thruster change idea

[boxfoxscoot]

the thruster changes that Ive seen floated seem somewhat arbitrary and would make a large portion of ships unusable or significantly worse or serve to be a minor and mostly pointless feature that only wastes your time to add so im here to throw my voice on the pile and say please reconsider

[najlitarvan]

@boxfoxscoot while i do know what is your issue, without said context, this makes zero sense, do actually say what is your issue here

[najlitarvan]

while i personally am not against the idea of making hidden thrusters less effective, i can see the issues and rather then straight up nerfing hidden thrusters, there should be a reason why players should want to have thrusters exposed, well here are some ideas before we start if i were to summarize why people tend to build hidden thrusters it would be this:

1. more speed

2. thruster look does not match the style

3. better thruster visual: right now the thruster effect is, let's be honest meh, one thing that would imo help encourage the usage of visible thrusters would be better looking effects, considering that the current thruster designs look like hal ion drives, , good hall ion drive looking engines are terratech's better future's ion boosters, i mention later it would be nice if the thruster's acitivation effect was closer to it

4. new thruster variants whenever these variants should retain the same characteristics should be a discussion for a different time but stuff like nuclear thrusters, rc nozzles, would be nice to give the players bigger selection in what thrusters they wanna use without having to create their own and having to hide their thrusters milenium falcon style glowing engine Aerospike engines

5. new thruster shapes, right now we have either meh looking square or decent ish circle shape, in my opinion we should have more variants for each thruster type including but not limited to: circle square right angle triangle equilateral triangle hexagon all of which should be scalable in all axis independent of each other

6. potentially a buff to all thrusters in general

7. thruster addons, while we have addons for guns, what about addons for thrusters to let the player eithr get more kick ouf of a thruster or increase efficiency

8. input reading (qweasd, ctrl, space) would lead to more usage of thrust vectoring, and with the fact we can logic pulse a thruster to update it, it is the only thing preventing proper thrust vectoring while not directly linked to thrusters themself, being to able to read what inputs are pressed would increase the likelihood of exposed thrusters for rcs like looks, ships that do make that look good are star citizen ships, which tend to have single axis rotating rcs ike nozzles across the body, being able to make these designs be actually functional would help promote the usage of visible thrusters

[Tackietacktack]

I think, tsuna mean, that system ship don't have hidden thruster, what make sense for me.

But najlitarvan's point are good. More thruster variations are good for survival mode. Some low effective thruster for the start and later we get from somewhere better thruster systems.

Or all species has a own thruster system.

Or Like egosofts X4 game there have all fraction own stats for shield, weapons and thruster. Thrusters could have other values for : Max speed, velolity, hull points, needed material,...

[tsunamayo]

@boxfoxscoot Hi, well don't worry for the actual build, if I do this I will add an option to deactivate the check at the level of the ship. Option only available in creative of course. I will flip the argument over: not doing this means that a player caring for making an efficient ship for survival can feel forced to hide its thruster as it is the smartest thing to do. Which feel unrealistic, and do not look good (I think having the glowing thruster at the aft look good...)

If you did this because of look, because your ship is a replica or whatnot, then your ship is not likely to be a survival ship.

=> guys tell me how that works in other game if you know?

Cheers

[tsunamayo]

@najlitarvan Hi, thanks for the suggestions, yes I want to add more thruster but I will wait to do more progress on the survival before doing so. It is not just about giving you more shapes to build in creative, now it should be pretty clear that it needs to fit into a game progression logic for survival. I dont want to give 10x variant of the lightcruise (like exa shape ect), but I want to give a slanted version as I think it could make some interesting design. Yes I want to improve the VFX, I also want to add a trail for lightcruise but it is very hard to do as it could look bad depending on how the player put its thrusters. Cheers

[najlitarvan]

@tsunamayo understandable, mostly just dumped my ideas i got after a relatively heated debate in the discord,though better to dump it here then have it completely forgotten, i do agree on not spamming us with shapes, but bigger variation could be nice, as was said also a mechanism that exposed thrusters could allow for easier is taking over ships, internal ships would have it harder to destroy just the thrusters, where as outside exposed thrusters an be easier to destroy hence making it easier to take over a craft

[Crimson-Artist]

Nerfing hidden thrusters doesnt make any sense to me. In my experience a ships speed and maneuverability has never been so overpowered that it needed addressing. If anything thrusters are severely underpowered. In the case that its not realistic, yeah so what? This isn't Space Engineers nor should it. The ability to build something how I want it and be effective is why I play. If hidden thrusters do become a problem why can't we scan ships and have vital system like thruster be highlighted as a overlay in the target preview window when we target subsystems?

[tsunamayo]

@Crimson-Artist Hi, I understand your opinion. May I ask you the following:

• do you build with creative or survival in mind? Isnt the creative toggle good enough for you?

Thruster being overpowered or not doesnt change this particular issue. It is not about knowing where thruster are, it is about being able to take them down easily. If you take down a ship thruster, it can't flee, turn and becomes a sitting duck.

Most people will want to expose their thruster, because it is what make sense and how it looks in 100% of the movie out there. With this those people are forced to hide (protect on all side) their thruster because you get an advantage out of it. I don't like that! People who want to hide do it because they dont like the standard look, and want a true custom rear end to match a specific design. => this means to me you build with creative in mind, not survival. It is fine by me! This is why I will add a toggle so you are free to build.

This is the same debate with solar panel. I think it is a bit dumb that you can hide you solar panel and still have them working.

[Crimson-Artist]

do you build with creative or survival in mind? Isnt the creative toggle good enough for you?

I do both. I build my ships with its usability in survival in mind while also adding as much creative flare as possible. The vast majority of my time is spent testing and researching whats possible in game. My transforming ship/mech took months of concepting before I event committed to building it cuz I wanted it to be actually useful in survival rather than just something cool. A creative toggle might be enough but im more concerned about how this change will be implemented. It still sounds like a fix to something that isnt broken.

If the goal is make thrusters easier to destroy by having them exposed then you need to think about how much clearance for the thruster exhaust is allowed. If its a set amount of meters then players could just build around it. If its an infinite cylinder shape clearance then players can just build a long armored shroud around the thruster. Hell, if its the later case then imbedding thrusters center mass of ships with long "thruster tubes" leading out the back would be the best strategy. The thruster will still be incased in armor but hey, at least its "exposed". If thats unacceptable then what about changing the clearance from a cylinder to a cone well that just means hull mounted engines located anywhere that isnt the absolute rear are unviable.

These are all things I thought up with just 5-10 mins of thinking. The problem wasn't solved, just shifted.

Thruster being overpowered or not doesnt change this particular issue. It is not about knowing where thruster are, it is about being able to take them down easily. If you take down a ship thruster, it can't flee, turn and becomes a sitting duck.

actually knowing where thrusters are will allow you to take them down easier. Having them highlighted on an enemy ship via scanning still requires that you aim at them. In that sense how effective you are at destroying them comes down to your ship design vs the enemy ship design which will always be the case.

Most people will want to expose their thruster, because it is what make sense and how it looks in 100% of the movie out there. With this those people are forced to hide (protect on all side) their thruster because you get an advantage out of it. I don't like that! People who want to hide do it because they dont like the standard look, and want a true custom rear end to match a specific design. => this means to me you build with creative in mind, not survival. It is fine by me! This is why I will add a toggle so you are free to build.

Whether or not players want to make their thrusters like the movies is down to personal preference. Personally I would like to have thruster plums but the thruster blocks don't mesh well with my build style so I usually only expose them when they are lateral thrusters. I've thought about a system where thruster plums can be projected out of another block, say the glowing tile, via the link tool.

This is the same debate with solar panel. I think it is a bit dumb that you can hide you solar panel and still have them working.

Not a fair comparison. Solar panels are objectively overpowered because of that. Hidden thrusters are of debatable power.

[BigBadKangaroo]

@Crimson-Artist Hi, I understand your opinion. May I ask you the following:

* do you build with creative or survival in mind? Isnt the creative toggle good enough for you?

Thruster being overpowered or not doesnt change this particular issue. It is not about knowing where thruster are, it is about being able to take them down easily. If you take down a ship thruster, it can't flee, turn and becomes a sitting duck.

Most people will want to expose their thruster, because it is what make sense and how it looks in 100% of the movie out there. With this those people are forced to hide (protect on all side) their thruster because you get an advantage out of it. I don't like that! People who want to hide do it because they dont like the standard look, and want a true custom rear end to match a specific design. => this means to me you build with creative in mind, not survival. It is fine by me! This is why I will add a toggle so you are free to build.

This is the same debate with solar panel. I think it is a bit dumb that you can hide you solar panel and still have them working.

@tsunamayo Hi there,

"People who want to hide do it because they dont like the standard look, and want a true custom rear end to match a specific design. => this means to me you build with creative in mind, not survival."

-> I strongly disagree with that point. I like the design of thrusters and making them visible, however, with most of my own designs I always have some empty space left inside the hull. This empty space is something every player will encounter at one point in their building-career. There are just a few options on what to do with that space: -leave it empty (why would you do that?) -put system bricks inside to enhance the stats of your ship

I put system bricks inside these empty spaces. It will either be more shields to be more tanky, more warp cores to travel further or put some thrusters inside them to boost the performance of my ship without adding even more thrusters to the outside of my ship. For me it is an additional stat-boost to enhance my ship.

I personally agree with you that hidden thrusters should be nerfed, other games do this as well (i.e. Space Engineers). But what if we would handle this the same way we handle the guns? With the guns (laser/beam) you get one block to place in front of the barrel to decorate it, without it being blocked. This way you get the ability to decorate your guns and don't get the advantage of being unkillable by building a ton of brick before the barrel.

What if we could have the same system for thrusters? Having one block in front of the thrusters without killing the thrusters performance and still being able to get the astethics you desire. This way you can't protect the thrusters by building an unkillable wall around it, just like the guns we have.

But I have one question: What about blocks that are not fully enclosed? How will that work? I personally love to decorate my manouvering thrusters with the "hollow wedge" brick. Or the girder bricks? Or even with some smaller bricks to give it a "vent-style". I don't build to protect them, but to make them more visually interesting to look at while flying the ship around.

[tsunamayo]

@BigBadKangaroo well if I had to code today here is how I would do:

• at a given interval (to not kill performance) do a raycast from a random point of the thruster surface.
• If that raycast hit: add x amount of heat to the entity hit.
• If the raycast hit our own ship: decrease the thruster efficiency. This would use a moving average so that if only a tiny portion of your ship is hit, then you are like 95% good. This is because a thruster pushing against yourself is not gonna get yourself anywhere.
• Spawn some nice vfx so it sparks some smoke when hovering over the ground or else.

@BigBadKangaroo So your enclosing are good, they wont be hit by the raycast. btw those horizontal patterns will alias like crazy when viewed from afar unfortunately...

Further steps that would soften the blow for people who want to show thruster on the outside of their ship in survival:

• I will likely add a special metal to make brick more heat resistant (so your little decorative pattern dont make a lot of heat)
• I can add gyro that would add some maneuverability boost while being enclosed. You can suggest some kind of an alien technology that would provide forward / lightcruise thruster also, as a higher tier techno.

@Crimson-Artist We had those kind of exchange with the community many time: unfortunately progressing on the game survival mode, ie moving out from a state of "ship in a bottle" to a real game is gonna create flashpoints between raw freedom to build and survival mechanics, or just in term of believability (I am not even talking about "realism", just common sense) Another flashpoint we had was for Children Entity collisions, a lot of people used that for decorative purpose and I wanted to fix that, because that was silly. I am all for giving you maximum freedom - I dont think there is another game out there that give you all we have in SEVO in term of freedom - but it is not Blender, I think it somehow have to make sense and be believable. Gameplay implication set aside, I just find silly that you can completely enclose thruster and have them working. A new player could legitimately think it is a bug or a lack of attention / effort in that regard, and they would be right because it is exactly that: something I did not took time to code.

I am really sorry I should have made this check sooner, we would not be in that situation. I slept on the fact that thruster enclosing was such a thing.

Cheers

[tsunamayo]

As a token of gratitude toward my beloved community I bestow this wedge lightcruise engine 😄 :

[ProPeach]

So this sounds like a very good compromise in my opinion - if I'm able to use this new metal to shape the exterior profile of my thruster and only loose 5-10%, then I'd be happy.

Like @BigBadKangaroo I completely disagree that there is a mismatch in design aims between building in Survival and building in Creative. Ever since "Survival" type elements like fuel and cargo piping was introduced I've been adding those to my Creative built ships in the hope that they will functioni in a Survival setting. I don't see a reason to build things differently for those two modes.

One of the main reasons I build internal thrusters now is to get the desired thrust performance out of a ship without having to build additional engines into the design. For example, I build my ship to my imagination with two engines, then I add my thrusters an it turns out I can pmly go 200m/s. I wanted to go at least 300m/s, so I build an additional layer of thrusters behind the first to boost the ships thrust. It's often not really an option to build another extra engine on to a design that you envisioned to have only two, even if you're not building a replica.

This kind of stat tweaking is impossible to plan and anticipate for before building or even before you have completely most of your ship, as it depends on mass/heat dissipation of the completed hull.

Would it be possible to have thruster blocks ignored by the raycast check, so we could still stack thrusters end on end for additional thrust? It would be as if they were one big thruster, which of course we can't place due to the 16x stretch limits.

Always appreciate you talking through your thought process with these things Tsuna, and of course the wedge LC brick looks great 😎😎

[Tackietacktack]

How about rethinking the engine design?

At the moment we have one thruster component. How about two components?

One for "energy conversion" and the other for "thrust energy output".

The "thrust energy output" is visible from the outside

And if it is destroyed there is no more propulsion.

A stupid idea perhaps, but perhaps...

Cheers

[asanagisae]

I'd just like to add 2 cents to this discussion, since we're aiming to build a game that a wider audience can enjoy.

I spend most of my time building in creative. However, I do so in order to perfect a design that I expect to be able to use on a survival server. One of the joys of playing on a server is showing off your ships to other players in a living world - that's survival mode.

This is one of the more popular methods of playing Space Engineers. You build your ship in creative mode: it's time spent efficiently because you are not fighting survival mechanics while thinking about a design, and you can spend dozens or hundreds of hours perfecting it. The final design is intended for use in survival by yourself and other players (via the Steam workshop). Whether it's a replica or "heavily inspired" does not factor into this.

One of the strengths and defining features of SEVO is the ability to build hidden thrusters, at least in a mechanical sense. It's not about visually removing thrusters from the ship exterior, it's about having the ability to meticulously craft the appearance of the thruster. You can add several large thrusters downwards to improve the ship's agility - if they were exposed, you would have these gigantic visible thrust cones pointing down, which looks ridiculous on a ship with a sleek and fast style. Instead, I would hide the large thrusters, then add several smaller thrusters on the surface. (Apologies for not building a model to demonstrate, I cannot currently run the game due to Steam issues)

Thruster packs truly define the feel of a space ship. And, since you'll spend most of your time looking at them if you fly in 3rd person, they are very important. If we have to have thrusters exposed, then all our ships will start to look very samey and uninspired. But, if thrusters can be obscured, you can build things like this:

https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/fc967692-8c18-4097-8002-7a95b5890229

In particular, note the two sets of horizontal grills, to the left and right of the main 4 engines, which cover the lightcruise engines. LC engines are the worst, visually, since they're giant blocks of eye-searingly bright light that are always rectangular.

Of course, with the expectation of moving ships from creative mode to survival, the ship printer would be one of the most heavily anticipated features/blocks in SEVO. That's a discussion for a separate thread. Suffice to say, personally I don't see creative ships and survival ships being different at all.

[BigBadKangaroo]

Of course, with the expectation of moving ships from creative mode to survival, the ship printer would be one of the most heavily anticipated features/blocks in SEVO. That's a discussion for a separate thread. Suffice to say, personally I don't see creative ships and survival ships being different at all.

I 100% agree on that.

[tsunamayo]

So making some kind of enclosure or enhancement to a thruster is a different thing to making entirely fake one and hiding the real one inside. Again I will give you "magic" thruster to hide inside so you can build fake custom one.

We already had a discussion back in the day and I made the non-lc thrusters more low-tone and easier to integrate in any design. Also compared to other game you can make a very long one with little visual real estate. But obviously you need to understand that my goal is not to design systems so people can hide them and make custom fake version of those systems. I won't prevent you from doing that, but I still want to focus and improve on the real systems.

I think we also have a different definition of survival vs creative ship, but in the end it doesn't matter much.

@asanagisae As a side note as you opened the can of worm: taste is personal, and I completely respect everyone's preferences, and certainly don't want everybody to design things the same way. However, here's another perspective to ponder: I find many of those designs too busy; perhaps it's all those smaller elements giving me visual overload. Maybe that is all those Children Entities that give me palpitations ;) Personally, I prefer the flat glow of an LC rack, which provides a visual contrast to the rest of the ship. It also reads much better from a distance. It's not about how good each element of the ship looks individually, but how they all fit together into a cohesive design. Making every little part look cool won't necessarily result in a cool-looking ship. Also this is a brick building game, trying too hard to make something real-life feels a bit off to me, I much drawn toward simple but elegant design. Again, personal taste!

Cheers

[Tackietacktack]

Sorry to come back to my post, but I thought about it and found it better than I thought.

I have spoken from a "energy conversion" it's something like a thruster energy loader and could works like shield with Capacitor. But it isn't connected to the thruster, we could build it everywhere. It's only works with thruster outside the ship in the same direction. -That give us the possiblity to build thruster inside the ship if we need more thruster and don't want build more outside the ship. -destroyed thruster, no speed. -we don't need to build huge thruster outside -could be a nice decoration in engine rooms

Only the quest, how much thruster are needed outside? It could be possible to build one from 1/8 thruster and the ship runs or 100 from1/8 and it runs and its impossible to destroy all thruster. Prost