Livestream snippet - explosions!

We really shouldn't be comparing this to Terraria. They are similar in a way, yes, but just because exploding things in Terraria leaves the materials to be collected, it doesn't mean it has to happen in Starbound.

Besides, exploding things doesn't necessarily mean that you should be able to just outright collect what you exploded, though I can also see the merit in this function as well. Perhaps this is just an early stage, or maybe it is based upon what type of explosive?

 

now that is mining

 

Lol why mine when you can just blow the ground up.

 

They should probably make the explosion animation last a bit longer, because it goes so fast that it's hard to see.

 

Because you will lose resources if you just blow everything up

 

Looks very nice, with room for improvement. I like the concept especially, with blocks being able to reattach. I noticed some things:

• It looks like some of the tiles that are displaced by the explosion are lost for good.
• Explosions affect background tiles too, just as expected.
• With blocks flying around and then "solidifying", explosions leave a real mess behind, like one would expect of a battlefield. No more pristine circular craters!
• If blocks are lost just like in Minecraft and also they don't drop immediately, this would have a serious effect on explosive mining.

I would expect to see different materials have different degrees of explosion resistance ala Minecraft, and perhaps there could be different types of explosives, in particular a special kind used for mining (which would make tiles "drop"). Or perhaps the devs could have some tiles relocate and others drop, I think this would be a nice middle ground.

EDIT: From the latter parts of the video, we can see explosions are not luminous. I'd expect a bright short flash from them, like a weak lightning, but then again I haven't seen many real explosions.

 

Looks like explosions don't actually drop blocks - pretty neat solution to your question, even if it was rhetorical

 

And thus did the griefers glee when they saw this.

Shame though, I LOVE explosions. Its just a shame that it happens to be the griefers tool of choice, so servers will need to be either very picky about who they let in, or Modding APi will need to disable them :_;

 

Ya I hope most building materials, especially ones that are commonly used for building bases, don't explode like that.
This would be unrealistic, but necessary for servers.
And also I have troll friends who would blow my base up...

 

I love the flashes of light from the nighttime explosions, so quick and "warm" looking. The puff of smoke needs to be a little larger, I didn't notice it for the first few tests.
I really love that the terrain is thrown around, even if it does need to be tweaked like people said above: rolling, etc.

 

I just noticed there actually are flashes of light. Is it me, or do they appear only some of the time?

 

It would be pretty cool to have all sorts of junk falling around you after your base gets nuked, though

 

When you blow something up IRL, the debris doesn't reattach itself to the ground. This doesn't ruin my perception of the game whatsoever. Just pointing out that it doesn't make much sense. And yes, I know this is a video game.

 

What does REAL have to do with video game that has nothing else real in it? I am just saying that maybe little bit brighter orange/red colors and lighting effect on surrounding area would do wonders.

 

I agree with the lighting part; there would seem to be some buggy lighting in place which is only visible twice, towards the end of the video. However, I believe small explosions should be rather unobtrusive, without a continued smoke and debris cloud that would make it hard to see the affected area... unless you're aiming for that precise effect, as in a smokescreen bomb or something (which would be rather nice for PVP, now that I think about it). Big explosions could use much more flare since there'll be less of them.

I believe Soup meant that the developers might have been aiming precisely for a more realistic explosion look; your initial argument, after all, was that they didn't look like explosions "at all".

 

If we have to play with this sort of 'feature' at least have it make sense. Right now when he causes an explosion in an area, it sprays the debris right back at the location of impact (or right at him).

Wouldn't it make more sense to have the debris fly away from the impact location?

 

I'm guessing the explosion only produces light for a single frame, and since the video framerate is lower than the game it's missing most of the flashes. I'm sure it looks much better on Tiy's computer.

Exactly.

 

Awesome flying blocks, hoping to see more fire.
And pore power.

 

I'm going to agree with Soup here. Streaming doesn't pick up all the frames so there's a good chance they're there, but not rendered on the stream. I love the effects of blocks being thrown about after the explosion. Only thing that bugs me, is when he built the pillar and shot it, blocks flew towards him instead of away like they should have. That's probably a really quick fix, but in general I love this idea even with the playdough sticking to stuff. That's fine by me.

 

First launcher's rocket continues on after exploding on the wooden wall... special weapon mod or bug?