Space Engineers
Posted: Fri Jan 17, 2014 10:26 pm
I've mentioned this in the past, I think, but I thought I should actually make a thread about it or something. Space Engineers is almost exactly Futurecraft. Build ships with blocks, mine stuff, craft stuff, shoot stuff, multiplayer, no aliens, etc. It's at a roughly Minecraft Classic level of development right now: the game is perfectly playable, and it's available on Steam, but important stuff is yet to be added. Like MC Classic, it's locked in Creative mode, although just a few updates ago they enabled the mining and crafting stuff, so that's rapidly changing. Multiplayer was added all of two days ago, so that's an alpha of an alpha, but like Minecraft Classic this looks like it has the potential to go a lot of fun places, and IMO it's worth the 15 US dollars it costs.
Now, how this is relevant to Futurecraft: This is basically what we're doing, but it's an actual game that can be played. There's a lesson to be learned from that: Stealing is awesome. There are a lot of features and mechanics here that suit what we want to do very well. In particular, we could do a lot worse than copying some of the mining/crafting mechanics. Mining is done with drills, either handheld or ship-mounted. Handheld drills are slower, of course, and they don't have an inventory; chunks of rock break off and then you have to look at them and press T to grab them. This is cool for precision work but not so great when you're trying to take out an entire asteroid, so each ship-mounted drill has an inventory into which rock/ore/ice/whatever is put. Once you've got your ore, you take it to a Refinery, which is a fairly massive thing mounted on a Station or Large Ship. That processes it into ingots or gravel or what have you, and those materials can be put into an Assembler, which will make you the items you want if it has enough of the right materials. There are a lot of materials: Iron, nickel, cobalt, uranium, gold, silver, platinum, magnesium, potassium, gravel, and almost certainly a few others I'm forgetting, plus more complicated stuff like reactor components or metal plates. This system seems to work pretty nicely so far; I haven't used it all that much yet because it only came out a few updates ago. Both the Assembler and the Refinery stop working when you look at their progress and won't start again until you've gone away, but presumably that'll be fixed. I think they just don't work well under pressure or something.
Ship construction mechanics will change considerably once the game can be played in Survival mode, but basically there are two kinds of ships: Small and Large. Small ships are fighters or whatever; the blocks used to construct them are much smaller than the blocks used for Large Ships. Large Ships are any ship you can run around in (or, perhaps more accurately, you can run around in any Large Ship). The blocks used are a full player-height, which only allows half as much detail as Minecraft. It makes construction much easier, though, especially as Space Engineers allows you to place an entire row, plane, or rectangular shape of blocks at once (the limit seems to be about 2000).
The one thing I think should definitely change is that in Space Engineers everyone's always wearing a spacesuit with at jetpack. The game doesn't have planets or any way to pressurize an area, though, so you'd be kinda screwed if it didn't. There's no distinction between 'vacuum' and 'inside' at all.
I have no idea whether all that was actually what I wanted to say in this thread. I think that about covered it, though.
Now, how this is relevant to Futurecraft: This is basically what we're doing, but it's an actual game that can be played. There's a lesson to be learned from that: Stealing is awesome. There are a lot of features and mechanics here that suit what we want to do very well. In particular, we could do a lot worse than copying some of the mining/crafting mechanics. Mining is done with drills, either handheld or ship-mounted. Handheld drills are slower, of course, and they don't have an inventory; chunks of rock break off and then you have to look at them and press T to grab them. This is cool for precision work but not so great when you're trying to take out an entire asteroid, so each ship-mounted drill has an inventory into which rock/ore/ice/whatever is put. Once you've got your ore, you take it to a Refinery, which is a fairly massive thing mounted on a Station or Large Ship. That processes it into ingots or gravel or what have you, and those materials can be put into an Assembler, which will make you the items you want if it has enough of the right materials. There are a lot of materials: Iron, nickel, cobalt, uranium, gold, silver, platinum, magnesium, potassium, gravel, and almost certainly a few others I'm forgetting, plus more complicated stuff like reactor components or metal plates. This system seems to work pretty nicely so far; I haven't used it all that much yet because it only came out a few updates ago. Both the Assembler and the Refinery stop working when you look at their progress and won't start again until you've gone away, but presumably that'll be fixed. I think they just don't work well under pressure or something.
Ship construction mechanics will change considerably once the game can be played in Survival mode, but basically there are two kinds of ships: Small and Large. Small ships are fighters or whatever; the blocks used to construct them are much smaller than the blocks used for Large Ships. Large Ships are any ship you can run around in (or, perhaps more accurately, you can run around in any Large Ship). The blocks used are a full player-height, which only allows half as much detail as Minecraft. It makes construction much easier, though, especially as Space Engineers allows you to place an entire row, plane, or rectangular shape of blocks at once (the limit seems to be about 2000).
The one thing I think should definitely change is that in Space Engineers everyone's always wearing a spacesuit with at jetpack. The game doesn't have planets or any way to pressurize an area, though, so you'd be kinda screwed if it didn't. There's no distinction between 'vacuum' and 'inside' at all.
I have no idea whether all that was actually what I wanted to say in this thread. I think that about covered it, though.