Without procedural worlds, it won't last. I love survival mode, but i gotta be honest!

It's awesome to see a proper survival gamemode, where it's always a scramble for resources or you simply die a cold lonely death.
BUT there is one huge problem that needs to be resolved.
The fact that the maps are limited so you will always eventually run out, no matter how well you do.
No matter if you manage to "legit" build an asteroid base or a big mining ship over the course of several days, what's the point? The asteroids and uranium WILL run out since the map is fixed.

That's a huge issue for the long term playability of this game imo.
Minecraft and Starmade has the advantage of always having something new to explore or find, you can survive indefinetly if you want, and things you build can persist BECAUSE you can survive and find new lands. The same applies to the upcoming indie game Limit Theory with is 100% procedural.
It feels fair. Your survive if you can manage resources. If you can't. You die.
But you don't suddenly get an unspoken "GAME OVER" screen because the entire world became empty of resources, it simply can't happen.
That's very very important in a survival game.
To some extent this applies to Project Zomboid and Don't Starve as well, but those games have either such a large map that it isn't relevant, or respawning resources.



Space Engineers really really has to introduce some form of procedural map generation as you enter the edge of the map, or it'll just end up being a short quick "1-session see how long u can survive" game. Which i don't think is what any of us want. I certainly don't. I want a long-term game i can play for weeks or months. I want to feel that i accomplished something by building things fair and square. I want them to persist in my savegame. Having a limited map just means that everything you do stops to matter.
Great, you built a nice space station or mining ship, but what does it matter? It'll all be pointless when the last uranium ore is gone.

I mean i don't want to have struggled for days to survive and built nice things legit, only to find that OH WELL all the uranium in the map is gone. Time to delete the save. lol.
I think the most important thing for the game right now is to work on getting some sort of procedural map going. Either if it's done in chunks like Minecraft or zones like Starmade. Or respawning asteroids (after the game detects that there are below 5% raw minerals left of a certain type in the map).
Honestly i would be perfectly okay if the ONLY solution is to have "edges" to the map where you enter a loading screen to load map X 0 Y 1 from your home map of X 0 Y 0 for example. Yes it would be crude and ugly, but it would solve the survival and exploration issue. You'd be able to take a ship on an expedition to get more resources. The trips would have to be longer and longer, eventually forcing you to migrate to another adjacent map to avoid too long trips in the future.
THAT is survival.

The game simply can't have long term playability or long term servers with nice multiplayer dynamics if the maps always run out of resources.
There needs to be some way to do it without "cheating" by turning it to creative mode or copy / pasting everything over to a new savegame.

 

Or some random asteroids drifting by, away from center of the map and spawning respawning depending on if they are being rendered. Say spawning despawning happening at some 30 km from the center of the map. Tho im not sure if making an asteroid move at say 0.5ms is possible.

 

I've been thinking about this as well. However, I think a workaround would be to go into creative mode, and copy/paste your stations and ships into a "fresh" map with asteroids you can mine.

 

I'm sitting in a survival world, realityx10, max asteroids, and I think just in the asteroid I decided to put my base would be capable to make a couple (at least) 1 M kg ships. Yep, that isn't the mega-monster, but that is also just one asteroid. This one seems to be mostly made of minerals, especially iron. It seems there is more 'stuff' than stone.

There is also lots of uranium, but how much? No idea, or how long it would last. I think, in the long run, that will be the determining factor, but I think that could be a long way away, because there is a LOT of it so far.

The only frustration I can lay claim to is the frustratingly slow refining process. I have one refinery for just uranium (and the rarer cobalt and platinum when I need 'em), and I find myself spending a lot of time waiting on it....the other refinery I'm using for the other minerals, and for some it too, is ridiculously slow.

I keep hesitating making another refinery or assembler simply because of the problems getting fuel to keep them running. I can find it, but the process uses so much fuel to make fuel, it has me hesitating to go further.

It probably wouldn't be so bad, except the only way to power a refinery and assembler is with large ship reactors (even though small, and the refinery and assembler only use about 11% of the output). In comparison to small ship reactors, they just suck up uranium.

 

In my experience the refining of uranium yield 10 times the amount of uranium than it is used to power the refinery. So thats no that bad.

Yes the game has asteroid generator, just needs a way to spawn/despawn them on random. Like I said, medium sized rocks drifting trough the sector at slow speed, it they happen to hit anything, sucks to be that thing.

 

I'm pretty sure they'll add procedural worlds, just give it another few weeks.

 

I wonder just what good a slow moving asteroid could really be? You wouldn't be able to safely use a drill ship on it....it's moving...and sooner or later you are going to get whacked by a wall.

If you set a grav generator on it, you would only be able to mine reliably by hand, and that would be with the suit thrusters turned off, otherwise, again, everything would always be moving from underneath you.

All that also, is assuming they get the movement glitches cleaned up, because for now, those also have to be taken into consideration.

I hope that isn't their solution to introducing more ores.

 

I think the biggest Problem with that topic is the amount of Data to be saved when ending the game or to be created when the edge of the map is reached.

One way to avoid this would be a 'travel' function.
Since it is to assume we're playing in a asteroid belt spreading once around the center star it shouldn't be too much of an effort to find a new gathering of asteroids.
You pack all the ships you've built together by landing gears, fly out of the Asteroid field and activate a 'travel' funktion.
Now a new map gets generated, but got can keep everything you've build so far except stations.
At this point many possibilities of random features to occur can take place like ship wrecks, abandoned stations or leftovers of huge space battles.
The prevous map could now be deleted. Or travelling back can also get realised, so the map can get saved but can stay unattended until you do so.

 

Fuel is always going to be an issue as it should be not just a small random inconvenience i got a 3x world running and i have no issues running 4 refineries 2-4 assemblers and 2 mining ships with 1 refinery on uranium. So of course as you expand even more you need more refineries to dedicatedly produce fuel the more you consume it of course as it also should be.

 

Using SEToolbox to manipulate the save world you can add in asteroids on the fly sort of speak into your world ( they will spawn random in the near vicinity of your host char, and they are copy pastable from your other worlds as well.

Which is a very nifty way of adding more asteroids and getting more out of the map because the map is huge and i still dont understand why people are obsessed thinking this is what there is going to be, i personally would assume that the reason the world is so small ( in terms of materials ) is for TESTING there is no need to have a 200.000km filled with asteroids overloading the systems if the basic features of the game is working yet.

 

I am pretty sure the Devs are already working on this. They spent a while making the game, so I think one of the most important features is a while in development now. Guess they just haven't gotten it in a playable state.
And until we get procedural maps or whatever I use the following:
When I run completeley out of stuff, I transform my base into a large ship, change the world in creative mode, open a new creative world, copy & taste everything from ther old world, delete the old world and change the new world into survival. Yes, it's a crude solution but at least you get to keep your stuff.
Also it should take a LONG time to mine all 16 asteroids on a large map, reprocess and use all the materials you find

 

0.5 ms is slow, but ok it could even be slower. You will be perfectly able to mine with small ships. As atm drills themselves shake the boat with more than a few ms oft top speed.

Basically what im suggesting is asteroids on rails, like planets in kerbal space program. They would be randomly spawned on linear paths outside the central area, and stay on for say a day. The number depending on setting and amount of people logged in on average.

It wouldnt need more than a few asteroids at a time. And if you start on 7 asteroid map there is still room.

Actually the faster its moving the harder it would be to mine. So a kind of a challenge for higher difficulty setting.

Or make it a hazzard, or some normal rocks flying trough the world as meteorites.

 

This has been suggested countless times, and I'm certain it'll be put in. Most games (such as MC) have to struggle to have a contiguous procedurally generated world. In SE, all you need to do is get past the render distance of the starting "map" and you can have another one pop up no problem. Give it time, it's too obvious not to implement.

 

I'd say this is an absolute certainty.
With a single player, you can strip 4 asteroids in a matter of weeks. With 12 players, you could do it in a few days. It's a no brainer really.
What I am really interested in is how they will implement this. A reasonable method is simply divide up (theoretically) infinite space into sectors, which you can travel to, one sector unloads, the next sector loads. The sectors don't interact at all, apart from the ability to move resources between them.

 

Hmm yeah, I like this idea of unloading one sector while the next one loads. Hopefully they'll give you some way to return to the old sector where you base may be. Would give me an excuse to actually attempt to build my carrier (Although it requires 12 Large reactors to power it without redlining in creative mode. I shudder to think of the fuel consumption that thing would have. Perhaps a smaller carrier then...).

 

Hopefully, they'll do the load/unload like in MC.

You get out of an "area" (or grid, or whatever), and the automation shuts down, but all the blocks are still there (for when you come back).

So, everything powers off when you get 30,001 KM from the centerpoint of your grid (i.e. you moved to a new grid).

In order to find your way home, you need to set up perimeter beacons. They operate exactly like normal beacons, but ALSO keep stuff "alive" across grid boundaries (within say 10 KM of the beacon).

So, you get close to the edge of a grid, drop a small "station" (minimum 1 station block + perimeter beacon + reactor) and activate the beacon. Cross the grid, and while you're still inside the influence of the previous beacon, set up a second perimeter beacon.

Once factions (or whatever) are implemented, then you can label them appropriately for "us" and "everyone else" (or something, IDK ... "Home this way" seems like a bad idea to keep public).

 

The sheer amount of raw materials in a single medium sized game is stupendous, though. Seriously, I have four refineries working overtime, and they're nowhere near enough to efficiently refine all the materials I've gathered in just a short amount of time.

 

With the PvP based gameplay this game is going for, a single "map" is like loading a level of de_dust2. It runs until one team wins, then everyone quits and starts over. No need for procedural generation; in fact, limited resources benefits the gameplay. In that light, I don't think this is a high priority. Whether or not I think it should be is immaterial.

 

TBH, I like the idea of procedural generation so that there's not a point where "oh crap, we're outta stuff ... gotta start over". Because by then, especially on the medium (7 big rocks?) or large (16) maps, you're going to have a pretty big station / fleet / whatever.

The small maps make sense for the kind of quick & dirty "game over, restart" style PVP, because honestly the first team to get small arms or even "gunblock" ships (cockpit + guns, thrusters, reactor, gimbal ... limited/no armor) will probably win.

Really, I'd like anything that allows people to interact as a whole rather than "USE Server" and "FUR-TEC Server" and "That mining faction server" and "Hostile Paradigm [HSTL] Server", ect. where events on one server don't matter to anyone else.

It could be as simple as gates that led to "KSH Public Link servers" (Running Empty Procedural World 1*) and then from there linked to everyone else's "private" servers**. So then, FUR-TEC is linked to KSH1, USE is on KSH2, and HSTL is on KSH3. They're the "big fish" in their respective KSH ponds, until say HSTL finds their way into KSH2, and starts shooting at USE (who calls on FURTEC to help out - maybe even needs to give coordinates to the KSH1-2 gate).

* -> Procedural only to a point -- assuming a sector is a cube, then 3 faces point at other sectors on that server, 1 face to a private server, and the other two linking to other KSH ponds ... or something else that makes sense.

** -> in order to accomodate "but we just wanna be by ourselves" types, you would need to either:
A. Start your server with "MAP + Stargate" OR
B. Set some kind of "Global PvP Enabled" switch

 

Devs can do chunks.
1 chunk - like a normal world with 2 - 6 asterods. But if you fly away - this chunk unloading and next chunk generaring ( game puts random asteroids and MAYBE parts of old structures in the world. It can be not procedural, game can put pre-builded stations and asteroids. For now.

 

It wouldn't even need to be done in chunks.

Asteroids should be far away enough from each other that by the time you reach the next one, the previous one is no longer visible and gets saved to disk to free up some memory.
For multiplayer games, you'll either need a very good server or make sure the players stick together.

 

Devs said in the stream yesterday that procedurally generated maps are going to be a thing, but it will be a bit before we get them. In the short term we might be getting some new types of asteroid morphology, so that is good.

So it is coming, out in the future.

 

Agreed. Without procedural asteroid belts, this game will die. The gameplay seems to suit groups of people focusing their efforts on building things such as large ships/stations or collecting resources. On the single,small map, teams of people will be too close and resources will run out. I don't like the idea of maps being disposable as one perso in this thread suggested.

 

Well there trying to keep it realistic, they could place asteroid belt or clumps at huge distance's , and you just have to make the journey ,half way being the map load point of a new sector. Then you are loading a sector while everything is out of viewing render distance, and it would appear seamless, still be realistic in the sense a 15 to 20 minute hike through empty space to get to a new sector isn't to long to get overly boring, you can get up to speed and turn thrusters off and dampeners off and cruise at low energy cost , for stragglers low on fuel its possible to get to a new system still, and all with no ''hyper jump system'' or any type of jump system.....

 

Why not just follow the EVE Online way of doing it?

You warp between different asteroid fields, planets or moons.

Also, there should be a possibility to get to completely new solar systems, but doing so should require a large ship with specific engines, e.g. Hyperdrives or wormhole generators.

That would make large ships something to aim for, especially if you want to explore. Smaller ships would buzz around within the asteroid belts or the between belts. I guess it should be a discussion whether smaller ships would have engines capable of travelling between belts or planets within a system or if you need a large ahip with warp engines to do so.

Anyways, each area would then be a 'grid' like in EVE.

 

Unless asteroids themselves had a weak gravity field (like some real life ones do). That should be enough for the game to move you along with the asteroid's gravity field, like it does when you're inside a ship (or will do when they perfect it and stop us bouncing around randomly).

 

I agree... I need a reason to build a giant carrier ship... or a station... Even with the large world right now I am scratching my head to come up with a reason to build such a thing. Right now my plans are to copy/paste my current survival mode creations into the procedurally generated world once it is released, so at least I have a reason/motivation/something to work towards.

 

I'm not into PvP in a combat sense.

I am currently having a blast mining, refining, and building my space station. Start out with priorities = uranium. I now have my refinery running constantly, and I need a second (and likely third). The amount of ore in the world does not bother me..... It's everywhere. I am running maximum world size, and I don't think I've even seen all 16(?) large asteroids.... Maybe 6-8 are immediately visible to me. The rest are hiding behind others, and are camouflaged into the skybox.

I love it the way it is.... Couldn't imagine how amazing it would be to have endless, procedurally generated worlds.