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Stop F'ing killing ships via Asteroids


hi13760
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I'm going to stop playing (aka rage quit) until the developers make it so that if you hit a small asteroid your mega ship doesn't get destroyed.

 

Seriously, if my mega ship gets destroyed via asteroids so easily and all my good components get destroy. Why would I choose to repeat my many hours of game play just to happen again?

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I'm going to stop playing (aka rage quit) until the developers make it so that if you hit a small asteroid your mega ship doesn't get destroyed.

 

Seriously, if my mega ship gets destroyed via asteroids so easily and all my good components get destroy. Why would I choose to repeat my many hours of game play just to happen again?

 

There is a way around that, when starting the game (or in the INI files) you can set your collision to zero, or learn to avoid said astroids. If you're mining, go in a smaller vessel.  and in a logical sense, of course big ships in space would want to avoid hitting asteroids, it's like hitting a sandbar or hidden reef in a naval vessel on the sea.

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Another thing that should help is making sure your ship has sufficient maneuverability (Yaw and Pitch). You may have to add more thrusters or replace them with Directional thrusters. That, and maybe zoom out a little to make your ship appear a little smaller, so you can better see how close your ship is to asteroids and how big they are in relation.

 

I'm not the only one saying that collision damage is too high by default. And I would think that huge ships with literally kilo-tons of armor would be much better able to take asteroid hits.

 

Sadly, shields don't help with collisions. Not even a little.

 

Also, it sounds like there is a severe bug with how collisions are calculated - particularly if your ship has integrity fields.

 

Related tip: For those who have really big ships and are running into stations all the time, you may be interested in the Extended trade reach mod. With that, you won't have to be so close to 'dock'.

 

There is a way around that, when starting the game (or in the INI files) you can set your collision to zero...

 

Turning it way, way down should help. Turning collision damage all the way off might be a tad excessive. Many popular multiplayer servers set collision down to half or 0.5. Some of them turn it down to 0.25 or less. But hardly any turn it off. And those that do usually claim that this is a temporary measure.

 

...or learn to avoid said astroids.

 

IMO, the common retort "Pffft. Asteroids? Just learn to avoid them." does wear a bit thin after a while. I think it can even sound a little callous. Especially considering how that is sometimes easier said than done when piloting a freakishly huge ship.

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Well, ramming in huge piece of rock at 3000km/h should destroy.. well anything? :D

 

But yeah, its annoying, so I am also playing on 0.25 collision damage - this way you wont get destroyed so easily, but it still forces you to evade asteroids so you dont have to repair your ship constantly :)

 

Also, for evading asteroids, yaw/pitch are in fact almost useless - you can change direction of your ship, but changing direction of your movement is MUCH slower and harder, especially when running at high speeds. What you really want, are strafing thrusters, especiallly for sidestrafing, so of asteroid pops up in front of you, you just sidestrafe to avoid it and you don´t have to change your vector at all.

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I used to rage at deaths when I played diablo 3, then I played hardcore, where death was the end of the game, which soon taught me to learn how to not die instead of raging about deaths.

 

In this game

(a) you slow down if the sector is foggy

(b) you start your initial thrust towards a gate not directly at it, which will reveal any roids that were directly between you and the gate (they can be hard to see against the gate field).

© Combat, you do from outside the roid field shooting at all the stupid NPCs caught on the roids, which is literally fish in a barrel.

 

Since I have done that, I have not collided with a roid in a way that seriously damaged my ship.

 

 

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If you really hate collision, you can tweak the collision damage. You might need to edit some .txt or save file if you've already begun your game; I forget which at the moment.

 

I've had 100% collision turned on since the beginning of my game, earned billions of credits and many hundreds of thousands of minerals, destroyed hundreds of pirates and xenos, and I have yet to die from collisions except when purposely ramming asteroids and stations for fun. I tend to lose bits and pieces while salvaging or in a cramped dogfight, though. Very occasionally I'll nudge an asteroid and get a couple of dents, but I've never full-on smashed into one. Just be careful, especially in foggy sectors as Tsunamik mentioned.

 

Aside from fortifying turrets, I don't mess around with integrity fields on ships (I do on stations/stationary ships) precisely because I do worry about possible collision bugs.

 

@Thundercraft You underestimate the immense mass of an asteroid. Mass increases exponentially with volume (density being equal), and our human-scale brains aren't used to estimating just how much mass a very large volume can contain. A single good-sized asteroid (in real life) contains more metal than all of the metal human beings have mined in our entire history, and additional minerals besides. Imagine jamming almost every bridge, building, automobile, bicycle, factory, and power station on Earth into one big lump, then ramming something into it.

 

Even a large, heavy, and heavily-armored ship is going to be a hollow, super-lightweight feather pillow by comparison. You'd go from X m/sec or km/sec to 0 or nearly 0 in a fraction of a second if colliding with an asteroid.

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In addition to what Blaine has said, our ships in Avorion lack Crumple Zones.

 

Sure, on a car they don't do all that much to keep it from being a write-off, but they do a whole heck of a lot to make sure parts of it survive. (the people in it, from a crash perspective, are basically part of it)

 

On a spaceship, you'd need basically entire rooms to act as "enough" of a crumple-zone to prevent the ship from being totaled.

(In Real-Life, water tankage may work for this, but possibly just an empty room instead)

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I think part of the issue is that the sectors are so dense. If the devs were to modify the sector generation to increase the spacing between asteroids and stations it should be much less common for players to hit asteroids.

 

And then more common for people to bash into stations as they build ships optimized for higher speeds, and end up overshooting more often.

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i agree with Thundercraft & Tsunamik that 0.25 makes a good compromise... little enought for those enemy ship's wreckage and the occasional rub-your-ships-butt-tenderly-against-the-roid...

 

...buuut if i do something really stupid like boosting with 3k m/s forward and overlooking dat roid in front of the gate... i SHOULD get wrecked in that case, not just bumb off of it IMO, no matter how big the ship... :'(

 

In addition to what Blaine has said, our ships in Avorion lack Crumple Zones.

...

 

related to that: Integrity Fields make Blocks individually 10x harder, but this wont affect Ships total HP, aye? So would a Block on the Nose of my ship, if destroyed from a collision enought to hit the 10x HP of it, do more dmg to the Ship at all as if there was no Field Generator? Cant a nose without Generator not be used as said crumble zone?

 

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I think part of the issue is that the sectors are so dense. If the devs were to modify the sector generation to increase the spacing between asteroids and stations it should be much less common for players to hit asteroids.

 

And then more common for people to bash into stations as they build ships optimized for higher speeds, and end up overshooting more often.

 

Well, that's the dilemma.

 

If any of you have played the X series, and I suspect many of you have, you may remember waiting minutes to travel from a gate to a station after jumping into a system while piloting a larger, slower ship, even with 1000% SETA active. It's pure tedium, and it's not even justifiable in terms of preserving economic balance, because on the whole competing NPC traders will move just as slowly—or as quickly—as you do.

 

The problem is that outer space is vast, and there are a lot of dilemmas faced by games like these. You could have just a single station, asteroid, planet, moon, or other interactable/land-able/contestable object per "sector"—and that would probably be more realistic than cramming a lot of stuff in one very small area—but then the "sectors" would be somewhat boring, because they'd have only one object in them rather than a much wider possible variety of arranged objects.

 

You can instead place stuff really far apart in each sector, but the problem then is that most sci-fi ship combat in games is very "cinematic." This requires ships to move at unrealistically slow velocities, usually with artificial top speed limitations, and often involves unrealistic scales as well. The Helios 2 spacecraft reached a velocity of 70 kilometers per second relative to the Sun, and spacecraft are capable of much greater velocities.

 

There's usually no perfect solution to this. Avorion has boost but not SETA, its ships move faster relative to objects than those in the X series do, and most of its sectors have objects significantly closer together than in the X series, and the scale is somewhat higher; in general, it's faster to get around in Avorion even without time acceleration, especially with boost.

 

I can't help but think there's a more elegant solution, but then again developers of these sorts of games have probably put more thought into it than I have and run into limitations and problems I'm unaware of.

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I'm going to stop playing (aka rage quit) until the developers make it so that if you hit a small asteroid your mega ship doesn't get destroyed.

 

Seriously, if my mega ship gets destroyed via asteroids so easily and all my good components get destroy. Why would I choose to repeat my many hours of game play just to happen again?

 

Calm down and just change the collision setting to 0.1 (10%, my choice) or 0.0 (remove completely). You can do it in an already started game.

 

That is not a cheating, you want to play a game where asteroids are not the major threat => you play it.

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Well, that's the dilemma.

 

A relatively simple "solution" would be to implement some basic collision warning systems. When it detects you are on course to bash into something you get an on-screen alert saying as much.

 

This could either be something included in the basic-most elements of the ship (such as how your basic ship comes equipped with a docking port that evidently is able to move to any and all sides of your ship) or something that you need to install via a system upgrade or possibly as a dedicated block you add to the ship.

 

It would be rather nice to have a block that adds more information such as your current speed (yes, you can select yourself to see your current speed, but that is not a great choice) as well as your current acceleration (meters a second per second for the last second as it were) and your current stopping distance based upon your current orientation and braking thrust, and perhaps also some data about enemy transversal velocity, etc.

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I think part of the issue is that the sectors are so dense.
Personally I think the biggest part of the issue, is that people are dense. It doesn't take knowledge of astrophysics and quantum mechanics to figure out how to adjust your trajectory in accord with your camera offset, or how you can use the reticles of you turrets to see where you actually going, or to aim in between the asteroids into the background space to avoid any collisions passing trough the field, or that you really should consider asteroid clusters as actual obstacles for a large ship... you got the idea.

 

If any of you have played the X series, and I suspect many of you have, you may remember waiting minutes to travel from a gate to a station after jumping into a system while piloting a larger, slower ship, even with 1000% SETA active. It's pure tedium, and it's not even justifiable in terms of preserving economic balance, because on the whole competing NPC traders will move just as slowly—or as quickly—as you do.

 

The problem is that outer space is vast, and there are a lot of dilemmas faced by games like these. You could have just a single station, asteroid, planet, moon, or other interactable/land-able/contestable object per "sector"—and that would probably be more realistic than cramming a lot of stuff in one very small area—but then the "sectors" would be somewhat boring, because they'd have only one object in them rather than a much wider possible variety of arranged objects.

 

You can instead place stuff really far apart in each sector, but the problem then is that most sci-fi ship combat in games is very "cinematic." This requires ships to move at unrealistically slow velocities, usually with artificial top speed limitations, and often involves unrealistic scales as well. The Helios 2 spacecraft reached a velocity of 70 kilometers per second relative to the Sun, and spacecraft are capable of much greater velocities.

 

There's usually no perfect solution to this. Avorion has boost but not SETA, its ships move faster relative to objects than those in the X series do, and most of its sectors have objects significantly closer together than in the X series, and the scale is somewhat higher; in general, it's faster to get around in Avorion even without time acceleration, especially with boost.

 

I can't help but think there's a more elegant solution, but then again developers of these sorts of games have probably put more thought into it than I have and run into limitations and problems I'm unaware of.

The solution to that problem is accelerator rings. Not a full rip-off from Freelancer, but just a two-way system that allow you to position your ship in one and let yourself to be accelerated before being decelerated in another, all within the same sector. This did not made any sense in Freelancer as a method of travelling between planets, but it does make sense in a certain synchronized orbit around a single celestial object, whatever it might be.

 

To diversify such waypoints would just take some misc stations like defense platforms (which currently doesn't exist even conceptually for some reason), storage facilities (mmm, sweet booty for pirates, yarrr!), observation satellites, communication arrays and unfinished installations. These objects might be used later for some interesting interactions and affect the chances for pirates to attack particular areas (hope you agree, that Xsotans and pirates attacking you in the middle of nowhere is not something, that should be left as it is), but that's secondary to just making sectors more saturated without blowing economy nodes out of proportions, which are already an overkill in most circumstances.

 

Talking about combat ranges, Avorion already suffers of a very narrow range bandwidths, where a short engine boost effectively makes all long-range weapons completely meaningless. Besides its a problem of combat balance, not necessarily of sector structure. If there's any desire to change that situation, then all weapons has to put a greater pressure on your energy generation to the point where activating all of them make you effectively immobile, especially for the larger ships with massive weapon arrays, that thematically expected to perform as mobile weapon platforms.

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Been crash testing my ship designs lately and this has led me to hide my root block a few layers of systems + an armor layer inside my ship. Now the only time I can ever seem to destroy my ship in 1 hit is by full-boosting straight into an asteroid. On full collision damage if I'm not boosting full speed face first into an asteriod I generally just bounce off with relative damage. If its other ships or stations I hit then depending on its HP I either smash straight through or send them spinning.

 

(I've become convinced if your root block takes enough damage your ship will be destroyed no matter how much hp it had, which is why I started giving it extra protection and it seems to be working for the most part)

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Been crash testing my ship designs lately and this has led me to hide my root block a few layers of systems + an armor layer inside my ship. Now the only time I can ever seem to destroy my ship in 1 hit is by full-boosting straight into an asteroid. On full collision damage if I'm not boosting full speed face first into an asteriod I generally just bounce off with relative damage. If its other ships or stations I hit then depending on its HP I either smash straight through or send them spinning.

 

(I've become convinced if your root block takes enough damage your ship will be destroyed no matter how much hp it had, which is why I started giving it extra protection and it seems to be working for the most part)

 

Yes the root block has Hp equal to the ship's no matter what block type it is.  Therefore if you run into an asteroid and you root block gets hit it's easy to lose the whole ship.

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That would explain what happened to me. I found an abandoned ship that was very powerful and made of xanion. I repaired it and flew out for a while then accidentally crashed into a long arm of a station in a murky nebula.  I was killed but luckily had some salvage fighters out so i was transferred to one of them. I flew back to gather up my turrets and modules and looked at the ship but it hardly had any damage.  The randomly generated ship must have had its core block near the front. Good to know.  It's there a way to highlight the core block

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I personally turned off collision damage, not because I don't want consequences for hitting asteroids, because it also means I can't have fun ramming smaller ships. No, I turned it off because I don't want to get smashed by cargo ships around stations or upon entering a system because there's an obstacle right on the gate/jump point.

 

...but I'm seeing all this talk of "root" block and while I can technically understand that you need a way to check on which side of a broken ship you are if it survives being split in large enough pieces, buuuuut... Instead of somehow having a determined root block, shouldn't the game simply ask itself whether or not there are crew quarters on any of the large fragments first, so that if your ship gets split into two parts and only one has crew quarters you end up in the one with crew quarters. Second, if multiple parts have crew quarters, it should put you in control of the one with the greatest volume/mass.

 

To me, it's just crazy to pick a block arbitrarily that, if destroyed, destroys the whole ship/kills you.

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I'm not a fan of the root block having such significance either, to me its nothing more than a start point for building. I do like the idea of a main bridge but I get the feeling it could heavily impact ship designs (though I suppose its all down to how a block like would be implemented)

 

As for highlighting the core block - As far as I know there is no real way to tell except you might get a general idea by going into build mode then copying the saved design to clipboard and see where its being grabbed from since I 'think' it trys to paste so the root block snaps to whatever block your targeting. (Some designs seem to behave like this others dont - or I have forgot where I put the root block on those ones)

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Well, ramming in huge piece of rock at 3000km/h should destroy.. well anything? :D

 

Well, these collision mechanic bugs do not make collisions very realistic.

 

Personally I think the biggest part of the issue, is that people are dense. It doesn't take knowledge of astrophysics and quantum mechanics to figure out how to adjust your trajectory in accord with your camera offset, or how you can use the reticles of you turrets to see where you actually going, or to aim in between the asteroids into the background space to avoid any collisions passing trough the field...

 

If only "dense" people are capable of having a collision accident, then I'm surprised that the Earth doesn't contract into a black hole from the density. :P

 

Seriously, collisions happens a lot - even of most players are reluctant to admit it. The other night, the chat on the server I was on was filled with reports of several players crashing into 'roids and gates, usually losing their ship in the process. Some of them lost their ship twice in the same night. Sometimes fog was to blame. Other times, not.

 

Keep in mind: This was in a galaxy where collision was set to 0.5 (half damage)!

 

Yes, adjusting our ship's trajectory can save it from collision - in a vaguely similar manner how a calm and experienced driver can correct a slide on an icy road. But that requires refraining from panic, a decent skill, and probably good timing and judgement. If you panic or you notice too late, then it's probably too late to avoid it.

 

Also, for evading asteroids, yaw/pitch are in fact almost useless - you can change direction of your ship, but changing direction of your movement is MUCH slower and harder, especially when running at high speeds.

 

See above. Yaw/Pitch are not useless if you have enough, know how to use it, and don't panic. You change your orientation and apply the afterburners. Pay attention to your turret reticle,  prograde and/or retrograde vectors. If aimed right, you can rather rapidly change the ship's movement or even stop. Granted, this is much easier said than done...

 

What you really want, are strafing thrusters, especiallly for sidestrafing...

 

Not sure what you mean by "strafing thrusters"... Are you referring to Directional thrusters? Directional thrusters pretty much act on the ship the same way as regular Thrusters.

 

In this game

(a) you slow down if the sector is foggy

(b) you start your initial thrust towards a gate not directly at it, which will reveal any roids that were directly between you and the gate (they can be hard to see against the gate field).

© Combat, you do from outside the roid field shooting at all the stupid NPCs caught on the roids, which is literally fish in a barrel.

 

These are good points, particularly the point about fog. However, © only seems useful if you happen to have long-range weapons. Short-range weapons won't reach from outside a roid field.

 

In addition to what Blaine has said, our ships in Avorion lack Crumple Zones.

 

related to that: Integrity Fields make Blocks individually 10x harder, but this wont affect Ships total HP, aye? So would a Block on the Nose of my ship, if destroyed from a collision enought to hit the 10x HP of it, do more dmg to the Ship at all as if there was no Field Generator? Cant a nose without Generator not be used as said crumble zone?

 

Yes the root block has Hp equal to the ship's no matter what block type it is.  Therefore if you run into an asteroid and you root block gets hit it's easy to lose the whole ship.

 

I think that Fox and SageThe13th have a point. Individual blocks can act as a sort of crumple zone. If having a core block in the front means a collision is far more likely to result in ship loss, this rather proves it.

 

Unlike core blocks, which keep subtracting hp from the hull until the ship is destroyed, regular blocks get sacrificed to protect the ship from further damage. So, if a collision is calculated to do 1000 points of damage, even if the blocks on the front of the ship only have a couple hundred hp (combined), they may take the brunt of this and spare the rest of the ship.

 

I think part of the issue is that the sectors are so dense. If the devs were to modify the sector generation to increase the spacing between asteroids and stations it should be much less common for players to hit asteroids.

 

Good point. Another reason why collions in Avorion are not always the player's fault. Also, more evidence that they're not realistic.

 

And then more common for people to bash into stations as they build ships optimized for higher speeds, and end up overshooting more often.

 

Another good point. It also depends on whether a player get's in a hurry to go someplace. Also, ever since that beta patch that increased engine speed and changed how thrusters work, things changed. I'm still learning how to not slide all over the place and overshoot my destination.

 

The problem is that outer space is vast, and there are a lot of dilemmas faced by games like these.

 

Like you said, even with 1000% SETA, travel in the X games can be slow and tedious. But I think this supports the call to nerf collision damage. Games are supposed to be about fun and entertainment. Losing ships and valuable resources to collions can get old pretty quick.

 

It would be rather nice to have a block that adds more information such as your current speed...

 

I agree that it would be nice to see our current speed. But, the rest of that sounds like information overload, IMO. And it's a lot to ask of the devs. (Avorion is supposed to be done by Q3.)

 

It'd be easier just to add a current speed indicator, fix collision bugs, and nerf the default collision damage a bit. That, combined with the new prograde and retrograde vectors, should be enough.

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Not sure what you mean by "strafing thrusters"... Are you referring to Directional thrusters? Directional thrusters pretty much act on the ship the same way as regular Thrusters.

 

 

Strafing thrusters, are directional thrusters facing sideways, so your ship can STRAFE (duh). This way, you don´t have to yaw/pitch as much, and you can just strafe away from collision path (which is usually faster than yaw+afterburner, and safer aswell, because you don´t have to enlarge your collision profile as you stay forward facing).

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To me, it's just crazy to pick a block arbitrarily that, if destroyed, destroys the whole ship/kills you.
It is not arbitrary. The ships are saved as a hierarhy from a single block, that's all others are placed relative to. Besides, if the root block has the same HP as the ship itself, then its destruction is irrelevant - if your ship HP are expended, you will destroy your ship either way, whether root block is involved or not.
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Well i do agree when in an asteroid field you should slow down and raming even a small rock at 1000 m/s should get you blown in peaces, of course.

 

But that's just plain carricature.

 

There are a few bugs or unpolished behavior with asteroids that can get on nerves, and with collision in general.

 

One simple exemple, to trade between 2 ships or with a station when you have a big ship, sometime you have to almost "physically touch" the one you want to trade with leading with a collision at less than 10 m/s and you get blocks destroyed for this, or blocks on the other ship/station, leading to rep loose, destroying the dock or some funcky effects. That shouldn't happen, really. I mean ok, raming a station with a big ship, even at low speed will make damages, for sure, but here it's a bit ridiculous as you can't have much control over it. And my ship have heavy trinium armor all on the hull, if the plating can't take a railgun shot but can't ram at low speed something, there is an issue.

 

It's the same with asteroides, sometime you need to go take a container, you slow down to be almost immobile, take it, then you rotate really slightly and bam you touch an asteroid, 1 block destroyed. Seriously ... So you will tell me "You shouldn't rotate close to asteroides then". Alright, but when you enter building more, or when you use the shift key to look a bit around you, the ship WILL rotate once you exit the mod, so you can't avoid it.

 

And lastly, and for me it's really the thing that makes lot of issues, the fact you can't see what is below your ship. The rear view is fun, but sometime you are flying in a sector, all seem clear and BAM, there was a rock in front of you, slightly at the bottom and you had never the opportunity to see it cause you don't have a better view like a cockpit one. This leading to the fact a cockpit block would be really something that could help a lot, placing it wisely to have a correct view on the ship, of maybe even a "camera" or "sensor" block that would place the camera in 1rst person view and prevent this kind of things.

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