Wow! You guys post a lot when I sleep : )
Although I would also add that SlocCount has never been a good estimate of anything* and so advertising that it's an excellent estimate of the work you've done so far was the main reason I disregarded your kickstarter.
As your posting here I'll probably take another look as a dev that follows up peoples interest is a good sign imo, but really you want concrete showing what it can do examples to show how much work you've put in.
I did change the wording there, removing the "excellent" and the money-mention. I think that's improved the section a little. While, given, line count is a sucky metric, it's actually possible to count and talk about - And, more importantly, it's one of the few metrics that's somewhat accessible to the layman. The phrase "We have no non-negligable memory leaks" would leave a programmer happy, but would terribly confuse your average person.
Actually, I forgot this, but in the kickstarter there's a 44m youtube video of someone building a "frankkinship", which should be Frankenship. He shows the heat engine working, the voxel-based damage, organic regeneration and a few other things. There's already a fairly large amount of work.
I do suck as describing my game. Time and time again, other people managed to do it better than I can. I was so incredibly thankful for that video, which shows off a ton of stuff.
Regarding the ego, I think it's the fact you assume that you are very interesting to other people. The tip-off for this, to me, was the "seriously" in the end of your full bio, when the description strikes me (at least) as perfectly normal. [...] I hope you don't take this the wrong way.
I like what you are saying. In your opinion, why do you think that the game is already so slow? Is it the fact that it's not block base but voxel based?
You must know a lot more tweed-wearing cavers than I do! Nothing about my description is particularly /amazing/, but a lot of the hobbies I pick up are not particularly common. Oh, and you'll have to work a lot harder to offend me!
The game is actually a lot /faster/ than it used to be, and getting faster. But yes, the reason this is a problem is the fact that it's voxel-based. To render the equivalent of a single minecraft block, we have to deal with 4096 cubes. This scales rapidly - The average scene needs to be able to work out which of 4billion+ cubes need to be displayed roughly 15 times per second.
Which is a huge thing, since there's absolutely infinite amounts of data to send (like the temperatures and whatnot).
Is the architecture already in a client/server model, as MC changed it to?
It's not yet client/server, but it's being designed with that switch in mind.
There's a TON of data that exists... But the trick is that most of that data either doesn't need to exist on others' computers, only needs to exist in a tiny sphere (Where the player can see), or can be re-calculated on the fly from more simple data. (I.e. A voxel hole would take hundreds of bytes if I sent it directly - Or < 10 bytes if I merely send the event that CAUSED the voxel hole)
A combination of these methods should make for reasonable data use. My goal is to make it work with the internet connection I have - 3mb/s down, <1mb/s up.
Shields
I think I'll make shields magnetic fields - This seems like the most plausible real-world phenomenon that corresponds to sci-fi shields.
Why would space-ship ramming be less effective than water-ship ramming?
Speed and mass.
A water-ship was to be, on average, less dense than the water it's floating in. Our largest aircraft carriers can displace over 100,000 tons of water. This means, if I'm remembering my physics correctly, (I may not be!) that they'd be 100,000 tons themselves. Spaceships don't need to me any more or less dense than anything, and adding on mass from asteroids is easy. Thus they attain larger tonnages rather quickly. By happy coincidence, I happen to have a partially-build ship roughly the size of an aircraft carrier. It masses 2,500,000 tons, and it's just an empty shell.
Our fastest large water-ships run at around 30 knots, or 15m/s. That's an excellent clip for something that large in the water... But it's peanuts for space. A spaceship may be able to accelerate at up to 20G's for upwards of a minute. That's 9.8m/s*60 seconds, or 588 meters/s.
Designing a structure that can withstand 100,000 tons @ 15m/s is an entirely different critter than designing one that can withstand 5 million tons @ 600 m/s.