A nitpick: There is no Bukkit Dev-Team. There are independent developers, similar to the common Mod, whose forks of the Bukkit API are approved by the staff.Dr. Mackeroth wrote:I thought I already replied to this topic....
Anyway, I have a few points:
1- Cores shouldn't work like that. Cores should be energy-production units, ranging in power and fuels. They should have a constant output, that you consume with the devices aboard your ship. No weapon slots. This way, you can have a ship with more weapons and less engines, or one with more shields, or whatever. Also, this will mean that ship classifications are builder-dependent, and not universal.
Cores ARE energy production units, and they also allow you to control ships. And it was decided almost unanimously on the old forum that cores would scale up with size, it's my input that they should also be named to avoid confusing players. Universal > Builder decided, in this case. And I've thought through the slot system; it prevents ridiculous scenarios like a corvette managing to take out a cruiser because it has more guns. It would require little to no extra code and provide an incentive to upgrade, rather than just power alone. Slots is just the maximum amount of weapons a certain core class can mount safely before compromising the power supply.
Cores would be fed fuels like Strontium, Yttrium, and Crocite, and consume them to produce a 'charge', how long that takes (and by extension how much 'fuel' is consumed in the process) would depend on the class of the core. A Corvette core, for instance, would take far less time to reach optimum charge than say, a Battleship. From there different subsystems can be allocated amounts of power that reduce or increase their effectiveness. So it might be impractical to mount every type of logistical equipment on a lower tier ship, where all of them would be liabilities if anything else, but since they're nigh unlimited one could forgo a Medium weapon type in favor of an extra shield generator, etcetera. Without restricting weapons this system doesn't work.
2- I like the research ideas, but I distinctly remember writing "no crocite". Additionally, the cores shouldn't be a part of the research process, no matter how small. That's like using an anvil to cook things with, it just doesn't make sense. No, we need to be able to craft/use a separate method of research in the beginning.
That you did, but it can serve a purpose in the mod. It can always be renamed to something like Rubidium but I wanted to hearken back to the original MCF post. I've also been debating with Jedi about research for the past two pages, so I'm assuming you just couldn't be arsed to read that; the OP was modified to reflect the compromise we agreed on regarding NPC research facilities.
3- The shipyards are designed to make building easier, not harder. We want people to build ships easily, otherwise the game will be too hard. A shipyard should be able to take a design and build it much faster than a human, with no wasted costs.
That leads to ships being too easy to build, this provides a bit of challenge before one can set up a 100% error free shipyard and mass produce ships. Otherwise we end up with them becoming a triviality in the mod rather than the stars of it. And I disagree that it's too hard, if you want to automatically build s**t, you're gonna have to work for it. Take Madrealms; if ships were just made of wood, they'd be everywhere instead of being prized of an asset. They're the latter on that server because they require a resource - wool - that's extremely rare on the Skylands generator. As a result having a ship is an immense luxury, similar to shipyards.
4- Hangars. This idea will ruin the use of launch tubes, and is rather slightly physically impossible. The main restriction to the carrying capacity of a ship should be space available, not power. I think fighters should be crafted (with customizable colours (and perhaps weapons/armor later in development) to suit your style), then simply park within a carrier ship (assuming this is easy to code. If not, a simpler suggestion is welcome). There should also be "tracks" for fighters to run along inside ships, to avoid interior collisions. I have no idea how fighters should land, any suggestions are welcome.
Again, debated with Jedi. We ultimately decided that the ideal solution would be to have a 'fabricator' array that spawns fighters and the hangar module itself would power them and regulate whether they're NPCs or for player use. No one is going to craft twenty fighters for what essentially constitutes a temporary damage buff before they all get shot down. That would be, as you say, too hard. As far as parking is concerned, shield doors should significantly slow down entities, similar to cobwebs in vanilla minecraft. Starfighter NPCs would be able to find their way in and despawn once within a few blocks of an array.
5- Your suggestions for factions and sever-stuff are all feasible, however, I did want planets to have more internal cohesion, not split into several factions. That being said, the "pride" concept is one of merit, perhaps you might like to suggest it to the Bukkit Dev-Team for their faction plug-ins. I'd need to re-read this section before making any further judgement.
You can't force people into cohesion, at least not upfront. By using something similar to the Factions plugin initially (where my ideas come from), people will think they can do whatever they want when in reality they're going to end up merging with a larger faction when they figure out they're not the only people in space.
Also cats, yellow is my color, bugger off
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