Thundercraft

Agreed. Though, as you suggest, it shouldn't add up to make that much difference. Granted. But one would think that computers made of more advanced materials would have the potential to be faster or miniaturized to be more powerful in a given amount of space. (Intel and others have been able to make some important advances in microelectronics by using different materials and different manufacturing techniques.) Also, we don't get access to Computer Cores until rather late in material progression. Crew quarters is understandable. But solar panels should probably improve with better materials. In real life, the efficiency of the latest generation solar panels are markedly improved and they are gradually getting cheaper. Again, due to new manufacturing techniques and new materials. Last I heard, the "Perovskite solar cell" shattered the efficiency record. And it uses a hybrid organic-inorganic lead material. True enough. Higher HP is what they need.

These are anything but terrible. They're very nice. And I can appreciate them even more looking in-game. As for ship names, the name "White Fleet" seems a bit angelic to me. If nobody else has a suggestion, how about "Archangel" for the large carrier, "Seraphim" for the destroyer, and maybe "Virtue" for the freighter? (Alternatively, perhaps "Brisk" would work better for the freighter, impressing upon players the fact that it is fast? I think 55.3 m/s/s is pretty fast for a large-ish cargo ship, though 115 isn't much cargo room.)

He may not need a file sharing site. Just compressing the .XML with a free .ZIP archive tool should shrink the ship file by a factor of about 10 or so. Unless these ships have several thousand blocks, zipping them should easily fit below the 128 Kb limit. (Also, when I set up my Dropbox, I thought the process was a bit of a headache. Signing up for Mediafire was easier.)

It is disappointing that many types of blocks do not benefit from higher-tier materials, other than by a slight increase in HP: This is confirmed by the More block/size infos! discussion on Reddit: To put this in perspective: A 10x10x10 Cargo Bay is 1000 cubic meters. If the player created cargo in the form of 1000 individual 1x1x1 blocks (also 1000 cubic meters), they would only end up with 437.5 cargo space. But by building it as a single 10x10x10 Cargo Bay, instead, a player would increase their cargo capacity by a whopping 685%! This gives players enormous incentive to create their cargo space as a single large block instead of a multitude of smaller blocks. But all that does is encourage players to make their ships (or at least their cargo bays) look simple and boring. See MrVorgra's awesome "Universal Container Freighter" in the Vorgra's Ships topic for an excellent example of how realistic and cool-looking a freighter can be with lots of small 'cargo container'-style Cargo Bays. Redesigning that ship with a single, huge Cargo Bay would probably increase it's cargo capacity by a factor of 6 or so, but that would look pretty simple and ugly in comparison. Also, this is unrealistic - absurd even. Logically, cargo space should increase linearly, not logarithmically, as it is purely a function of volume.

I completely understand if it's been decided that there are more pressing issues and more important suggestions. However, no offense, but having "too many keybindings to support joysticks" doesn't sound like a good excuse to me. (You should see how crowded the keybindings are for joystick games like the X-series!) Joystick support would only require the most important 2 or so buttons, which usually comes down to the fire button and afterburners. All the rest of the functions are mostly irrelevant, especially since many joysticks these days are programmable. Most players should be able to use a combination of joystick and keyboard. The difficult part of supporting joysticks is getting the X and Y of the joystick yolk to correspond satisfactorily with ship or aircraft responsiveness. But there are plenty of C++ or C# libraries that support joysticks. Maybe some day, then? But I'm sure there won't ever be a mod for joystick support as that should be virtually impossible for anyone but a dev. You can't just "bind" a joystick's X and Y yolk to Up/Down/Left/Right (or WASD). That won't be responsive enough - players would be better off with the keyboard and mouse.

sure, just need to figure out how to do this xD These really are gorgeous ships. I'd love to be able to fly them.

If you're going to suggest adding all those different kinds of captains, with different types of strategies, why not include a few cheaper non-combat and/or amateur varieties? That is, why not have types of captain that are cheaper than the typical $7500 hourly salary because either they've only ever commanded non-combat vessels and that's all they've been trained in (so any armed turrets on the ship won't be used) or they are fresh out of the academy (or whatever) and have little to no experience (so they are terrible at combat and so armed turrets miss frequently and systems fluctuate between bad and good performance - at least until they level up)?

Most of the popular space combat and space sim games that I can think of either featured joystick control or at least supported it as an option. While the current mouse / keyboard setup isn't as bad as I thought it would be, it is not ideal. I'm sure the lack of joystick support is turning off some prospective players. And I have some good joysticks collecting dust on my shelf...

This is already possible, just select multiple blocks and while pressing Ctrl select the block you don't want in that selection. Is there a trick to this method that you forgot to mention? I ask because I seem unable to do this... You forgot to mention that this only works by clicking the middle mouse button while holding [Ctrl]. By default, the left mouse button is used to select blocks. So it seemed fair to assume that the left button would unselect, too. Thanks for sharing though. This should be quite useful.

Guys! Are you just reading about upcoming changes and you already have suggestions on how to further nerf or "safeguard" Thrusters? ::) Or have you done like me and opted into the beta branch to test out the changes first hand? If you haven't even tried it, suggesting further changes to upcoming beta branch changes would be like posting a movie recommendation based on hearsay or watching a single trailer. Earlier, several people complained about how Thrusters worked. The dev listened and now Thrusters have been seriously nerfed. (See this post in the beta branch topic for before and after screenshots for an idea of how much it's been nerfed.) This change is new to the latest beta branch. It's not even part of an official update, yet. And, already... more thruster suggestions? Please, at least try it out, first. As for the idea of preventing players from creating thin sheets of Thrusters... Why? What purpose does that serve? With the way thrusters are in the beta branch, we need a larger volume of Thrusters than the volume of ship Engines just to get something that handles better than a flying bathtub made of uranium. The ship I'm designing now has a much larger volume of Thrusters than Engines. Yet, I'm still forced to create these Thrusters in thin sheets in order to have a decent Brake Thrust. Doing it that way comes with a disadvantage, though: Thrusters in the form of X-Y thin sheets have noticeably less Pitch / Yaw / Roll thrust than if the same thruster volume was a single Thruster. (This can be verified by using 'Merge Selected Blocks' to combine them into a single block.) P.S.: I'm thinking that those of us who spend a lot of time designing ships will tend to get tired of having to redesign them every time the way Thrusters or Engines work is radically changed.

With the changes to Thrusters in the latest beta, Thrusters are now calculated by surface and volume. For ships that took advantage of Void tech Thrusters or thin sheets of thrusters, this change absolutely guts maneuverability and Brake Thrust by about 75 to 80%. (See This post in the Beta Branch Patchnotes 0.10.3.7509.) As such, I think it's safe to say that Thrusters have been "patched" in terms of this void tech exploit. So, I recommend that future versions of the Void Drive be all engines, leaving out the Thrusters. There's no point to including Thrusters in them now, since that part is just going to suck energy without much benefit. I used the Mk. 7 Void Drive in a ship I just finished building. Before, it was super fast and handled like a dream! Now, it handles like a drunken turtle. :(

Please consider buffing the Thrusters more to compensate for the new way in which they are being calculated. :( My ships now have Pitch, Yaw, and Roll of about 80% less than before. They move like turtles now, whereas before they were super responsive and fun to fly. Right now, it seems like we have to have a total volume of Thrusters much bigger than the Engines in order to have decent (not even good) maneuverability. A "buff" of just 5 or 10% or so isn't going to cut it. (An increase of something like 50% more Pitch/Yaw/Roll than what it is currently would be more like it.)

These two separate points, combined, tell me that you have either forgotten about or have never found a C43 Object Detector. That is a module with a description that says it quote, "Detects claimable asteroids and wreckages." However, despite the description, it almost never highlights or otherwise indicates wreckages. That is, the wreckages portion of the detector seems very broken. (See my post here in the "Target nearest wreck" topic for more.)

I've been trying to design some new ships through a separate galaxy set to "Creative". It is nice to have unlimited credits and resources to test various designs out. However, I'm frequently interrupted by many of the same annoyances as a regular galaxy. Namely, even in a Creative galaxy: Ships must still have the required number of mechanics and engineers, et al. All I want to use Creative for is to create and test various ship designs. But, because I did not bother to get mechanics, I'm frequently spammed by warnings that my ship is damaged. Then, suddenly, I'm unable to add new blocks or do anything until I repair my ship - even though it's currently under construction. I finally grabbed a few mechanics. But when I load a small ship without much crew quarters or start over with a new ship, I lose my mechanics and no longer have enough for the next design. There are no safe sectors. Pirates, aliens and factions attack regularly. These create frequent interruptions where I have to stop and move to some other part of the system or move to a different sector. I would ignore the pirates and aliens, except they do damage my ship. Even if they're only attacking, say, the Shipyard, if my under-construction ship is docked, it will take damage as well. Creative mode still has the limitation on repairing a ship that regular mode has. That is, I've tried to repair the damage to my under-construction ship without success, with a warning saying that my ship was recently damaged (so repair is not allowed until after a cool-down time). Perhaps, instead of changing how "Creative" works, though, it would be better to have a separate "Ship Workshop" mode as another option in the Main Menu?

Good idea. Too often I'm unable to position a block right because it just so happens that there isn't a block directly underneath the center or some such silliness. Though, if we ever get a "Snap to Edge", that should solve a lot of that. I could imagine it working much like the Alt key for the clipboard. Holding down Alt could show a faint wireframe inside the block to show cubes representing the Snap to Grid distance. And I think it could allow us to move the virtual 'center' from the actual center to any 'unit' that makes up the block's shape. For example, if a block was shaped like this, with each "X" representing a distance of 0.1 (since the Grid was set to 0.1): XXXXX XXXXX Then holding Alt could allow us to move the center from the actual center to any "X" (or Grid block). Somehow, I forgot about that one, despite how I find it a bit annoying. But I've seen others suggest this, too. Nice idea. Sometimes it's hard to see the ship I'm building because the lighting is so poor. And even if I have enough light to build, I may not be able to see clearly enough to determine whether or not I've selected the right colors. Yes, this is needed. Currently, there's only a single wedge block and three different "corner" blocks. This isn't enough variety to build every type of sloped or triangular shape, nor enough to fill every corner or smooth every rough edge that using these sometimes create.

This could improve immersion, true. But it would drastically change how Avorion is played. For one thing, most ships would have to be designed with some cargo space. (Currently, many ship designs have none.) More significantly, players would have to be a lot more careful about their ship being destroyed because of the harsh consequences. Further, hauling around all our resources in a way that they could easily be wiped out by, say, crashing into an asteroid or a game bug could really upset some players and turn them off the game. I think the only way I could get behind such a change is if it was made optional, such as a checkbox on galaxy creation or something. Also, I feel that the game would either have to have some place for players to safely store their excess minerals (like a warehouse or storage station or a bank vault or something player-made), or additional ship insurance was made available to also (partially) cover the minerals in a ship loss.

that is actually a remarkably robust yet concise system. i hope this gains traction as the system to be used. I'm working a revised version. Unfortunately, it's starting turn into a bit of number soup... I'm liking these suggestions and the way this discussion is going. But, yes, the 'number soup' thing is something to be concerned about because it would probably discourage use. It probably needs to be fairly simple, if almost intuitive, to have a chance of catching on. For right now, I'm tempted to stick with using "Class {x}" (where x is the number of module slots) to describe size. But I will totally start using those two-letter abbreviations for primary material. And I may yet switch to that material-module slot class system. It seems simple enough.

I haven't had a chance to salvage wreckages since the last update went public. But I would totally find the behavior described quite frustrating. To have some sort of wreckage cleanup script or routine makes sense if it's going to improve server performance. But I'm a firm believer that wreckages should only be deleted either after all players have left the system (or logged out) or at least after a very long time (as long as players are in the system). And I also agree that, eventually, there should be a server config to adjust this.

I'm starting a thread here to collect suggestions on improving Build Mode. Being able to Scale a template (or whatever is in the clipboard) by a specific numerical amount, like x1.5, x2, x3, x0.5, 0.25, etc. Being able to apply decals to our ships. Any sort of decal would be wonderful. But to be especially useful, decals need to support alpha transparency. Another useful feature for decals would be support for a glow map so we can have decals that glow. (Imagine being able to apply our own 'windows' as decals to emulate the "lights on" look of crew quarters.) Having a Grid Size of 0.025, as suggested here. Having a Snap to Edge option, as suggested here. A slider to adjust the "Scaling" of the appropriate block texture. Also, I'd like sliders to adjust the X and Y start positions of the texture. This would be very similar to the "Scaling" slider in the Build Ship window on Shipyards, which allows us to scale the texture of the procedurally-generated ship. The ability to easily share individual templates, as suggested here. The ability to name and rearrange templates, as suggested here. Being able to upgrade the materials of our ship for a given block type. For example, it would be super handy to replace any or all Titanium Generators on our ship with Naonite, Trinium, Xanion, or Avorion Generators with the click of a button. (Often, important systems like Generators, Integrity Field Generators, and Shield Generators are deep inside of our ships and difficult or impossible to get to without tearing it apart.) Some function to either learn the name of the color of a selected block, or the ability to copy the color by clicking to make it the selected color. Note: The main reason why I would like sliders to adjust the X and Y start positions of a block's texture is because it seems impossible to get the windows on crew quarters to line up in an aesthetically-pleasing way. At least with small ships, those windows almost always seem unbalanced or skewed or otherwise won't fit our shape. Worse, I've had the position of these windows change on me after saving it as a template or ship file and then Applying it to something.

That would be wonderful, yes. Frequently, I find myself checking the "Match Block" checkbox, hoping it aligns a block properly, but disappointed in how it also reshapes the block to 'fit the hole'. This effect makes me question why there is even a "Match Shape" checkbox. I never find myself using that option and it seems kind of pointless to me.

After more experience with Build Mode, I realized that this issue is much more prevalent and problematic than I thought. I have never cursed and sworn at my monitor so much in my life as when I'm frustrating by this issue when trying to use blocks that are 0.05 in any dimension (any combination of X, Y, and/or Z). As I wrote earlier, using an atypical size of root (core) block is likely to cause this or make the situation much worse. But that's not the real problem. It's much like I mentioned earlier: The root of the problem is how Avorion will center the current block. This can cause issues for any block - or template of blocks - that has a unit length of an odd multiple of the Scale Step. Think about it: If I have a block 3 units long with a Scale Step of 0.1, then that is 0.1 + 0.1 + 0.1 or 0.3 long. To center this, the game realigns the center to half of that, or at 0.15. This necessitates either reducing the Grid Size to half of the Scale Step or, in this case, increasing it to 0.15. This becomes an impossible problem when Scale Step is set to 0.05 and an X, Y, or Z dimension is an odd number. There is no way to set the Grid Size to half of 0.05. I'm not asking for a Scale Step of 0.25. But, I beg of you, give us a Grid Size of 0.025! Please? Edit: I found another impossible situation: Any time the Scale Step is set to 0.25 and we attempt to use a block (or template) that is an odd number. Consider what happens with a block, say, 5 units long at 0.25 per unit. That's 0.25 x 5 = 1.25. But dividing that by 2 (to find the center) gives 0.625... That is not divisible by 0.05 and makes it impossible to center because we can't set the Grid Size to anything less than 0.05.

I agree: This would be useful!

Updated. If past experience is any indicator, I'll likely either forget or real life will interfere. I don't recall the last time I intentionally left a game. If I don't respond or reply to requests here within a week, anybody is free to borrow the server information I collected and post their own updates. (The easy way would be to click the {Quote} button on my OP and reuse that BBCode as if it were your own.) I'm fine with doing what I can. But I did not set out to maintain this list and never asked for this it get pinned. Anyway, Avorion has a greyed-out "Browse Servers" button. Eventually, I'm sure it's going to support listing servers automatically in-game and then we won't need this list.

Just 18 views? So, nobody else can agree that this is needed?

Looks very cool! 8) Since you don't provide the .xml, I can't be sure how you designed and built this "Planet Killer". However, I think it's safe to assume that you used the traditional ship-building method. By that, I mean I doubt that you took advantage of known exploits to get insane engine and thruster performance by overlapping or "void technology". Scytales shared several "modules" of compact, cheap, and efficient engine/thruster blocks as well as shield generators and power generators. (See the Scytales Laboratories, Optimized Starter Ships and Ship Modules [.xml] thread.) I'm just thinking that you could hide a few dozen X-009 Needlepoint as "modules" around the perimeter of your current huge engine complex and then convert your current engines into glow blocks. (Thrusters work better the further from the center of mass.) Or, perhaps you could use W, A,S, D to scale the X-009 to make it huge and use only two or three of them? By itself, each of his modules only requires 1 mechanic. You should end up with even better performance, yet at a small fraction of the current mechanic and engineer requirements. To make the glow bocks appear a bit more like thrusters, you could color the outer ring of them a golden yellow and the inner ring(s) could be a whiter and hotter shade of yellow. Up close, that would not look quite as good as real engine blocks. But they would still seem like engines and would still be impressive. Also, hiding several Scytales' "Void Generators" and "Void Shield" inside could probably add a lot of energy and shields without much credit or resource cost (esp. if they were converted to Avorion, Xanion or Trinium). Just a thought.