I came back to Starbound after a long while to check everything out and I decided this time I was going to play on a server with all of my subscribers and so far everything feels so disappointing. In my head I imagined these interesting dynamic of everyone starting off in their own part of the universe, everyone talking about having a unique experience, which we would be able to send screenshots of "here look at these things I found," or "my planet is so cool!" Instead everyone just starts off on the same planet. The way things are set up to begin with locks everyone to this beginning world forcing them to do all of their beginning quests there, which means if you didn't start off on day one instead of an interesting experience everyone is dodging holes in the ground. You can't really blame everyone for digging straight down either because the cave generation has problems. There is no such thing as a cave network, you sort of have a swiss cheese design where you get a good cave for a few hundred blocks then you have to say "Well crap... maybe I'll dig that way and hope I find something?" Which never feels good if you're forced to do that with low tier digging tools. You then have these really interesting traveling mechanics and then you put in systems to completely negate using them. Why can you teleport from your ship to your Home world? Why can you party with someone and then instantly teleport to their ship and then teleport to the planet their over top of? These two things seem ridiculously overpowered and break all immersion in the game. Why do we have ships at all? We seem to be able to teleport around willy nilly, unless there's a piece of wood over our head, then teleporting falls apart for some reason. It feels equivalent to just having a /tp admin command. It would be way more fun to say "Meet up at the hub world" and have you and your friend have to work to meet each other then just teleporting to their ship for no effort. Maybe make it so it's easier to travel between worlds by constructing a warp gate or something, that way you can use the warp gates to get back to your home planet. That way not only are you shaping the planets but the solar systems as well.
Most people on Multiplayer servers do meet up at the "hub world" but I don't see what that has to do with ships. As far as I can tell, you just want to remove teleporting to anything other than the planet you're above. The warp gates don't really seem any more immersion-breaking than teleporting either.
I've never had much of an issue connecting a cave I find to others. Maybe I'm just lucky? But either way, it wouldn't make sense for a planet to have an enormous massive cave. You could MAYBE get away with having one or two planets doing this. But having it where that's most of them would seem weird. As for teleporting, why not just set rules for that on your server? It sounds like you're wanting more of a roleplay experience. No reason you and your friends can't act that out.
I have always felt teleporting as a big no-no for any game. It feels cheap when the game throws player around to points of interest. It's like the game is a slide show or a movie, going from one scene to another: here's an interesting place A, look out, this is dangerous place B, whew, what a relaxing place C ...and nothing between them. What's more, the planets feel very small. One planet doesn't have it all: polar caps, volcanoes, tropic, tundra, deserts, oceans, lakes, ..why not? For example, GTA V has many kinds of environments and it all fits nicely on one small island. You don't need zillion different planets to have mountains, swamps, forests, beaches, rivers, etc. One island has more space than any dev team can fill with content. I kind of understand why there still are so many games with an universe of one-theme-planets: the idea of having an universe inside a game is very tempting. So tempting few stop to think what it means to actually do such a game. Edit: even the original Star Wars fell to the same trap: there was one ice planet, one desert planet, one jungle planet and so on.
I would hate to have planets have every biome on them. Because then there isn't much point for exploration. And given the number of available possible planets, they can easily do small planets. I wouldn't want to land on a giant planet myself. I feel the size of each planet suits it given just how massive the Starbound universe is. Having each be diverse gives a sense of wondering what that next planet will be like. If you remove this diversity, the planets will just feel too similar to one another with only minor differences. This diversity is what drew me and I'm sure many others to Starbound. You never quite knew just what to expect would be on a planet, even though you could tell what biome it was. It's something I hope they never change.
Well darn, you must really hate living on planet Earth, then. But seriously, the point of having an universe is to have a huge amount of diversity. So much diversity that you can fill one planet with as much stuff as what Earth has and it wouldn't even put a dent on unused possibilities and variations. What, can't generate so much content? Then don't do a game with an universe in it. Otherwise you might end up with this situation where you have a massive universe but it is filled with similar planets. Other option would be to use variations sparingly. Hold on to them, don't give it all to players too soon. Make large scale trends spanning over light years. That way it would make difference between travelling 10000 light years or 10. Now there is no difference and the planets stay the same no matter how far you travel.
No need to get a bit hostile over me simply stating my opinion. Not sure if you are, but that's how your first paragraph is coming off to me. One thing I could get behind is if a planet has a few different biomes on it. Say, 2 or 3 per planet. This would allow for more diversity while still giving the two of you what you are suggesting. But contentwise, you have to keep in mind that making it to where you have so many biomes most planets wouldn't be somewhat similar looking would be quite a lot of work, causing us to have to wait far longer for the game to release. But, coming up with a few more and having each planet have 2-3 biomes, increasing the size of the planet slightly would be more doable. At the same time, due to the exploration root of Starbound, you don't want planets so massive that it takes 40-60 minutes to fully get around the whole planet. As for holding off on variations, that sounds a bit boring. I wouldn't want it where multiple planets in one area of the galaxy have similar trends. Take a look at our own galaxy. Each planet is very unique with their own environments. I'm simply saying that planets with a certain biome aren't a bad thing.
No offense meant. They way Starbound markets its strengths makes it look like it would have a lot more variance in its content. But, playing it makes me feel like the procedural programmer dude left the house and now they are trying to do the best they can with what s/he made before quitting. Procedural stuff feel only skin deep in the game when there's clearly a need for much heavier use for automatically generated content. Planets could be wildly varied with smooth transitions from asteroid fields to solid cores to molten cores to atmosphered planets to gas giants. There could be randomized generated quests available on planets, not just in the outpost hub. The game could have flora generated with L-system. And so on.
the way the spawn system works now is good for small parties. however in a MMO server, the host should have some sort of editted server software that spawns different players in "sectors", just making sure they always spawn on a gentle star. i could see that being a decently accepted server mod tbh
I believe it's due to how the server has a single universe file so all players are in the same universe. If I'm correct in my assuming, I would take a guess that it chooses a random planet in this generated universe to start a person on. This then gets set for every new person on the server. I feel as though you'd have to make it to where the server file will change the start planet for each new connection. Again, this is purely speculation on how it works.
Maybe that's a difference of play styles there. I personally would prefer playing the game a lot more if the player files lived Server Side instead of on the client side. It's one of the things that killed Terraria for me. I like sandbox games where you can trade for resources, invite a large community to play and meet people. You can't really trust that the person you're playing with just cheated everything in at this point. There are ancient artifacts at the moment that allow warping to the Outpost, which feels like it fits within the reality. Teleporting with no cost across insane distances not so much. I honestly don't like the idea that you can travel infinite distances at the moment through FTL. It would make more sense to make it so you need to make multiple FTL jumps to get far. Which also allows for a progression of FTL upgrades for more distance.[DOUBLEPOST=1424891468][/DOUBLEPOST] If you're attempting to run a large community game inforced mechanics kind of need to be in place. It seems like something that should be in the server settings. restrictPartyTeleporting=true/false When on you can only teleport to your party's ship if it's in the same solar system/planet enableHomeTeleporting=true/false[DOUBLEPOST=1424891682][/DOUBLEPOST] The way solar systems work now where it's free to travel between any of them I tend to think of them as a single unit. At the moment there is no way to target a specific area of a planet so imagine going to a planet and running to the left every time for 20 minutes past 10 biomes to get to the Swamp you wanted. Seems a little much.
the multiple jumps could be made possible through a actually working fuel system, where 1000 isn't the limit, so that, let's say a travel actually requires 1500 fuel, you'll have to do it in 2 jumps, one of 1000 and one of 500 then again, the star-map should be improved in many ways, and we're still in early access, so everything is still subject to change.
