-==SOME QUESTIONS FOR THE DEVS==-
(I'm actually going to post a link to this on their dev facebook page and hope they come and give us a visit. Of course, everybody feel free to throw in your own thoughts too.)
- GAME MODE CONSTRUCTION
How do you see the basics of the game world working? How do I go from an avatar floating about in space (or starting in a space station?), to building my own ship? With minecraft its fairly realistic to be able to craft everything single handedly because of the low level of tech we are dealing with, but what about blockade runner? Will you buy necessary components and combine them yourself into specific blocks on the spot? Will some/many/all? of the components be directly harvestable/craftable yourself via some kind of development chain?
- SHIP PHYSICS
I've been thinking a bit about ship physics, and I've been wondering how you might deal with some problems that might arise when representing stress on the ship structure. (I'm basing this on the assumption that the current model is temporary anyway, which you have mentioned somewhere I think. Ideally, it shouldn't be possible for blocks to float in mid air while still aligning with the rest of the object, right?)
What is preventing people making ships with extremely strange shapes which would be physically impossible under something approaching real physics? For example, massive engines being linked by a think thread of blocks to the body of the ship, perhaps even with a u-bend? Will this just have to be accepted, or is there some way of calculating the stress load places on individual squares? If possible I think this would be pretty cool, especially if the load limit changes depending on the square type. So, when designing your ship, especially with large ones, you need to make sure you have lots of strong steel girders running along in a kind of 'spine' to hold everything together.
- CONTROLS
How do you envisage the basic mechanics of ship control design? Leaving aside unique control blocks like ship flight/weapon systems, I'm guessing you might have a system something like this...
1. Action blocks. Single function with state of ON or OFF. I.E.
- Air pump - Moves air from one side to the other when activated. Three versions (north/south, east/west, up/down).
- Vent - Acts as open block for purpose of air when activated.
- Doors (not really a block perhaps, but anyway)
2. Power/Communication blocks.
- Links to other bocks of same time to create a route for signal/power for action blocks.
3. Command block.
- Activating it sends a signal
Is this about right? I'm guessing you don't want command blocks magically or wirelessly connecting to action blocks, as it makes ship design/damage less interesting. OK, I was thinking though that you wouldn't want to have to make unique circuits for every command to action block set up, as you could end up with an unmanageable number of cables everywhere, esp. in large ships. So, could you make it so that action blocks and command blocks can run through the same communication cable? So long as there is a viable route for the signal to cross, it's OK? Linking specific command blocks to specific action blocks could be done by say, holding an engineer tool of some kind while using the blocks.
I could keep going but that's enough for now! Looking forward to every update.
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Topic: More Minecraft-inspired Awesome AND WE'RE IN SPACE - Blockade Runner (Read 57095 times)