} \steamapps\common\Avorion\data\music\action Don't get me wrong: I love Avorion's music! However, there are only 8 background tracks and only 8 action tracks. After a while, they can start to sound a little repetitive. So, I wanted to add more. In case anyone else would find this useful, here are the tracks in X2: The Threat that fit a background / ambient theme: And here are the X2 tracks that fit an action / combat theme: IMO, another game with music that sounds rather reminiscent of Avorion's is Eve Online.

Q: While we can use Iron salvaging turrets to salvage Titanium, is there an efficiency penalty for doing so? Wouldn't we get more Titanium by using a Titanium salvaging turret with the same (stated) efficiency? What about salvaging turrets? Aren't they restricted by turret material and what they can salvage in the same way that mining lasers are restricted by turret material?

That would be nice. And it should be simple to implement, I would think. After a while, we've gathered a large collection of turrets. And since our inventory does not seem to organize them very well and since there is no filter or button to to sort them, it can be quite tedious to find the turrets we're looking for.

I agree. There should be more incentive to mine regular (non-rich) asteroids. And having a decent chance to get non-ship ores like gold is a good idea.

Avorion was only just released on Steam. And the wiki seems pretty new and needs a lot of work. But it would be very nice if someone created such a flowchart of goods and resources to give players an idea of how the economy is supposed to work. Someone has to compile that data, make the flowcharts, and upload them to the wiki, though. Good luck to anyone willing to do that. (I do know that there are quite a few free flowchart programs to choose from.)

I recently released my Eos Mk. I freighter ship design, which has well over 3000 blocks and I have not noticed any issues. At least, I did not notice glitches, an increase in crashes or a drop in framerate or anything. (BTW: Most of those 3000 blocks goes into the thousands of nearly microscopic thrusters I hid inside hollow compartments.)

The music in Avorion reminds me so much of the X-series games that it makes me very nostalgic. I love it. Though, I could almost swear some of these tracks are identical to that used in one of the X titles. Edit: Does anyone know if it's possible to add a few more tracks for the game to play? Can we just drop some music files into, say, the 'background' subfolder and the game will randomly play them? Or would this require modifying a certain file?

I have seen a few faction names which are at least readable or memorable, such as "The Ahoosoo Collective" or "The Uey". However, most faction names are complete and utter gibberish that are clearly computer generated - names like "The Uugqoujlhiin' Conglomerate", "The United Easpbaakaiv Organisation" or "The Empire of Ulbufiodl". How can you even pronounce these? See my Any galaxy seeds worth sharing? topic for a list of several dozens of galaxy seeds I started and the name of the faction you start with. IMO, it is not at all appealing to have complete, unpronounceable gibberish for faction names. It breaks suspension of disbelief for me and makes it hard to empathize with the story. I'd much rather have fixed names or at least names pulled from a list. I did actually manage to change the name of my starting faction, but it required a hex editor and had strict limitations. (See my How to change a faction's name topic for details.) Which is why I suggest that the dev either gives players the ability to change faction names or at least an option to have the game pull faction names from a text or .xml file of names or name parts. It would be one more aspect of the game that could be customized if we could add our own lists of faction names. Consider the Aurora 4x space strategy game that pulls ship names from a list. It allows players to customize their game with ship name sets, to customize it for the theme or nationality they're going for.

Yes! This would definitely big a big QoL improvement for me! Also, without having to zoom out so much, it should be a lot easier to spot small stuff.