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Massive Super-Constructions and Station Docking Engine, and Docking in general


AvorionCraft
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The attached images are of a "Dyson Sphere" that was the product of about 60 hours of work, requiring a market equivalence of 100,000,000,000 credits to construct. (approx 60,000,000,000 actual credits, 40,000,000,000 in resources). Though I am sure there are more costly stations out there, I don't believe anybody has constructed anything even remotely as complicated as this one. This was also completed within about five weeks of a full server reset. (Humble brag +1)

(Edit: On that note, we might want to talk about economy, as I have officially gamed the system so hard that nobody could possibly catch up to the GMF Alliance.)

In the third image, the "tug" that you can see is about 4km long. It is server-max on volume, and is effectively nothing but thrusters with a little engine to move gigaton scale objects around. It doesn't work very well admittedly, but it was enough I suppose. In the fourth image you can see a Star Trek Next Gen canon-scaled Galaxy class inside the sphere. I cannot state it enough. This project was viewed as "Fing insanity" by many others including admins and the server owner too. My gut says that had it not been for my active efforts in doing everything to resolve server load for this thing between inertial dampeners, constantly going in to click on and enter each station to kill the jumpy bug, and actively decancering it, the admins may have been forced to delete the sector just for server stability. Props to the owner for allowing it to stay after all of it considering how often GMF home sector popped up as "oh my god why is this thing murdering my server."

Though at this time the station is more or less complete, being an amalgamation of 27 total stations linked through magic and heresy to a single central station which is the "star" in the middle. For some reason I'm lacking screenshots of the completed station before I had to partially deconstruct it to fix the GPU cancer that was afflicted upon any/all visitors. You devs are welcome to join up on Tree-Cafe and request a joining of the GMF (Galactic Monetary Fund) for a quick dock/transport to the galactic core to see it for yourselves. You would need to join the discord and ask for a GMF representative though. They'll point to someone that can help. As always, if you have minerals to sell, GMF will buy them. (the plug cannot be stopped, GMF basically owns the galaxy).

I believe that this station has more or less pushed the upper limits of what is even possible to do in Avorion on a more or less totally vanilla server. (Tree Cafe 1) 

The construction of this monstrous amalgamation was at the very least, exceedingly difficult (and has since still been left partially deconstructed because of these issues and general frustration).

Stations/tug would randomly decide to fly off at near light speed upon undocking. There was an incident in which the first Dyson structure was in process of docking a contracted shipyard (alliance member) and it flew away at near light speed. It eventually came to a halt about 5500km away. Rather than shrink it down and bring it back quickly (crew as already in place), I instead elected to, out of spite, send the tug and slowly bring it back just because. That process took about 3 hours, and the risk of it happening again was unfortunately omnipresent.

Individual station pieces would randomly jump/jolt (and still do) between 0m/s and 1000+m/s velocity. Reasoning is unknown, but it does occur. Desyncs with this issue can result in undocking and flying/flailing dyson pieces. One of which did result in a server issue, as one of the pieces wound up desyncing and getting stuck inside the bounding boxes of the other 20 stations resulting in the entire 25gigaton (ish) structure jumping around like a kangaroo mouse on speed.

The docking process itself was nightmarish, in that the docking mechanism pulls to the center of mass, not the nearest dock. There were times in which I had carefully pushed/pulled/maneuvered massive structures up to the central piece in which there was a docking port less than 2 meters away from the structure, and rather that clip in and latch, it would pull the structure off center. This alone cost at least 20 hours of the process in total. Exceedingly frustrating where it does not need to be. For that, it would be best if you guys would create a way for docks to lock to each other based on user input. A way for the player to effectively highlight a dock in building mode on one, and then go to building mode on the other, highlight the dock that is desired, and then the docking procedure pulls only those two docks together.

Edit: A Ship module called "Tug Power" or something like that, that increases the overall engine power, thruster capability, and so forth would be golden for builders like myself. The natural counterpoint would be "ship can no longer carry offensive weaponry" meaning that the ship would require an escort. Naturally this would make moving stations and asteroids to different sectors far more smooth.

Additionally, docking is full on broken in other ways. You cannot fast-travel (captain command) with a docked object, as this results (in a documented case with a station) in situations where an admin must be contacted and called in, because the station is bouncing between 200-500km from sector center at literal light speed.

There is not enough of a time delay for active stations before they push other objects out of the way. If a station like this were to completely desync for example, there would be a symphony of utter chaos as 27 stations docking ports suddenly start pushing against one another, shoving 600Mt-2.2Gt objects around like they're massless. It is the sole reason that my alliance GMF has restricted access to station management (accidental undock all being the other side of that issue.)

An individual station management gui to clarify within the alliance that alliance members may have access to manage stations except stations specifically marked/toggled on the build screen would resolve that.

A way to pre-set where stations will be docked and an autopilot module that will line up said docks without player manual manipulation would be a massive boon for such a project for those crazy like foxes to do it, as well as simpler smaller stations. 

Docking is one of the coolest yet most frustrating things in this game at this time.

Multi-hull ships actually cause enormous issues (admin and I to test at some point for your data points). In addition to this amalgamation, I created a multi-hull ship in ship which didn't quite cheat server rules, but showed something interesting. Docked ships inside of other ships or stations create massive latency and makes servers excessively angry. This is a pity, as the entire point of the multi-hull ship was to take advantage of the docking mechanism as it was given. The result was a ship with 2mil dps, insane maneuverability, 1trillion impenetrable shields, and over 2million cargo space within a combined hull of about 400m m^3. It was initially higher but I rebuilt it and shrank it so it could fit inside the passageways of the sphere in the pictures. Basically another fanatical undertaking because I think of things and then do them.

It is my hope that you guys will see this, and at some point in the future the admin and I will be able to provide server data that covers this from the development perspective. 

Summary:

Docking is broke as hell, but also cool as hell. Nothing quite like flinging a 1Gt object around like a dervish via a ship that masses in the Kiloton range. It's hilarious. If you join up I'll be happy to show that off too.

 

-Halcyon

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Addendum:

Further enhancements that I can suggest for docking in general (in addition to "hard dock" as kinda suggested by kamots below for the physics engine):

Hard dock described: Functionally make docked objects single objects--cut down on server load. I can't think of how the rest of the physics engine would be any different than what it already is.

Station Thrusters/Engines: Add engine/thruster blocks to stations with a required module with a caveat--stations despite having the module cannot move on their own, but their engines/thrusters can be operated by a docked ship, increasing the ability of the ship to operate/maneuver the station around.

Active Mobile Stations: If Hard dock were a thing with single operating structure physics and station thrusters/engines, truly magnificent structures/vessels could be created. This could be achieved through a new module called something "Mobilization Module" with a similar restriction as the further above suggested Tug module. "Cannot be equipped with offensive weapons modules" and "unique." With only the legendary version also adding in up to 4 offensive weapon slots. This module would allow for a station to be active while being transported, and additionally there would need to be a module on the tug which would dictate how many stations it could carry with it, (1/2/4/6/8/12/16).

These would allow players to effectively build city ships that could take their factories to optimal locations (within reason similar to proposed limitations). I had heard rumor of one modder planning something similar to this but I think he's on a boat somewhere in the frozen waters of the Caribbean deep above the skies of the rocky mountains at the moment or something, and that rumor is over a year old.

Hard dock would also kill issues with de-sync, allow for multiple-hull ships to operate without issue of desync (it happens a LOT more often than it should) but may also come up with other issues, which would probably necessitate yet another module that I've outlined before as "Parasite/Command" module pairs.

Edited by AvorionCraft
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Docking.... uh.... "issues" also causes significant server-side performance hits. It would be good to see some improvement to the docking system. The worst issue seems that, when docked, it isn't a "hard dock" where the vessels become a single physics unit which means one or both of them will constantly wiggle, again causing server performance impact.

Edited by Kamots
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On 5/28/2022 at 9:42 PM, Kamots said:

Docking.... uh.... "issues" also causes significant server-side performance hits. It would be good to see some improvement to the docking system. The worst issue seems that, when docked, it isn't a "hard dock" where the vessels become a single physics unit which means one or both of them will constantly wiggle, again causing server performance impact.

Yyyyyyyep. This little issue ruined my day for my god killer. ;_; Still sitting in drydock, hoping to be used again someday.

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What would help a lot is multidocking, so we can dock on other ships/stations already docked to something else. At the moment we can dock to the one structure it all started with.
Better than nothing, espeacially without the cargo shuttles we had before. I am a little bit sad they are gone, but I can live with that.
BUT I still want an efficient setup for my stations, so the only way for now is docking product lines togheter.Sadly this brings another performance impact to the sector the stations sit in.

Another (in my opinion) good idea could be a change on the station system itself, but this will take some time and effort.

Let me explain : Instead of building one station at a time with just one purpose it could be a great idea to have a modular system.
For example : We buy a mainframe station instead of a one purpose only station, and instead of just building new stations we buy station modules we can attach on the mainframe station. It all would merge and become one, the already existing docks could be modified to create a specific new block even with tractor beams for that specific purpose. This way we could get rid of some performance impacts ,too.
Ofcourse it will be difficult to keep already existing stations, if this would be possible at all. But this is not that much of a problem, we start new games every few months or weeks anyways.( again, just my opinion and it is totally fine if you disagree )

I fully understand that this is not as simple as I let it sound here. This is just one idea I had while playing Avorion and struggling with intense performance issues on a still strong rig.So I started thinking how I can bring in some ideas for you guys.

At this point there is just two things to say : Avorion is already an amazing game with so much potential, modding community is still active, every few days we see new amazing creations at the steam workshop and I hope we will have many years to enjoy Avorion from now on....maybe even with some new dlc to keep Boxelware up and running 😉

I am done throwing money at AAA studios like EA where all the ppl standing for good games and art are already gone..... do you guys here on the forum even remember the old days in the 90s when EA said " treat games as art and developers/gamedesigner etc. as artists" .....

Edited by wuki1989
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