Here are my two children ( and soon to be more ). Boat and plane engine!: They dont like you going overspeed They dont like you using more weapons that you should They dont like you turning faster than you should I'm pretty sure that when they grow up, they wont like you spamming oil tanks on small vessels ( Yeah, they are a bit moody) - Some random guy: Oh, your children suck then! why you even brought them to the server!?. - Locko1997: Wait till you meet them, thanks to them we'll be able to go in speeds faster than 15 mph on small or well designed boats. Also, they will see no one is using more weapons than the boat should allow. They are even gonna check that they dont turn the boat in half a second ( Like Reddeath's ships ). - Some random guy: I still dont believe you, i'll have to see them to believe it! - Locko1997: That's not even the best part. They check the vessel size and shape to determine their speeds, turning rate and armament according to that. If you want to see them, i hold a picture of them in my wallet. I'll show you. This one is plane panel. And this one is boat panel. How to use them Weld the panel to your vessel. Make sure to weld it to the base prop if you have one, or to the most stable props your vessel has. Press E twice on the panel. If your vessel is too small, or lacks fin area in the case of planes, the panel will let you know. Once the requeriments are met, the engine will be created at the center of mass of your vessel, and you will be free to play with it. - Some random guy: Wait, what the hell is "fin area"!?. - Locko1997: Plane panel check's the area of the wings in a plane, so we can avoid: Purely E2 planes Hover Planes Really Small and mingy planes - Some random guy: Oh crap, there goes all my planes - Locko1997: You can build better ones, i'm sure of that. The good thing is that now plane combat will be more fair, as they will be regulated according to their size and shape. So no more 180 turns in half a second. - Some random guy: Damn, there goes my plane fighting skills too. Features! Maximum Speed Checks for ship size and the lenght/width ratio. This meaning that long and thin boats will be faster than fat and short boats. Also means that we would finaly have light ships that could go above 15 mph making combat more intresting Maximun Turning Speed Checks for ship size and the lenght. Meaning that long boats will turn slower than short boats Maximun Armament Checks the ship size and assigns a determinated amount of points to be spent on the ship. With this we could have a limit bigger than our 16 cannon current limit. ( To be discussed ) Point System Point system is very simple. Each different weapon will have a different point cost, so you can arrange your boat how ever you like, as long as you dont use more points that your boat is able to. For example, right now boat points are like this: Cannons: 1 point 50cal MG Turret: 2 points Flak Turret: 5 points Plane Points: Turrets: 2 points Bombs: 4 points - Some random guy: Wait there, what happens if i excede my stats? -Locko1997: As soon as you excede your engine maximum speed / turning rate your engine will start to stress. After a short period, your engine will fail breaking your ship. The good thing is that if you stop exceeding your stats, the engine will lose stress. Also, if you have an armament excess in boats, you'll just lose a point in speed for each point of armament in excess. On planes you wont be able to get outside harbour.
Why not make the panel appear above the core once it's placed on a central prop instead of needing to manually weld a panel and select a base prop, then have the engine appear? Also, wouldn't it be better to disable thrusters and just use the engine itself to move the central prop, thus making the 'stress' mechanic redundant? Lastly, the server really needs poly weld combined with a tool that removes all the welds on contraptions and welds each prop to one central prop in order to stop less experienced players from creating constraint whoring ships that chew resources. Looks good though, any back end support to solve rule issues is a welcome change.
It's more of a shock collar, We don't want to replace thrusters or movement e2, I mean part of building is actually making your ship move the way you want to. This is not here to limit the way you move your boat. But to limit the rule breaking.
I initially asked "Why not just make it an actual engine that propels the vehicle?" too, but Altair explained that him and Locko want to be able to maintain the players ability to make their own propulsion system (especially for aeroplanes, for example, Xpho's uses a wheel connected to a prop axle connected to a fin tooled prop propeller that generates forward momentum).
Also last time I checked Altair, shock collars are not supposed to kill the dog XD Maybe "Movement Enforcement System (MES)" might be a better name for this, lol.
I was thinking about it as well for a while, I ended up siding with a need to limit certain aspects of the game in order to provide a better player experience. Limiting the propulsion mechanism of ships affords you the following: No thruster sounds or effects Possible server performance increase due to props not being shoved into each other constantly/thrusters spammed/E2 ops. It stream lines the game mode and simplifies it while still allowing players to make a ship look the way they want it to which makes the game mode more marketable to new or inexperienced players which is a problem we've been struggling with for a long time. What we really need to be looking at are ways to make the game mode more marketable and that should be a priority. I was originally going to suggest that we implement a series of hulls and have players build there ships off them so instead of having a separate core, the hull of the ship would be one big core with set depth and limited angular rotation. Then new players wouldn't need to worry about buoyancy or their ship capsizing or propulsion, cannon limitations etc. All they'd have to do is put a few props and a seat on top of the hull to complete the ship. But this is probably at another extreme of the spectrum.
The engine does not need for you to weld more than 1 prop, to detect which contraption we are using. Welding it to the core prop means that the panel wont have any kind of angular acceleration caused by prop spazz. This was considered a lot by me and altair, as he already said, we didnt wanted to take the freedom of players to create stuff. Normaly most of the playerbase we get knows how to use wiremod at least to a basic level enought to put together a ship and move it. I dont think we should make the gamemode that simple, part of the fun of naval goes throught the satisfaction of mastering building. But i do agree the more marketable part, but the issues is that marketable stuff is often purely visual as most of the AAA games show us.
Wouldn't that be exactly the same as if you placed the core on the central prop and had the panel as a UI above the core? The playerbase we get is split off into 2 factions, those who just joined and have no idea what they're doing which usually end up either leaving or annoying every other player and those that joined whom have knowledge of the basics of building. The marketability stems from the ease of access. With game modes like TTT and DarkRP being so prevalent, the amount of people who are going to master or even consider mastering building is significantly smaller than it used to be, by minimizing the skills needed, we could allow for that reduction because at the end of the day, people aren't looking to master building and the ones that are aren't going to play on a server with the ones that aren't either causing the server to crash, prop smashing there work or having such a restrictive rule set. Having the shiniest guns and prettiest UI won't matter when the players don't know how to operate them or even build something to put them on. I'm not saying that it wouldn't attract the builders that remain and I'm not saying we couldn't split it off as it's own game mode but it does make sense to try and appeal to as broad an audience as possible.
As i'm really hung over right now, i'll keep it sorta short. First: core is placed on the COM of the vessel, since that is where you need to make the readings. Second UI will be made on a future Agreed Yep Agreed
This is one of the reasons why I am reluctant to put this on the server, I beleive a video is needed to explain how it works or maybe a ingame tutorial?
