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  Issue with Hull void
Posted by: Oggal - 04-05-2019, 10:06 PM - Forum: Prerelease Bug Reports - No Replies

When designing a ship I found a hull void was causing me to be teleported as soon as i moved into it if I had gravity enabled. It seems I get moved to the same x and y locations but to the plane of Z = 0. All in world space not grid space.

I'm trying to get a work around and I'll update this post as I find more.


Some information for now:
My hull void is located below the plane Z = 0.
It does this in both off-line and on-line designers as well as preview modes.

Problem is solved moving design so the void is above the Z=0 plane

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  Old Style City Nerf
Posted by: Haxus - 04-05-2019, 07:05 PM - Forum: Cantina - Replies (12)

Old style cities are going to be deleted.

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  2019-04-05 Query Starmap, Finalize Progress, Server Config
Posted by: Haxus - 04-05-2019, 02:11 PM - Forum: Updates - Replies (2)

Query Starmap
The star map window has a button to request empires and a button to refresh the map. Having two "refresh" buttons is confusing and clunky.

Star map query reply now includes empire data that is needed by the client.

Refresh Empires button was removed from the Star Map window.

Hulls Inside Hulls
It is possible to cheat the designer into thinking a blueprint has more volume by placing hull parts inside of hull parts.

Volume calculation of spacecraft and building hulls now does a better job of estimating the volume of the model, without being fooled by overlapping parts. Unfortunately, this added some grueling processing to the Finalize and Refresh Obstructions processes, making them take longer, especially on large sized blueprints.

This will not affect blueprints that have already been finalized. Their hull volume will not change.

Finalize Progress
Finalizing a blueprint can take a long time. A cancelable progress control would be welcome.

Progress control added when finalizing spacecraft and building blueprints. It can be canceled.

A progress control is not necessary when finalizing assemblies.

Refresh Obstructions Progress
Refreshing obstructions in a blueprint can take a long time, longer now with the change to the hull volume calculation. A cancelable progress control would be welcome.

Progress control added when refreshing obstructions in spacecraft and building blueprints. It can be canceled.

Cannot Climb Down Ladders
I can climb up ladders in a spacecraft but I cannot climb down them. My legs move but my guy doesn't go anywhere.

Fixed downward movement on ladders.

Blueprint Number
It would be nice if the blueprint number was shown on the spacecraft specifications window.

Blueprint number now appears on the spacecraft specifications window.

Server Configuration
Since updating the servers to use the qt5-default package, gdb no longer provides useful stack trace information. This makes tracing server crashes impossible.

Reconfigured servers to use Qt libraries built by me. This was successful on the test servers. Stack traces are back where they belong.

Server restart will take a little longer than usual. Public servers will be reconfigured after they shut down for the restart. This takes a few minutes per server. Then they will be restarted normally.

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  2019-04-03 Turbo Lift Gravity, Shields Charge, Multi Select
Posted by: Haxus - 04-03-2019, 03:35 PM - Forum: Updates - Replies (1)

Turbo Lift Gravity
After the last update, the gravity in the turbo lift on Atlantis is broken.

Found/fixed a bug that caused all turbo lifts created prior to this update to have natural gravity inside their room void, instead of artificial gravity. To fix this, the gravity in all turbo lifts created prior to this update was set to artificial. This is least likely to cause trouble for existing ships and buildings.

Shields Charge Bug
On some spacecraft the shields did not appear to charge.

Fixed a bug in the data stream of the shield station. It was displaying the shield levels incorrectly on ships with very large shields. Their shields were charging correctly but there was no way to tell.

Make Turbo Lift
The command to make a turbo lift consumes the room but it leaves the room void and the door jig behind. This is confusing.

Changed the turbo lift maker to eliminate the room void and door jig.

Publish Multi Select
The publish blueprint window should allow multiple selection so I can publish many blueprints at once.

Windows to publish building and spacecraft blueprints now support multiple selection.

Unpublish Multi Select
The exchange windows should allow multiple selection when unpublishing blueprints.

Building and spacecraft exchange windows now support multiple selection when unpublishing blueprints.

Delete Multi Select
The delete blueprint window should allow multiple selection so I can delete many blueprints at once.

Windows to delete building and spacecraft blueprints now support multiple selection.

Designer Snap
It would be handy if there was a way to know if the cursor was snapped to an existing part of the design.

Cursor blip now highlights when snapped to an existing part.

Landing System Bug
If I take Atlantis and land on a planet, I can launch fine, but cannot land.

Spacecraft in atmosphere zone of a world now respond to landing requests, unless they are actively hiding in ground clutter. Previously, they ignored landing requests when in the atmosphere.

Transporter Ambiguity Warning
Warn about two transporter stations in the same room. It is ambiguous.

Building and spacecraft blueprints can no longer be finalized if two transporter stations are in the same room void.

Verify Planar Void Faces
Verify that the faces of voids are planar. Bent faces cause strange problems with the algorithm that determines if things are inside the void.

Voids with bent faces will now produce an error when finalizing a design. If you get this error, the solution is to adjust the vertices of all faces so they do not form bent planes, or fracture the faces of the errant void. Fracturing a face reduces it to its individual triangles, which cannot be bent.

Please do not fracture all voids because the inside-void algorithm is much more efficient otherwise.

Edge Lines Offset Bug
In the designer, sometimes edge lines are offset from solids. This appears to be related to right-click somehow, maybe incomplete drag.

Reset part dragging state values when needed.

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  Sent 4 hours away in the same system
Posted by: Captain Knuckless - 04-03-2019, 06:23 AM - Forum: Prerelease Bug Reports - No Replies

[Image: l0e2jqs.jpg]
Was about to warp to a new system when it sent me half way across the galaxy, but still in the same system.
[Image: Rtdfu5M.jpg]

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  2019-04-01 Module Patents, Space Rocket, Natural Gravity Voids
Posted by: Haxus - 04-01-2019, 04:38 PM - Forum: Updates - Replies (2)

Module Patents
Patents for spacecraft modules take a huge amount of materials.

Material requirements for module patents were reduced a lot, x10 generally, more in a few cases.

It is likely that buildings already configured to develop these patents will have to be reconfigured, to pick up the changes.

Space Rocket
I have had a to-do item for a long time to make a simple rocket driven space ship design. This somehow made it onto my list of things that must be done before a Steam release.

I designed a simple space rocket and saved it in two configurations, one with a wormhole drive and one without. I will publish them in the exchange when the servers wake up. Doing this revealed a few problems.

Natural Gravity Voids
Void spaces in spacecraft designs that are configured with natural gravity have problems.

Fixed various problems with voids that use the natural gravity of the rocket's environment.

Ladder Paths
NPCs have trouble getting through a design if the path requires them to move from one ladder to another.

Fixed NPC use of ladder paths.

Rocket Entrance Bug
Space rocket design stands on its tail. A ladder leads up to the door from ground level. NPCs will not enter the rocket when it is sitting on the ground.

Fixed entrance code to consider tail landing configuration.

Omnidirectional Light Position
Omnidirectional headlight on spacecraft puts the light source in the wrong place, far from the ship.

Fixed positioning of light source for omnidirectional head light bulbs.

Suit Light Breaks
Suit light should be broken when seal is broken.

EVA suit light is now broken when the seal is broken.

Spacecraft Air
Scout parked in Atlantis hangar bay. Bay doors closed. Vacuum fills with air. Scout still thinks it is in vacuum until it is moved.

Subordinate spacecraft are now notified when air pressure changes.

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Big Grin 2019-04-01 Pirate boarding and raids, Cloaking shield, Digging, A drill tools
Posted by: Deantwo - 04-01-2019, 01:54 PM - Forum: Cantina - Replies (3)

Pirate Boarding Parties
Pirates should attempt to capture your spacecraft rather than destroy it.

Pirates will now attempt to board and capture player ships.

  • They will use transporters if they have them and can get enemy shields down.
  • If they have no transporters they will attempt to EVA over and breech the hull doors with plastic explosives.
  • Once on board they will fight their way to the helm to start the capture sequence.
  • Only ships with valid pathing to the bridge from all rooms and hull doors will be valid boarding targets.

Pirate Raids
Pirates should raid poorly defended cities.

If a system has no defenses and there is a pirate base in the sector pirates will now raid the cities.
  • If no avatar is on line in the system the raid will simply appear in the city's event log.
  • If an avatar is on line in the system an encounter will spawn a pirate ship that will move to hover over the city.
  • Pirate raid will steal commodities from the cities on the world. Primarily stealing money, upgrade modules, spare parts and food.
  • If the pirate ship has a deployment bay and bombs in its hold it might drop a few bombs for dramatic effect.

Cloaking Shield
Cloaking shield is not implemented.

Cloaking shield is now implemented.
  • Ships
    • The cloaking shield provide a very weak shield for the ship.
    • While active on a ship it will be hidden from sensors when outside of visual random.
    • The ship is further more obscured slightly while the shield is active.
    • Pirates use cloaking shields to great effect.
  • Buildings
    • A military shield projector with a cloaking shield will hide all emissions generated by the world.

Digging
Digging trenches and mines by hand.

You can now use shovels and other digging tools to reshape the terrain.
  • Use a shovel or drill on the terrain to dig.
  • Every dig has a chance of spawning rock resource items.
  • Reshaped terrain can be reverted by bulldozing it.
  • Don't be surprised if you find bugs.

Drill Tool
Need bigger digging equipment.

Added an electronic drilling tool. All mining manufacturing processes gain time reduction from having it.

Mine Machinery
Mine machinery is not implemented.

Mine machinery is now implemented.
  • Added a temporary mine machinery model.
  • All mining manufacturing processes gain time reduction from having a mine machinery on a connected building's site.
  • The mine machinery has a special weapon that will work like the shovel's digging ability.

Subterranean Animals
Subterranean animals should react to digging near them.

Subterranean animals that are burrowing underground will come to the surface and attack you if you dig near them.

Mega Beasts
Animals are too easy and provide no challenge. Bring back mega beasts.

If you dig too deep you might disturb dormant mega beasts hidden underneath the surface that will attack anything in sight. This include buildings and ships.

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  Ship Designer - Interior Layout Tool
Posted by: leadphalanx - 03-30-2019, 06:20 AM - Forum: Arena of Ideas - Replies (10)

After chatting about this idea in Discord, it was suggested I make a write-up and put it up here.

What it all boils down to is that creating an interior of a ship is tedious and exhausting.  I'm more than capable of modelling out all the rooms, setting up jigs for doorways/windows,creating doors, creating voids, getting it all configured, etc., etc., etc.  but thought of spending that much time and effort just to get one interior designed is a bit discouraging.  Quite a few people feel the same way.  However, I am definitely not advocating removing these features, or scrapping the new editor.  Instead, I think a bit of automation could fix this up.  Add a non-destructive workflow and you've got a recipe for ship designing to be a hell of a lot more fun.

I've put together a bit of a 'mock-up' of how this could work.  This 'floorplan' tool would essentially allow players to easily create a layout of their interior, and keeping it in a non-destructive workflow so things can be moved, added, or deleted at any point.  It would control all the voids, doors, connections between rooms, etc. so all you have to worry about it what shape the rooms need to be.

This tool would be completely optional of course.  While working with this tool, the rooms you create would be 'controlled' by the floorplan tool.  As such, you cannot directly mess with the geometry of the rooms with the normal tools (but adding in extra pieces like pipes, consoles, chairs, etc. would work).  After you are happy with a layout however, it could be converted into a standard format for more in-depth customization (if so desired).

Similarly to the old designer, you would be only drawing the 'floorplan' of the design.  Rather than "painting" in grids though, you will be drawing a free-form shape on a grid (much like you would do before extruding a flat object to create something 3d).
-Each room will have a matching interior void which will change as the room is changed.
-Rooms will have a minimum distance to an adjacent room, to prevent clipping of any sort and leave room for doorways.
-Room height will be set by a 'deck height' value, which is a global design setting that can be modified.
-As in the old designer, you can work on multiple 'decks'.
-Rooms can be set to be several decks tall.
-Maybe can set rooms to be set at a mid-deck height? As long as there is some room collision 'invalidation' seems like it could be fine.


[Image: VxV1BHX.jpg]

For some designs, having an easy way of drawing out hallways between rooms would be useful.  For halls, instead of drawing out the shape of the room manually, you would select a point on the walls of two rooms, creating a hall between them automatically. 
-These will remain connected even after moving a room
-All the necessary voids will be set up
-Options for adding/adjusting curvature of the hall
-These can be ramps/stairs when connecting to rooms in different decks

[Image: srWLNR8.jpg]

Doors and windows would also work similarly to the old designer (or at least attempt to). 
-Placing a door will automatically create a door connecting the adjacent room.  This is a dynamic 'door' object that can be moved/modified at will while you design.
-Windows and external doors will attempt to connect to the external hull model once finalized
[Image: mYuqdiE.jpg]

Doors could have a 'shape' you assign them (for example a simple trapezoid like the below pic), with a door-frame automatically created along with doors (if you want doors that is). 
-Control panel automatically added (optional)
-Dynamic door 'width' slider for bay/cargo doors and such.

[Image: qwiqsXw.jpg]


The rooms themselves of course will need some spice so they don't end up just being flat-walled boxes. Here's a mock-up of what you could see when selecting a room or hallway:
[Image: 6crzBXG.jpg]



Wall Profile Editor window:


[Image: hd9XRmP.jpg]


Which in a hallway would look like this:
-For halls, this applies to just the sides of the hall, where a standard room applies the shape to every side of the room.

[Image: 03fgY9g.jpg]

Having some 'struts' to throw in can also spice things up.  

[Image: ULxv1Ue.jpg]

[Image: vW9P9Lv.jpg]
[Image: 15HnVsq.jpg]
[url=https://imgur.com/srWLNR8][/url]

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  Rats Derail Ship
Posted by: Vectorus - 03-28-2019, 04:04 PM - Forum: Prerelease Bug Reports - Replies (1)

Something dies on the ship. Perhaps the carcass is inaccessible. Now an infinite cycle of rats starts to spawn and, because of the new rules, each time one appears the entire crew abandons its stations to deal with the threat (provided it dies in a room with lots of consoles).

Perhaps crewmen should compare the combined hp of the threat with the combined hp of units already responding, before deciding whether to leave their posts as well? So if a 3hp rat is being dealt with by a 38hp soldier, no one else gets involved, but if a 800hp warp monster is on the loose, everyone pitches in.


(Changing stance to defensive appears to work, but I'm not sure what effect this will have on fire control officers and turret gunners?)

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  2019-03-27 Pirates, Bugs
Posted by: Haxus - 03-27-2019, 04:00 PM - Forum: Updates - No Replies

Citizens Not Working
It was reported that citizens randomly seem to do no work at all.

Fixed a bug when employing/unemploying citizens.

Troops Spawn and Die
Troops appear at post points of buildings. Sometimes those posts are outside and the building is in a harsh environment. If a troop spawns there without an environment suit, it dies, then another spawns and dies, then another.

Troops no longer spawn at troop posts in a harsh environment if the town's inventory does not have a helmet and suit that will protect them.

Static Displayed Items
I clicked on an officer log on static display. Then, on the item manipulator, I clicked the button to show its detailed information. The simple window used to display the information does not scroll and the info is very long.

The item details button on the item manipulator window now uses the item inspector window, the same one that is used when you inspect an item in your inventory. That window shows the description text a lot nicer and it also includes a 3D image of the item that can be rotated and magnified.

Crew Attack Base/City Snafu
I orbited over a pirate base. My crew, in offensive posture, gleefully attacked the enemy base below. Unfortunately, they decided to destroy the HQ first. The HQ cannot be destroyed until all other military buildings are destroyed. I set them to berserk. They attacked a civilian building, which could not be destroyed due to the presence of the military buildings.

Bay weapon gunners and turret gunners no longer target buildings that cannot be destroyed due to game rules.

Pirate Bases Grow
Pirate bases were incomplete in the previous update.

Pirate bases now grow by adding more buildings. The number of buildings is limited by pirate empire difficulty. They also build some roads, to help interconnect their buildings.

Designer Bold Description
Little typo here. In designer, if you type in some description, whole remaining text will be bold

Fixed html error when formatting the description of a blueprint.

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