This thread will focus on one specific problem encountered with exploration: Lack of engagenement.
This seperates down into some subproblems, such as lack of any meaningful progression etc.
Although I might be a little bit more busy next week since I need to finish some coursework, it shouldn’t take long and hopefully I can start work on it. For now we can have a thread discussing some ideas.
This thread will mainly focus on the ship piloting and progression aspect of exploration crew to increase engagement. Other problems like technology disks won’t be handled by this design.
Summary
Exploration is currently a department that has very little progression to it, and poor engagement. The main issues I can see with it is that:
All shuttles are the same basically. You may notice slight improvements in performance on the flight map, however there is very little actual noticable difference. A ship that is 3 blocks long is usually better than a 30x20 giga shuttle since it can land in smaller places.
During flight there is basically nothing to do. A bit like real piloting, the autopilot does all of the work and you just have to sit around doing nothing. There should be something at least to ensure that players need to remain vigilant while on the flight map.
Some change ideas
Implement ship systems that affect functionality. This allows for upgrading of ships and some kind of progression system.
Potentially having the ability to find ship ruins with either better parts, or just better ships that you can take for your own would be pretty cool.
These better ships could even spawn on their own asteroids, encouraging players to explore locations other than just their objectives.
Engines:
Different engine types that have different costs and accelerations.
Ships start with plasma engines, however these can be upgraded to Ion and even void thrusters.
Interdictors:
Different interdictors may require different amounts of power and have different interdiction ranges.
Sensor Arrays:
Define the detection radius of a shuttle.
Better arrays use more power howver can see greater distances.
Afterburners:
Gives a functionality to pilots to increase speed at the cost of decreased fuel efficiency. Adds in an actual action to perform while on the map to increase pilot engagement.
Gravitational Shield Generators:
The map has hazardous zones such as debris fields and solar flare zones.
These hazardous areas will affect the ship if the shield structure is reduced to zero. If a shield takes too much damage from debris fields, the ship will dock at the current location and have to sit through a shower of space debris impact.
Power balancing:
Basic ships should use ~20kW of power so it can be powered by a basic pacman.
This should steadilly increase so that better power solutions are required.
I have mentioned 2 map hazards so far, my ideas were:
A debris field that does damage to a ships shield overtime while passing through it. If a ships shield integrity reaches 0 it automatically docks at that location and then is hit by the weak space sand meteor things that do little damage.
Electromagnetic Storm that will randomly EMP machins on board a ship if the shield reaches 0 integrity. Could be pretty chaotic and damaging if not managed.
These threats could be dealt with by managing the shield and making sure it has enough power to charge as well as the pilot simply avoiding hazardous areas.
Any potential work on this might be delayed for a little bit since it requires about 3 PRs as dependencies.
Open to all kinds of feedback, suggestions as well as the idea that this could just be a bad idea, I haven’t worked on this yet and if there are better things to do instead and people don’t think this will work out then I’ll try thinking of some other ideas instead.
Ability to turn off/on a ship transponder via the flight console, when it’s off your ship will still be a detectable signal on the overmap but it’ll be “Unknown Signal” - you could be a meteor, hostile ship or something else for all anyone knows.
If you don’t have your transponder on then you might get interdicted by NPC space police ships that are nearby and they’ll force your ship to remain stationary for X seconds as a punishment.
If you do have it on then you’re more likely to get interdicted by NPC space pirates, who’ll ask you to pay their bribe (forcibly deducting your credits) and if you refuse they’ll fire a missile at the ship (dealing decent hull damage but not immediate death).
im all for turning this into startsector
however i dont see much reason for transponders considering space chasing so rare ive only seen it ONCE since we got supercruise
maybe if we had… ahem… random ships. with dubious alegiences doing all sort of stuff
some could be AI controlled just doing their thing untill attacked by players then ghost roles will spawn to deefend it
others will spawn active doing all sorts of missfortune
… some ideas off the top of my head would be
a syndicate ressuply ship (contains mats and some loot)
lesser pirates (can interdic the supply shuttle stealing some crates and slowing it down)
syndicate scoutship that takes potshots at the station and miners if its near the station and lavaland respectively
comms jamming pod that scrambles comms until destroyed
I like these. Aside from the occasional perma-gulag (or prisoner-supression), the security shuttle doesn’t have much use. These two features would incentivize using the shuttle more.
A bluespace storm would be pretty cool to see. It would teleport the shuttle to a random position on the flight map, so pilots would really have to learn to avoid it.
Another idea that I had in mind was adding more stuff to asteroids. Right now they are just big rocks without much on them except for some tendrils/tumors (I haven’t explored space in a while, so this may have changed). Some things that could spawn there could include:
Lavaland and space ruins - people don’t tend to explore space z-levels as often as before
Secret carp research facility
Space golems - same ship as their Lavaland counterpart
how about “porting” some things from shiptest?
there being nebulas, ion storms, meteor belts, and such could make it much more fun to fly around, and make it a bit harder to find your target locations.
another idea could be trade outposts and trade caravans.
signals would appear on the map that you can dock with, and within are traders (vending machines reskinned with human sprites) that you could buy better parts / new ships/ equipment and such. it could also open the possibility to sell artifacts and duplicate tech disks
this could also link into the cargo change, where the trade caravans could have special items for sale or discounts on pre-existing deals.
What if we make a map that is just one massive ship? It would only work with a relatively small crew, but it would make everybody involved with whatever the ship is doing. First, it would have to go to Lavaland to get minerals, and later it could make some exploration. It would be a specific kind of round.
Alright progress report 1:
I have added in ion thrusters and ion burst thrusters.
Ion thrusters use power, but provide slightly less thrust compared to plasma thrusters.
Ion burst thrusters provide insane amounts of thrust, but will always use more power than their ion capacitor (engine heater) can provide. This means that they are good for short sprints, but not sustained flight.
I have made some huge improvements to the behind the scenes code in order to facilitate the changes required, shuttles now store data about their thrust, mass, shields etc. on a shuttle datum object. To make things easier for coding, I will be making all shuttles (that use the overmap) require some form power for propulsion. So far I have remapped the mining shuttles to have burst ion engines, so that they can quickly get to lavaland and back along with a SMES unit which should store enough power for a large amount of trips. Could be an idea to setup some place in engineering where shuttles can dock to be resupplied with fuel and power.
Next changes I wish to make are the map threats and collision detection for weird shaped objects (since the map threats should be weird shapes that aren’t circles.)
Some method of communication between vessels and or the station, a Hailing channel or something you could open up would be incredibly helpful and generally facilitate more interesting interactions to develop