• CIR
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Topic: Beacon Terraforming

1. Like the old system you buy a plan & can scale it up & down in size

2. unlike the old way, when you complete the purchase of the plan 4 terraforming beacons automatically drop at each corner of the TF plan. (have a little construction line show up on terrain between the beacons tongue )

3. NO TF plans can overlap. set a small buffer zone 50m ect. this would help in avoiding possible exploiting.

4. As we had on the test server back in the day just shade tile red that exceed the slope limit.

5. Now here's the big change from the old way. when you charge the TF beacons. The whole plan starts to TF. any design you have made will slowly take shape. This avoids the problems encountered with the old system.

Terraforming should still be a big draw card for Gamma. Beacon TFing allows for more fun designing & less of a sh*ty time than having to use tile TFing.

I know my idea may still not solve all the issues but it might come close?

True Pros make a Podcast to influence the Devs minds, 
The rest of you guys are Hacks tongue

PS. I got my Highways & stopped playing b4 they came in & have never used them! ...... Irony much ? tongue
  • JOKE
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Re: Beacon Terraforming

beacon terraforming would have been fine with the current 3km restrictions if they had kept the station limit. Without the station limit it wouldn't work.

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  • CIR
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Re: Beacon Terraforming

yeah it would have been interesting to see how it might have played out with old TFing but with all the other changes that were made.

All I want is the ability to come up with some cool TF designs again. that can still be done even with slope limiting

True Pros make a Podcast to influence the Devs minds, 
The rest of you guys are Hacks tongue

PS. I got my Highways & stopped playing b4 they came in & have never used them! ...... Irony much ? tongue
  • JOKE
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Re: Beacon Terraforming

Obi Wan Kenobi wrote:

yeah it would have been interesting to see how it might have played out with old TFing but with all the other changes that were made.

All I want is the ability to come up with some cool TF designs again. that can still be done even with slope limiting

I dont think so. The changes are short sighted really, they just doom the islands to flatlands.

Proverbs 23:20-21 warns us, “Do not join those who drink too much wine or gorge themselves on meat, for drunkards and gluttons become poor, and drowsiness clothes them in rags."
  • YBA
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Re: Beacon Terraforming

Back in the day when terraforming was being conceived a few of us (myself and Arga spring to mind) had a serious discussion about "dirt".

I still like the concept. If you dig a hole you've got to dump the dirt somewhere. I think we ended up concluding that it would be a mistake to allow transport off island but would be fun if you could dump in the sea to create new land.

  • CIR
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Re: Beacon Terraforming

Ludlow Bursar wrote:

Back in the day when terraforming was being conceived a few of us (myself and Arga spring to mind) had a serious discussion about "dirt".

I still like the concept. If you dig a hole you've got to dump the dirt somewhere. I think we ended up concluding that it would be a mistake to allow transport off island but would be fun if you could dump in the sea to create new land.

that actually would be cool. But how do you stop people disposing of it in other ways?

True Pros make a Podcast to influence the Devs minds, 
The rest of you guys are Hacks tongue

PS. I got my Highways & stopped playing b4 they came in & have never used them! ...... Irony much ? tongue

7 Reply by Burial (edited by Burial 2015-08-09 12:08:05)

  • JOKE
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Re: Beacon Terraforming

Good part without beacon terraforming is that sieges are a lot shorter. Used to be a competition around who's willing to stay up longer to terraform ramps up and turrets in, or stop the attacker from doing it, but nowadays it's more about actually shooting the base when the structures are vulnerable.

The freedom beacon terraforming gave for building a base was awesome, but as a siege tool it was a major pita.

  • PHM
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Re: Beacon Terraforming

Burial wrote:

Good part without beacon terraforming is that sieges are a lot shorter. Used to be a competition around who's willing to stay up longer to terraform ramps up and turrets in, or stop the attacker from doing it, but nowadays it's more about actually shooting the base when the structures are vulnerable.

The freedom beacon terraforming gave for building a base was awesome, but as a siege tool it was a major pita.

I actually miss that.

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Re: Beacon Terraforming

Ludlow Bursar wrote:

Back in the day when terraforming was being conceived a few of us (myself and Arga spring to mind) had a serious discussion about "dirt".

I still like the concept. If you dig a hole you've got to dump the dirt somewhere. I think we ended up concluding that it would be a mistake to allow transport off island but would be fun if you could dump in the sea to create new land.

Just take all of what Ludlow thinks, and put it in game, then hire him.

Done!

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Re: Beacon Terraforming

Burial wrote:

Good part without beacon terraforming is that sieges are a lot shorter. Used to be a competition around who's willing to stay up longer to terraform ramps up and turrets in, or stop the attacker from doing it, but nowadays it's more about actually shooting the base when the structures are vulnerable.

The freedom beacon terraforming gave for building a base was awesome, but as a siege tool it was a major pita.

was the first and last gamma siege i actually enjoyed thanks for being there Burial!

Now its a big LOS-Lag fest of just walking to the next target

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  • YBA
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Re: Beacon Terraforming

Obi Wan Kenobi wrote:
Ludlow Bursar wrote:

Back in the day when terraforming was being conceived a few of us (myself and Arga spring to mind) had a serious discussion about "dirt".

I still like the concept. If you dig a hole you've got to dump the dirt somewhere. I think we ended up concluding that it would be a mistake to allow transport off island but would be fun if you could dump in the sea to create new land.

that actually would be cool. But how do you stop people disposing of it in other ways?

If you don't allow changing zone with dirt on board (I believe that includes docking up as far as server sees it) then the only way I can think of would be to:

  1. leave umpteen bots on terrain with full cargo

  2. destroy bots full of dirt

  3. fill field can, let it expire

All of these situations can be dealt with in the same manner - i.e. auto load dump onto terrain. Conceptually I don't think its that crazy an idea.

Even the interface can be intuitive and simple if beacon terraforming comes back in some form. After all, the original terraforming plans used top tell us how much dirt needed shift to complete the plan. At least some of the programming work must be there already.

  • BKK
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Re: Beacon Terraforming

easier: do not allow to store dirt in cargo at all.

make the process instant - remove "volume" at one point, and add it on another. The creative part would be how.

When i theocrafted Terraforming with Alexadar years ago, we had something in mind like this:

  • one Teraforming Module using industrial slot on the robot

  • one deployable device for long-range matter transfer

  • one Transfer module using a misc-slot on the robot to connect with the deployable

  • deployables can be chained but require colony control interface

the deployable would add/remove matter only in a large area around its location, while the Terraforming module on the Robot would be used for fine-control.
Terraforming would work smooth like inte old beacon-template editor live on terrain. you either target-lock the beacon with the transfer module equipped, or without, you would lock a ground tile to get the same effect using only the TF modules but with lower transfer rate since half of your TF modules remove dirt, while the others add it to terrain (automatically done by game)

to make this easier to handle "volumes" for the server, i would have tried to handle this with voxel/particles. eventually that would be faster then complicated hightmap editing... eventually. (Nvidia particle demos can handle millions of particles in realtime)

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