Let's get radar into space engineers

Let's all come together as a community and get radar into this game. The reason I say this is because when you're on multiplayer you can't find anybody it's like you're playing by yourself and yet there's people out there playing you just can't find them. I would like to raid bases but I can't do that because I can't find people. Every other game you have out there you can find players to fight with but in Space Engineers there's no possible way because everyone is so far apart that's why radar is so important. I mean sure you can type in the the chat box in multiplayer and see if anyone's up for a good fight but what's the fun in that you shouldn't have a choice in the matter. I want to see encounters I mean you see encounters sure but they are rare and far between. The limitation of not being able to find players really holds this game back from becoming great I know I'm not the only one that thinks this people have wanted this feature for a long time and sure there's been mods here and there but it's not really part of the game.

 

https://feedback.keenswh.com/idea/less-asteroids-and-radar-gameplay-5984a5e7802d8

 

I would think that would be obvious, especially when you look at the discussion below. But no, suggestions can't be changed, unfortunately.

 

If there would be a radar that reveals players new players would get immediatedly stomped by the players that have advanced further in the server.

So far i think current system is ok.
The solution for having more pvp would be having something to contest for.

Also having no means to safely grow and expand versus superior enemy would get pretty frustrating.

Would you like your landing craft being smited by enemy mothership every time just as you have set it to ground for first time?

 

There are such things called safe zones for a reason let's say you make a safe Zone and your requirements are to make a jump drive as fast as you can. As it stands right now you cannot find anybody because space is so massive and that's boring. There needs to be a way to find other players it needs to happen if you want to play by yourself go play single player. Multiplayer shouldn't be holding your hand it should be challenging. Your base should get raided every other day instead of your base is just an object floating in space and it will last forever because no one will find it. There needs to be a balance put in place all of these massive ships and massive bases are slowing down servers because they're not going anywhere they're not getting raided they're not getting destroyed. That's why we need radar that's why we need to be able to find other people out in space.

 

Space is a huge void. It's not like stepping into a saloon and starting a shoot-out.

 

Safe zones and radar are a very bad combination, IMO. Say, sure, your objective is to make a jump drive as fast as possible, but what then. You jump out, you're immediately tracked, the people outside the safe zone that are already way stronger than you come as soon as you reposition outside the safe zone. You're faced fighting a stronger enemy without the resources to do so.

You can say that radar has a range, but that immediately makes radar next to useless since space is really, really huge, and people would just try to carve out an existence way, way out in some far corner of the map. Instantly, you're back to square 1.

I would also argue against safe zones in general, primarily because it's very, very hard to do right in open-world-type games because the mechanic is very easy to abuse. There will always be safe zone campers and people running into safe zones to avoid damage. And if you've played DayZ Overwatch or Epoch long enough, you know that it's that kind of gameplay that causes the in-game community to devolve into an exercise in the most caustic and excruciatingly annoying form of juvenile mudslinging.

@halipatsui's idea above is probably the best approach: create "destinations" in the game. Places where certain resources spawn that you can't get anywhere else will force players to congregate at these locations. Compression into these destinations will force players to interact, whether it's cooperatively or hostilely. Then, you'll get the PVP you long for without compromising the ability of players to join an active session in relative safety and without introducing mechanics that can drive people away from the game.

Creating destinations has other benefits too:

• It opens the door for emergent gameplay to surface. Factions will naturally form so that players can get resources from a destination under the protection of a fleet. Then, say your faction manages to wrest control of a destination, you can choose to go on the war path and use the resources you now exclusively have to go on the offensive, or you can use your cartel status to facilitate trade on your terms. Soloists will devise ways to extract resources from a destination stealthily (a potentially fun thing to do that you take away if radar is added). PVP piracy might become a thing. P2P trading for destination resources entirely outside of the destinations themselves can also emerge as a result.
• It is believable, since there are no safe zones in real life.
• It's also relatively trivial to implement, even in the procedurally generated backdrop of Space Engineers. A "destination" could be a planet or a small region of space with higher-than-normal asteroid density. Resources respawn at a controlled rate (some sort of organic resource would fit in really nicely here), so that the world never completely goes dry of them. A limited number of destinations spawn in a multiplayer world, and GPS contains a permanent marker for all destinations so that everyone knows where they are.

 

I've wanted radar and other PVP features in this game for a very long time but unfortunately it seems the majority of the player base are PVE/ Role players who despise us PVP players. This is evident from browsing the steam workshop for 5 minutes and looking at all the poorly designed and inefficient "battleships" you see on there. (Mostly unimaginative crap copied from sci fi movies/tv series).

Even the servers themselves tend to be PVE heavy. Scroll through the server browser and you will see mostly 2-3/60 servers. Pretty much PVErs in their own little worlds hiding away building giant laggy ships that serve no purpose. The few actual PVP servers out there tend to have inane and dumb rules that basically make it near impossible to do PVP. The few that don't tend to have either infinite map sizes or very large map sizes which also mean PVP is extremely rare. After 3+ years this game still only has 3 weapons - gatling, rocket launcher and warhead and yet the devs keep adding pointless cosmetic items like different colored space suits and pretty glass

 

For me the biggest thing that stops me enjoying pvp is the time it takes to create a ship and the time it takes for it to be destroyed, it can take weeks to gather resources and build a nice ship and a few seconds to loose it all, just makes it not worth while, with a radar people would just hunt down and destroy offline players stuff, no one wants to log onto a server to find all their creations were destroyed while they were offline,

they need to strengthen all blocks to damage so its not soo disastrous to have a pvp encounter, maybe some kind of shields and some way server owners can create safe zones where people can leave their ships while offline, people will be more incline to pvp if they have a chance to survive the encounter.

 

Trouble with radar's is they put quite a strain on the server, rember they are constantly updating the postions of player's/ships relative to themselves so its not as simple as "here is the cords of a player" And TBH It's down to server owners to make reasons for players too meet up and pvp I haven't seen a single suggestion in the thread thats not possible using the current API the tools are there but you cant expect the DEVs to play the game for you. FYI these servers do infact exisit and tend to be very popular and for that reason you wont find them simply looking within the ingame browser.

 

I think a better alternative would be to make things that a ship does make that vessel more detectable. Something like detectable "heat signatures".
Engines firing for example, would give off a lot of infra-red, which could (irl) be used to detect the ship. A simple aproximation would be to just use power consumption as a measure of how detectable a ship is.
The server could then send the position to other clients (players) that are inside detection range, displaying it on their HUD depending on how far away they are. If multiple ships are close together, then at a distance, you would want them to "merge" and be seen as a single large heat signature to stop people from just breaking large bases into individual parts to avoid detection.
To hide, you would have to reduce the observability of your ship by shutting down as many systems as possible. When you log off, all you would need to do is park inside an asteroid, kill all of your systems bar minimal life support, hop in a stasis pod and log out.
This would also add some depth to strategy and design, putting a large number of refineries or assemblers in one place would be potentially very dangerous. So you might spread them out across a few asteroids. Or if you want to escape a visible incoming enemy, you can cut power and drift. Or perhaps if you want to move undetected, you could add separate minimal sets of "stealth thrusters" to your ship to minimise power usage while manoeuvring. If the devs put a lower limit on the detection threshold then this would open up the way to building "stealth ships" whilst simultaneously relaxing the need to do heat signature calculations for every bit of floating space junk. You could even go as far as adding stuff like internal emission sinks (like the normandy from mass effect) to temporarily absorb heat generated by ship systems. Or players could create massive heat sources to serve as honeypots for other players, there really are a lot of possibilities...

It would also mean that the big, well established powers on a server would be much easier to detect than the newbies in their smaller ships. So if it's balanced well, there shouldn't be any curb-stomping problems either.

Wow, that idea really ran away from me...
Still, thoughts?

 

How about the "Radar" just detects, but you don't know if it's a player or an asteroid? Only when it moves you now it's a grid, but not if it is a player or debris.

On the other side, I can confirm that the radar mods have a huge performance impact on DS. At the moment I'm satisfied with a way to measure the distance to a spotted target

 

I use "Midspace's Exploration Ship Scan" mod for finding stuff (both other player and encounters) in space. With the new tracking options, it is just as good as radar, it is limited by my antenna range, and the antenna exposes me when I'm scanning (like a radar ping would). Have you tried that mod?

 

Midspace exploration ship scan does not detect other players ships. It is specifically designed to detect only unowned AND unpowered blocks. Both conditions must be true for detection.

Could you explain how you are detecting other player's stuff with this?

It's cool as a tool for SP, but you specifically mention using it to find players...