I love to get you guys thinking about the future of the game so let me know your thoughts on the stuff discussed in this video or any other future ideas for Space Engineers!
Maybe a good soulution could be to put the asteroids in a loose configuration around a planet and have the space between the planets asteroid fields as a non-euclidian space, where the space itself gets gradually smaller and then bigger again, so that you still have the visual distance between the planets but automatically travel much quicker between them. No change in maximum speed required and the problem with crashing would be overcome. Only thing I am not sure about is, if you could build in that space. Mostly because any station could appear out of nowhere, but also because weird physics of "stretching" the block size if you want a gradual shift in the space folding. Sorry if that is convolouted guys, I hope it is understandeble.
Ok, I made my other comment, but my suggestion for what to see next is - the ability to remove collision between certain blocks within your ship or connecting to it, like rotors or hinges with connected parts that smack your ship and make it move around. That’s just my opinion as an Xbox SE player though, your choice.
I have an idea: the jump drive could make you go much faster, not skip space... so, like in that mod, "supercruise", but you have all the voxels you can hit and you have to set a rout in the navigator. And while you are jump-driving, you can walk through the ship doing other stuff. And then multiple ships could enter "the same jump rout", so you can even have a battle where enemies enters your "jump-drive tunnel" and then you need to defend your ship while jump-driving! (i don't play the game, yet, but it will be very nice!!)
Building jump gates would be a good way to help make space travel more important, but also reward people for making the long trecks. Then you have to make expiditions to build new jump gates at new locations.
In my opinion SE could make use of terminal velocity as it's in atmosphere limitation. While under thrust you can exceed this speed, but if you're just falling (re-entry) then the atmosphere would cause you to slow to a more manageable speed. Then if it's a non atmospheric planet and you're being that careless it makes sense to slam into the ground.
I think having the asteroids grouped into specific areas would be good for multi-player servers. It would keep people from flying away and never being seen again. You could do that and have a base set up somewhere in the void but you'll need to return to the Asteroids at some point to refuel your hydrogen or collect building supplies thus putting you into proximity of other players. It could open up possibilities for both pvp piracy as well as white knights to offer protection.
HAHAHAHAHAHA... You have clearly never played EVE online. There are no white knights, If you can't kick seven shades of ^%$% out of anyone you are never safe outside the protected zones. That's just how PvP works. No one is looking for a FAIR fight, fair fights are for suckers.
I honestly like the idea of an asteroid belt or asteroid field. Perhaps even something like a wide flat ring that when you zoom farther out turns into a ring like Saturn
What about some kind of a long distance radar? A part that tells you if there is anything in your path, even if it isn't currently rendered, so you can adjust your direction in advance. You could also automate it, so it would automatically evade asteroids that are in your path. Another idea is a way to calculate your breaking distance, so you wouldn't smash into planets at high speeds. And jump drive should be used for interstellar tavel anyway :D
I would love this especially if you could give it set up actions and have it linked to sound blocks so you could be anywhere in your ship and be called at a moments notice if something could be in your path.
@@thee_number_six6227 yeah exactly! I want to do that sort of thing. Even might try and get the same alarm sound from the millennium falcon in a sound block if we can do that.
The problem with this is when you are flying through space, roids are constantly being generated and spawned. So the computers would just see empty space until roid is in your face. And at high speeds have fun dodging. Me and some friends have had a roid spawn issue like this before with a cluster server. We made our "jump" to the next server and when we all loaded in the game had also decided to spawn an roid right in front of us so we lost 1/3 of our ship.
How about the idea to convert the Jump Drive into a station only block and make it work as a tunnel device. With the impairment that it needs antenna connection to your ship and another jump station we could actually have a usecase for laser antennas, too. That way we would have to travel to the location manually and then build a kind of stargate over there to get our teleportation running. This would encourage building Space Station AND Ground Stations. And to get another threshold: Besides the power needed by the jump device the antenna connection needs to be established for a few seconds or minutes before jumping is possible, a bit like the shield bubble for stations. Just so the station needs to be maintained and defended and the ships can't easily escape sticky situations in a blink of an eye
I feel like it should kind of work like the Elite Dangerous supercruise where it kind of puts you in a physicsless area but forces you to drop out at a certain radius, and also makes you extremely visible, just to spice the pvp aspect up
Remove jump drive. Add warp speed block. Same size and a small block version. This block speeds your ship up to a configurable speed and only works to full capability in space and only slightly speeds up in atmosphere (so it can be used as an “afterburner”) next add jump gates. So you can still fly ships through rings that get you to other fixed positions and act more as a multiplayer hub and almost force character interaction. By using this idea you wouldn’t need to shorten planet distance and you could even develop some story around the gates with factions or have one of them deactivate because of pirates. Having to gaurd these in order to use them would be a great way to implement the new drones and add to the economy update by giving players a real reason to actually do quests, this idea could wrap together space engineers and make survival play an overall more rewarding experience.
Supercruse or warp bubbles seem like a good idea, but they should be harder to get and maybe be less modular with how you can duct tape a jump drive to a chair and move across the system. I want a more research or configuration based progression vs the just welding of a block, one idea I've heard is skill based blocks where the more you use a block the better it is up to a point. And the less you do the more prone to failure or inefficient it is. Or as I'm sure was mentioned in a previous video, jump gates, super structures that are built and maintained vs being their own ships. Which is another problem with the game, building large mega structures isn't fun because of lag / block limits. Space Engineers is super fun but it still has ways to go, but I recognize how far it's come and I can't wait for more improvements.
@@Zer0sLegion I wouldn't be sure about that. If you want to fix that problem besides having to change range (which would already be broken) you would have to change the projectile speed. That would make dodging strategies really ineffective. The only way I can think of to counter that would be to allow ships to accelerate quicker as well. If you implement all of that you end up with the same combat but ships being way further apart and therefore way harder to hit. I think it would probably take all the fun out of it Edit: Because firing at that range would just waste ammunition and you would just have short windows of combat
@@Creeperking-bw7wi they could change up the system completly by adding heat managment in space heat cant spread out through the atmospere so either have to store it or vent something like superheated gas or something to radiate the heat away slowly this makes the speed and firepower cap how much heat you can afford to make without active cooling this would change so much though its cool because its more realistic but im not sure if they can make it fun enough
@@Zer0sLegion imho, it is relevant, because it interconnected with gameplay altogether. Calling it irrelevant is just kinda shallow thinking. for example higher speed means faster ship on combat. Faster combat means faster bullets and tracking and longer bullet distance are needed. And that bits of stuff stack up on sim speed too. Let's say we go vanilla, no weaponcore, having fast rotor/hinge speed on custom turrets while zooming at high speed? I'm having clang issues with custom turrets on my small grid corvette at 400m/s combat already. Also at 100m/s I can easily dodge and weave between gatling and autocannon shots at 500m too. Another matter is subgrid/supergridding issues. On vanilla mp, with enough people, a dip in sim speed leads into a catastrophic wrath of clang even on a good server. And high speed limit tanks sim speed on a populated server (at least in my and my friends experience). Before increasing speed limit, the game/sim needs to be stabilized first (which I think what keen did) and existing stuffs will also need to be rebalanced too. Also, jump drive is not only a travel convenience block but also has a good strategic value in combat for jumping in/ambush or jumping out/escaping. Removing it means combat will have just two strategies: face to face total annihilation or outrunning your enemy to escape. No more ambushes/cutting your eny escape, except you know, you modded stuff like the stealth mod. Well I speak mostly vanilla based, as it will be applicable both for se pc and console. Also we need to keep keen's design philosophy for se in mind, as it's geared towards semi-realistic sci fi engineering and exploration game first, not combat first. If you don't agree with what keen did, you can mod the hell out of se. Even the stuff like you stated like planet size and distance can be modified in mp by server admin already. Otherwise you are just pushing smaller scale worlds and your definition of "fun" on everyone including people who don't play mp and wanted the exploration feel. If you don't care about realism and just wanted the combat outside vanilla capabilities, you can mod and gear your playthrough towards that. If one wanted their playthrough to be as realistic as possible outside vanilla capabilities, they can mod their playthrough as they want. To each their own and keen/se provided the way too.
I remember using jump drives with a few friends. It still took us an entire night of switching pilots, taking turns while one of us slept at our desk and the other was awake, about 16 hours in total to reach the nearest planet with many jumps.
Never really gave this much though but the idea that there would be different speed limit for space and planets, it would even make sense with air resistance being a thing, this combined with asteroids only existing as clusters and rings sounds really cool (having a ringed planet would be amazing in its own right)
Idea, keep the speed limit, The jump is more like a warp (think Star Trek). Rework jump/warp drive to be more like the Plasma generator mod so it has components, as you add components you warp faster (sorta Star Trek again). Edit: Give asteroids some kind of gravity or something that kicks you out of the warp/jump (think Star Wars this time)
I agree with this. Back when me and few buds were playing SE we decided to join a Multiplayer server where there was PVP. We had decided to meet up with another faction on the server on a different planet, but we didn't have the resources for the jump drive. We ended up pulling over 8 hours of taking turns flying and swapping out. We also ended up at the wrong world and that further extended the time. it was an experience to say the least lol.
I like the idea of a single large planet with small moons and an asteroid belt. That feels a lot more comprehensible as a place to me. Also you can hide a jump drive (or a few) in the asteroid belt and make them unbuildable so they’re like a super rare major advantage that people want to steal a lot more than they want to destroy, but they can also do that.
The FSD Drive kinda solves most of the problem for me. But I agree that changes are very needed. With an "exploration" update that is hopefully coming and that hopefully puts SE somewhere closer to Empyrion. So I was an Eve Online player and from that I think maybe jump gates might be a good thing. Maybe something you have to unlock the ability to use or find a key that allows you to access a gate network. Make it endgame.
@@Zer0sLegion I was watching Xoc's live stream yesterday and he did a vote on what everyone wants for the game and most said either exploration more survival mechanics more reasons to progress further and better ai/npc's. As I told him the game is awesome but you can only build just so much or play a "survival" scenario over again for so long and then you look for new reasons to play. problem seems that Keen believes that most all players just want them to give new blocks and keep it more of a building game.
In my opinion changing jump drive to work like that supercruise mod would be the best choice. No Mans Sky works like that within the confines of solar systems. Never played space engineers but I've played alot of NMS. And the way the supercruise mod sounds reminds me heavily of how travel between planets works in nms. It keeps the space travel feel very much intact and cuts down on travel time between planets. If space engineers had multiple solar systems, that'd be where you'd want something like the current jump drive, but with the scope as it is now, supercruise is the best solution imo.
you could have wormholes rarely spawning that are randomly paired, maybe even end up being able to make artificial ones that requires you to build both ends of a portal or gate (think star wars hyperspace lanes or stargates)
Or the jump drive can go full star wars hyperdrive. Instead of instant teleport your ship goes into a hyperspace tunnel for a certain amount of time depending on distance. Also artificial gravity can be used as an interdictor that can pull you out prematurely if you want that pvp action.
The solar systems realism is already out of wack. The sun is infinitly far away, the planets aren't orbiting and are just kinda stationary. You may as well cram them together, they already serve gameplay over realism as is.
I love the idea of asteroid belts around planets. And that also gave me the idea of stuff like comets and meteors floating about like those pirate ships, except actual moving terrain
Love the idea of the bunched up astroïds. And really for multiplayer as its ofc rich in resources but all bunched up would probably make it more hostile too. Maybe higher chance of pirates there would be cool too. Just something to spice them up.
I'd like the jump-drives to function as carriers from one place to another. Basically they only function when a grid is a Station and explosively auto-destruct if ever a Station becomes a ship. This would allow for space-based stations to be able to cycle around as just really massive "ships" who don't use conventional thrusters. It would allow for another version of highly armored capitol ships during battles, but also allow large mining/processing grids to move on to previously scouted locations, each toting their scores of smaller "large grid" and "small grid" ships.
Orbital mechanics. It feels strange that there are no mechanics like that in the game. It is very possible to move about in the way you do in the game, straight off a planet, straight down to it, but it requires more energy than orbital insertions and transfers.
Yeah, I would like this but Keen would want to simulate it properly rather than faking it and that would probably require a massive rework (or more likely a new game.)
@@Zer0sLegion the orbital velocities would be incredibly high like 7km/sec high. Hard to simulate a ship passing by you that fast, and the gameplay could become disasterously hilarious. Battles would probably have to be highly staged at legrange points.
I remember (I think) Xoc or Marek mentioning the team trying to include orbital mechanics a couple of times over the years, and each time the engine basically imploded so the resource investment just wasn't there. Still feels odd that I played the game for ~2yrs without planets being a thing in the game lol
Orbital mechanics are possible, just need a high speed mod and a mod that changes the gravity falloff from 1/radius^7 to 1/radius^2 like it is in real life. Also pretty sure stable orbits are mathematically impossible in any instance where that power (^7, ^2 etc) is an odd number
@@Daddy_Damo There are 2 aspects here, is it possible, and is it possible in SE's current engine. Are basic orbital _flight_ mechanics possible? Yes, and there is a long standing mod on the workshop that does it. But for planetary orbital mechanics, which is what I'm assuming is the main point, the developers have said that the original scope/design of the engine was not intended to have those functions included, and because of how they did code the back-end, introducing them on a non-localized grid (which is not the same as the application of delta-V to maintain a "stable" orbital flight of a ship or station is) just isn't something they can do easily without a major revamp of the base code. There are two games which are voxel based with at least a pseudo-OM system (Empyrion and No Man's Sky), so again, it can be done, but only when the core code base is designed from the ground up to do it.
I agree the jump drive became pointless once I could not use them in a creative way such as jumping the enemy near a planets gravity and with a mix of gravity drive to pull other's into the gravity, pulling that off was my greatest achievement! Also at this stage Homing Rockets should have been in the Warfare pack with timers to self demo or range of course.
I'd really like to be able to build my own jump gate networks. My idea is you build an end point gate, fly through space normally to build a transmission gate that has a clear line of sight to the previous gate (no asteroids, planets, etc), and repeat as many of these transmission gates as necessary to map a safe route to the final destination where you build another end point gate. Use laser antennae to link them in the correct order. Then you can travel from end point to end point instantaneously for a cost of power only at whatever entrance gate you're using. Maybe make it possible to enter via one of the transmission gates but the power then has to come from your ship's jump drive since you're not using an end point gate that can provide its own power. That's the only way ship jump drives could be used long-range. The longest gate-less jumps should be limited to 10-15km and be significantly more expensive than gate jumps. If your ship has an antenna connection to the gate network and its own jump drive then your ship's jump drive can choose the destination end point gate of your jump; if your ship doesn't have a jump drive with a valid destination set then the entrance gate's jump drive controls the destination. If you want to enter a transmission gate then you have to have (or previously had) an antenna connection with the gate network to get your jump drive set to a destination gate, otherwise nothing happens.
I like the Idea of arrea with asteroid fields instead of asteroids everywhere. Combine that with a supercruise would be nice. Also, you could modify the jumpdrive to increase the power required to use them to the point regular generators would not be enough to power them continually. I did something similar to that once: I put the planets very far away from each other (about 10k Km) and put the mod no uranium anywhere: The only power I had in space was Hydrogen and solar power. So i had to plan my trips to other planets very carefully. it was very interesting.
I like Uranium only being on the alien planet and it being the furthest away so that it's an endgame thing. Problem is, everyone beelined to the alien planet lol 😅
I think that the best idea for multiplayer building on what you said, would be to remove the astroids being at random positions in space and only be around a certain planet, so the only way to get resources for you space base would be to go to a ringed planet and either ferry it all the way to your base or build you base there, this would make it so there's a hot spot of people around a planet instead of basically never meeting another person. I think that the best solution for the jump drive is that you have to find a monolith (witch would be endgame stuff) and use that to make it, and it would have a more "we didn't make this, we just kinda found it and put some wires into it" style and everytime you jumped it would have to chance to malfunction and do something evil, like blowing up or jumping you to a enemy outpost or something like that.
I think it would be cool to have a star trek type warp core. You would have to use a navigational computer to plot a safe course to your destination so that you wouldn't hit any objects on your way. It would still take more time to reach your destination, but you would have need to do some recon before you start your journey some how (telescopes, deep space imaging equipment etc). After you have done the trip once, it would be easier to move between the two points. But please, don't mind me. I've played less than 10 hours atm :D Addendum: This way, you can find out what is on your way there, and if there's any intersting objects you can stop and mine the resources on an asteroid for example. Maybe even build a waystation that other players can use?
They said you can't increase the ship speed because it would cause people within the ship to rubber band and get stuck in walls and die. The solution imo is to increase the ship speed limit drastically, but make the interior be it's own packet, so to speak, by making people within the ship only move relative to the ship rather than the world.
@@Zer0sLegion I Like Sebi's Idea, however changing the movement system to a relative one is not a realistic option at the moment, in my opionion. I disagree with putting planets closer together. I like increasing the speed and have an idea to combat rubberbanding issues: What if we went a Star Wars like approach with a Hyperdrive that allows up to, let's say, 10.000 m/s. This can only be used while every player is seated in the ship, this would defeat rubberbanding. Collisions for players and objects are disabled and the ship is treated like a large block, so the physics are not calculated for every given block but rather once per ship in this state. The hyper travel ends as soon as somebody leaves their seat/cryo (or alternatively they die on leaving, while hyper travel is active). If we combined this with the long distance radar idea of @hamaczech13 to show the clearance of a path before starting the travel - or the radar is able to show 10 seconds of movement obstacle detection, giving you enough time to react and abort the hyper travel. Hyper Travel should be initiated like the current jump drive and may be set to a target, just like the jump drive - or may be cancelled manually. Most of the power should be consumed on start and some while travelling. What do you think?
@@Mimonsi there's a mod called FSD superdrive that does exactly what you described, except you can actually control the ship at high speed. Your speed is determined by the power output of all your reactors and batteries combined, along with the mass of your ship. You must be seated to use it, just like the jump drive. It's amazing. But as far as what you said about if it was that easy, the devs would have done it by now, think about how long it took them to give us T-shaped conveyor junctions. Not saying it would be easy, but the game knows when you're inside a pressurized ship, so you already have a true/false state to determine when to apply the altered physics to the player, which seems like it would be the hard part. But, you're not wrong.. who really knows how hard it would be until it's been attempted?
No Man's Sky handles the space travel really well. If you look at the pulse drive and the hyperdrive system, it allows for a space game with both far away and closer planets in a fun and exciting way.
Love the idea of asteroid rings and fields, would make PvP way more interesting. Would be cool to make hidden bases in, with trap asteroids, base stations, etc.
My solution if you remove the jump drive. 1) a special "Phase drive" or engine that let's you go faster. 2) a warp gate. Requires the play to build certain blocks in a pattern to make a portal between any two. They have to travel there first and build the gate before being able to FTL.
I think a solution to having asteroids in the way is actually very simple, but I have two possible choices. 1. A block which detects asteroids and circles them on your hub or cockpit, (can be turned off) It can even detect them outside of viewing range, Aswell as give info on how close they are. The larger the viewing range the more power it needs, and it can only be placed outside the ship. 2. Areas where the asteroids are cleared away or theres less of them, whilst areas with asteroids are denser. These empty areas would be far and few between. This adds to a better dynamic however for AI ships and multiplayer. Larger ships would need to travel through these areas or risk being smashed, which means AI and players can defend these areas because of their importance. Smaller ships can also escape large vessels alot more easily and have more freedom for traveling.
I'm for the level design solution, and the end game jump drive. another option is to have non-buildable star gates generated in the world around key points of the world space to facilitate transit, the idea being that the technology is of unknown origin. My favourite option is to have everything generated in clusters and use a KSP style interplanetary navigation system that unlocks the speed limit but gives you the tools to properly navigate deep space and reduce your speed when entering a planetary cluster or giant.
The way i see it, if they remove the jump drive they need to increase the base speed by a LARGE portion. perhaps adding a block that effectively acts similar to a jump drive but allowing to travel exceedingly fast in space and making you accelerate faster, alongside a counterpart to limit top speed if you dont wanna accidentally go too fast
Since watching this video... I believe that a wormhole setup is more likeable. Using jump drives to get places and setting up a worm hole network at places using laser antennas to keep them linked. This can also allow for detectable pings or traceable worm hole resedu. Like holding a worm hole open allows for people to track it. This can help with people to be able to trace people in a end game setting. When only people who could maintain a wormhole could be able to take on another person with said wormhole.
A proper fix might be Gates instead of drives, as you 'build' gates of proper size at places you have already visited. This means to journey to new places, or ones you dont have a link to, The distance will need to be breached by conventional speeds, either by a player, or a drone designed to build a gate upon landing at or near the orbit of a planet
Thrusters should not just be faster than current ones, they should be in tiers just like tools are, and each should require different materials like platinum to craft, and each should be faster than previous tier. Also it would be cool to get more ores like tungsten or maybe something from sci-fi like vibranium for better thrusters or other endgame stuff
I don't think tiered thrusters is a good idea. I don't mind more thrusters, even ones that are better just with different requirements, but have just a tier 2 and 3 thruster isn't the right fit for Space Engineers. I agree with more ores though, although, we probably need to rebalance the ores we currently have first.
I personally think there should be more types of thrusters requiring more advanced materials which could be crafted by combining different types of metals together. No Mans Sky has a decent resource system which space engineers could take a bit of inspiration from.
@@Zer0sLegion oh, you mean there could be more kinds of thrusters like in stellaris, now we have only ion but there could be something like impulse or plasma?
Tiers I don't think would be a good idea, that's just another wall to get stuck behind, but adding other forms of thrust that have different pros and cons such as higher speed wouldn't be a bad idea. Solar sails also wouldn't be a bad idea for a cheaper slower accelerating propulsion.
I like the idea of making it only one planet with a few moons around, raise the speed in atmosphere to ~150 (100 is too slow), and make it progressively faster, up to 1000 when getting out of atmosphere, and then I would make the jump drive only be able to jump from portals to portals. So you'd have to build an actual structure down, and "register" it's portal into your jump network. Then you'd have to fly to one of your portal with a ship equipped with a jump drive, and then jump to another one of your portals. Maybe even have to jump the ship through a jump area, so the bigger the ship you want to jump, the bigger your portals would need to be made. This way, you will have to first fly anywhere you want to then be able to jump, and also build and keep powered a structure just for that purpose. The drives would still have a use, but then it would definitely be some end game stuff.
When i did play online a few months ago they had a gate system with the gate hub and 4 planetary systems with 1 main planet + moon or astroid belt and it worked very well. Something like that but tweaked could be a solution. Instead of gate teleports just bring the ship to super fast speed and fixed no collision route until the exit gate is reached. Then put the AI trade stations directly next to the gate or give them a personal safe bubble to dicourage from gatecamping. Keeping the jump drive in some way intact is probably better to circle the planet faster and reaching the stations/asteroids without a sleeping break inbetween. One more thing said server had for all 5 areas a different actual server with auto server switching so i would prefer it if the distances would be far enough to be able to use such options when needed even in a standard system.
The issue related to large distances/skipping areas with a jump drive becomes an issue for any means of compressed travel without a complete (or near complete) rework of a lot of systems. Reducing distances but increasing speeds just means the server has to populate the space in-between the 2 points with items that the player is still speeding past. The jump drive "skips" the auto generation process entirely (given large enough jump ranges). So that area stays "empty" until there is a need to populate it. This impacts the server's performance (or the single player's local machine in non-MP games), so needs to be kept in mind. Also, with speed limits, "catching" a speeding ship for PVP/PVE (vs AI) is not really a thing in SE as-is. Most encounters are framed combat (auto-cannons at dawn) or complete ambushes, when it's a random player encounter, if someone wants to escape before getting into weapons range, the first ship to reach the speed cap wins, always. So we need a rebalance on how speed limits are applied to grids (Dangerous Reentry mod might be a good example of grid mass/design impacting speed limits) This might encourage actual diversity in ship designs and would likely make usage of ship size categories a thing. Longer term, what the game really needs is a way to "encourage" players to not skip the content areas by default, which means the entire resource/valuables system needs to be reconsidered. I think making asteroid fields larger, but more spaced out, and adding "rings" to some worlds would be a nice compromise. This allows having resources sort of how they are now with higher-end resources becoming more available the further you get from the starting area(s). Well except uranium, put it back in the moon's resource table, maybe even on the general planets, just require platinum for reactor cores (or some other component) to move reactors more to the end of the tech tree. This also means a rebalance on vendors (for those who play with economy enabled) which removes things like platinum from the "selling" list on/around starter worlds, so a player cannot buy these items (in)directly on/around the starter worlds, including removing ships with ion thrusters/jump drives within the same sphere/range.
I think the best solution would be this: bring the planets closer but not too much, just a bit. replace the jumpdrive with something like the supercruise mod, but instead of disabling physics, add some sort of scanner blocks to detect asteroids and maybe even navigational mechanics to traverse set routes in space. Maybe the jumpdrive would be replaced with some sort of enhancer block that allows thrusters to supercruise.
Autopilot functions with a higher space speed limit would be cool, tell the computer to go to within so many miles of a planet on auto, enters a form of supercruise or just avoids asteroids automatically. Could even implement jammers or interdictors for pirates/pvp, entering a jammed zone would disable autopilot and rip you back to standard speed
One of the neat things about Space Engineers is that you can, using mods and plugins, have all of these changes and more and switch between them at different times. But that requires you to learn all of those mods, spend all of that time setting up, testing, and fiddling with them, and so forth. Keen should consider moving many of these functions into base game configuration values and offering different start conditions using them. Say for instance, if the speed limit and radius around planets asteroids could spawn in became sliders or drop down boxes in the same menu as inventory sizes and meteor storms. In the part where people can choose a stock star system or the crashed red ship and so forth they could have the small system - perhaps an official gas giant planet with the other vanilla planets as moons for instance - as an option. Stuff like that.
The X series had pretty low speed limits (fastest scouts were ~600m/s, battelships and carriers were 100m/s), in the newest game in the series they added a "Travel drive" which allowed for ships to go up to 5-10k m/s. Getting hit by any fire, or too close to obstacles or other ships would exit travel mode. Obviously the X series is very scifi, but you could have a "Travel Drive" within Space Engineers to solve some of the problem that high speeds create for the physics engine, while also making the drive less sci-fi than how it is done in the X series.
There's a concept within some scifi called "slipstreaming" It essentially makes you move so fast, as well as distorting physics within your area, that you basically squish into a 1-dimensional line in the direction you're heading. It makes you go really really fast, as ALL of your propulsion is focused on literally one single point, while also making it impossible to crash into things while slipstreaming. The only issue would be coming out of slipspace within an object, which obviously you just wouldnt do. Not a lot of scifi settings use this for some reason. Maybe SE could.
I say keep the jump drives but make them extreme end game, but change the function of them. Make them jump gates, using the gravity block and a new "gate" block and build them like a station and you need to connect at least two to make them work. That and have a speed enhance block like a warp/hyperspace block, that allows the extreme speeds.
Yep increase the max speeds. And add more planets and things todo at and between the planets enemy ships, stations, asteroids etc. The jump drive can be used as fast travel once a destination is reached
i think the jump drive block its self should stay but the bam teleport should go and we treat it more like a warp drive giving it travel time so you go to "warp" for 5 mins and you have travelled the required distance rather that charge teleport land as i feel thats a bit better for the way space engineers works
just change the scenarium to moons orbiting a gas giant. an earthlike moon, an icy moon, alienlike moon, rocky moon, jungle moon etc etc. have the gas giant have an astroid belt. ex. gas giant -> alien -> belt -> rocky -> jungle -> earthlike -> rocky -> icy.
I think No Man's Sky tackled this issue well. They used a warp drive to travel VERY fast between planets in a star system, which removes collision as you had suggested. This reduces the time to get from planet to planet from like 17 hours down to a couple minutes. The game will automatically bring you out of warp travel when you get close to a planet as well, that way you don't do just go through the planet. Then they used a jump drive to move between star systems, which is kinda irrelevant in SE. I think if the warp drive was implemented, the planets and asteroids could stay as is.
Interesting suggestions for Jump Drives... but here's an alternative or way to augment them... make Jump Drives only operate where you've sent and established some sort of probe - something with something like a gravitational subspace anchor or some such. That forces players to visit locations (within a certain radius) they've been to before in some fashion. I could see building a bunch of small craft automated probes and sending them out ahead of sending manned missions to establish a presence, or a chain of them to allow a stable flight from A>B... as well as allowing multiplayer servers to disable such anchors by destroying the probes. Just my 2 cents, but in conjunction with some of your other thoughts this would be an interesting gameplay mechanic.
Imo the super cruise is the best idea, I like the planets being further away, heck sometimes I think they're too close together, but as far as game play goes its the opposite. I would also like the asteroid generation to be in rings or clusters, not just random through out the entire distance of space. Its kind of immersion breaking also.
Could have asteroid clusters dotted about that show up as a cloud from far away. It'd make space travel easier and probably cause players to end up bumping into eachother more often in space.
Make an area that acts as an asteroid belt. A ring between the planets. Make it something you have to navigate, but only when going to to farthest planet. Likewise, you can keep one super far away, and the rest closer. A layer of asteroids between the inner, and deep space planet.
One thing I want to see is the ability to place armor over certain existing blocks. The end of an ion thruster? Slap a ramp on it and it'll meld really well with your ship. Have no space for fuel tanks? slap them on the outside and cover them in heavy armor.
you could add a way for players to build a block that forces someone out of "light speed" basically forcing them to jump to that area and no further until they get away from of destroy the blocker.
One thing that would encourage exploration could the different gases that can only be harvested in space. Say they can give you an unique boost or the like, faster propulsion.
I think a good fix and the most likely is that jump drives are changes to just make you accelerate to an insane speed like 5km/s over a 30 second period and turning off collisions with non planetary voxels and grids or maybe not grids because ramming something as an insane speed could be something interesting and funny if you collide with someone as your way of finding them but I wouldn't thing they would have grid collisions. that adds a more realistic feel to it then magic like we have now and wouldn't need people to rebuild their ships to add a new block or fill the space that jump drives would have taken up.
honestly your right about the Area being too big. you can random spawn in a space pod in the middle of nowhere and never see another player ever. planets spawns are about the only way you'll meet anyone.
I think the ship's engines should still matter for interplanetary travel. Maybe have the warp drive move the ship into a "hyperspace" of some sort,where all distances are shorter,just like nether highways in minecraft
Good points. I'd prefer to see worm holes at set points between planets and then have the more end game block be a worm hole controller. This could be done in a few ways, either building the block would show you all the worm hole locations. Or you'd have to find 1 end of each worm hole to be able to use it. So some planets and or moons would have to have 2 worm holes. This would have us doing more flying through space, but would allow for planets to be far apart. All while increasing how likely you are to see other players on multi player, since everyone would be using the same worm holes.
I actually really like the wormhole idea for several reasons: They solve one of the big multiplayer problems by creating high-traffic areas since they are fixed fast-travel points, they encourage exploration to *find* these wormholes, and they create opportunities for unique engineering projects. So here's what I think would be neat: create a block called the "Wormhole Stabilizer" to go along with these wormholes. If the wormhole stabilizer is active for 5 minutes in proximity of the closed wormhole, it opens, allowing ships to travel to the other side, and the wormhole remains open for as long as the stabilizer is nearby it. The stabilizer also broadcasts a signal that is visible at reasonably long range. The 5 minute timer is to encourage players to build an external device, something not attached to their ship that they leave outside the wormhole, and the broadcast range is to attract other players to your discovery once you've made it and help create a sort of "hyperlane" that would bring all space traffic in a segment of space through that point. It makes the wormhole a strategic point of interest: Are you going to try to defend it? Leave it open as a charity? Are you going to have the wormhole stabilizer block attached to your ship and wait the 5 minutes for the lane to open, hoping nobody tracks you down from the broadcast? It could be very interesting.
These days I forgo the jump drive anyway. I generally set my variable speed mod to 1500-2000 m/s for large ships. That gives you enough speed to travel farily comfortably between planets with plenty of time to get into adventures along the way. It keeps the planets far enough out of reach that the trip feels like a journey. I leave the small ships on vanilla speed (as they aren't normally able to jump). But, with that said, SE was designed so you can play it your way! 😀
one solution to the problem of asteroids could be the addition of a shield generator of sorts which would protect the ship from terrain but only when in space
perhaps jump drive should be changed as if it worked as a hyperspace gateway from Cowboy Bebop you create a station with it in one place, and transfer yourself to a station in another
It certainly is a difficult problem to tackle. Even with a 15 minute travel time, when nothing else is going on, it would be rather unspectacular. Maybe they can get some ideas from Elite Dangerous. In Elite, you have a Frame Shift Drive, which is sorta like a jumpdrive / hyperdrive that can operate in two modes. One is jumping, which is similar to what the Jump Drive in Space Engineers does. It's used to jump from system to system and it is basically a teleport but with a fancy animation playing. However, you do skip space completely. You don't physically move between systems like that. The other mode is Supercruise, which is a mode in which you accelerate to very high speeds, meant to travel between planets within a solar system. Planets can be really far away but it's all relative because you can move really really fast. In this mode, you don't skip space, if there is something in between I think the radar would still show it and I think (not entirely sure anymore) the closer you got to the planet, the slower you went. If we raise the overall speed limit in Space Engineers, that opens up a whole host of new problems and it would still overall be slow. If we move the planets closer together so it's a closer planet cluster, I mean yeah that works, but even then you probably still want some reasonable amount of space between the planets so it doesn't feel too cluttered. You still end up with a fairly high travel time and the travel itself being rather unspectacular. So, I feel like high speed travel between planets absolutely needs to be its own mode. Turning off physics may just be the best solution in that case. Purely for travel, and have the game automatically slow you down near planets, maybe even (large) structures?
A really simple solution could be to have the jump-drive be a "slips-space" drive and render the ship immune to physics like the supercruise mod. Allowing you to fly through anything smaller than a planet. Then just up the speed limit to 2500 while in "slip space". It's still beyond the tech of the game for the most part. But I like the idea of having more moons and asteroids around planets and also making planets a bit closer together. If the "jump-drive" would exist as a final end-game version of the slips-space drive, it could take players to new maps. Kinda like how ARK: Survival Evolved has clusters of worlds that can be travelled between. Or a single map could simple have clusters of planets that are far apart and use the drive as an end game item to visit those new systems. It gets overly complicated quickly. So I still think just closer planets, fewer asteroids in the 'void' and allow the jump drive to enable the vessel to ignore obstacles and raise speed significantly. This would let it be used in battle as well but wouldn't be a blink jump. Just that players in real space would lose visual on the ship using slipspace to transition in and out of the battlefield.
I have an idea, to add to the game like a "cruiser mode" where you ultrapass the speed limit but you need to have to be in the space and you coudnt change the direction easly and the ship someway just moves the direction its pointing for
Here is my solution to the problem: - Scale everything down, to get planets with max diameter of ~20km. - Make Gravity fields smaller. - Make a Solar system with rocky planets and gas giants. - Add small moons, rings and asteriod clusters close to the planets (call this volume planetary space). - Leave the remaining space empty (call this volume interplanetary space). - deactivate the speed limit in interplanetary space and deactivate collision detection beyond 100m/s. - Jump drive stays, but like you said, as an end game item.
The way I see it space engineers needs a star/planet system like in the game No Mans Sky. I sort of achieved this by modding my own star system and using modded planets. I usually play with custom star system where I place planets myself closer together. I often make my star systems so a group of around 3 planets are placed around a gas giant or sometimes a black hole to form a planet cluster with 3 to 4 cluster in a system. Some clusters would have "failed" ecosystems with mainly super hot, icy or desert plannets while other clusters have more earthlike plannets or tropical plannets. For traveling between planets in 1 planet cluster I use super cruise mods with which I have a travel time between plannets of around 15 to 20 minutes. 30 minutes if the cluster involves a black whole which you have to fly far around for. Traveling between planet clusters requires a jump drive which are modded to use more power to recharge. Asteroids are only 25% as dense as in vanilla in clusters and only 3% as dense in deep space between clusters. Traveling between clusters without a jump drive would take around 5 to 10 hours at 100m/s. Edit: typos
I used a grav drive mod on PC to instantly accel and deccel. At 20kps you can phase through most small rocks. If you place slower version of the device in all other directions you can control that speed in any direction. Using timers I simulated hyper space travel 20kps. Earth to Mars in under a minute. And the ability to walk around the ship in transit. If you don't phase through the floor.
Just change the dynamics of the jump drive. Begin with a slow start up speed, then the starburst effect but a lot slower as you maintain flight at which point the asteroids cannot be seen but the planets and moon can be seen for effect. Maximum speed will be 666.67 with the option to exit warp but with a slowdown starburst transition reverse of the startup starburst (similar to those movies we dare not name :) Also, the jump drive heats up after each use requiring cool down as well as power regulation, Also for the future, stress on the outer panels from jumping require repairs after much use. A good vector streak upon jumping would also be nice so one might be able to track their aggressors or their prey.
I like the idea of moving asteroids to their own area instead of being effectively a RNG minefield you navigate. Or even just cluster them like how star citizen does it, and enhance the ability to scan long range for minerals (there's a mod on the workshop for this, but it doesn't have to work exactly as such). Or simply make up for the difference in difficulty by adding more economy integration to make buying resources worthwhile. Lots of considerations but lots of options too For me the main gameplay concerns are: 1. Doesn't create a constant fear of bashing into something when you leave the bridge 2. Doesn't cause issues with players being afraid to walk around in their ship at high speeds (clip through a block and be ejected) 3. Doesn't make it hard to change course (inertia, acceleration and deceleration times) 4. Doesn't make it hard to intercept, rendezvous, etc due to speed 5. Doesn't take forever, but is still friendly to high distances 6. Still allows in-transit encounters, which goes hand in hand with the last 3 IMO, raising the limit (or faking that with in-engine trickery) + overhauling the jump drive + a progression rework (and potentially an endgame fuel to manage beyond uranium to power said jump drives) is the most satisfying solution, but it also requires quite a bit of work.
yeah your points 1 and 2 are my current biggest problems with the travel time in space engineers. If they fix those two alone and move jump drive somehow to end/end game(pretty much been everywhere point) atleast for SP or small group MP the game would improve.
Yeah, I understand why asteroids are the way they are as you need them to survive in space but I'd prefer them to be grouped or clustered with more "space"
I've always been a fan of the point of interesst method to make people converge in certain areas and make them hotzones for any kind of activity. And I do also favor the idea of being able to travel between locations without jump drives, and jump drives being an endgame rare utility block rather than commonplace mandatory. That being said, raising the speed limit to something as ludacris as 1000m/s brings in a lot of other problems. Such as render/sync distance with other grids, objects, weapon ranges and rebalancing etc. So if you want higher speeds, you need to rebalance weapons and render sync distance for your server as well. Many servers already do this. Reducing the distance between locations, and having locations that can act as waystops is the better option. While also increasing the speed limit a bit (not more than 2-300m/s for balancing reasons imo). And preferably with a relative top speed mod, as to make ship types/classes a bit more relevant. That way you can get from a to z and do stuff on the way without a jump drive, but it will take time, and encourage you to at least go by a few of the other points in between on your way there.
I think these are pretty popular opinions. The speed limit makes the world artificially too large, but if you moved planets close enough for a 15 minute 100 m/s trip it would just look weird. I'm a fan of the super cruise idea, but don't think it should require a separate block.
Talking about not seeing players you could fix that with active radar and stealth blocks. Radar so you can people and objects outside of your render distance. And stealth so you can hide if you have to.
@@Zer0sLegion It seems like they could create a temporary radar block by either selecting grids and creating map markers for them that meet certain qualifications, or by having a special turret that can detect and mark when grids pass within its field of view. Say at a maximum of 50km with big power requirements.
They should shrink the distance between planets, it is less realistic but it might be better for forcing people to physically travel. Shrink planets. Shrink system. Localize asteroids to regions, belts etc. Keep the chance that you'll collide with an asteroid, Add a block or system that can abort hyper speed when it detects a collision. This will give the chance that some might do "blind jumps" without that block/system installed or functioning. JUMPDRIVE's new usage: - can be to achieve "hyper speed" where it creates a visible bubble around the entire rig that requires power to maintain and maintains the felt inertia within the bubble while on the outside the bubble the ship can travel really, really fast. BUT if the jumpdrive bubble is without power it collapses and everything suddenly suffers all those G's. A ship wrapped in the bubble can still collide with asteroids, planets and other player rigs etc. Edit: the bubble is not a forcefield, things can still enter and exit it, it is more of a "G-forcefield" where the physics inside it can be calculated separately from the outside, meaning it can be considered stationary this hopefully work out for the game's convenience too in regards to calculating physics. Inside you should be able to walk around, build and dismantle parts and even have smaller ships fly around. You should be able to look outside and see the system whiz past the bubble too. Because that would be cool. If the ship collides with something it simple goes through the bubble, "¿slowing the object down a bit or imparting some of the bubble inertia to the object"? (I'm not sure) to help the game calculate impact physics, it will still be catastrophic.
my solution: halve the planet distance and increase the speed limit(if not remove it), braking on planets without speed limit is hard for you because you are not used to it
I love the line of thought and I just had an epiphany as how to achieve it. Use real physics as a guide, real FTL is theorised to need a high and low gravity field in front and behind respectively. So adding a Gravity Generator "setting" that allows it to function as a FTL assist for your thrusters instead of adding a new thruster. Basically a "FTL" on/off switch. How to balance collisions is a big question mark there. Like someone else has mentioned, a long distance radar would be good. For jump drives I would prefer if they became infrastructure instead of component. Make a jump drives wormhole generators. Each one can cover a certain amount of area that is contained within its Grid and can send that to another jump drive's location that can accommodate it as well. It still becomes a late game mechanic but still scales with the size of whatever you're trying to send through it. (Think ring transporters combined with the Stargate's from Stargate)
I would really like it if the jump drive would not go whoosh and you're there, but instead would work like a "real" warp drive and just lets you travel with multiple thousand m/s. And no collision with asteroids could be explained with the gravity fields the drive produces.
I agree that jump drives are OP. I am still on my idea to have different types of thrusters (more speed-less power or less speed-more power or mix both types) plus cruise engines for higher speeds/lower manuver etc. Also, it will be nice to have some kind of space lane travel. If you played Freelancer back in 2003 if I remember, there are jump lanes that boost the player thru the map but not too fast and not too slow. Maybe it will be good to let the player(s) build that structures as they travel to another planet and then as a result they will have trade lane system between those 2 planets/places in space. Like you build the structure on certain distance from each other and you can build multiple in line to boost staff which pass thru and in order to work, lane should have minimum of 3 points/structures. One for starting the boost, one for braking and one/more for boosting the player to another near structure etc.... That way, player will be more occupied doing something while in space :D Freelancer have good solutions about traveling in space, it is an old game but definitely have some good stuff.
I think building some kind of warp gate system would be great. It would encourage engineering and logistics to create and maintain. It would effectively work like the current warp block but instead of effecting itself it would affect another grid and for the same distance cap current warp blocks have. It would be 1 way, necessitating a whole ring system that youd have to build to go back and thus youd have to hunt down the materials to build the next link in the chain. This would also work very well in multiplayer, enemy clans attempting to destroy or take over these gates ect.
There is actually an old star gate mod that worked on the same general principle (obviously based on the same movie/TV series with the same name), and it also introduced new resources, components, and had unique visual effects. Personally I'm a fan of it because someone had to travel out to the two points, gather the resources, build the infrastructure to power/run them, just to link 2 points in space-time. So even with long travel times/huge distances, once someone "settles" the area, you can eventually link spaces together.
@@Haladmer yeah I used it before but the rest of the mod was easy to cheese. I was able to take over one of the warships using the space starter ship. This idea would be more like the large stargates that were able to send full sized ships through. Though the land based one would be great for late/end game.
@@rabbidninja79 Yep, but it does work as a good example of ways the concept could be supported in-game right now. Personally, I used them for resource transports. Had one standing next to a collector, so when components/ore came through, they'd land in the range of the collector for an easy supply line lol
@@Haladmer you're right, it's definitely a proof of concept that would work well. That's actually a really good idea except the one I grabbed was a missile god that could rain hell, I suppose it could be retrofitted to just a cargo barge though.
a game called Interstellar Rift has a ship engine system..actually it's not too dissimilar from the FSD from Elite Dangerous, but, you can accelerate to max sublight speed, then have "even faster" speed, in tiered increments. but if you're going too fast/close to a gravity well, you get dropped a tier....but not always, so you can still go straight up to things or even pass stations.
If you remove jump drives, you would have to blend some star trek with it, Like Warp engines. which enable you to travel around 5000m/s in a straight line and phaise through all objects. Perhaps You need to build atleast 1 rear and 1 forward engines to it to be functional, and require things such as uranium to enable a new block called a warp core to work. Perhaps go futher and for combat people, you can link weapons into the warp conveyors for more powerful weapons. and for me, making ships with conveyors, life support conveyors and Warp thruster conveyors would add more to my RP of building my ships.
I think the best course of action is an advanced form of propulsion that allows you to travel a lot faster but doesn't remove your ability to hit voxels. A new block that determines where asteroids are should exist to show you the best course of travel. Like a new satellite dish you can put on your ship that finds out where the asteroids are between you and a GPS coordinate you give it or celestial body; while you are piloting your ship it will indicate a green line that slowly changes to yellow, orange, then red to show the safest path to where you are going. Green means nothing spawned by the game will block your path. Yellow is minor hazard potential, orange is very hazardous, red you will crash. This would make it where you can experience more of the travel and in the case of multiplayer you can't just suddenly get out of danger. You can also accidentally run into danger along the way with pirates setting up traps. More realistic, more gameplay elements, more multiplayer interaction capabilities. Having asteroids in certain locations would mean that the majority of space is totally empty, yea space, but from a game play element its really not fun. Gravity gates work again to skip the step of flying at slow speeds or needing jump drives. Yes it takes time to set up a network but it does cause a lot of different interactions to happen in multiplayer. Having planets closer together ruins gameplay. On servers being on a planet means way less since every player can just be at each planet in no time at all. Even jump drives cause delay in those sort of encounters. Also removing the space from space engineers, it's not planet engineers. Been testing on 80+ player servers for a long while. Trust me when I say current planet distances are very much needed so everyone is breathing down eachothers necks. Even thou most of us don't enjoy playing on planets since we've played so many hours before they existed and just never got the legs for planets. Mainly newer players on the server stay on planets. Still don't know why the hydrogen engine doesn't exist for me for the last years.
i think Jump drive need to be better, not just JUMP but TRAVEL DRIVE, when you hit the JUMP button your ship Starts to Travel do coordinates very fast like 800m/s without hiting voxels, its more interesting than just JUMP, and you can enjoy the journey inside your ship
I love to get you guys thinking about the future of the game so let me know your thoughts on the stuff discussed in this video or any other future ideas for Space Engineers!
Maybe a good soulution could be to put the asteroids in a loose configuration around a planet and have the space between the planets asteroid fields as a non-euclidian space, where the space itself gets gradually smaller and then bigger again, so that you still have the visual distance between the planets but automatically travel much quicker between them.
No change in maximum speed required and the problem with crashing would be overcome. Only thing I am not sure about is, if you could build in that space.
Mostly because any station could appear out of nowhere, but also because weird physics of "stretching" the block size if you want a gradual shift in the space folding.
Sorry if that is convolouted guys, I hope it is understandeble.
Ok, I made my other comment, but my suggestion for what to see next is - the ability to remove collision between certain blocks within your ship or connecting to it, like rotors or hinges with connected parts that smack your ship and make it move around. That’s just my opinion as an Xbox SE player though, your choice.
My mate said to me the reason why he did not buy the game is because he think it is to ez to get place with the jump drive
I have an idea: the jump drive could make you go much faster, not skip space... so, like in that mod, "supercruise", but you have all the voxels you can hit and you have to set a rout in the navigator. And while you are jump-driving, you can walk through the ship doing other stuff. And then multiple ships could enter "the same jump rout", so you can even have a battle where enemies enters your "jump-drive tunnel" and then you need to defend your ship while jump-driving! (i don't play the game, yet, but it will be very nice!!)
I'm hoping SE2 will have a dynamic solar system. Would be significant improvement.
Building jump gates would be a good way to help make space travel more important, but also reward people for making the long trecks. Then you have to make expiditions to build new jump gates at new locations.
In my opinion SE could make use of terminal velocity as it's in atmosphere limitation. While under thrust you can exceed this speed, but if you're just falling (re-entry) then the atmosphere would cause you to slow to a more manageable speed. Then if it's a non atmospheric planet and you're being that careless it makes sense to slam into the ground.
I think having the asteroids grouped into specific areas would be good for multi-player servers. It would keep people from flying away and never being seen again. You could do that and have a base set up somewhere in the void but you'll need to return to the Asteroids at some point to refuel your hydrogen or collect building supplies thus putting you into proximity of other players. It could open up possibilities for both pvp piracy as well as white knights to offer protection.
HAHAHAHAHAHA... You have clearly never played EVE online. There are no white knights, If you can't kick seven shades of ^%$% out of anyone you are never safe outside the protected zones. That's just how PvP works. No one is looking for a FAIR fight, fair fights are for suckers.
Agreed. Best fun I've ever had on a pvp server was one with a central asteroid field.
Nah. It would end in people just spawning and dying till their neighbours run out of ammo
I honestly like the idea of an asteroid belt or asteroid field. Perhaps even something like a wide flat ring that when you zoom farther out turns into a ring like Saturn
What about some kind of a long distance radar? A part that tells you if there is anything in your path, even if it isn't currently rendered, so you can adjust your direction in advance. You could also automate it, so it would automatically evade asteroids that are in your path.
Another idea is a way to calculate your breaking distance, so you wouldn't smash into planets at high speeds.
And jump drive should be used for interstellar tavel anyway :D
We do need a better way to detect grids and players. Hoping that comes as part of the exploration update.
I would love this especially if you could give it set up actions and have it linked to sound blocks so you could be anywhere in your ship and be called at a moments notice if something could be in your path.
That's kinda like a navigation computer from star wars and then using hyperdrive lanes. Find a clear lane make a jump.
@@thee_number_six6227 yeah exactly! I want to do that sort of thing. Even might try and get the same alarm sound from the millennium falcon in a sound block if we can do that.
The problem with this is when you are flying through space, roids are constantly being generated and spawned. So the computers would just see empty space until roid is in your face. And at high speeds have fun dodging. Me and some friends have had a roid spawn issue like this before with a cluster server. We made our "jump" to the next server and when we all loaded in the game had also decided to spawn an roid right in front of us so we lost 1/3 of our ship.
How about the idea to convert the Jump Drive into a station only block and make it work as a tunnel device. With the impairment that it needs antenna connection to your ship and another jump station we could actually have a usecase for laser antennas, too.
That way we would have to travel to the location manually and then build a kind of stargate over there to get our teleportation running. This would encourage building Space Station AND Ground Stations. And to get another threshold: Besides the power needed by the jump device the antenna connection needs to be established for a few seconds or minutes before jumping is possible, a bit like the shield bubble for stations. Just so the station needs to be maintained and defended and the ships can't easily escape sticky situations in a blink of an eye
I feel like it should kind of work like the Elite Dangerous supercruise where it kind of puts you in a physicsless area but forces you to drop out at a certain radius, and also makes you extremely visible, just to spice the pvp aspect up
Remove jump drive. Add warp speed block. Same size and a small block version. This block speeds your ship up to a configurable speed and only works to full capability in space and only slightly speeds up in atmosphere (so it can be used as an “afterburner”) next add jump gates. So you can still fly ships through rings that get you to other fixed positions and act more as a multiplayer hub and almost force character interaction. By using this idea you wouldn’t need to shorten planet distance and you could even develop some story around the gates with factions or have one of them deactivate because of pirates. Having to gaurd these in order to use them would be a great way to implement the new drones and add to the economy update by giving players a real reason to actually do quests, this idea could wrap together space engineers and make survival play an overall more rewarding experience.
Simply clustering asteroid areas and increasing the chance of hostile interactions with ai or other players would make the game way more interesting.
Supercruse or warp bubbles seem like a good idea, but they should be harder to get and maybe be less modular with how you can duct tape a jump drive to a chair and move across the system.
I want a more research or configuration based progression vs the just welding of a block, one idea I've heard is skill based blocks where the more you use a block the better it is up to a point. And the less you do the more prone to failure or inefficient it is.
Or as I'm sure was mentioned in a previous video, jump gates, super structures that are built and maintained vs being their own ships. Which is another problem with the game, building large mega structures isn't fun because of lag / block limits.
Space Engineers is super fun but it still has ways to go, but I recognize how far it's come and I can't wait for more improvements.
The devs are working really hard to make the game everyone wants at the moment and i'm excited for the future of the game.
The thing with increasing the speed cap is that even if you think it's a good idea it breaks other things like combat
Yeah, I didn't mention it as it wasn't relevant to the video but that's a major concern I have but I'm sure a creative solution can be made.
@@Zer0sLegion I wouldn't be sure about that. If you want to fix that problem besides having to change range (which would already be broken) you would have to change the projectile speed. That would make dodging strategies really ineffective. The only way I can think of to counter that would be to allow ships to accelerate quicker as well.
If you implement all of that you end up with the same combat but ships being way further apart and therefore way harder to hit. I think it would probably take all the fun out of it
Edit: Because firing at that range would just waste ammunition and you would just have short windows of combat
@@Creeperking-bw7wi they could change up the system completly by adding heat managment in space heat cant spread out through the atmospere so either have to store it or vent something like superheated gas or something to radiate the heat away slowly
this makes the speed and firepower cap how much heat you can afford to make without active cooling
this would change so much though its cool because its more realistic but im not sure if they can make it fun enough
@@Zer0sLegion imho, it is relevant, because it interconnected with gameplay altogether. Calling it irrelevant is just kinda shallow thinking.
for example higher speed means faster ship on combat. Faster combat means faster bullets and tracking and longer bullet distance are needed. And that bits of stuff stack up on sim speed too. Let's say we go vanilla, no weaponcore, having fast rotor/hinge speed on custom turrets while zooming at high speed?
I'm having clang issues with custom turrets on my small grid corvette at 400m/s combat already. Also at 100m/s I can easily dodge and weave between gatling and autocannon shots at 500m too.
Another matter is subgrid/supergridding issues. On vanilla mp, with enough people, a dip in sim speed leads into a catastrophic wrath of clang even on a good server. And high speed limit tanks sim speed on a populated server (at least in my and my friends experience). Before increasing speed limit, the game/sim needs to be stabilized first (which I think what keen did) and existing stuffs will also need to be rebalanced too.
Also, jump drive is not only a travel convenience block but also has a good strategic value in combat for jumping in/ambush or jumping out/escaping. Removing it means combat will have just two strategies: face to face total annihilation or outrunning your enemy to escape. No more ambushes/cutting your eny escape, except you know, you modded stuff like the stealth mod.
Well I speak mostly vanilla based, as it will be applicable both for se pc and console. Also we need to keep keen's design philosophy for se in mind, as it's geared towards semi-realistic sci fi engineering and exploration game first, not combat first. If you don't agree with what keen did, you can mod the hell out of se. Even the stuff like you stated like planet size and distance can be modified in mp by server admin already. Otherwise you are just pushing smaller scale worlds and your definition of "fun" on everyone including people who don't play mp and wanted the exploration feel. If you don't care about realism and just wanted the combat outside vanilla capabilities, you can mod and gear your playthrough towards that. If one wanted their playthrough to be as realistic as possible outside vanilla capabilities, they can mod their playthrough as they want. To each their own and keen/se provided the way too.
@@kellynolen498 That idea sounds pretty cool
I remember using jump drives with a few friends. It still took us an entire night of switching pilots, taking turns while one of us slept at our desk and the other was awake, about 16 hours in total to reach the nearest planet with many jumps.
Never really gave this much though but the idea that there would be different speed limit for space and planets, it would even make sense with air resistance being a thing, this combined with asteroids only existing as clusters and rings sounds really cool (having a ringed planet would be amazing in its own right)
Idea, keep the speed limit, The jump is more like a warp (think Star Trek). Rework jump/warp drive to be more like the Plasma generator mod so it has components, as you add components you warp faster (sorta Star Trek again).
Edit: Give asteroids some kind of gravity or something that kicks you out of the warp/jump (think Star Wars this time)
I agree with this. Back when me and few buds were playing SE we decided to join a Multiplayer server where there was PVP. We had decided to meet up with another faction on the server on a different planet, but we didn't have the resources for the jump drive. We ended up pulling over 8 hours of taking turns flying and swapping out. We also ended up at the wrong world and that further extended the time. it was an experience to say the least lol.
I like the idea of a single large planet with small moons and an asteroid belt. That feels a lot more comprehensible as a place to me. Also you can hide a jump drive (or a few) in the asteroid belt and make them unbuildable so they’re like a super rare major advantage that people want to steal a lot more than they want to destroy, but they can also do that.
The FSD Drive kinda solves most of the problem for me. But I agree that changes are very needed. With an "exploration" update that is hopefully coming and that hopefully puts SE somewhere closer to Empyrion. So I was an Eve Online player and from that I think maybe jump gates might be a good thing. Maybe something you have to unlock the ability to use or find a key that allows you to access a gate network. Make it endgame.
Looking forward to the exploration update the most, very excited.
@@Zer0sLegion I was watching Xoc's live stream yesterday and he did a vote on what everyone wants for the game and most said either exploration more survival mechanics more reasons to progress further and better ai/npc's. As I told him the game is awesome but you can only build just so much or play a "survival" scenario over again for so long and then you look for new reasons to play. problem seems that Keen believes that most all players just want them to give new blocks and keep it more of a building game.
In my opinion changing jump drive to work like that supercruise mod would be the best choice. No Mans Sky works like that within the confines of solar systems. Never played space engineers but I've played alot of NMS. And the way the supercruise mod sounds reminds me heavily of how travel between planets works in nms. It keeps the space travel feel very much intact and cuts down on travel time between planets. If space engineers had multiple solar systems, that'd be where you'd want something like the current jump drive, but with the scope as it is now, supercruise is the best solution imo.
you could have wormholes rarely spawning that are randomly paired, maybe even end up being able to make artificial ones that requires you to build both ends of a portal or gate (think star wars hyperspace lanes or stargates)
Or the jump drive can go full star wars hyperdrive. Instead of instant teleport your ship goes into a hyperspace tunnel for a certain amount of time depending on distance. Also artificial gravity can be used as an interdictor that can pull you out prematurely if you want that pvp action.
The solar systems realism is already out of wack. The sun is infinitly far away, the planets aren't orbiting and are just kinda stationary. You may as well cram them together, they already serve gameplay over realism as is.
True
I love the idea of asteroid belts around planets. And that also gave me the idea of stuff like comets and meteors floating about like those pirate ships, except actual moving terrain
Love the idea of the bunched up astroïds. And really for multiplayer as its ofc rich in resources but all bunched up would probably make it more hostile too.
Maybe higher chance of pirates there would be cool too. Just something to spice them up.
I'd like the jump-drives to function as carriers from one place to another. Basically they only function when a grid is a Station and explosively auto-destruct if ever a Station becomes a ship. This would allow for space-based stations to be able to cycle around as just really massive "ships" who don't use conventional thrusters. It would allow for another version of highly armored capitol ships during battles, but also allow large mining/processing grids to move on to previously scouted locations, each toting their scores of smaller "large grid" and "small grid" ships.
Orbital mechanics. It feels strange that there are no mechanics like that in the game. It is very possible to move about in the way you do in the game, straight off a planet, straight down to it, but it requires more energy than orbital insertions and transfers.
Yeah, I would like this but Keen would want to simulate it properly rather than faking it and that would probably require a massive rework (or more likely a new game.)
@@Zer0sLegion the orbital velocities would be incredibly high like 7km/sec high. Hard to simulate a ship passing by you that fast, and the gameplay could become disasterously hilarious. Battles would probably have to be highly staged at legrange points.
I remember (I think) Xoc or Marek mentioning the team trying to include orbital mechanics a couple of times over the years, and each time the engine basically imploded so the resource investment just wasn't there. Still feels odd that I played the game for ~2yrs without planets being a thing in the game lol
Orbital mechanics are possible, just need a high speed mod and a mod that changes the gravity falloff from 1/radius^7 to 1/radius^2 like it is in real life. Also pretty sure stable orbits are mathematically impossible in any instance where that power (^7, ^2 etc) is an odd number
@@Daddy_Damo There are 2 aspects here, is it possible, and is it possible in SE's current engine.
Are basic orbital _flight_ mechanics possible? Yes, and there is a long standing mod on the workshop that does it.
But for planetary orbital mechanics, which is what I'm assuming is the main point, the developers have said that the original scope/design of the engine was not intended to have those functions included, and because of how they did code the back-end, introducing them on a non-localized grid (which is not the same as the application of delta-V to maintain a "stable" orbital flight of a ship or station is) just isn't something they can do easily without a major revamp of the base code.
There are two games which are voxel based with at least a pseudo-OM system (Empyrion and No Man's Sky), so again, it can be done, but only when the core code base is designed from the ground up to do it.
I agree the jump drive became pointless once I could not use them in a creative way such as jumping the enemy near a planets gravity and with a mix of gravity drive to pull other's into the gravity, pulling that off was my greatest achievement! Also at this stage Homing Rockets should have been in the Warfare pack with timers to self demo or range of course.
I'd really like to be able to build my own jump gate networks.
My idea is you build an end point gate, fly through space normally to build a transmission gate that has a clear line of sight to the previous gate (no asteroids, planets, etc), and repeat as many of these transmission gates as necessary to map a safe route to the final destination where you build another end point gate. Use laser antennae to link them in the correct order. Then you can travel from end point to end point instantaneously for a cost of power only at whatever entrance gate you're using. Maybe make it possible to enter via one of the transmission gates but the power then has to come from your ship's jump drive since you're not using an end point gate that can provide its own power. That's the only way ship jump drives could be used long-range. The longest gate-less jumps should be limited to 10-15km and be significantly more expensive than gate jumps.
If your ship has an antenna connection to the gate network and its own jump drive then your ship's jump drive can choose the destination end point gate of your jump; if your ship doesn't have a jump drive with a valid destination set then the entrance gate's jump drive controls the destination. If you want to enter a transmission gate then you have to have (or previously had) an antenna connection with the gate network to get your jump drive set to a destination gate, otherwise nothing happens.
I like the Idea of arrea with asteroid fields instead of asteroids everywhere. Combine that with a supercruise would be nice.
Also, you could modify the jumpdrive to increase the power required to use them to the point regular generators would not be enough to power them continually. I did something similar to that once: I put the planets very far away from each other (about 10k Km) and put the mod no uranium anywhere: The only power I had in space was Hydrogen and solar power. So i had to plan my trips to other planets very carefully. it was very interesting.
I like Uranium only being on the alien planet and it being the furthest away so that it's an endgame thing. Problem is, everyone beelined to the alien planet lol 😅
@@Zer0sLegion thats the problem in multiplayer endgame means safty. safty means godlike power and to many go for this
I think that the best idea for multiplayer building on what you said, would be to remove the astroids being at random positions in space and only be around a certain planet, so the only way to get resources for you space base would be to go to a ringed planet and either ferry it all the way to your base or build you base there, this would make it so there's a hot spot of people around a planet instead of basically never meeting another person.
I think that the best solution for the jump drive is that you have to find a monolith (witch would be endgame stuff) and use that to make it, and it would have a more "we didn't make this, we just kinda found it and put some wires into it" style and everytime you jumped it would have to chance to malfunction and do something evil, like blowing up or jumping you to a enemy outpost or something like that.
I imagine the monolith will be tied to the jump drive as in the First Jump scenario it plays a big role with it.
I think it would be cool to have a star trek type warp core. You would have to use a navigational computer to plot a safe course to your destination so that you wouldn't hit any objects on your way. It would still take more time to reach your destination, but you would have need to do some recon before you start your journey some how (telescopes, deep space imaging equipment etc). After you have done the trip once, it would be easier to move between the two points. But please, don't mind me. I've played less than 10 hours atm :D
Addendum: This way, you can find out what is on your way there, and if there's any intersting objects you can stop and mine the resources on an asteroid for example. Maybe even build a waystation that other players can use?
They said you can't increase the ship speed because it would cause people within the ship to rubber band and get stuck in walls and die. The solution imo is to increase the ship speed limit drastically, but make the interior be it's own packet, so to speak, by making people within the ship only move relative to the ship rather than the world.
If it were that easy, they would have probably have done it. And that's one of the minor issues increased speed causes.
They already do that its just that it works differently at higher speeds i guess
@@Zer0sLegion I Like Sebi's Idea, however changing the movement system to a relative one is not a realistic option at the moment, in my opionion. I disagree with putting planets closer together. I like increasing the speed and have an idea to combat rubberbanding issues:
What if we went a Star Wars like approach with a Hyperdrive that allows up to, let's say, 10.000 m/s. This can only be used while every player is seated in the ship, this would defeat rubberbanding. Collisions for players and objects are disabled and the ship is treated like a large block, so the physics are not calculated for every given block but rather once per ship in this state.
The hyper travel ends as soon as somebody leaves their seat/cryo (or alternatively they die on leaving, while hyper travel is active).
If we combined this with the long distance radar idea of @hamaczech13 to show the clearance of a path before starting the travel - or the radar is able to show 10 seconds of movement obstacle detection, giving you enough time to react and abort the hyper travel.
Hyper Travel should be initiated like the current jump drive and may be set to a target, just like the jump drive - or may be cancelled manually. Most of the power should be consumed on start and some while travelling.
What do you think?
@@Mimonsi there's a mod called FSD superdrive that does exactly what you described, except you can actually control the ship at high speed. Your speed is determined by the power output of all your reactors and batteries combined, along with the mass of your ship. You must be seated to use it, just like the jump drive. It's amazing.
But as far as what you said about if it was that easy, the devs would have done it by now, think about how long it took them to give us T-shaped conveyor junctions. Not saying it would be easy, but the game knows when you're inside a pressurized ship, so you already have a true/false state to determine when to apply the altered physics to the player, which seems like it would be the hard part. But, you're not wrong.. who really knows how hard it would be until it's been attempted?
No Man's Sky handles the space travel really well. If you look at the pulse drive and the hyperdrive system, it allows for a space game with both far away and closer planets in a fun and exciting way.
Asteroid belts sound quite fun to be honest. Speaking of smushing planets, there's a scenario people may like called "Worlds collide."
Love the idea of asteroid rings and fields, would make PvP way more interesting. Would be cool to make hidden bases in, with trap asteroids, base stations, etc.
Rings would also make the planets more unique and interesting as currently they're all the same but different coloured.
My solution if you remove the jump drive.
1) a special "Phase drive" or engine that let's you go faster.
2) a warp gate. Requires the play to build certain blocks in a pattern to make a portal between any two. They have to travel there first and build the gate before being able to FTL.
I think a solution to having asteroids in the way is actually very simple, but I have two possible choices.
1. A block which detects asteroids and circles them on your hub or cockpit, (can be turned off) It can even detect them outside of viewing range, Aswell as give info on how close they are. The larger the viewing range the more power it needs, and it can only be placed outside the ship.
2. Areas where the asteroids are cleared away or theres less of them, whilst areas with asteroids are denser. These empty areas would be far and few between. This adds to a better dynamic however for AI ships and multiplayer. Larger ships would need to travel through these areas or risk being smashed, which means AI and players can defend these areas because of their importance. Smaller ships can also escape large vessels alot more easily and have more freedom for traveling.
A Hyperspace block with a Counterblock to slip someone out of it like the Interdictor does in Star Wars, that would be amazingly cool
I'm for the level design solution, and the end game jump drive.
another option is to have non-buildable star gates generated in the world around key points of the world space to facilitate transit, the idea being that the technology is of unknown origin.
My favourite option is to have everything generated in clusters and use a KSP style interplanetary navigation system that unlocks the speed limit but gives you the tools to properly navigate deep space and reduce your speed when entering a planetary cluster or giant.
The way i see it, if they remove the jump drive they need to increase the base speed by a LARGE portion. perhaps adding a block that effectively acts similar to a jump drive but allowing to travel exceedingly fast in space and making you accelerate faster, alongside a counterpart to limit top speed if you dont wanna accidentally go too fast
Since watching this video... I believe that a wormhole setup is more likeable. Using jump drives to get places and setting up a worm hole network at places using laser antennas to keep them linked.
This can also allow for detectable pings or traceable worm hole resedu. Like holding a worm hole open allows for people to track it.
This can help with people to be able to trace people in a end game setting. When only people who could maintain a wormhole could be able to take on another person with said wormhole.
A proper fix might be Gates instead of drives, as you 'build' gates of proper size at places you have already visited. This means to journey to new places, or ones you dont have a link to, The distance will need to be breached by conventional speeds, either by a player, or a drone designed to build a gate upon landing at or near the orbit of a planet
Thrusters should not just be faster than current ones, they should be in tiers just like tools are, and each should require different materials like platinum to craft, and each should be faster than previous tier.
Also it would be cool to get more ores like tungsten or maybe something from sci-fi like vibranium for better thrusters or other endgame stuff
I don't think tiered thrusters is a good idea. I don't mind more thrusters, even ones that are better just with different requirements, but have just a tier 2 and 3 thruster isn't the right fit for Space Engineers. I agree with more ores though, although, we probably need to rebalance the ores we currently have first.
I personally think there should be more types of thrusters requiring more advanced materials which could be crafted by combining different types of metals together. No Mans Sky has a decent resource system which space engineers could take a bit of inspiration from.
@@Zer0sLegion oh, you mean there could be more kinds of thrusters like in stellaris, now we have only ion but there could be something like impulse or plasma?
Tiers I don't think would be a good idea, that's just another wall to get stuck behind, but adding other forms of thrust that have different pros and cons such as higher speed wouldn't be a bad idea. Solar sails also wouldn't be a bad idea for a cheaper slower accelerating propulsion.
I like the idea of making it only one planet with a few moons around, raise the speed in atmosphere to ~150 (100 is too slow), and make it progressively faster, up to 1000 when getting out of atmosphere, and then I would make the jump drive only be able to jump from portals to portals. So you'd have to build an actual structure down, and "register" it's portal into your jump network. Then you'd have to fly to one of your portal with a ship equipped with a jump drive, and then jump to another one of your portals.
Maybe even have to jump the ship through a jump area, so the bigger the ship you want to jump, the bigger your portals would need to be made.
This way, you will have to first fly anywhere you want to then be able to jump, and also build and keep powered a structure just for that purpose. The drives would still have a use, but then it would definitely be some end game stuff.
When i did play online a few months ago they had a gate system with the gate hub and 4 planetary systems with 1 main planet + moon or astroid belt and it worked very well.
Something like that but tweaked could be a solution.
Instead of gate teleports just bring the ship to super fast speed and fixed no collision route until the exit gate is reached.
Then put the AI trade stations directly next to the gate or give them a personal safe bubble to dicourage from gatecamping.
Keeping the jump drive in some way intact is probably better to circle the planet faster and reaching the stations/asteroids without a sleeping break inbetween.
One more thing said server had for all 5 areas a different actual server with auto server switching so i would prefer it if the distances would be far enough to be able to use such options when needed even in a standard system.
The issue related to large distances/skipping areas with a jump drive becomes an issue for any means of compressed travel without a complete (or near complete) rework of a lot of systems.
Reducing distances but increasing speeds just means the server has to populate the space in-between the 2 points with items that the player is still speeding past. The jump drive "skips" the auto generation process entirely (given large enough jump ranges). So that area stays "empty" until there is a need to populate it. This impacts the server's performance (or the single player's local machine in non-MP games), so needs to be kept in mind.
Also, with speed limits, "catching" a speeding ship for PVP/PVE (vs AI) is not really a thing in SE as-is. Most encounters are framed combat (auto-cannons at dawn) or complete ambushes, when it's a random player encounter, if someone wants to escape before getting into weapons range, the first ship to reach the speed cap wins, always. So we need a rebalance on how speed limits are applied to grids (Dangerous Reentry mod might be a good example of grid mass/design impacting speed limits) This might encourage actual diversity in ship designs and would likely make usage of ship size categories a thing.
Longer term, what the game really needs is a way to "encourage" players to not skip the content areas by default, which means the entire resource/valuables system needs to be reconsidered. I think making asteroid fields larger, but more spaced out, and adding "rings" to some worlds would be a nice compromise. This allows having resources sort of how they are now with higher-end resources becoming more available the further you get from the starting area(s). Well except uranium, put it back in the moon's resource table, maybe even on the general planets, just require platinum for reactor cores (or some other component) to move reactors more to the end of the tech tree.
This also means a rebalance on vendors (for those who play with economy enabled) which removes things like platinum from the "selling" list on/around starter worlds, so a player cannot buy these items (in)directly on/around the starter worlds, including removing ships with ion thrusters/jump drives within the same sphere/range.
I think the best solution would be this:
bring the planets closer but not too much, just a bit. replace the jumpdrive with something like the supercruise mod, but instead of disabling physics, add some sort of scanner blocks to detect asteroids and maybe even navigational mechanics to traverse set routes in space. Maybe the jumpdrive would be replaced with some sort of enhancer block that allows thrusters to supercruise.
Autopilot functions with a higher space speed limit would be cool, tell the computer to go to within so many miles of a planet on auto, enters a form of supercruise or just avoids asteroids automatically. Could even implement jammers or interdictors for pirates/pvp, entering a jammed zone would disable autopilot and rip you back to standard speed
Apparently autopilot is coming with GridAI.
One of the neat things about Space Engineers is that you can, using mods and plugins, have all of these changes and more and switch between them at different times. But that requires you to learn all of those mods, spend all of that time setting up, testing, and fiddling with them, and so forth. Keen should consider moving many of these functions into base game configuration values and offering different start conditions using them. Say for instance, if the speed limit and radius around planets asteroids could spawn in became sliders or drop down boxes in the same menu as inventory sizes and meteor storms. In the part where people can choose a stock star system or the crashed red ship and so forth they could have the small system - perhaps an official gas giant planet with the other vanilla planets as moons for instance - as an option. Stuff like that.
The X series had pretty low speed limits (fastest scouts were ~600m/s, battelships and carriers were 100m/s), in the newest game in the series they added a "Travel drive" which allowed for ships to go up to 5-10k m/s. Getting hit by any fire, or too close to obstacles or other ships would exit travel mode. Obviously the X series is very scifi, but you could have a "Travel Drive" within Space Engineers to solve some of the problem that high speeds create for the physics engine, while also making the drive less sci-fi than how it is done in the X series.
There's a concept within some scifi called "slipstreaming"
It essentially makes you move so fast, as well as distorting physics within your area, that you basically squish into a 1-dimensional line in the direction you're heading. It makes you go really really fast, as ALL of your propulsion is focused on literally one single point, while also making it impossible to crash into things while slipstreaming. The only issue would be coming out of slipspace within an object, which obviously you just wouldnt do.
Not a lot of scifi settings use this for some reason. Maybe SE could.
They could call it "Mass Effect" 😉
I say keep the jump drives but make them extreme end game, but change the function of them. Make them jump gates, using the gravity block and a new "gate" block and build them like a station and you need to connect at least two to make them work.
That and have a speed enhance block like a warp/hyperspace block, that allows the extreme speeds.
Yep increase the max speeds. And add more planets and things todo at and between the planets enemy ships, stations, asteroids etc. The jump drive can be used as fast travel once a destination is reached
i think the jump drive block its self should stay but the bam teleport should go and we treat it more like a warp drive giving it travel time so you go to "warp" for 5 mins and you have travelled the required distance rather that charge teleport land as i feel thats a bit better for the way space engineers works
Yeah, that's definitely a better way of doing it.
There is a mod for that now, but it would be nice if it was vanilla.
just change the scenarium to moons orbiting a gas giant. an earthlike moon, an icy moon, alienlike moon, rocky moon, jungle moon etc etc. have the gas giant have an astroid belt.
ex. gas giant -> alien -> belt -> rocky -> jungle -> earthlike -> rocky -> icy.
I think No Man's Sky tackled this issue well. They used a warp drive to travel VERY fast between planets in a star system, which removes collision as you had suggested. This reduces the time to get from planet to planet from like 17 hours down to a couple minutes. The game will automatically bring you out of warp travel when you get close to a planet as well, that way you don't do just go through the planet. Then they used a jump drive to move between star systems, which is kinda irrelevant in SE. I think if the warp drive was implemented, the planets and asteroids could stay as is.
Interesting suggestions for Jump Drives... but here's an alternative or way to augment them... make Jump Drives only operate where you've sent and established some sort of probe - something with something like a gravitational subspace anchor or some such. That forces players to visit locations (within a certain radius) they've been to before in some fashion.
I could see building a bunch of small craft automated probes and sending them out ahead of sending manned missions to establish a presence, or a chain of them to allow a stable flight from A>B... as well as allowing multiplayer servers to disable such anchors by destroying the probes. Just my 2 cents, but in conjunction with some of your other thoughts this would be an interesting gameplay mechanic.
Imo the super cruise is the best idea, I like the planets being further away, heck sometimes I think they're too close together, but as far as game play goes its the opposite. I would also like the asteroid generation to be in rings or clusters, not just random through out the entire distance of space. Its kind of immersion breaking also.
Yeah, mostly clear space with a few scattered and then high density areas. Like our own asteroid belt and Kuiper belt.
Could have asteroid clusters dotted about that show up as a cloud from far away.
It'd make space travel easier and probably cause players to end up bumping into eachother more often in space.
Make an area that acts as an asteroid belt. A ring between the planets. Make it something you have to navigate, but only when going to to farthest planet. Likewise, you can keep one super far away, and the rest closer. A layer of asteroids between the inner, and deep space planet.
They could make jump drive work like light speed where you can only use it on lanes and only shortness distance between objects
One thing I want to see is the ability to place armor over certain existing blocks. The end of an ion thruster? Slap a ramp on it and it'll meld really well with your ship. Have no space for fuel tanks? slap them on the outside and cover them in heavy armor.
you could add a way for players to build a block that forces someone out of "light speed" basically forcing them to jump to that area and no further until they get away from of destroy the blocker.
i like that idea with Planet System with like 5-10 mins flights,with smaller planets and stuff,would be rly cool for multiplayer
One thing that would encourage exploration could the different gases that can only be harvested in space. Say they can give you an unique boost or the like, faster propulsion.
Or different ores or something. A reason to both explore space and each planet would be awesome
I think a good fix and the most likely is that jump drives are changes to just make you accelerate to an insane speed like 5km/s over a 30 second period and turning off collisions with non planetary voxels and grids or maybe not grids because ramming something as an insane speed could be something interesting and funny if you collide with someone as your way of finding them but I wouldn't thing they would have grid collisions. that adds a more realistic feel to it then magic like we have now and wouldn't need people to rebuild their ships to add a new block or fill the space that jump drives would have taken up.
honestly your right about the Area being too big. you can random spawn in a space pod in the middle of nowhere and never see another player ever. planets spawns are about the only way you'll meet anyone.
I think the ship's engines should still matter for interplanetary travel.
Maybe have the warp drive move the ship into a "hyperspace" of some sort,where all distances are shorter,just like nether highways in minecraft
Good points. I'd prefer to see worm holes at set points between planets and then have the more end game block be a worm hole controller. This could be done in a few ways, either building the block would show you all the worm hole locations. Or you'd have to find 1 end of each worm hole to be able to use it. So some planets and or moons would have to have 2 worm holes. This would have us doing more flying through space, but would allow for planets to be far apart. All while increasing how likely you are to see other players on multi player, since everyone would be using the same worm holes.
I actually really like the wormhole idea for several reasons: They solve one of the big multiplayer problems by creating high-traffic areas since they are fixed fast-travel points, they encourage exploration to *find* these wormholes, and they create opportunities for unique engineering projects.
So here's what I think would be neat: create a block called the "Wormhole Stabilizer" to go along with these wormholes. If the wormhole stabilizer is active for 5 minutes in proximity of the closed wormhole, it opens, allowing ships to travel to the other side, and the wormhole remains open for as long as the stabilizer is nearby it. The stabilizer also broadcasts a signal that is visible at reasonably long range. The 5 minute timer is to encourage players to build an external device, something not attached to their ship that they leave outside the wormhole, and the broadcast range is to attract other players to your discovery once you've made it and help create a sort of "hyperlane" that would bring all space traffic in a segment of space through that point. It makes the wormhole a strategic point of interest: Are you going to try to defend it? Leave it open as a charity? Are you going to have the wormhole stabilizer block attached to your ship and wait the 5 minutes for the lane to open, hoping nobody tracks you down from the broadcast? It could be very interesting.
These days I forgo the jump drive anyway. I generally set my variable speed mod to 1500-2000 m/s for large ships. That gives you enough speed to travel farily comfortably between planets with plenty of time to get into adventures along the way. It keeps the planets far enough out of reach that the trip feels like a journey. I leave the small ships on vanilla speed (as they aren't normally able to jump). But, with that said, SE was designed so you can play it your way! 😀
True, SE is your game to create.
@Fullashit Ministries As long as you keep the asteroid density low you shouldn't have any issues. 🙂
one solution to the problem of asteroids could be the addition of a shield generator of sorts which would protect the ship from terrain but only when in space
perhaps jump drive should be changed as if it worked as a hyperspace gateway from Cowboy Bebop
you create a station with it in one place, and transfer yourself to a station in another
It certainly is a difficult problem to tackle. Even with a 15 minute travel time, when nothing else is going on, it would be rather unspectacular.
Maybe they can get some ideas from Elite Dangerous.
In Elite, you have a Frame Shift Drive, which is sorta like a jumpdrive / hyperdrive that can operate in two modes.
One is jumping, which is similar to what the Jump Drive in Space Engineers does. It's used to jump from system to system and it is basically a teleport but with a fancy animation playing. However, you do skip space completely. You don't physically move between systems like that.
The other mode is Supercruise, which is a mode in which you accelerate to very high speeds, meant to travel between planets within a solar system. Planets can be really far away but it's all relative because you can move really really fast. In this mode, you don't skip space, if there is something in between I think the radar would still show it and I think (not entirely sure anymore) the closer you got to the planet, the slower you went.
If we raise the overall speed limit in Space Engineers, that opens up a whole host of new problems and it would still overall be slow. If we move the planets closer together so it's a closer planet cluster, I mean yeah that works, but even then you probably still want some reasonable amount of space between the planets so it doesn't feel too cluttered. You still end up with a fairly high travel time and the travel itself being rather unspectacular. So, I feel like high speed travel between planets absolutely needs to be its own mode. Turning off physics may just be the best solution in that case. Purely for travel, and have the game automatically slow you down near planets, maybe even (large) structures?
7:50 Well personally I think... Um, Zer0- Zer0 the planet. _Z-Zer0? The planet, Zer0? _*_Zer0, the planet?! Zer0?!?_*
😓
A really simple solution could be to have the jump-drive be a "slips-space" drive and render the ship immune to physics like the supercruise mod. Allowing you to fly through anything smaller than a planet. Then just up the speed limit to 2500 while in "slip space". It's still beyond the tech of the game for the most part. But I like the idea of having more moons and asteroids around planets and also making planets a bit closer together. If the "jump-drive" would exist as a final end-game version of the slips-space drive, it could take players to new maps. Kinda like how ARK: Survival Evolved has clusters of worlds that can be travelled between. Or a single map could simple have clusters of planets that are far apart and use the drive as an end game item to visit those new systems. It gets overly complicated quickly.
So I still think just closer planets, fewer asteroids in the 'void' and allow the jump drive to enable the vessel to ignore obstacles and raise speed significantly. This would let it be used in battle as well but wouldn't be a blink jump. Just that players in real space would lose visual on the ship using slipspace to transition in and out of the battlefield.
dense asteroid fields sound like a 0g pilot's wet dream. hiding the best/most metal in big rocks in the middle of the field
I have an idea, to add to the game like a "cruiser mode" where you ultrapass the speed limit but you need to have to be in the space and you coudnt change the direction easly and the ship someway just moves the direction its pointing for
I would be interested in watching a let's play by this creator, I get the feeling that it would be pretty entertaining for some reason.
OMG I love the idea of asteroids belts! No random roids in space and just put them in a couple of belts or groups here and there. 10/10
IKR!
@@Zer0sLegion I found a mod that used to do it but it's very old and abandoned I can't get it to work. Oh well.
adding a lesser jump drive, something like a warp drive, would be a great idea in my opinion
Here is my solution to the problem:
- Scale everything down, to get planets with max diameter of ~20km.
- Make Gravity fields smaller.
- Make a Solar system with rocky planets and gas giants.
- Add small moons, rings and asteriod clusters close to the planets (call this volume planetary space).
- Leave the remaining space empty (call this volume interplanetary space).
- deactivate the speed limit in interplanetary space and deactivate collision detection beyond 100m/s.
- Jump drive stays, but like you said, as an end game item.
The way I see it space engineers needs a star/planet system like in the game No Mans Sky. I sort of achieved this by modding my own star system and using modded planets.
I usually play with custom star system where I place planets myself closer together. I often make my star systems so a group of around 3 planets are placed around a gas giant or sometimes a black hole to form a planet cluster with 3 to 4 cluster in a system. Some clusters would have "failed" ecosystems with mainly super hot, icy or desert plannets while other clusters have more earthlike plannets or tropical plannets. For traveling between planets in 1 planet cluster I use super cruise mods with which I have a travel time between plannets of around 15 to 20 minutes. 30 minutes if the cluster involves a black whole which you have to fly far around for. Traveling between planet clusters requires a jump drive which are modded to use more power to recharge. Asteroids are only 25% as dense as in vanilla in clusters and only 3% as dense in deep space between clusters. Traveling between clusters without a jump drive would take around 5 to 10 hours at 100m/s.
Edit: typos
I can get behind this idea
Imo, the best option is turning the jump drive into something similar to the supercruise mod.
I used a grav drive mod on PC to instantly accel and deccel. At 20kps you can phase through most small rocks. If you place slower version of the device in all other directions you can control that speed in any direction.
Using timers I simulated hyper space travel 20kps. Earth to Mars in under a minute. And the ability to walk around the ship in transit. If you don't phase through the floor.
Or crashing into a wall an immediately die lol
@@Zer0sLegion actually not too bad so long as you're done accelerating and sit back down before you stop
i think solar sails would be a good addition, it'd fit the aesthetic too
Just change the dynamics of the jump drive. Begin with a slow start up speed, then the starburst effect but a lot slower as you maintain flight at which point the asteroids cannot be seen but the planets and moon can be seen for effect. Maximum speed will be 666.67 with the option to exit warp but with a slowdown starburst transition reverse of the startup starburst (similar to those movies we dare not name :) Also, the jump drive heats up after each use requiring cool down as well as power regulation, Also for the future, stress on the outer panels from jumping require repairs after much use. A good vector streak upon jumping would also be nice so one might be able to track their aggressors or their prey.
I like the idea of moving asteroids to their own area instead of being effectively a RNG minefield you navigate. Or even just cluster them like how star citizen does it, and enhance the ability to scan long range for minerals (there's a mod on the workshop for this, but it doesn't have to work exactly as such). Or simply make up for the difference in difficulty by adding more economy integration to make buying resources worthwhile. Lots of considerations but lots of options too
For me the main gameplay concerns are:
1. Doesn't create a constant fear of bashing into something when you leave the bridge
2. Doesn't cause issues with players being afraid to walk around in their ship at high speeds (clip through a block and be ejected)
3. Doesn't make it hard to change course (inertia, acceleration and deceleration times)
4. Doesn't make it hard to intercept, rendezvous, etc due to speed
5. Doesn't take forever, but is still friendly to high distances
6. Still allows in-transit encounters, which goes hand in hand with the last 3
IMO, raising the limit (or faking that with in-engine trickery) + overhauling the jump drive + a progression rework (and potentially an endgame fuel to manage beyond uranium to power said jump drives) is the most satisfying solution, but it also requires quite a bit of work.
yeah your points 1 and 2 are my current biggest problems with the travel time in space engineers. If they fix those two alone and move jump drive somehow to end/end game(pretty much been everywhere point) atleast for SP or small group MP the game would improve.
Yeah, I understand why asteroids are the way they are as you need them to survive in space but I'd prefer them to be grouped or clustered with more "space"
I've always been a fan of the point of interesst method to make people converge in certain areas and make them hotzones for any kind of activity.
And I do also favor the idea of being able to travel between locations without jump drives, and jump drives being an endgame rare utility block rather than commonplace mandatory.
That being said, raising the speed limit to something as ludacris as 1000m/s brings in a lot of other problems. Such as render/sync distance with other grids, objects, weapon ranges and rebalancing etc.
So if you want higher speeds, you need to rebalance weapons and render sync distance for your server as well. Many servers already do this.
Reducing the distance between locations, and having locations that can act as waystops is the better option. While also increasing the speed limit a bit (not more than 2-300m/s for balancing reasons imo). And preferably with a relative top speed mod, as to make ship types/classes a bit more relevant.
That way you can get from a to z and do stuff on the way without a jump drive, but it will take time, and encourage you to at least go by a few of the other points in between on your way there.
I think these are pretty popular opinions. The speed limit makes the world artificially too large, but if you moved planets close enough for a 15 minute 100 m/s trip it would just look weird.
I'm a fan of the super cruise idea, but don't think it should require a separate block.
Talking about not seeing players you could fix that with active radar and stealth blocks.
Radar so you can people and objects outside of your render distance. And stealth so you can hide if you have to.
Yeah, we do need a better way to detect grids and players
@@Zer0sLegion It seems like they could create a temporary radar block by either selecting grids and creating map markers for them that meet certain qualifications, or by having a special turret that can detect and mark when grids pass within its field of view. Say at a maximum of 50km with big power requirements.
They should shrink the distance between planets, it is less realistic but it might be better for forcing people to physically travel.
Shrink planets.
Shrink system.
Localize asteroids to regions, belts etc.
Keep the chance that you'll collide with an asteroid,
Add a block or system that can abort hyper speed when it detects a collision.
This will give the chance that some might do "blind jumps" without that block/system installed or functioning.
JUMPDRIVE's new usage:
- can be to achieve "hyper speed" where it creates a visible bubble around the entire rig that requires power to maintain and maintains the felt inertia within the bubble while on the outside the bubble the ship can travel really, really fast. BUT if the jumpdrive bubble is without power it collapses and everything suddenly suffers all those G's. A ship wrapped in the bubble can still collide with asteroids, planets and other player rigs etc.
Edit: the bubble is not a forcefield, things can still enter and exit it, it is more of a "G-forcefield" where the physics inside it can be calculated separately from the outside, meaning it can be considered stationary this hopefully work out for the game's convenience too in regards to calculating physics.
Inside you should be able to walk around, build and dismantle parts and even have smaller ships fly around. You should be able to look outside and see the system whiz past the bubble too. Because that would be cool.
If the ship collides with something it simple goes through the bubble, "¿slowing the object down a bit or imparting some of the bubble inertia to the object"? (I'm not sure) to help the game calculate impact physics, it will still be catastrophic.
my solution: halve the planet distance and increase the speed limit(if not remove it), braking on planets without speed limit is hard for you because you are not used to it
I love the line of thought and I just had an epiphany as how to achieve it.
Use real physics as a guide, real FTL is theorised to need a high and low gravity field in front and behind respectively. So adding a Gravity Generator "setting" that allows it to function as a FTL assist for your thrusters instead of adding a new thruster. Basically a "FTL" on/off switch. How to balance collisions is a big question mark there. Like someone else has mentioned, a long distance radar would be good.
For jump drives I would prefer if they became infrastructure instead of component. Make a jump drives wormhole generators. Each one can cover a certain amount of area that is contained within its Grid and can send that to another jump drive's location that can accommodate it as well. It still becomes a late game mechanic but still scales with the size of whatever you're trying to send through it. (Think ring transporters combined with the Stargate's from Stargate)
I would really like it if the jump drive would not go whoosh and you're there, but instead would work like a "real" warp drive and just lets you travel with multiple thousand m/s. And no collision with asteroids could be explained with the gravity fields the drive produces.
I agree that jump drives are OP.
I am still on my idea to have different types of thrusters (more speed-less power or less speed-more power or mix both types) plus cruise engines for higher speeds/lower manuver etc.
Also, it will be nice to have some kind of space lane travel. If you played Freelancer back in 2003 if I remember, there are jump lanes that boost the player thru the map but not too fast and not too slow. Maybe it will be good to let the player(s) build that structures as they travel to another planet and then as a result they will have trade lane system between those 2 planets/places in space. Like you build the structure on certain distance from each other and you can build multiple in line to boost staff which pass thru and in order to work, lane should have minimum of 3 points/structures. One for starting the boost, one for braking and one/more for boosting the player to another near structure etc....
That way, player will be more occupied doing something while in space :D
Freelancer have good solutions about traveling in space, it is an old game but definitely have some good stuff.
asteroid radar would be a good move imo, it would let you plan burns to dodge them at high speeds
I think building some kind of warp gate system would be great. It would encourage engineering and logistics to create and maintain. It would effectively work like the current warp block but instead of effecting itself it would affect another grid and for the same distance cap current warp blocks have. It would be 1 way, necessitating a whole ring system that youd have to build to go back and thus youd have to hunt down the materials to build the next link in the chain. This would also work very well in multiplayer, enemy clans attempting to destroy or take over these gates ect.
There is actually an old star gate mod that worked on the same general principle (obviously based on the same movie/TV series with the same name), and it also introduced new resources, components, and had unique visual effects.
Personally I'm a fan of it because someone had to travel out to the two points, gather the resources, build the infrastructure to power/run them, just to link 2 points in space-time. So even with long travel times/huge distances, once someone "settles" the area, you can eventually link spaces together.
@@Haladmer yeah I used it before but the rest of the mod was easy to cheese. I was able to take over one of the warships using the space starter ship. This idea would be more like the large stargates that were able to send full sized ships through. Though the land based one would be great for late/end game.
@@rabbidninja79 Yep, but it does work as a good example of ways the concept could be supported in-game right now.
Personally, I used them for resource transports. Had one standing next to a collector, so when components/ore came through, they'd land in the range of the collector for an easy supply line lol
@@Haladmer you're right, it's definitely a proof of concept that would work well.
That's actually a really good idea except the one I grabbed was a missile god that could rain hell, I suppose it could be retrofitted to just a cargo barge though.
a game called Interstellar Rift has a ship engine system..actually it's not too dissimilar from the FSD from Elite Dangerous, but, you can accelerate to max sublight speed, then have "even faster" speed, in tiered increments. but if you're going too fast/close to a gravity well, you get dropped a tier....but not always, so you can still go straight up to things or even pass stations.
If you remove jump drives, you would have to blend some star trek with it, Like Warp engines. which enable you to travel around 5000m/s in a straight line and phaise through all objects. Perhaps You need to build atleast 1 rear and 1 forward engines to it to be functional, and require things such as uranium to enable a new block called a warp core to work. Perhaps go futher and for combat people, you can link weapons into the warp conveyors for more powerful weapons. and for me, making ships with conveyors, life support conveyors and Warp thruster conveyors would add more to my RP of building my ships.
I think the best course of action is an advanced form of propulsion that allows you to travel a lot faster but doesn't remove your ability to hit voxels. A new block that determines where asteroids are should exist to show you the best course of travel. Like a new satellite dish you can put on your ship that finds out where the asteroids are between you and a GPS coordinate you give it or celestial body; while you are piloting your ship it will indicate a green line that slowly changes to yellow, orange, then red to show the safest path to where you are going. Green means nothing spawned by the game will block your path. Yellow is minor hazard potential, orange is very hazardous, red you will crash.
This would make it where you can experience more of the travel and in the case of multiplayer you can't just suddenly get out of danger. You can also accidentally run into danger along the way with pirates setting up traps.
More realistic, more gameplay elements, more multiplayer interaction capabilities.
Having asteroids in certain locations would mean that the majority of space is totally empty, yea space, but from a game play element its really not fun. Gravity gates work again to skip the step of flying at slow speeds or needing jump drives. Yes it takes time to set up a network but it does cause a lot of different interactions to happen in multiplayer.
Having planets closer together ruins gameplay. On servers being on a planet means way less since every player can just be at each planet in no time at all. Even jump drives cause delay in those sort of encounters. Also removing the space from space engineers, it's not planet engineers.
Been testing on 80+ player servers for a long while. Trust me when I say current planet distances are very much needed so everyone is breathing down eachothers necks. Even thou most of us don't enjoy playing on planets since we've played so many hours before they existed and just never got the legs for planets. Mainly newer players on the server stay on planets.
Still don't know why the hydrogen engine doesn't exist for me for the last years.
i think Jump drive need to be better, not just JUMP but TRAVEL DRIVE, when you hit the JUMP button your ship Starts to Travel do coordinates very fast like 800m/s without hiting voxels, its more interesting than just JUMP, and you can enjoy the journey inside your ship