Introduction

shcipwa

Hai,

I am new to these parts, I have been looking for a few weeks for a badass spacebuild server to make my home, and from the forums / youtube videos this place looks exactly what I was looking for.

A bit about me:

I am a 25 year old software engineer and independent game developer
Grew in the HL2 engine competing at national CSS comps
Dabbled with wire mod a year or two back, built some self stabilizing thruster powered follow drones that were a lot of fun.
Only touched on spacebuild for a few quick sessions. Never really had time to invest figuring out how stuff worked properly.
Have recently been reading up on lua coding and gmod addons and am keen to get my hands dirty.

I have heard some cool ideas thrown around here, ideas that I have had myself for a while. I love the idea of a spacebuild survival server and would love to have a chat to Steevoo about that and where you want to go with it (if you haven't lost interest)

Anyways, cant wait to get on and build some stuff, im sure you guys will see me around soon (provided the ping to the server is bearable from AUS)

roychook

woohoo hopefully a new developer? oh and welcome to diaspora

Lambda217

With people willing to donate, and a new coder to help with balancing, maybe glorious days could return to Diaspora!

shcipwa

I tried jumping on the server last night, looks like the main server is down.

Is the dev server the main server now?

noldevin

Yes for now we all use the dev server

shcipwa

Something I was wondering about powering ships,

I noticed the fuel system thread surrounding Gyro pods, that sounds ideal for most people...

Are there imposed limitations around purely wire thruster based ships?

I can imagine using the plain wire thrusters would avoid the whole fuel system which would not be fair, are there fuel consuming thrusters that use the same fuel as gyropods? Is this a legit option?

DuneD

Welcome
You can bypass the gyro fuel limitation using several ways, most efficient is e2 applyForce ( you can actually emulate the gyro using only e2, and its less expensive since you can make a case for your ship, so you avoid doing all the checks the gyro does, like looking for 4 props to apply force and such), there are even some nice e2 on the showcase that do that, in another hand the gyro can work only with energy, its still what everbody uses and its quite effective, still for small ships with limited energy it sucks a bit, I decided to make my own e2 applyForce system after seeing I couldnt power a shuttle gyro using solar panels on the roof of that shuttle.

Amaroq

Actually, E2 is a lot more hard on the server than the Gyro is. It has been updated and changed quite a bit from the old Gyro, and currently works with parented ships to easily find the parent and manipulate it's velocity with :SetVelocity(). This is also much easier on the server than ApplyForce is, since it has to calculate a great deal less.

Lua is also much faster than E2, and has to do a lot less internally for it to function. Stick with the Gyropod.

DataSchmuck

Amaroq wrote:

Stick with the Gyropod.

I agree.

Furnardan

Or you can use an E2-Thruster stabilization system. Instead of using the E2 itself, which lags worse than Gyros, you can use properly placed thrusters which are operated by the E2, which is surprisingly not laggy at all. No worse than a Gyro, if not better. It also leaves alot more possibilities for movement controls.

While on the note about lag on the server, parenting with the easy precision tool is also less laggy than the normal parent tool, as I've seen.

DuneD

Right then, I still think its safer for the server sticking with applyforce, last time I used gyropod in battle I ran out of energy, my ship started drifting and ended colliding with the world, which caused the server to crash, thats the main reason I made the applyForce system.

Amaroq

Wa? Just make some fuel. Way more efficient. Coulda sworn I fixed the PN shit a while ago.

Furnardan

Or... simply make the Gryo activate to something else, like a chat command or numpad button or such so you can restart it easier. OR!! Attach the Gyro to a secondary energy source, so it won't have its power drained!

If bumping the server wall caused a crash, something is poorly assessed about your ship... like I said, easy precision parenting is less laggy and from my experience, less buggy when hitting things.

DuneD

I always used easy precision to parent my stuff, and any contraption crashes the server if it hits the world wall at certain velocity and right now the only way to get PN in dev is by using the drills, which isnt a very efficient way xD

Lambda217

Parenting will always be a bit dodgy, the crashes that sometimes occur if a parented ship is smashed into something probably can't be fixed.
Using applyforce/setvel to move your ship does give more freedom, but you can get idiots like me who make their ships capable of changing their velocity instantly and at a high speed, rendering anything slower than a drone fairly useless at any distance greater than "sodomy". It would be nice to see a SetVel movement system that gives a reasonable speed depending on ship size, and has decent simulated momentum.
le petit edit:
If we had two servers, maybe we could do some testing (IE: crashing stuff into stuff) to see if there is a way of preventing impact crashes. But ensuring Fuhr doesn't keel over from starvation comes first

DuneD

there is an easy way to fix that, make the contraption blow if it hits the skybox, I remember long time ago we had a similar issue with gcombat, randomly, when you fired against the skybox the server crashed, then garry added a function to check if it hits the skybox and the issue got solved, same could be done with ships, on ent touch if its skybox then boom xd

NormallyClosedSwitch

BING BADABOOM!!! PACLOWWWWWWWW NUUUUKE THEM ALLLLL!

DataSchmuck

how bout if you hit the skybox it just sends you back the other way, like you kind of "bounce" off the walls. Otherwise my ship will blow up every time I go out cause I ALWAYS run into those damn walls.

Steeveeo

DataSchmuck wrote:

how bout if you hit the skybox it just sends you back the other way, like you kind of "bounce" off the walls. Otherwise my ship will blow up every time I go out cause I ALWAYS run into those damn walls.

That would probably cause the server to lag horrendously or crash just as hard as a normal collision, judging from what happens when you move parents around independently from their children (and doing it for each prop would also lag as much, considering you'd have to do it one at a time anyway). I did this with my jetbike racks a while back and every time I'd move them to unload them on another planet, they'd crash the server. Strange thing was, it would crash even if the bike was completely non-solid. Last I checked, GravHulls also have similar issues with moving parented objects.

One thing I'd like to see is a collision with the side teleporting you to the other side of the map seamlessly and without too much lag.

Lambda217

I remember the last time we tried to teleport something parented (with a GHD). Bad things occurred.

DuneD

Yea that could explain why is more likely for a small contraption to crash the server than a big one when running against the wall, my ship for example needs to go very very fast in order to crash it, or collide the parent directly against the world, what could be done is check if the parent hits the world, and if that happens kill the contraption, that way we could narrow it down to only if the parent hits instead of the whole contraption.

shcipwa

The main reason for wanting to use thrusters was the handling of gyropods are very glitchy imo, even with multiplier tweaking.

Does the performance problem of manual flight systems come in because of the E2 processing or the actual physics solver of too many welded parts simulating from single points of thrust?

I have tried to steer away from vector thrusters and just relied on old fashion single direction thrusters (about 6 per ship currently).

My working E2 chip that can fly a ship using only single direction wire thrusters sits at about 150 ops and shows 2% of quota which seems like it should not lag the server.

As far as parenting goes, this is a new concept to me. Just did some reading, seems to be what I was looking for but a note on the facepunch thread got me wondering:

Facepunch Thread wrote:

So long as you don't use it for a moving surface you walk on or for, say, landing gear, it works perfectly. Any kind of decorations, walls inside a structure or vehicle, railings, what have you, it's all good.

How would this work for building a ship?

Lambda217

We have a parenting E2 on this server that does a combination of weld and parenting, so basically the ship is unable to spaz and causes much less lag.