Kamo

The economy in Avorion is not really well balanced, but (seems to be) more or less functional. It’s definitely very complicated with a huge amount of goods, even more than in X2, but it’s a worthwhile detail: someone does not simply decice to "make an intergalactic empire" and actually do it as easily. All the necessary production is more or less "realistically" complex, which then justified why trade is important and why supply and demand vary depending on different but similar regions of space: generations of tycoons tried to find a perfect balance and failed, their stations running chains that worked before they broke for various reasons (the cataclysm being one of them). The player is in the same spot, trying to support various industries with various degrees of success and inevitable bouts of failure. The "overly human" goods are actually destined to biotopes and habitats, that are a currently not-yet-totally-implemented thing: galaxy (re-)population and crew production, right now crew is more or less easy to obtain in that there aren’t any shortages of them and they "regenerate" alongside equipment and other "spawned" goods, but it may change in the future... (And, if those goods are "not alien enough", well, the game is made for humans to enjoy, so being more realistic about that approach would either call for More and even procedural types of goods Goods whose names do not mean a thing to players Goods whose designations would be too complicated to players, or too distant to players' tastes (as example, "Beer" is much more warm and significant than "Low-Yield Alco-Beverages").) Alongside the "sentient" factor of failure, is failure endemic to the system itself, secondary "goods" that are actually useless trash, which Toxic Waste is a perfect example. You cannot throw it into space because it will fall again on planets, be extracted again as asteroids, or make giant corrosive clouds once burned by a sun. Getting rid of it should be relatively easy but penalizing in various, player-chosen ways, another challenge to make the universe more lively (which is why I made that suggestion thread). Added a new idea on the main post: the Trash Heap ! Once I had a random looted sheep in my cargo. It stayed in my ship for in-game days because the nearest biodomes were distant, I traded for other things, and I just assumed it was brought by one of my crewmen to serve as a pillow :P.

Okay ! And I just did some additional tests, AoE hits do not inflict damage on the ship per block hit, so no damage multiplication either. They do the same damage when hitting a one-block generator (had to put a big one to hit it with torpedoes... and bigger hull blocks besides to not hit the ship's behind ::)) or a giant 200-block millefeuille.

The no-damage bug is still active on 0.16.6, just tested it now. The new "blocks not breaking" patch is kind of easy, almost rewarding vulnerable designs at lower difficulties and seriouly cutting down repair costs, but since torpedoes inflict high AoE damage, they may wreck the systems on the inside so I guess it protects small designs from ubiquitous capital-ship-destroying ordnance ! Though, I got a Misao cruiser hit numerous times by torpedoes and the delicate "energy millefeuille" (ultra-fine-grained solar array made of less-than-1 hp solar panels) inside stayed fine... Oh ! Is NPC torpedo damage not affected by difficulty ? That would be where the balance problem is, as it would increase the already-huge disparity between NPC torpedo damage and NPC turret damage. So, when a block is damaged, the block and the ship are damaged, but when a block is destroyed, the max HP stat goes down, resulting in corresponding HP going down and therefore additional damage ? Interesting, and I wonder how it does with AoE damage: is the hit inflicting damage on the ship per block (basically multiplying damage by the amount of damaged blocks then doubling it as it breaks them, probably causing the "shield penetrating one-hit-kill" effect) or just once per ship then the block damage ? That and the inner block threshold multiplier explains how wreckage is even possible.

Those are desync issues, they also happen in solo play. The server acknowledges the wreck to be at a different position than the client acknowledges. The collision causes communication with the two that updates the object data on the client, making it display at the right place. Sometimes by firing around the wreck you can damage it, therefore updating it with the right position. Also, sometimes collisions with desynced ships may cause no damage, or extraordinarily high damage, as the collision can happen while the true position of the wreck is respectively (hopefully) away from your ship or inside your ship. It also happens. I reckon it may be because big enough pieces can collide with the yet-whole wreck, causing destroying blocks of the piece, making it "different" in the eyes of the server, while the client didn't calculate at the same pace, causing two "pieces", one of them duplicated and undamageable. It also happens with some wrecks and ships, though it is kinda rare: blocks that are destroyed server-side but aren't client-side. Since health is stored in a floating point variable and calculated both client-side (to quickly update alongside the game action) and server-side (as projectiles and other damaging things are calculated server-side), discrepancies due to rounding errors can happen, causing the client and server to "miss" the block destruction event despite the server erasing the block. It happened once to me with a station wreck which had a gargantuan crew quarters block (more than six Takis' long). Do not hesitate to send client and server logs if it's recent, though. May be another bug.

Whoa, scary :o ! As always, post the client and server logs to allow the developers to find the source of the problem, or use the bug tracker.

Nowadays some stations produce Toxic Waste, that can only be sold at Trading Posts and clog our cargoes. Stocking it is kind of necessary but since it's infinitely produced (like all trading goods), is only a very temporary solution. I have several ideas to put back the Toxic Waste into the cycle. The nice but expensive solution - Waste Decanter: That could be a special kind of station that'd turn waste into low-level resources, but the conversion rate would be capped by a logarithm of how much waste is currently inside, because compression would be involved. So they would be really pricey to maintain to be efficient enough for a station or two, as they'd need to have cargo holds as big or even bigger than Trading Posts'. (However the production would make them less of a money sink.) The slightly evil solution - Jenkhem Factory: A definitely illegal station that would make Morn and Acron out of (a lot of) Toxic Waste alongside other things. Now the problem becomes smuggling the drugs... unless you have a really conveniently-placed smuggler post trading both, of course. May increase pirate activity. The really evil and hopefully temporary solution - "Suspicious" Stations: There could be some stations using Toxic Waste as supplementary ingredients to make things. Those would be less expensive than normal stations to build, more efficient with the ingredients, but their cycle is dangerous: they would have a chance to lose crewmembers at random production cycles (so they may need crew runs in addition to cargo runs, and they'd be able to resupply themselves automatically with the crew they offer) and the production would count as Suspicious cargo (because it doesn't meet regulations). Suspicious Stations would also be able to be "sanitized" into their ordinary counterpart for a small price, for when the player'll have enough money to afford another or a bigger decanter. The careless solution - Trash Heap: Another station that is just classed as "Suspicious", it just fires Waste into the nearby star(s), but it has been proven that a really small amount of waste really lands on it. For some reasons Xsotan hungers for the most of the rare toxins inside, so building that station increases Xsotan activity, in quantity and quality. (Also, dropping Waste into space would have a similar effect, or else it waste processing station would be useless.) And worst of all, it gets rid of Waste really efficiently, bringing cargoes from distant sectors to empty their holds inside, causing the increase to be massive :o and the need to build and maintain large Xsotan-culling fleets. (Alternatively, Xsotan make organic, crew-killing torpedoes out of it ! Yeowch ! And annoying ! Players and other NPCs could also make them, but they are illegal under space-Geneva Convention :P.)

It's effectively nice that the 0.16.5 is a little different from the 0.16.4. Lots of quality of life upgrades and bugfixes, especially "Fixed an issue where the player didn't stay seated when transforming a ship to a station", "Fixed an issue that caused one-way gates" (made the KaedeIizuka seed easier, by the way) and "Fixed an issue where UI of station docks wasn't rendered when in huge ships" !

Exactly, 11, 12, 14 and 16 are showing the anomalies. Someone should maybe stick this thread. Or not. I wonder if it should be or not ???.

Yay, torpedo shooting shouldn't even count as reputation lost. In fact that should even count as reputation gain in compensation for damaging you (if diplomacy should be managing debts in terms of damage). Becoming friends with a hostile faction has become straight-up impossible with the torpedo factor, unless one makes a stupidly huge ship with enough health to withstand all of the potential torpedo fire (taking into account some people reported one shot deaths with health in the 14 million mark, that some torpedoes penetrates shields, that an Avorion torpedo launcher contains 23 torpedoes, and there doesn't seem to be any limit to headhunter spawning apparently).

Wonderful idea ! That soundtrack really captures the feelings of Avorion at times. Maybe that will incite certain developments ;). Nope, also the case for me. The track "jumps" at various places. Maybe it's somehow copyprotected or due to encoding problems ?!

Whoa, the curves on that Architeuthis are incredible ! The other ships too but I definitely imagine the people on MP starting to yell hax when they see it, or wondering if they found a shader bug ;D ! The Mantis is also way cool: who drives a four-slot, flak corvette-sized 14 229 block ship 8) ?! An entire fleet of 'em would kill a server :o. D'aww ;D Nice spinal mounts for the Paladin, I'm waiting for them too ! And the end of the no-damage server overload bug that stopped my campaign :(.

Well, it's actually true that cubes are better than any other shape in Avorion, but ships are also the reflection of how fancy or utilitarian they and their crew are. The Borg use cubes because they are the Borg, as drones they try to be as utilitarian as possible, while our time's rocket-like long ships are made for thrust and atmospheric piercing (another utilitary design for another use). In contrast, fancier and less optimized designs show freedom, individuality or other desires to get away from being drones, showing, in other words, that space is not (yet) an unforgiving and cruel enough place, fit only to the most efficient and rational designs. Though nowadays the mace designs may have gotten the additional advantage of dodging some torpedoes by spinning, though I've seen torpedoes explode just before colliding. Mace designs also profit from "load-bearing" (when someone fires at a block at the center of a line to destroy it, she needs to deal enough damage to destroy at least half the blocks of the line, negating need for any lateral armouring ! I've seen that in station designs with proeminent load-bearing generators, adding insult to injury by making a traditional weak spot the strongest on the station ::). The only weak spots would be the edges of the stick: put a slightly bigger armor block (with some microscopic integrity field generators) and the spot isn't weak anymore, as removing the block would need ten times it's health in damage, probably killing the ship way before removing the block.

Awesome design, very detailed :) ! Might be persecuted and have trouble fighting, though. And also have jumping problems. 2x upsize might do the trick.

Exactly ! Main bug thread is (link) here, and it happened since 0.16.1, and was identified as a desync issue at (link) 0.16.2. It may be another separate bug, so don't hesitate to post server and client logs, or even enable profiling on your galaxy.ini and post the .txt and .html results with a data transfer service such as WeTransfer. Really bad that it happened at the final boss fight for you :(.

Formation declaring and maintaining would definitely help since telling more than one ship at a time to go somewhere cause the ships to go exactly to the pointed destination, therefore certainly crashing and getting stuck on each other ::).

The problem is kind of logical, made some testing, with 1600+ m/s TL 1 nuclear torpedoes and four exotic TL 1 PDCs on a Shihori: the target prediction seem to be off for torpedo targeting ???. Torpedoes beelining to the ship get destroyed very quickly, but those which curve almost always hit the ship (or get hit 0.1km from her). Torpedoes not getting shot can also be caused on low-end machines by the "no damage because server overloaded" bug, as PDCs fire a lot of shots and some could be ignored but not the torpedo. Bug: Researching PDCs cause either very few or no PDC results (tested with 160 exotic PDCs, got 32 legendary usual chainguns and no legendary PDC). Other, minor bug: right-clicking on Research Tab opens up the new Mail/Destroy context menu. Some good news: turrets put on Defensive Mode seem to stay on Defensive Mode after exiting the ship. PDCs still fired at the torpedoes during a purely remote test-duel. So ships can be escorted by PDC flak craft ;). The "no damage because server overloaded" bug is still not fixed. More patience low-end computer users :) !

Avorion, Homeworld 2, Freelancer, X2: The Threat and Wing Commander: Privateer II were the only ones I had. I loved Homeworld 2's aesthetic (especially with the fighter squadrons and the slow missiles making trails~) and plot, but I was really bad at strategy games, so I abandoned it at the third of the campaign (and got trounced one ship against three against one cpu opponent on the easiest setting). Freelancer was kinda cool, but a bit boring (making boring combat more tedious isn't very engaging), and I adored the prototype capslock weapons ;D I really liked X2 for the station-building aspect and the slow pace, though I disliked the beginning grind. It's my second favorite of all those on my post (first being Avorion~). I also played Privateer II when I was really young so I didn't understand some of the plot ramifications, but the whole aesthetic, with the minimalist cockpit view and weird planets with GIF animations, just fascinated me. It was hilariously overdone, but at the time very few things fazed me and those did :). I also got to play Elite II when I was little but it was too complicated and stressful for me at the time. Also, I-War some years later, with the same problem and I wasn't smart enough to deal with the situations, reacting like "aaagh there's too much enemies firing and BOOM~". Oh, and I guess Descent II, though it was inside space mines, and it was a blast (though I played on Beginner but got lost on the penultimate level ::)). I also really liked playing the demoes of Descent: Freespace, two of the Star Wars games (Rogue Squadron and X-Wing vs TIE Fighter), Terminal Velocity, Wing Commander 4 (that one that only had an instant action cruiser defense endless fight scenario), and that Star Trek game that happened on a flat plane of space (although I found it excruciatingly hard). I once played Evochron, but once I figured the game was about PvP with completely crappy balance (why dogfighting ? you have multi missile launchers, first who fires wins lol) I abandoned it :(. I also played EvE, as a maker and dealer of ships and ammo, utterly hated its whole "Tech I/Tech II lololol carebears suck" balancing >:(, hated the utterly safe menu-and-click-based "piloting", hated the low-sec/null-sec barrier and PvP focus (by virtue of being a carebear explorer) and grudgingly played in one of those poor little carebear alliances which was trying to change the status quo and fail miserably, then stopped when the last computer I had that could run it suffered hard drive failures that punted it to Linux, before completely failing. Or was it when I was fed up of mining for hours and hours... Substance, I played for weeks of IRL-gametime mining, all for not much enjoyment :(. I'd really like to play a lot of space games if I wasn't on a very small entertainment budget with a crappy computer. If I was richer I'd play X3, Starbound, and Space Engineers too (it definitely evolved into its thing!) (also, ouch, 25€ ?! It's even more overpriced than Avorion :-[ !). P.S.: Just bought Starbound to pass time. Not one of my favorites. There's still an exploration premise but a lot of content (wiring, signs, pets, etc.) is gated by linear game progression, like in Terraria. Even when trying to do something for casual gamers, they ended up pandering to the hardcore combat-addicts :(. P.P.S.: Nevermind I found a book mod for my journalizing need, and a guided rocket launcher. Cue reckless and jubilatory ownage of enemies that constantly dodged and trick-shotted me 8) P.P.P.S.: Screw Starbound, still hating it. But I now can run Empyrion: Survival Evolved. Playing coop with my dad :). P.P.P.P.S.: Now (since September 2018) I'm playing Star Trek Online with dad instead of Empyrion. Not very balanced for duo team play but playable, and it has a lot of nice ideas... and a lot of paywalls too. And to the whole "going into an MMO together" thing since friendlisting is locked either by level or mission count somehow.

Me neither, and few people take requests in avorion~ But you may change the post title to "[Request] CoD Retribution Carrier" or something along those lines to make your post stand out. Also, img tags would allow the image to be shown without clicking on the link. [url=https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_original/vv6qx21j1jgdtslxjcyi.jpg][img=https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_original/vv6qx21j1jgdtslxjcyi.jpg][/url]

It's not 0 but near-0, but it still happens. Especially with Mobile Merchants and Smugglers (two smugglers out of five are just "useless"). The "no damage because server overloaded bug" is still not fixed, it even worsened, even enemy torpedoes do no damage. Have patience low-end computer users :) ! Aww :-\. But I guess that's a good idea because coverage is important for fighting with salvagers, and huge mining lasers are cool but impossible to put on tiny "scavenger" ships :). (Maybe bellcurving slot amount probabilities be a solution ?)

Well, I wouldn't say that. The clash of three concepts is a wonderful idea, but it's also definitely difficult to execute. The first problem of two is gameplay balance. The amount of damage dealt is effectively maybe a little too much, and the randomization makes very very unequal weapons. Since each faction have three weapons, you can trundle on factions with one or two weaksauce weapons reducing their collective DPS, or godroll weapons for the reverse. People are noticing it with torpedoes as the same seed is used for all "three" torpedoes, so someone can suddenly be blocked by a new hostile faction sporting ultrafast one-shot-one-kill shield-penetrating monster torpedoes. The damage discrepancy is also enforced by the weapon triats: Since, at the very core of the game, dodging is nigh-on impossible, the damage-range normalization will always make the most imbalanced non-equilibrium imaginable (more damage + more range = better), and torpedoes make this conundrum even more exaggerated ! Making a galaxy-based (with a little less than one million sectors, of which 2000-3000 would be "economically active") 4X game with ship-by-ship creation, block-by-block damage physics and dynamic galactic economy is possible, but is extremely demanding in terms of processing power. That's the reason why Toady One of Dwarf Fortress chose a minimal graphical interface (to begin with?): he actually reached the point where he has to optimize his game to add new features, and so with almost no power to graphics and turn-based gameplay, because the simulation is extremely detailed ! Notch, with Minecraft, was lucky at the beginning by striking the right balance, but had to increase minimal requirements of his game to add shaders. Avorion is in a little less savory position where the limit has been hit, but the game can hopefully retract in many ways: less detailed (non-realtime, prediction-based) out-of-sector economy and combat for instance. Avorion doesn't use much power in graphics (ships are made of a pretty limited amount of polys, as one block equals one poly, so few scenes have more than ten kilo-polygons), it most likely uses its power on script execution (and maybe collision calculation). Right now the AI seems script-based, which needs a very small scripting tick, which then reflects onto all the other scripts, some of which should not be called as much and use a lot of processor power as a result. Separating the two kinds of scripts would suddenly and drastically decrease the necessary power. (It may not actually be the case, but it's just an example to explain how quickly nowadays' computers gigantic processing power can be divided by factors of simulation complexity.) Just getting rid of those two problems would make the game infinitely better and pave the way for more features like "making the Iron Wastes interesting".

I've seen some pirates go upward to 220 m/s in the Iron Wastes: the procedural ship generation definitely improved itself over the past few months :), they sometimes get back in range of my ship after a boost. ... I like the subject title, feels like an anime title ::).

The problem is effectively not happening in other galaxies, like my testbed which has less Out-Of-Sector-Production enabled sectors, where I got to a naonite sector and fought against torpedo-firing pirates which behaved normally under fire. After all, my machine is right on the minimal requirements for the game, so it's a way of observing how Avorion fares with very limited resources. So, it'd be a priority-based problem between In-Sector realtime gameplay and Out-of-Sector simulation, explaining why only some people have that problem: gaming rigs nowadays are more than ten times as powerful, so it would need ten times as much stations to observe the same-ish bug. ...d'oh, it kinda kills the whole "making a whole galactic empire" ambition of mine ::). Maybe the simulation's update interval needs to be scaled with its available resources by simulated sector, or a server option to manually change the update interval. I screwed around with the "emptySectorUpdateInterval", putting it to 5.0 then 30.0 from the default 0.5. Didn't do much.

Yup, there is no variable-mixable tracks in the default music, but putting new music into the game is extremely simple and it would be designed with customizing one's own music in mind. I've put all the "common" Wing Commander tracks in mine, for exemple, so the escort/patrol tracks and the corresponding battle tracks would go together well, even if it isn't a complete variable mix :)

Good bugfix :D ! Will probably be implemented next update !