bring back the old style

[Mr. Mortius]

The new designer needs to keep it's flexibility, or it will not be worth the time spent developing it.

I have yet to see a ship with an entirely impossible to navigate interior, only challenging ones. Crazy geometry is a good thing, and allows some really interesting designs to be made. As an example, something like this:

https://i.imgur.com/aKDCrV8.gifv

would never have been close to possible in the old designer. I'm currently working on a ship that expands upon the different directions of gravity with paths and rooms spiraling around each other in every which direction. Would Quake identify this as "screwy geometry" and want to remove any and all designs any Hazeron players made like this? The ship is still perfectable walkable, but uses highly unusual geometry and pathing. Limiting these to the old style would restrict the new to simply fancier looking old ships.

If there is ever a return of the old style room drawer, it should be limited to a simplified option that automatically creates everything, while leaving the possibility to define everything manually.

As for the designer being too difficult to use, neither Vectorus nor I had any 3D modeling experience before using the designer. Both of us learned how to use it without issue, although I'll admit Vectorus may be slightly more skilled in one or two areas of design. It was the same way with the old designer for me: I thought it extremely confusing at first, but then learned how to use it and eventually became familiar with it. I'm sure the new designer will be the same.

[Vectorus]

As I said, I'm not against the old designer's "room painting" method as a supplementary tool. It'd be great for people who are intimidated by 3d modelling and don't have the time to learn. Just not at the expense of the improved way. And certainly not to enforce a given interpretation of "non-screwiness" (not that I don't appreciate the gameplay concerns).

I find the new designer faster in almost every goal-oriented case (rather than just painting on the fly). "Put a pillar here, put a window there": that was unintuitive in the old designer. It was often a puzzle game rather than a 3d asset-creation programme, even if it was quick once you'd learned the puzzle. In the new designer, however much some may call it unintuitive in return: if you want a pillar, you jolly well draw a pillar. You don't create two rooms which meet half way, disguise the meeting point with wall openings, then have a third room in the middle to represent your pillar, then copy the entire thing onto eight different levels, one of which doesn't work because there's accidentally a room already there with the same number. "Oh, you want your hull door only half as wide as your ship? Better have your two rooms and three wall openings ready." Want a table in your cabin? "Oh, you're going to have to make a tiny patch of lounge just there, sorry about that. No, I'm not telling you how!" Just remembering it makes me steam at the ears. Now, at least, any idiot can make something that looks like the Enterprise, without having to type into Google "minecraft make circle from cubes calculator" - i.e., without having to use skills more related to logic puzzles than design. You want a circle, you draw a circle. You want a window, you draw a window. It's not always quick, but it makes a lot more sense. To this idiot, anyway.




Anyone think they can copy this in the old designer while screaming fewer than, let's say, 5 times? No, seriously. I'll give you 5 quid, one per non-scream. Oh, and you have to eliminate the weird floating floors, too. And why yes, it does indeed still look like crap; thank you for noticing, kind sir.

Now, it's possible that a thoughtful room-painting addon could solve my gripes better than the old system ever did. I'd hope for that, rather than a straight rehash of the bad old days. I would add to Anr's point that making a design with specific functions is actually easier now, even if on-the-fly editing is not. Want a ship with so much shield power? In the old designer: "oops, can't fit enough shield units here. Better add some more hull. Oops, now it's too heavy. Add more grav units. No space - add more hull. Over TL limit. Sigh". Everything's numbers now. All you need to do is look up how big a cube you need and you can plan everything in advance. Make the cube, assign the volume. Done. Worry about aesthetics later. Creating functionality brushstroke by brushstroke was not always life's purest and most unalloyed pleasure...

Anyway, everyone's fundamentally agreed here. A room-drawing system would be a good addition. Wholehearted support here. Just don't force it on the rest of us. Celarious, let's stay courteous. You're getting almost as bad as Kohta  ;)

EDIT: Mortius got in there before me. Now, that's a cool ship! And good points made, too. Freedom of function, things like gravity direction, is even more important than aesthetic freedom. Let's have a show of hands. We encounter an alien species in 2019. Their ships are either a) screwy b) non-screwy. Keep them up while I count.

I saw Quake's post later. I take the point, but I believe some way of downloading enemy void plans would be a good solution. No functioning ship is truly non-navigable. I have boarded four or five unknown new designs, without a guide, and found my way around without too much trouble. About two of them had intentional "mindscrew" traps, which were far from insuperable.

[QuakeIV]

There is no reason why some rehash of the old system would have the same excessive limitations. I also agree it would be exceptionally difficult to create a system that guarantees navigable geometry that also enables the fairly creative environments with varying directions of gravity.

Currently there is no correlation between the collider vertices and what you see visually, and furthermore there is no limitation on importing models with for instance a bunch of polygons jutting into the halls and obscuring your view. You could for instance have a path through the polygon clusterfuck that you have memorized which isn't obvious from inspecting the design due to the sheer amount of noise introduced by the designer. Then you just carry the crew to their stations and the ship runs fine while being pretty much impassible to anyone but the designer.

You could also put invisible pit traps into ships with jagged overlapping colliders at the bottom that would be impossible to escape from.

Not to mention I have seen some extremely high-polygon designs that probably would not render well on older machines. I don't know off the top of my head if there is an upper limit but there probably should be. By all appearances it would currently be perfectly possible to create deliberately laggy environments, though that could be resolved by simply putting upper limits on the amount of detail you could add, rather than forcing the player to create a simpler interior for someone to render (using a drawing system rather than full 3d rendering).

There is also no obligation to actually add ai pathing, so you are left in a scenario where AI helping you board is outright impossible, and player boarding would be extremely difficult and unpleasant.

[Mr. Mortius]

Both ship and building allowable detail have been heavily restricted since the new designer was first added. I haven't had any lag with the new system since then, even with large groups of ships in a single location.

[QuakeIV]

That particular point is quite moot, then.

[Vectorus]

I think we can mitigate a lot of the problems here, but there's still a kernel of truth in it. First, boarding is really difficult - even humans boarding other humans. In modern warfare, boarding actions under fire are extremely rare, for a good reason. The Royal Navy last boarded someone in combat on 16th February 1940. That's 5 remaining years of WWII (+Suez, the Falklands etc.) during which they didn't board anyone. And even then, it wasn't a warship. All you get now are police actions after the enemy has already surrendered.

If you do plan to board someone, you're going to need the SBS or the American Navy SEALs, backed up by weeks or months of careful naval intelligence, which probably begins with getting hands on the target ship's blueprints. After that, like any action against a prepared force in an enclosed space with home advantage (e.g. hostage situations), it's going to become a slaughter very quickly if you make any mistakes at all. Remember those old S.W.A.T and Rainbow Six games? Like that, but probably worse. In the new Star Trek film, Kirk and Spock boarded Nero's ship blind, near the end, and immediately they were nearly killed. If they'd been redshirts, they would have died there and then. We're all redshirts in this game, man! Take the redshirt pill, Quake!

Now, boarding is tons of fun, so it should be easier than real life. But I really do think some form of scanning and intelligence is a necessary preliminary. Downloading a read-only copy of all or part of the enemy design is the obvious way to go. It would make shipboard design stations (which are now possible) a really useful thing to have and consistent with the setting; right now they feel a bit meta. Handheld scanners could reveal paths/doors. I've said it all before.

Another thing that'd help would be a "beam to room/part number" setting on the transporter. That would circumvent most traps. You can already do it by offsetting coordinates manually, if the room's position is known. An auto setting would be great. That would lead to situations where you control the ship but not all the internals. Remember the beginning of Star Wars, where Vader has control of Leia's ship, but still has to fight through the inside? Or Stargate: Atlantis and Universe, where I understand they control the alien structures for several weeks/months before fully exploring everything. That could be really cool. Imagine travelling through space in your captured vessel, weeks later:

"Sir, we've just found a bottomless pit on level five. There's a nest of ravenous bugblatter beasts down there!"
"Um, how are they down there if it's bottomless, Lieutenant Ixtihub?"
"Why don't you ask them, sir?"

Finally, forgive me for saying it sounds as if you haven't been using new ships much. Give them a chance! Frustrating interiors have always been possible. Anyone remember robske's ships, with hundreds of totally separate compartments and no doors, so that you had to keep beaming back and forth for hours before you got anywhere? Paladin, you here? But the point is, for every one time you're boarded, there are 99 times when you just get blown out of the sky at max range. Especially in the war situation you suggest, when the enemy takes no risks.  And there are 999,000 times when you don't get attacked at all. During those times, you'll have to live with warp monsters that the crew can't reach, warp monsters that you can't reach and make horrific chewing sounds 24/7 while stuck in the ceiling; you'll have to live with that guaranteed time you click on the floor with all crew selected, and now they're all leaving their posts, getting stuck and you have to spend an hour fixing it (because you have no paths). And so on.

Long story short: if you make a "screwy" ship, it inconveniences me for at most, a few minutes out of my life, before I chuckle and laser it into the next galaxy. It causes you yourself untold hours of frustration. Is it really worth it? The fact that almost every ship I've encountered is easily navigable suggests most people think not. Even our resident Munchkin Mortius and our resident Mindscrewer minty make ships that are reasonably practical and transparent, while still being inventive. It's just that some of us probably aren't helping things by posting only our weirdest creations online (*cough* Mortius *cough*)...

[QuakeIV]

Given your remarks about boarding, I really doubt you have fought even one battle in a full scale war in this game, let alone the 100 implied by your 'for every one there is 99' simile. Boarding has been exceedingly, excessively, massively common in almost every big conflict in the game so far, and I was with syndicate since the west galactic federation. I have single handedly destroyed an entire tl32 empire in less than a day, and helped destroy a couple dozen more.

A huge part of attacking an enemy empire is stealing their equipment, or overpowering a superior fleet by momentarily knocking a ships shields down and murdering the crew. If that aspect of the game turns into an arms race of who can make the most horrible ship to board in a world where the designers control every polygon of the display and collider meshes, then that would be utterly miserable. You would have extensively terrible ships specifically designed for the purpose. (as had existed in the past, except on steroids. people have already proven to be willing to spend days on these things, the WGF fracture design took weeks in total). You would have a requirement to at least match the enemies ability to build such abominations lest you be at a huge disadvantage due to the boarding threat. Yes, horrid ships existed previously, but that mainly had to do with making lots of doors. At least you could generally blast your way through that with C4 instead of it just being a wall of fuckery.

Downloading the enemies designs in advance, even if that were for some reason allowed for proper combat designs, would hardly ensure that you knew how to board said design if it was just a confusing mass of lines in the designer where you don't know what to look for. Especially since they could fairly easily add a variety of decoy files that aren't actually meant for use, just enough vertexes to make the file size plausible. Dont patronize me and assume I just don't know how to look at CAD drawings, I will prove your ass wrong and show you exactly what I mean if provoked.

Also, most designs so far have very evidently not been designed with any intent at vigorous competition in mind. If any two groups of people get even mildly riled up when trying to destroy eachother, then one will inevitably push the boundaries of whats acceptable in a ship design, and force a cascade of retaliations in kind.

I agree you could for instance beam to individual crewmen and pick them off, but that would be a worst case scenario and would be a really miserable slog, especially if they had plenty of backup control stations. Beam to crewman, suicide bomb him since there is nowhere to go from that one guy, beam to next one, do the same. All while swirling around in a star system for hours on end trying to get their shields knocked down again. Which is perhaps something else that needs to be pointed out. Spacecraft fights can easily turn into multi-hour jousts, I have been tapped into a fight that had been running for eight hours straight by the time I arrived and joined in. Forcing people to beam over repeatedly massively drags things out.

I could edit this into a more elegantly arranged post, but I frankly don't really expect to be taken seriously and am mostly posting here on the off chance that I'm wrong on that, since talk is cheap. Especially typing something up on a forum. What I am trying to say is evident in whats written here, you quite simply take me seriously or you dont.

[Mr. Mortius]

Why would you waste eight hours on a single fight against some spacecraft? In that time you could build about 24 maximum population old style cities, take more than that from the enemy by avoiding the ships, or ram some cheap designs into them for easy kills. Fighting them ship to ship is an inefficient use of time.

I don't take you seriously. You were part of Syndicate? I fought against Syndicate with a small group of two other people and held off a group of 6-8 for a long time without much trouble. Later I matched the population of their entire combined efforts (~350-400k empire loyal population) alone while there were still only old style cities in the game. You took down a TL32 empire singlehandedly? First thing I did when I joined the game, using my tl4 shuttle while I still had no idea that the lights were blinking red because I'd left the doors open. I'll be the first to admit I was a clueless and near useless player at that time. I've conquered over 130 empires since then, many of them multiple players against me alone, and only lost once. Most importantly, I've actually played the game recently, instead of hiding in some remote corner of space.

If you can take down the shields on a new style ship, you can take down the ship in another few hits, especially after the health reduction recently. Fights between ships are no longer hour long slogs. All energy weapons have the same range now, no matter the volume dedicated to them. There is no point anymore in the old jousting strategy. Warfare has changed since then, and your information is badly out of date. Please try and leave suggestions on mechanics to people who are familiar with them.

This is something many people seem to have difficulty understanding. If you cannot destroy an obstacle directly, go around it or figure out some more creative way to deal with it. I just recently took down a group of three Q220 ships and a similar station with a Q80 shuttle design, no boarding involved. There's certainly no shortage of options.

[QuakeIV]

If ships do in fact destroy eachother extremely quickly then that does make a big difference. We did eventually ram it, but thats hardly viable if they are moving very quickly, which they were doing most of the time. Last I heard the main difference between old ships and new was maximum volume and aesthetics, I had not been aware that ships would die in a few shots. I'm actually not sure how on earth thats supposed to be workable but I mean meh, valid point if true. It still does nothing to address equipment theft, which more or less decided a lot of conflicts in our favor since many of us only knew how to steal shit. All weapons having equal range doesn't say anything about the validity of jousting, so its not obvious why you brought that point up.

Syndicate was also one of the only groups in the game that actually knew combat in and out at the time. Its quite plausible that you fought syndicate and won at one point, that was far from impossible. Most of the people we fought were severely inept, had no idea how to make difficult-to-capture cities or dangerous ships, and as a result we steadily got more bored with the game and became much less proficient at it. I'd say more than half of our existence in the game was in that inept, half-bored state. Most of us hung around as long as we did in hopes the game would one day change.

In general the long engagement I mentioned proceeded as it did because they were fairly effectively showing up and retaking cities as they were being captured, or in some cases driving off the attacking ships and preventing the attacking players from respawning reliably in order to wear down the cities. Bypassing a warp 9 capable ship that had access to mail reports telling of cities under attack isn't valid unless said ship bypasses you. Part of the reason things took as long as they did was because zeros was trying to avoid them and take cities and was not being allowed to do so.

Yes, it would have been possible to shit out huge numbers of cities and completely invalidate any kind of combat. Yes we could have dropped powered down respawn pods and harassed them indefinitely (this was found to be distateful and was discontinued shortly after its discovery). In fact, we or in many cases the opposition could have fucked off into space and it would have been functionally impossible to find them or us. These are extremely cheesy strategies and huge flaws in the games conflict system as they more or less render the supposed combat entirely moot. In general we avoided that and wanted the game to actually have some interesting action in it.

[Vectorus]

Trying to stay on-topic here, I have no reason to question Quake's experience, or the fact that his experience led to useful insights under the old metagame. That's for him and Mortius to debate! But I don't think what we're saying and what he's saying are incompatible.

What Quake is saying, I think, is that in the WGF/Syndicate era, boarding and capture were an important part of total warfare. We're saying that in the new designer era, boarding shouldn't be the most important part of total warfare. One statement is indicative and historical, the other is deontic and programmatic. I think we've adduced enough support from real-world conditions, sci-fi narrative tropes and video game balancing conventions (all good sources for Hazeron to draw on) to establish the position. I'm a fan of boarding and have always argued for mechanics which enable it: weapons which disable and immobilize, shield disruption etc. But every reference I know argues for its being an entertaining secondary mechanic, not a front-line strategy. Someone may be able to make a good argument against that, but I don't think they've done so yet. 

The only area where I'd make a claim to some solid experience is new ships themselves. In recent months, I've become very familiar with the tremendous firepower of new ships compared to their health. I'm just not sure I can think of a situation where I'd sit around, inside transporter range, fiddling about with boarding while my own vessel gets hammered. You'd have a few minutes at most. I'd only risk it if I had a tremendous tactical advantage, or stealth and surprise, or a completely disposable ship. In any of those cases, I'd presumably be able to solve the puzzle at leisure, or else give up and destroy the enemy some easier way. Hence, my 1:99 statement, which I will defend. In war, you try to win without fighting the enemy's strongest units at all, a.k.a. the Maginot Shuffle. If you must fight those, you take the minimum risk possible, which certainly precludes boarding as a first resort!

Most of the people we fought were severely inept, had no idea how to make difficult-to-capture cities or dangerous ships

Er...I wasn't going to make that point, out of respect for the fact you've probably fought more people than I have. But it seems you've just made a pretty good case against yourself, anyway. So, do you want more difficult-to-capture stuff, or don't you? Getting slightly confused.


(By the way, if it's ever revisited, my "steal blueprint" suggestion was not about downloading something from a list of enemy designs, but pointing some sort of scanner at a specific enemy ship and pulling part or all of its file; presumably with the help of future stealth mechanics. Modified by Q, scanner volume, ECM, &c. Hiding everything except room voids and stations in the parts list gives you a pretty good general idea of layout. The rules about how voids must be made are strict enough that you can't really do anything super-wacky with them without lagging your own ship to death. At careful team shouldn't need more than a week to work out how to capture any given design. If you're really set on capturing, that's a lot quicker making a new one of your own.)