#A Test Tweak for the Turrets. Please vote or downvote

79 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

opaque kestrel
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So, it should be easily modified (at least, from my POV)
What you think if it will be done on the STU for test purposes?

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@west sinew @dusty crest @dusk saddle What you think, how hard it will be to do and will it break the game?

dusty crest
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I don't imagine it being that difficult to do, but no clue. Also doesn't sound like it should break anything more than normally.

dusk saddle
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Hmm, what is the reason behind this change though? What's that extra power going to do?

thin tendon
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People like to build large rotating structures and usually abuse a bug involving robot arms to bypass the weight limits anyway, having a legitimate way to do it would be nice

radiant fossil
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when you say turrets, i hope you mean turntables and not just cradles. Building our own is the fun part and cradles have some bugs like not transfering ammo etc.. Heck boosting all moving parts would be great.

Yes currently using the robot arm bug is the only way to build an effective turret, If turntables had boosted torque by x5-10 that could make them useful and more accessible. From my tests, even stacking many turntables to lift one gun is not good enough right now. And you need at least enough power to lift one gun with multiple layers of armor or it is useless in pvp and will get 1 shotted out of action. Of course there are some moving part jank still, like a shot turntable can disable a ship if you don't build around that issue but us builders can worry about that for now.

cobalt remnant
# dusk saddle Hmm, what is the reason behind this change though? What's that extra power going...

Currently, no one is using the turrets because:

  • there is a chance to fall off
  • it's VERY weak.

So, if you put only weapons on the turret, there will be no enough power to rotate it while a ship is maneuring. Even when flying forward, it rotates slow, which is not responsive and hard to aim on the enemy ships. And it's only weapons, no additional armor. With armor it become even slower.

Atm, there is a bug with robot arm which is widely used to bypass the limitations. (Commando Doggo has more experience on it)

So, the change needs to be done to the small and big turret platforms and turret cradles Yaw.

potent niche
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In fact, even just strapping two lamps to a turntable will slow it down to a surprising degree. A discovery made when creating police lights. Torque is tiny

thorny olive
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I don't really want to put together test cases, sooo if you guys have turntable (or hinges, I suppose) turrets/contraptions that work but are just really slow and unresponsive, send them my way and I'll goof around with their torque. No saying that those changes will ever propagate to Live or even STU, but it'd at least be a fun demo for FB

potent niche
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At least one amusing example of just how much you can slow down a turntable is this abomination at the start of the video Doggo made ways back. Extreme example, but when you consider examples like the very heavy pitch turret https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlU8LortWxs

But I'll see about making you a test bed with some basic unviable heavy setups, like turrets armored with the armor designed for them And other people can provide some specialist cases.

YouTube
Commando Doggo
Starbase - How to Wire Anything to moving turret cradle

As requested, this is a quick tutorial on how to attach anything to a moving turret cradle while staying powered.

▶ Play video
potent niche
# thorny olive I don't really want to put together test cases, sooo if you guys have turntable ...

So here we have tesbed with vanilla weight in an unadorned robot arm, but instructions for how to get it to move slow by the levers. A basic armored turret, thus heavy and quite slow. And a superheavy example.

The notable detail with all of these, is that with low torque, it means that turning a ship can make them flail even with yolol designed to return them to 0. So compound any speed issues with physics.

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potent niche
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As for turntables, from every source I have ever read and own useage, the small and large turntables appear to have the same torque. And thus share the inability to fight back against heavy thruster rotation while moving.

radiant fossil
potent niche
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When I think of turrets, I'm always brought back to one of my favourite videos on the potential of their utility, back at the start of early access.

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You can mess aroun with control schemes so that you can fly a ship and control a setup like this at the same time. But the fact that the turrets would not be able to reliably stay on target in flight due to lack of torque is depressing. It just seems like exactly the sort of engineering solution that should be viable.

radiant fossil
potent niche
rapid junco
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theres something wierd on the stu where turrets make my ship twitch

radiant fossil
rapid junco
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yeah hopefully its not some new wierdness

radiant fossil
potent niche
rapid junco
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i didn't, I'll have to try that. I mean the whole ship jerks from side to side, its more than a twitch I should say

cobalt remnant
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The new settings kinda help, but not removing the problems

thorny olive
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Can't really remember, were there issues unique to the self-hosted turret/cradles? ie, apart from the usual popping off whenever you look at them the wrong way

potent niche
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as far as I know, the issues are universal. As the turntables/turrets/cradles are just in general, powered by a very overworked endo hamster. But Doggo would have the testing experience.

rapid junco
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I've had almost no issues with using standard turrets and cradles for mining, but I think using these turrets for multicrew stuff won't be happening

radiant fossil
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I've tried multi crew a few times (robot arm turret), it worked fine for the passenger. the only problem was slight network delay which also causes the projectile to leave their turret late. So i had to have less armor close to their gun barrels for the shots to fire clear.

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if your talking about those "dev turrets" i have no idea

thorny olive
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Yer, the dev turrets from CA days is what I meant

fickle copper
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@thorny olive What values are available to easily tweak other than Torque? Because I agree baseball bat ships aren't good and torque isn't the only problem hinges/sliders/turntables have. Though it is the big one.

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I'm actually working on a door right now that I'm struggling with because of slider weirdness. Like my slider bumping into it's end stop and shifting my entire ship a couple cm...

thorny olive
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Which slider?

fickle copper
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All of them are doing it. Doesn't seem to care about the weight of the ship either. Shifts a couple cm with a few plates, or with a hundred max mass crates.

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It's not the slider alone, it's when I put a couple of hinges and plates on it for me door.

thorny olive
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Suppose that's not too surprising. Sliders have self collision enabled whereas turntables don't

radiant fossil
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Its late and i got to sleep, but i have ideas to balance turrets if you buff them dusty. depends if you can increase torque without increasing speed. currently even max speed super fast turrets will give you just as many negatives as advantages in strict meta pvp. Extra space for turret, more fragile multidirectional armor, more balance thrusters, odd shape, the list goes on. However, they can shut down smaller fighters or micro fighters very quick so i can see its not healthy gameplay for some. I think very high torque but not super quick movement could be a comprimise to allow fast small ships to still avoid them. Anyway would need to think about it more, off to bed.

thorny olive
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Angular velocity is decoupled from torque, so snappy but slow is very much doable

radiant fossil
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ah cool. will have to experiment.

fickle copper
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So can you only mess with torque or are the other values you can change for turntables? And are the tweeks the same for hinges and sliders?

thorny olive
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There's a bunch of properties, but I'm currently recompiling sooo can't exactly say what.

thorny olive
potent niche
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or because they are moving and bouncing in a 0.1 range and not hitting lock, like hinges sometimes do if they can't quite close

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As for a manual lock safety field, that's more of a theoretical safeguard for hosting, unhosting from going out of range and returning, and being around lots of other ships at once like a station. And butterfingers.

thin tendon
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While on the topic, it would be useful if torque was separate from max speed as a device field.
Atm they're linked so it's a bit annoying when you're trying to get slow-smooth movement, but the torque goes to basically nothing as a result

radiant fossil
# thin tendon While on the topic, it would be useful if torque was separate from max speed as ...

This is true, i have a slow button for my turrets for steady smooth aim instead of fast and jerky. But i rarely use it because it looses torque and collision resistance. I didnt want to overcomplicated this for devs but theres a lot of points im curious about that I haven't brought up.

Like what is the relation between torque and collision/stress resistance on moving parts? Depending on ship size, shape, turret size, and turret connections all play a role in it and i havent figured it out. Essentially if a turret is hit by several auto cannons or lasers at once it looses torque and stutters temporarily, becoming disabled pretty much. On some turrets its so bad they get disabled if the paint is scratched. I've figured ways to mitigate it a lot, mostly just keeping the turrets smaller and spread out, and honestly its nit-picking so i'm happy with just the torque increase if they do.

potent niche
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If I were to speak myself from use of the basic turntables and turrets,. Torque is 100% the highest thing I would desire for both utility and fun. The actual speeds available to the turret are fine.

When combined with ship rotation it's more than enough for target acquisition, as long as you can aim. So there is a skill challenge for manual, or a programming challenge where the target always has 0.2 second advantage.

As such, I have to conclude that multiplying the current torque by X to make them reliable tractors is a huge quality of life and fun change. Especially as high torque is also a stopping force, making them not overswing from their own movement.

radiant fossil
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tbh i can't remember the exact speed of cradles and turntables by themselvs, but correct they shouldnt be too fast. slower turrets with high snappy torque are very useful still for targeting medium fighters and above in dogfights. And if a big turret ship really wants to fight a small fast fighter then they should have to play smarter by flying perpendicular like a ship of the line battleship or fly away shooting back. Im baised to turrets obviously but we wouldnt want to completely cut off small fast builds and micro fighters, they should have a benefit at close range at the least, and from my experience its hard to hit them with slower turrets even with high snappy torque.

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So in summary, maybe keep speed as is, or boost standard cradle speed and turntable speed by a small amount like 20%? I havent used them in ages so would need second opinion at least. Then massively buff their torque so they can actually carry some armored guns and aim.

thin tendon
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having a torque field would be a nice bonus on top of that, but yeah pretty much what doggo said

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I want to build another mech, since my current one looks like it has arthritis when trying to move it's joints lol

radiant fossil
thin tendon
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There's also min/max rotation which as far as i'm aware don't work at all (or very reliably) when in motion, which is probably more of a bug than anything else.
But I would say a fair few ships suffered a laser to the generators as a result of it, my first fighter had floppy lasers because of it lol

radiant fossil
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hmmm, they do work as i've used them, but not in motion. I only used them to set there default position to another. I switched to using lever min/max instead in later designs although i think its the same. The values do get a bit weird or buggy if you turn them too far though, im thinking like a 3 quarter turn or more.

thin tendon
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Mm, I think if a turntable is forced via external forces past it's limits it'll overshoot (I.e. your ship is spinning). Wheras under it's own power it works

radiant fossil
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not sure what you mean there. I have some ships where i switch the min/max values so the default position is forward mouse aim, but it can mouse aim 180 backwards too, havent had much issue as long as it doesnt go past 3 quarter at least because the value calculations go a bit weird, but not enough knowledge on that tbh

thin tendon
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meh I'll just write a bug report, getting a little off topic anyway

radiant fossil
fickle copper
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hey @thorny olive you had any more time to play with this?

thorny olive
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Yeah, but there was a lot to consider – too much, really. A lot of changes on their own just introduce new problems, most generally with balance

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I couldn't repro any spontaneous disconnections either, which made it a bit hard to test the potential of any would-be fixes

potent niche
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Including just having higher torque? We can already do that with stacking turntables. So just a single much stronger turntable+turret but not faster at all,
Theoretically just let's us do what we already can without the jank solution.

thorny olive
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Their being largely undesirable to use at least takes some of the urgency off of FB to fix the disconnection issue, I suppose. Mostly though, it comes down to what the 'ideal turret' should end up being, and just bumping torque could lead down some unpleasant avenues

radiant fossil
thorny olive
opaque kestrel
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Idk why the counter spinning moment goes to the parent object. Yes, it's physically accurate, but who cares if it makes the gameplay worse?

potent niche
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But it does seem like there is unanimous agreement that the core obstacle between functional turrets and turntabled. Is just the fact that they do not have sufficient torque to counteract ship movement.

So be the solution either to increase only the torque to the point where that is moot, or make their movement a physics exception to ship momentum. Either way more turret chair setups or yolol turrets would appear as experiments. And I would be keen to experiment with a theoretical trial run at some point. 😄

thorny olive
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Iiii dunno I'd say the "popping off whenever someone looks at them wrong" is a more pressing issue

potent niche
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I admittedly have never had one of mine fall off since returning to the game, but I too have heard the stories.

opaque kestrel
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I would make them consume a lot of power, but be able to move heavy stuff relatively quick

thorny olive
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As I recall, the speed at which they move objects is more constrained by the turntable/cradle torque, no?

opaque kestrel
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they have independant stats

thorny olive
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Ah right, I forgot they can maneuver objects independently