Cornflakes_91 wrote:WeirdCulture:
Josh stated that resources will be respawning in asteroid(field)s, so that the universe does not need to completely go locust and mine out one system after another multiplying every time.

Maybe theres a switch for turning that off

Cornflakes_91 wrote: Also would it be quite unrealistic to completely mine out a whole system, as for example our asteroid belt is iirc ~4 times the mass of our moon consisting of more or less valuable minerals. So it would take a while to mine out the asteroid belt. And then there are tons of other matter, for example roe troyan moons in jupiters L4 and L5 lagrange points.
And that is not even touching larger sub-planetary masses. (Xena, pluto, charon, io etc...)

Yes, and that is exactly the reason why asteroids should deplete and never come back Mines on earth are depleting, why should asteroids never deplete or respawn after a time, which mechanism creates the resources from nowhere? I can understand it is easier to implement some kind of respawning of asteroids as long the amount X of materials is not depleted, which is defined to be in the mining area/field/whatever, but after a while, and I am assuming that on the "inner worlds" many corporations wants to have some piece of the pie so the resources are being harvested not only by one singe player, the resourceflow should end and the caravan has to move on

WeirdCulture wrote: Yes, and that is exactly the reason why asteroids should deplete and never come back Mines on earth are depleting, why should asteroids never deplete or respawn after a time, which mechanism creates the resources from nowhere? I can understand it is easier to implement some kind of respawning of asteroids as long the amount X of materials is not depleted, which is defined to be in the mining area/field/whatever, but after a while, and I am assuming that on the "inner worlds" many corporations wants to have some piece of the pie so the resources are being harvested not only by one singe player, the resourceflow should end and the caravan has to move on

Or it could be the reason to just handwave it away and make resources respawning or on larger bodies even infinite.

Mined out asteroids could be removed on or off screen and be replaced when "nobody looks", as it would be illusory tomake even a dent in asteroid density inside of the games scope (some 100eds oh hours).
with lots of "empty" asteroids interspacing the valuable rocks you'd never notice any change

Josh has said that respawning happens, but that asteroid zones will have different rates. So it will still be possible to "overmine" if you mine faster than the belt can regenerate.

In this sense, I am beginning to think that concentrating on single-asteroid mining is a bit of a red herring anyway. An asteroid isn't the resource. The resource is the asteroid field.

I'm now moving pretty firmly into the opinion that individual asteroid mining should be quick and simple, and that the real complexity should begin once you start treating asteroid fields like whole resources. Even if you only have one or two extra ships to help out, it's the ways you try to get the optimum mining yield across the field that I think will yield the rewarding and scaleable gameplay.

McDuff wrote:Josh has said that respawning happens, but that asteroid zones will have different rates. So it will still be possible to "overmine" if you mine faster than the belt can regenerate.

In this sense, I am beginning to think that concentrating on single-asteroid mining is a bit of a red herring anyway. An asteroid isn't the resource. The resource is the asteroid field.

I'm now moving pretty firmly into the opinion that individual asteroid mining should be quick and simple, and that the real complexity should begin once you start treating asteroid fields like whole resources. Even if you only have one or two extra ships to help out, it's the ways you try to get the optimum mining yield across the field that I think will yield the rewarding and scaleable gameplay.

Yes a asteroid field is a resource, but the resource has to be extracted, and this is a procedure which takes time and some effort. A coal mine manager sees the Coal in his mine just as a resource, but if you ask the guy who has to dig it out of the stone, he will tell you something different. If you don't want to go mining yourself, let some contractors does it for you, then you get the resource from the field.

Um... where do we disagree?

I'm not disputing that "stuff in rocks" is a resource.

I'm talking about the ways in which we concentrate on the individual gameplay components.

If we break it down into a higher level of detail, an "asteroid" isn't the lowest component but a "lump of ore" is. At some point you still have a lowest-detail "lump" of stuff which you want to be able to mine quickly, whether that's an asteroid or a patch of ore in an asteroid.

I'm saying that personally I think I see more gameplay potential leaving asteroids as the lowest level "lump" and expanding on the gameplay to let you locate and extract multiple lumps across the asteroid field. Mining platforms, automated scanners, surveys, yield optimisation, all that good stuff.

McDuff wrote:Um... where do we disagree?

I'm not disputing that "stuff in rocks" is a resource.

I'm talking about the ways in which we concentrate on the individual gameplay components.

If we break it down into a higher level of detail, an "asteroid" isn't the lowest component but a "lump of ore" is. At some point you still have a lowest-detail "lump" of stuff which you want to be able to mine quickly, whether that's an asteroid or a patch of ore in an asteroid.

I'm saying that personally I think I see more gameplay potential leaving asteroids as the lowest level "lump" and expanding on the gameplay to let you locate and extract multiple lumps across the asteroid field. Mining platforms, automated scanners, surveys, yield optimisation, all that good stuff.

Why not both? at low level mining (like josh showed in #14) you search with single ships around single asteroids where to mine, when you scale up your operations you dont tell your ships anymore "scan this asteroid and mine at this position on the asteroid" but "scan this area and mine this specific asteroid".
We could even scale it up indefinitely "Scan this field and mine this areas in the field" et cetera.

Why just limit to one level of abstraction?
(This limitation is imo what makes some games not much fun on bigger/smaller scales then what they are built to make fun. I LOOK AT YOU EGOSOFT)

Cornflakes_91 wrote:

McDuff wrote:Um... where do we disagree?

I'm not disputing that "stuff in rocks" is a resource.

I'm talking about the ways in which we concentrate on the individual gameplay components.

If we break it down into a higher level of detail, an "asteroid" isn't the lowest component but a "lump of ore" is. At some point you still have a lowest-detail "lump" of stuff which you want to be able to mine quickly, whether that's an asteroid or a patch of ore in an asteroid.

I'm saying that personally I think I see more gameplay potential leaving asteroids as the lowest level "lump" and expanding on the gameplay to let you locate and extract multiple lumps across the asteroid field. Mining platforms, automated scanners, surveys, yield optimisation, all that good stuff.

Why not both? at low level mining (like josh showed in #14) you search with single ships around single asteroids where to mine, when you scale up your operations you dont tell your ships anymore "scan this asteroid and mine at this position on the asteroid" but "scan this area and mine this specific asteroid".
We could even scale it up indefinitely "Scan this field and mine this areas in the field" et cetera.

Why just limit to one level of abstraction?
(This limitation is imo what makes some games not much fun on bigger/smaller scales then what they are built to make fun. I LOOK AT YOU EGOSOFT)

In addition, I'm very much in favour of Katorone's suggestion for different sizes and scales to asteroids. So to combine that with what Cornflakes is saying here, you'd mainly focus on the smallest types of asteroids first, perhaps using an "engaging" mechanic (e.g. the Motherload-style one) for harvesting them since with the most basic equipment it will take a fair amount of time to harvest ore. As you get bigger mining ships and better equipment, you'll probably focus more on medium-sized asteroids and use engaging mining mechanics for that, whereas small asteroids could be exhausted quickly so you'd likely mine them the way we saw in the latest dev video, except not so much caring for the position where you mined as just mining it. As you continue to scale up, you'll start focusing on large asteroids and apply the engaging mechanics to that - medium asteroids could be exhausted within a couple of minutes perhaps, and small asteroids within 10-30 seconds (these are all up for balance).

Sleep deprived so the above is poorly articulated, but basically the bigger your scale of operations get, the more you'll apply the "engaging" mechanics to larger asteroids, where you care about positions and such, and the more you'll just sweep through smaller-sized asteroids.

Hi!

I saw your vid asking about how to make mining fun. Not sure if it was mentioned yet, but here it goes, 1 word:

EXPLOSIVES, big ass explosions for cracking the asteroids up.

Some details and arguments:

Real mining is frigging dangerous and certainly not boring. The same way you try and find the best point to mine with the drones right now, make it so that you actually have to drill a hole or a pit or a shaft or whatever with a laser into the asteroid, then put explosives in and bust the whole thing apart. You have to take the mass of the asteroid and the type of the ore into account so as not to completely disintegrate a tiny asteroid with a 50kilotone nuke and vaporize yourself in the process... or on the other hand, waste explosives to basically no effect on the other hand, you can blow up an asteroid and pieces of it fly off making it a dangerous place to be in when you pull the trigger... You then have to chase down the most lucrative piece of ore and mine it as it moves through space, make quick decisions what part of the asteroid you will chase... etc. Makes it a lot more interesting in terms of combat too. Hide nukes inside asteroids and blow them up into deadly projectiles, making it difficult for people to follow you... The more that people mine a certain sector, the heavier it becomes to mine with all the pieces flying around... also an attacker needs scanners that can pick up radiation from the nukes... depending on how deep they are placed, etc.

and lastly, make the asteroids BIGGER, A LOT LOT BIGGER, bigger to a point that you actually have to deal with drilling deep and placing very very strong explosives all over the place, detonating them all at once, in a time delayed way, in a sequence etc.

Mining is expensive, because of the tools you need it for... it also makes for an interesting career... start small on small asteroids, work your way up to blowing up really really really big ones... if you make the nukes expensive enough, they become an asset worth stealing... so you need to have a good ship to protect your nukes from being stolen etc... things like that.

hope this gives you some ideas!

best regards,

V

Aah, the Michael Bay approach to mining, make it bigger and more explod-y


But there remains one question:
Why should i send 3/4 of my ore in directions i dont know beforehand and collecting the remainder 1/4 that would be a lot more radioactive than before? All this while using more energy than mining it by cutting the asteroid in nice small slices and sucking out all the ore i want to have?

It would be fun, agreed, but why should anyone use it if it is more profitable going the boring way?

It would make more sense to break the asteroids up to feed them into my refinery to have them processed more efficiently than my ship.
Which would by the way be an awesome way of mining.
Do not take the ore, take the whole asteroid!
But that is sadly ruled out by the engine, as asteroids are static objects and as such not moveable....

Explodable asteroids is a non-trivial bit of computation given current asteroid implementation in the engine, so I don't think it'll happen.

As to "why not both" - conservation of Devtime.

A mechanic that rewards optimisation based on "asteroid fields" as the resource can scale up and down, giving you new and different things to do depending on the size, density, relative distribution etc. It's one mechanic.

Adding complex faffing around with individual asteroids is a different mechanic.

Given finite devtime, I'd rather see Josh spend it adding complexity to the scaleable mechanic than introducing a different one.

I don't see why this necessarily precludes different sized asteroids and even different kinds of equipment.

McDuff wrote: As to "why not both" - conservation of Devtime.

Josh already has to implement lots of abstracting systems out of LOD and other gameplax aspects, given joshs workflow i dont really think that it would make much of an difference.

If combined with nested zones like i suggested in the zones thread it would also come almost free, as there does not need to be any conceputal difference of "mine this asteroid" and "mine this zone"

If it can be got for free, cool.

If it can't, and it's a trade-off, I'm voting which way I'd like the trade-off to go. That's all.

you could just take the asteroids that are generated and clump them together with certain 'trigger' points which release the asteroid clump when geometrically the explosion wave touches the trigger point or something like that.

as for pieces flying apart and the chasing comments.. that totally depends on how good your calculation of how much explosive to use is. Use less explosives if you dont want it flying away or put breaking engines on to a piece first, then blow it up and have the engines decelerate it or something.

if you can have ships flying around... and colision detections etc.. why not just program a single vector into each asteroid piece that works like the engines accelerating in that direction when the asteroid is blown apart? Hold on to your hats, full spead ahead, we stop for noone!

But yeah, i get it that there might not be devtime to do it

You'd get cool points if you did though

v0lZy wrote:you could just take the asteroids that are generated and clump them together with certain 'trigger' points which release the asteroid clump when geometrically the explosion wave touches the trigger point or something like that.

here seems to be a slight misunderstanding. The problem is not that asteroids are fixed in form and size but fixed in position. They cannot be moved. Its an engine limitation that makes the vast amounts of asteroids possible.
Chipping them in smaller pieces is afaik easier to implement than making them mobile.

McDuff wrote:Explodable asteroids is a non-trivial bit of computation given current asteroid implementation in the engine, so I don't think it'll happen.

As to "why not both" - conservation of Devtime.

I believe we've decided the canonical solution to questions like this is "just add another slider."