How would you go about handling the timescales in multiplayer with several different kinds game play integrated together?
asynchronous time warp. This has already been done in KSP multiplayer mods. Of course the real challenge is getting it to run for sever hundred or several thousand players on the same server in a stable manner.
What is the intended play session length? Is the intended core game play loop more like CDE where you spend an hour toying around with slider bars and then running a separate simulation for ten minutes, or is it more like Factorio where it's in pseudo real time and you have to micro manage far more?
It is more like Factorio and Space Engineers.
Is this to be strictly multiplayer, or is this to have a PvE component?
The only PvE are bots ordered to do things by players. I dont intend for the AI to do anything, because I am a truck driver. Not a programmer.
But setting up waypoints for bots to travel or patrol between or telling them to stay in formation with you (whether on the personal or starship scale) is a feature I would expect. Scripting behaviors other than patrols and formation would be no more complex that what is available in the CoaDE sandbox.
You should be able to command an NPC to go to a ship, undock, intercept a destination, dock, un/load and refuel, then do the same to go to N other destinations and then be able to loop it
To me, KSP and CoaDE are basically nothing alike. KSP is a piloting sandbox with basic course plotting CoaDE is an engineering sandbox with basic course plotting that feels more awkward than KSP's despite the 3 body physics.
KSP is all interceptes, docking maneuvers, and landing. CoaDE has intercepts too, but just doesn't require any of the docking or landing.
I mean, my perfect game would be Factorio with realistic resources with spacecraft and bases built like space engineers with the nav ball of KSP with the realistic interaction and engineering of CoaDE, multiplayer of course.
But yeah. KSP and CoaDE are just *extremely different* and have very little overlap in gameplay or execution.
Honestly? Multiple intercepts and time-skipping multiplayer sound great!... for CoaDE 2: Multiplayer edition.
I think the last thing on my wish list would be an order to set the angle/rotation of the ship relative to the bearing of the target, so you stay at a constant orientation when engaging a target.
But let's be real here: I'm gonna get whatever qswitched-senpai makes. They've earned that much from CoaDE.
Hey, qswitched. You did good. CoaDE is an awesome simulation that I was praying for since childhood. You have gone above and beyond supporting CoaDE. But real talk: it came out in 2016. Have you been working on any other projects that I, and your space nut fanbase, could throw money at? Or be teased with the the hope of buying another product of yours in the future?
Come to think of it, nukes do impart momentum on ships at close range (you can make really, really bad orion drives this way), so I suppose that non-flak modules actually would get accelerated that way.
Not really. From my work with orion NPP, a nuke interacts with the ship armor, and the ablation of the armor flying off of the ship imparts (neglegable) momentum to the ship, until the armor fails and the nuke ruptures a reaction mass tank. But the flying/spinning momentum of the ship careening off into the void after that is from all if the dV in the tank being expelled, not the nuke.
And it just gets worse from there. I've been told that Magnetic plasma sails coupled to the solar wind that can porportunatly grow the farther you get from the sun can give near constant acceleration in the milliG, but those require at least a fission reactor to charge the plasma.
I've run into a weird glitch. I just won the last mission, and was watching the epilogue but the game soft locked. I'm stuck watching a fleet of friendly gunships orbiting with a fleet of enemy fleet carriers around Rhea, all time accelerated and spinning furiously around Saturn, orbiting every minute or so. I can select the fleet, but other than that there is no UI and i cannot exit out of the program through the escape menu.
And there's the rub, innit? There might be some exclusivity clause with Steam.
But srsly, download the client. There isn't some weird ad bombardment like windows 10 where it has advertisements on my freaking start menu, and it won't add a useless toolbar or fill your hard drive with malware. It isn't going to redirect your homepage to Bing or some other service you don't care about, it won't activate your laptop's camera and gaze longingly into your eyes deep into the night. It just sells games and makes gaming better.
Edit: OH YEAH, and Steam is the only retailer on the planet that will give you a full refund for your game as long as you've played less than a few hours of it and only had it a few days. I have never, ever heard if anybody else giving a full refund for software. I bought Space Engineers for my gal-pal and she freaking hated it, so I got a refund and we went out to eat instead.
Just found this game - looks amazing. Kind of scratches the 'The Expanse' itch from the Corey/Abraham/Franck novels.
Anyway, I'm adamant about not installing the abomination that is the steam client on my machine, but I'd love to play (and pay for!) this game. Please let me know if you've got any pending plans to distribute it apart from steam. In the meantime I'll have to content myself with watching gameplay videos...
Thanks!
2 things:
Firstly, welcome to the forum.
Secondly, why?
As far as I can tell, Steam is a great service that easily allows me to access my library of games on any machine connected to the internet. Which is great for when I traveled and couldn't bring my desktop, or when I upgrade and have to migrate everything. It is easy to keep my games patched with steam, a one stop place to keep my games' version current so I can link up through multiplayer more easily, or get swift access to patches for bug fixes and added content. Steam workshop support is an extreamly easy way to share vessels I created in space engineers, from the depths, Airships: Conquer the Skies, and even custom models or whole ship in Children of a Dead Earth. And the Steam workshop makes getting mods for a game i own easy and searchable, with a clear display and description and discussion back to back with other mods, and ive never ever heard of anyone getting anything malacious through the workshop, unlike downloading a random execuatible file from some corner if thw interbet you'be never been before that claims it's just a game mod and not a bunch of bundled malware. Steam multiplayer easily allows me to connect for free with friends and play pretry far into Terrarria, carried by their later game gear. And you don't always have to be online to play your games, unless they have some draconian DRM; but that is a problem with the game, not with Steam. I've opened Steam on a friend's computer, then set it to offline mode so they don't authenticate but can play my game I really want to show them, them fired up my computer and played what ever I wanted too.
I kno I'm gushing over Steam, but it is kinda like smartphone levels of good for improving my quality of life getting access and playing games, i.e. I can mark my life as before I got a smartphone where I had to sit down at a terminal I had to get access to the near sum total of current human knowledge that is the internet and now where now I have a star trek device in my hand that connects me to the world as long as I'm within 5 miles of a cellphone tower, and Steam just beats the absolute pants off of going to Wal-Mart to buy a game or some specific website for each game, oops needs a patch, log into a unique website and make an account, download and install the patch, and remember every website and every account and every password for every single game I own and keep on top of patching everything.
So care to share why you are adamant about rejecting the 3ed best free service on the internet? (Google, Wikipedia, then Steam)
We could always have Legends of the Galactic Heroes except with more hardcore science.
Lieutenant: we got em admiral! With the "narrow space" next to Venus, they can only approach frome one vector. Let's fill the "narrow corridor" with drones and missiles!
Admiral: *beat*
Admiral: You're fired. Out the airlock. XO!
After a small struggle with the XO, the lieutenant is dragged screaming out of the CIC. The camera then focuses on the admiral, her hand just holding her grim, downcast face.