This is all about allowing people to fight eachother seriously, since this game has the possibility of war, and things will get serious if people are trying to settle their differences. If anything the playerbase has dwindled to the current size because even in the old system it was very difficult to resolve conflicts within the rules of the game, and the new ship designer only worsens that. If you can just create really laggy/screwy geometry and make it impossible to board your ships, then that is a huge and unfun advantage that more or less shuts down conflict on both sides as you get an arms race on how best to break the game (as has happened in the past).
I mainly am proposing something along the lines of automated pathing and colliders. I'm not arguing against things like allowing ant sized species their ant sized hallways, although that sort of thing basically requires any real militaries to use ant sized crews. Thats fine in my opinion, and honestly kindof hilarious.
Its another matter entirely if someone is allowed to create crazy geometry that is completely unintelligible to humans and not pathable by the ai at all.
If you required people to draw collider and path map things in something distantly resembling the old style, and then enabled an option for interiors to be rendered off of that instead of the player defined geometry, then that would remove all possibility of creating impossible to navigate interiors. It would also further erase all incentive to create deliberately screwy/laggy geometry as the enemy could just turn it off as needed and see the smooth/rectangular collider geometry. The pointlessness of being an asshole should in turn lead to people almost never having to use that mode, so you can for the most part see peoples fancy interiors they spent time on.
I mainly am proposing something along the lines of automated pathing and colliders. I'm not arguing against things like allowing ant sized species their ant sized hallways, although that sort of thing basically requires any real militaries to use ant sized crews. Thats fine in my opinion, and honestly kindof hilarious.
Its another matter entirely if someone is allowed to create crazy geometry that is completely unintelligible to humans and not pathable by the ai at all.
If you required people to draw collider and path map things in something distantly resembling the old style, and then enabled an option for interiors to be rendered off of that instead of the player defined geometry, then that would remove all possibility of creating impossible to navigate interiors. It would also further erase all incentive to create deliberately screwy/laggy geometry as the enemy could just turn it off as needed and see the smooth/rectangular collider geometry. The pointlessness of being an asshole should in turn lead to people almost never having to use that mode, so you can for the most part see peoples fancy interiors they spent time on.