Space Engineers - Hardcore Mode

[FlowerChild]

Oh BTW, FlowerChild, I just realized that if you make an ore detector, you can easily find your base again. Ore detectors have an expanded range in this mod.

Tried that. Actually cheated it and went into creative to spawn an ore detector on my respawn ship (an antenna too as I thought the recent changes to stock may have allowed me to sense my starter ship with it), and no dice. Found two asteroids, neither of which were the ones that had my original ship near it, killed myself, tried again, and found two more that were again not where my original spawn was. No other asteroids were within range either time, and I finally gave up due to the realization it would take me an average of 8 tries (I had it set to 16 asteroids with sparse generation) like that to find my original base (with lengthy flight times after each to get to the closest asteroid), that I was making my world feel very "cheaty", and that even if I rebuilt from scratch due to the distances involved and given that if I tried searching I'd have no way to tell if I was flying off into infinite empty space, that I would likely never find my stuff again.

So yeah, at present unless you're extremely lucky, it pretty much amounts to permadeath, which may indeed be a little too punishing for this :)

And BTW: it wasn't my ship that I crashed into the asteroid...it was my dude. My original spawn was near an asteroid, and I was flying back and forth with my jetpack mining iron. On one trip I think I accidentally hit the key that turned off my dampeners and only realized too late I had been accelerating full blast the entire time towards the asteroid. Was just a stupid mistake on my part, but the kind of mistake where you don't really feel it was worth a restart :)

Not sure about the changes you are proposing, but will ponder some more. On first glance though, I'm a little worried what you're talking about would decrease the value of mining to the point where it might no longer really be part of the progression.

Despite my unfortunate demise, I think it's also worth mentioning that I was having quite a good time before that happened. Definitely the most fun I've had with SE since they added the small ship grinder :)

[Gilberreke]

So yeah, at present unless you're extremely lucky, it pretty much amounts to permadeath, which may indeed be a little too punishing for this :)

Yeah, it's too punishing. I will make sure there's a beacon on the starter ship in the next version. They require 200kW to run at infinite, so you'll want to only turn them on when you're out of base. It's also a necessary component to make salvaging work properly. I also want to make it easier to get that first med bay running. Unless I can pull off something as rewarding as Hardcore Spawn, those med bays need to be straight forward to get I feel.

Not sure about the changes you are proposing, but will ponder some more. On first glance though, I'm a little worried what you're talking about would decrease the value of mining to the point where it might no longer really be part of the progression.

Yeah, I'm keeping that in mind. Due to how salvaging will work, I need to take great care to balance the resources on wrecks. That's why the current passing ships don't work. They're just free bases floating around.

Not to spoil too much, but mining will actually become MORE important next version. Wrecks will basically only be a decent source of iron if you're scrapping them entirely, and even then, I don't think it'll get you as far as just mining iron. I'm pretty sure that my current todo list would give you a hard-on ;). Obviously, wrecks won't be JUST iron either, but again, I want to keep it a bit of a surprise.

Despite my unfortunate demise, I think it's also worth mentioning that I was having quite a good time before that happened. Definitely the most fun I've had with SE since they added the small ship grinder :)

Yeah, the most important thing is I can keep it moving forward. As long as I make sure the game becomes more fun, all's good. And it certainly feels more fun right now than vanilla. If my proposed changes don't work out, I can always move back to this version, just fixing up the rough parts (like dying and passing ships being goldmines).

Also, I didn't mention this yet, but please keep in mind that this is a beta, meaning I can't promise yet that it has no rough parts or that I won't break your world. Before I stick a number one in front of the version, chances will be that something stupid might leave you with a permadeath.

Last thing I want to mention is that the assembler is a Bad Idea with capital letters. It's bad game design and it's hurting this game maybe the most out of any feature. You get to scrap any part loss-less and remake it into something else. Any balance I try to introduce runs into "ah yeah, but they could disassemble that" issues. With asteroids being so close together in vanilla, it's not like it matters that certain asteroids don't contain certain resources, so assemblers are basically Equivalent Exchange in space.

[devak]

Can you remove dissassembly recipes? Then its not a problem

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, it's too punishing. I will make sure there's a beacon on the starter ship in the next version. They require 200kW to run at infinite, so you'll want to only turn them on when you're out of base. It's also a necessary component to make salvaging work properly. I also want to make it easier to get that first med bay running. Unless I can pull off something as rewarding as Hardcore Spawn, those med bays need to be straight forward to get I feel.

Yup, those were pretty much my feelings on it as well. It also occurred to me that the newish antenna system might have some interesting potential uses in it, although I'm not sure I fully understand how it's working at present.

Yeah, I'm keeping that in mind. Due to how salvaging will work, I need to take great care to balance the resources on wrecks. That's why the current passing ships don't work. They're just free bases floating around.

Well, IMO that comes down largely to a bug. If the ships would actually attack you like they used to, I think it would be very cool. I'd hate to see you spend a bunch of time trying to address a problem that will likely be fixed with no intervention on your part, although I was disappointed to see there was no news about that with today's official release.

Yeah, the most important thing is I can keep it moving forward. As long as I make sure the game becomes more fun, all's good.

Exactly man, and it's something I'd really recommend keeping in mind at all times for the sake of your own sanity. With BTSM and throughout most of BTW's development, it's not like the entire game was exactly how I wanted it to be. However, reminding myself that the game was *better* as a result of my efforts allowed me to feel good about what I was doing.

Also, I didn't mention this yet, but please keep in mind that this is a beta, meaning I can't promise yet that it has no rough parts or that I won't break your world.

Oh no, I am of course aware of that. I was in no way pissed off or blaming you for my demise or what have you, was just trying to figure out a solution that would allow me to continue playing from where I was.

I'll likely restart at some point today or this evening and place a beacon in creative mode on the starter ship from the get go to make sure I can keep going if I run into another "accident" :)

Not sure if it would be possible with the way scenario editing works (which is something else I have no clue about), but was just thinking it might actually be kind of cool if the beacon existed as a separate ship near your starting one with a couple of solar panels on it, kinda like a "nav buoy" or something floating a short distance away.

[FlowerChild]

Gil, is there anything special I need to do to get the mod working with the new version of Space Engineers? I tried loading it up just now, and the mod just doesn't appear to be in effect. The scenarios aren't even showing up in the list when I try to create a new world.

EDIT: Ah. Turns out it isn't just your mod. Suckage:

http://forums.keenswh.com/post/custom-s ... te-7006955

[Gilberreke]

Ah that sucks. Not sure if I can do something about that. Watching a horror flick with the girlfriend. I'll have a look if I can do something in a few.

[FlowerChild]

Ah that sucks. Not sure if I can do something about that. Watching a horror flick with the girlfriend. I'll have a look if I can do something in a few.

Yeah, I'm not sure if it's fixable on your end either. Had a look around the .cfg files and couldn't find anything.

EDIT: More discussion here in case anything useful pops up:

http://forums.keenswh.com/post/1-040-is ... er-7006658

EDIT 2: This might also be worth checking out Gil:

http://forums.keenswh.com/post/shaking-player-6999433

I've been getting this shaking on my hand in first person view and it's been driving me nuts. When I just noticed this thread, it occurred to me that it may be related to the distances involved in your sparse scenarios. Looks like it can have far more severe impact on the game as well.

EDIT 3: And another one to cause you nightmares Gil, which I thought might be interesting to you given it's related to the cargo ship mechanics:

http://forums.keenswh.com/post/01-040-0 ... le-6979621

Honestly, I'm not certain it's the best time to be actively developing this kind of mod. The game appears to have mega-issues at present.

[Gilberreke]

Honestly, I'm not certain it's the best time to be actively developing this kind of mod. The game appears to have mega-issues at present.

Okay, I had the time to have a look:

The mods thing: I can't do anything about it. I think I know what caused it, but I have no clue how to fix it. I'm going to hold off on updating, as I was planning on messing around a bit tomorrow, trying out a few new tricks.
The cargo ships: I know about this bug, it's a multi-player desync issue, I was actually hoping it got fixed in the new update. It shouldn't affect single player though.
The shaking: This is bad. Real bad. From what I can tell it's a floating point issue, meaning they are working with global coordinates. The fix is switching to a relative coordinate system. The problem is, that's a major engine rewrite. I'm assuming they'll just smooth out the problem client-side, which means that combat far from center will always feel off. I hope I'm wrong, but I can see this turning into a major problem down the road. I was already wondering how their architecture can do a few things it shouldn't be able to.

As for the future of the mod: the shaking issue might present a problem, but one I can work around by decreasing sparseness to a workable number. Current generation is pretty hardcore, based on the scarcity mod. I can certainly tweak that a lot and it might even improve game-play a bit. The balance side of things is just fun to do for now, so I'll keep trucking, but yeah, this game is not doing too well on the bug side. Too much focus on new features. Do we really need pistons when there's a fair number of serious bugs, like cargo ships not working and multiplayer desync issues?

[FlowerChild]

Yup, I'm full aware you can't do much about many of these issues. Just thought you might find the heads-up useful on them on the design side :)

As for too much focus on features rather than bugs, that's unfortunately typical of game development, and it's doubly unfortunate that trend has carried over to early-access games where it's all the more damaging.

A lot of developers have an unfortunate tendency to focus on new features as they are sexy and way more fun to work on than tracking down bugs. I've experienced horrible situations developing commercial titles where development of a game ends with a month long or more bug stomping fest which is utterly soul-crushing.

I developed professional habits to try and counter this, and came to absolutely not tolerate it as a lead. You'll notice that I'm very careful when I'm working on my mods to tackle a round of bug fixes with each release, and to try and stomp on them as quickly as possible in general for that reason. It's very easy to let a project get completely out of control because you don't feel like bug fixing at any given time.

I'm seeing this carry over to optimization as well. Yes...there are some thing that are best optimized only once the code is more or less finalized, especially low level optimizations, but if you don't at least do an initial pass of high level optimization (which is where you get most of your savings anyways) you'll never really be certain what your game is really capable of and thus won't be able to design around any performance issues that you might not be able to resolve in the end. Again, this is very easy to procrastinate around with the nigh-religious belief that you'll eventually be able to sort it out.

[Gilberreke]

I heard a story once about a developer shop that had full automated testing (unit testing, functional testing, the works). They installed a big flashing red light connected to the automated testing and if a test failed (meaning a new commit broke an old system, probably the most common case of introducing bugs), the light went on, so all devs could see they screwed up.

Not saying I think that flashing red lights in your developer's eyes when they make a mistake is a good idea, but I respect that shop's leader for being absolutely anal about fixing bugs first, features later.

If you'd like to run a similar automated test rig as a sole developer btw, there's a great blog post here about how to do it for game development. I keep wanting to try it out, but I've never had a reason. Even if you're not a fan of unit tests, you should still give it a full read, the post is really interesting when it deals with functional testing and games.

[FlowerChild]

Was just thinking about a bit of a strange side-effect of the mod being more dependent on solar panels than stock.

The sole survival requirement in space engineers is energy. In stock, you unfortunately have to start with some form of energy generation or you won't be able to make any forward progress, which limits the survival aspect rather substantially. However, because you're dependent on uranium for power generation, you at least have a bit of a ticking clock on your survival, and need to go out and find some before you run out.

With the mod however, given solar power is infinite, no such timer exists, thus, you've effectively decreased the survival aspect of gameplay while making a hardcore mod :)

[Gilberreke]

With the mod however, given solar power is infinite, no such timer exists, thus, you've effectively decreased the survival aspect of gameplay while making a hardcore mod :)

Hmm, interesting assessment. I was brainstorming some ideas yesterday and one of the things that came up was that I could solve a few issues by swapping small generators and solar panels in terms of power production. I assume I can use that same swap to solve the issue you just mentioned. I'll give it some thought.

The reason I'm playing with this idea is that all wrecks need to have a working beacon and I don't want to give the player a free small generator for every wreck he captures, unless that small generator is not very powerful. Drastically lowering the power output of the small generator would leave a huge gap in energy production between small and large generators and the obvious fix is to let solar fill that spot, essentially a swap.

I have to ponder it a bit in terms of balance, as I don't want there to be an abundance of uranium in wrecks, including the starter wreck and rescue ships, but I'm sure I can work something out that fixes this issue, so uranium mining and the subsequent survival timer become more important.

[FlowerChild]

Hehe...well, they apparently put out a hotfix that "fixes" the problems with loading mods:

http://forums.keenswh.com/post/1-040-ga ... ow-7008696

So, instead of just not reading the mod files, the game now crashes if you have anything in your mods folder :)

[Gilberreke]

Hehe...well, they apparently put out a hotfix that "fixes" the problems with loading mods:

http://forums.keenswh.com/post/1-040-ga ... ow-7008696

So, instead of just not reading the mod files, the game now crashes if you have anything in your mods folder :)

Apparently it has to do with models, so my mod should be unaffected, I'm trying it out right now :)

[FlowerChild]

Just tried it, and crashed right away, so doesn't look like it's only restricted to models (yours is the only mod I have installed).

[Gilberreke]

Just tried it, and crashed right away, so doesn't look like it's only restricted to models (yours is the only mod I have installed).

Apparently it's looking for folders that don't exist, dropping a bunch of dummy folders in there seems to fix it, give me a few seconds to go through it.

[FlowerChild]

Apparently it's looking for folders that don't exist, dropping a bunch of dummy folders in there seems to fix it, give me a few seconds to go through it.

No rush man. I don't have time to play right now anyways, just did a quick test to see if it would load :)

[Gilberreke]

No rush man. I don't have time to play right now anyways, just did a quick test to see if it would load :)

Apparently they screwed up bad. This is ridiculous. Also, it spells disaster for this mod, as what they've apparently done is make it so a mod can't edit the main game. If this is something they want to keep, I have to switch to a basemod, which is something I'd very much like to avoid.

Does no-one test features anymore? I mean they changed the mod loader, didn't do even a cursory test to see if it's working (as any mod crashes the game). Then they made a hotfix, again untested as it fails for almost every mod out there.

I made some arrangements for today specifically to be able to work on this, suckage.

EDIT: I think I can fix it for myself, but not for any users, as it's a bit too involved. Still, better than not being able to develop.
EDIT2: no such luck, crappy day :/

[FlowerChild]

I take it there's no way for you to revert to the previous version of SE for the sake of your own productivity while you wait on them to fix it, right? I checked Steam to see if I could do it through the properties tab like with KSP, but no dice unfortunately :\

[Gilberreke]

I take it there's no way for you to revert to the previous version of SE for the sake of your own productivity while you wait on them to fix it, right? I checked Steam to see if I could do it through the properties tab like with KSP, but no dice unfortunately :\

I don't think you can and yeah, this is mainly a blow to my productivity. I worked on this for two days and now I'll have to wait until Monday at the earliest, if not Thursday and hope I can clear enough schedule then to do more work. No better way to kill drive for a project than letting me wait a week when I'm super excited about it.

I still have faint hopes I can make it work today, but I'm running out of strings to pull at.

[FlowerChild]

I know the feeling of having an outside element interfere with your productivity very well man, so you have my sympathies.

Will run a background mental task myself on potential workarounds.

[Gilberreke]

I know the feeling of having an outside element interfere with your productivity very well man, so you have my sympathies.

Will run a background mental task myself on potential workarounds.

I found a quick solution that seems to work for now and I made a versioned repository of Space Engineer, so I can roll back the game to any version from now on. It also lets me see what exactly they changed line for line in a new version.

So yeah, we're good, just lost 2 hours. Could have been worse.

[DaveYanakov]

I'm only home for a few hours before I head out again for a few days but I am excited by the progress here

[LupusExMachina]

I am grateful this is happening.
I hope we'll see another talent like flowerchild develop here.

[Gilberreke]

I am grateful this is happening.
I hope we'll see another talent like flowerchild develop here.

Hah, I'm about a million years behind, but I have a pretty good analytic brain, so I can mimic what he's doing in a very crude manner. Maybe if I cultivate my abilities, I'll be as good as him by the time I'm 80 :D

I'm only home for a few hours before I head out again for a few days but I am excited by the progress here

Hopefully I'll get you something cool to play with by the time you come back :)


I just finished my feasibility study. Everything I want to do is possible. I now move to implementing it. Making a component non-craftable is not possible, so I designed a work-around that works fine.