Lupoviridae wrote:Animation: This seems to be your main objection, and I suppose it is a matter of opinion. Personally I think if you take the logistics robot model, blow up the size 10x, and send it whizzing across the screen it would look fine. If you're far out from your base you won't see 95% of it's flight path anyway.
Hm.
I try to explain it differently: Many other strategy games have something like "Click on a unit, open it's view in a new window". Factorio has this feature, too, but not finished yet. You can see that currently in two mods: Fat Controller
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... =86&t=4504 and Command Control - Remote viewing and management
https://forums.factorio.com/forum/vie ... 86&t=13338.
But I see also the changes into the lua-api and this will be a lot easier in 0.12.
That means for planes - even if you cannot enter a plane - that you might have a view to planes. And this view will not be rendered faster than 1/60 second, because that is in most cases the maximum speed for your monitor.
What I state is that you don't need to have an opinion: It will look bad, if you move the background more than one tile per 1/60 second. The eye is physically unable to follow that movement (unless you have completely zoomed out). In other words: It is a misuse of the game-engine to move entities that fast.
Replacing trains: If each flight of the "plane" requires direct player input, it cannot be automated by it's very nature, meaning it would be impossible to replace trains.
Why should I built that. Even in the simples version I have planned here, the transport was automatable.
For me the trains, planes, ships, cars or other types of vehicles and transporters are like the type of transport, that can be seen in games like OpenTTD: An vehicle can follow a more or less fixed route. It cannot say "Today I want to go to outpost B, cause they have too less basic circuits",
if outpost B is not on the route. That makes also no sense, because the type of logistic, which the logistic bots follows, can only work in limited areas.
Cheating: you would need to physically run to the location you want to call the "plane" to, so I'm not sure I understand this at all.
Yes: Like rockets.
The player would not be able to ride the plane, it would be more like a mobile roboport (that also carries items)
As I tried to explain it above: That makes no sense. The basic game-mechanics enables to "overtake" an entity, see it's "view".
It would be quite illogical, to disable that for planes and only because of this quite questionable feature, that planes (or trains) can bring only emergency transports.
It would also be illogical to have two types of planes (or trains): Some, that could be entered and others, that are not. And - before you say "but not for robots": I'm not sure, but think with 0.12 it might be possible to enter also the view of a robot.
Personally I think the idea of a "plane" (aka a flying roboport) would work perfectly for building outposts outside of the range of your logic network. For personal resupplying I can see rockets being useful, but they don't work for any sort of large transfer.
Well, where is the difference? Resupply your personal inventory and resupply the ability to built stuff? I don't see the difference.
I see planes as some kind of "normal" transport of items, like trains, but faster and much less stacks for transporting. That is the kind of "normal supply" an outpost needs to survive, like repair packs, turrets, walls, and such stuff. But it can be replaced by trains, but planes work much faster, for complicated landscapes, islands, big lakes etc.
I see planes also as player transport. Transport of rare items. Exploration (as said: When you are inside of a plane). Such things.
Killtyrant wrote:You want something that no matter how busy your base is, this tech is either given priority thus everything else ceases to allow it to function properly or somehow doesnt interact with anything else other then the player entity and the potential structure that houses it.
Not exactly. The idea was, that you need to prepare and that the preparation is worth it's effort. Which means it is expensive, but then it enables you some new kind of game-experience; in this case building up new outposts within 3-6 minutes, instead of 30-60.
Pocket portals. When you manufacture this item you get a pair of them and they are linked together by some sort of frequency. There would be a structure that charges the items up (cost of use would be power as well as items needed to make it) when it is fully charged, perhaps there is a special chest you place one of the pocket portals in that is covered by your logistics network so when you are in a pinch, thousands of tiles away, you can request what ever items you need (the chest only has 4-6 slots) and after X amount of time, you activate your pocket portal and grab the items and discharge all of its energy thus making it a single use.
Im sure there are major issues with this idea but im sort of thinking them up on the spot. Ill let you find the flaws and shoot em down
Well, hehehe. that was the reason, why I started this thread: We had this type of discussion in the suggestions board and I wanted to move that to general: this discussion about teleporting of items already. The most forum members said, that a simple portal would make things too easy. As a conclusion of that I suggested the pneumatic delivery, which is in general the same as the rocket-mail system as part of this thread: A component, which must be transported back. The "cargobox". (Or in the context of the pneumatic delivery a "pneumatic capsule".)
The reason for introducing cargoboxes is also much more interesting: I believe, that the game needs something like this. Cargoboxes will enable a complete different gameplay, which is the about specializing, centralizing and globalizing the production.
chris13524 wrote:If a player is on the ground, not moving, they when a plane passes over (depending on the speed) it might not be rendered. If a player is riding a plane, they the plane could be rendered, because the delta between the player and the plane is 0. Now if the plane was flying very slow over head and the player on the ground, then the plane should still be rendered.
And if a player is sitting in the plane and flying at max speed, everything is flirring around. You can see that already with trains: You are so fast, that you cannot tell, if you are moving backwards or forwards. Now I try to imagine that with 10x more speed.
I think that players should be able to fly the plane themselves like a car. If one player can fly over a lake because they made a plane, well so what?
Well, then because he made a plane and is now in the plane and moving around. Which takes his time and can be a lot of fun. But not, when he already walked the whole way and now needs to fly the same. And that not only once, but over and over. You need not to make 1 or 2 outposts, you want to make 20; or maybe 50.
And I wrote it above: It makes no sense not to be able to automate that and no sense to enable driving a vehicle non-automatically without sitting in it: That would enable really nasty strategies.
Planes would have a similar mechanic to trains (which I guess might be a bad thing?) You have air ports instead of train stations, and a plane can have a schedule. It would fly around to all the different airports.
Yes. This is similar to many other transport games and compares quite good to reality. That kind of traffic could be automated. But if you want to
To produce a plane (it would be relatively different depending on the plane), you would need a few parts. The wings, then engines, the the rest of the aircraft. Biplanes would need a different type of wing then a jet for example. Air traffic control centers could require 25 processing units, and "super-fast" jets, 50. Biplanes 5. So why not make a "super-fast" jet and then just use that instead of a biplane? Well it's stall point is much lower than a jet so it can be used for inspections of biter bases, etc.
Much too much complicated for what I have in mind.
