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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   1991 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 8, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I briefly tried Satisfactory and trying to align the machines in gridless, first-person 3D was too much of a hassle.

For what it's worth there is a grid if you build on foundations. But I don't disagree that it's a hassle. Building stuff is a veritable chore in Satisfactory, not helped by the fact that the devs have refused to implement blueprints big enough to actually be useful.

They’ve since added an optional (hold Control) ‘world grid’ to Satisfactory, which helps a lot with alignment. But it definitely does get overwhelming still, and not a problem specific to just this game: Manufactio and Space Engineers struggle a lot because of it.

But Space Engineers has a grid.

The problem with Space Engineers is that a building game with a default multiplayer build limit that you can max out in 6 hours is kinda pointless. Played some of it but honestly..

Yeah, I meant more in the sense that intersections of two grids (or more, or where subgridding) can be annoying to line up at best, and Clangtastic more often.

The PCU limits are really conservative, especially with modern computers. The defaults can be easily disabled and the hard limits are a lot more reasonable, but it’s definitely a thing I hope is much improved for the vrage3 version.

Playing in a sandbox by myself is not interesting anymore(put a ~few 100 hrs into that).

PvP multiplayer is where it's at, but last I checked those servers either had punishing settings where you'd spend a day slaving away to build the equivalent of the 'starter' ship.

I tried it a few times, and if you gave me the yellow starter ship out in orbit, I could get enough materials to build this in three hours..

These are gravity drive powered remote control miners that chew a straight way through an asteroid, throw out uninteresting ore and then report 'job done'.

You can basically build anything. The guys basically made a 'game construction kit', not a game. I basically gave up on it after I understood something as simple as a huge (100k tons) ship can lag a server by itself if it's moving. The engine is a toy engine.

They also gradually removed much of the challenge of the game itself.

Ironically, the actual 'Space Engineers' game is KSP. You've got heat, aerodynamics, actual slightly simplified orbital mechanics.

can be annoying to line up at best, and Clangtastic more often.

I dunno, I remember merge blocks being fairly okayish. I used them for docking without issues.

Yeah, that's fair, especially the frustrations about the game itself not really existing. Having some level of self-imposed limits on guns and ship complexity can keep a server moderately performant even with bigger ships -- I have had several 2m-5m kg multi-ship combat scenarios that were reasonably playable physics-update wise -- but the lack of reason to do it is more serious for the game.

It's realistic that space doesn't really have a ton of choke points, but it has a very First Year No Man's Sky feel to it, without a lot of the charm that NMS had. Keen's put into a wide variety of game modes that just don't really exist in the vanilla game. Even with Contact finally adding a reason to actually use the combat system after literally ten years, it ends up resulting in a couple dozen randomly-placed encounters with nothing but GPS waypoints to push toward them. MEMS and similar mods show solutions to these things, and I can understand not wanting to be quite as overwhelmingly common as in those mods, but it's disappointing in many ways.

KSP is definitely more 'complete' as a game (and more realistic, as you mention on the orbital mechanics stuff), even if some of the mechanics in the non-sandbox mode are kinda dumb. In exchange, it's a good deal more limited on the construction side.

I remember merge blocks being fairly okayish. I used them for docking without issues.

They're a lot smarter than Connectors, but there's some hilarious stuff that happens if you have too many around, or if certain blocks are on the subgrid (eg, magplates, short wheel suspensions, rotors oh god rotors).

Dyson Sphere Project had a respectable pseudo-3d grid system, made somewhat annoying by the wierdness of mapping the grid to a sphere.

Flashbacks to Planetary Annihilation ruining the best part of Supreme Commander by making bases guaranteed messy

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