Infinite Beacon range and possibility to set Beacon for Jump Drive target

This is the best way, I love it, thank you.

It gives the most control to the player and pretty much solves beacon spam.

Laser antennas now have infinite range (praise be to rexxar), just scaled power usage to make them balanced.

Beacons should be able to do the the same thing, and since it's not tied into the antenna system, it shouldn't affect performance.

Increasing power cost per range and positional delay (performance overhead notwithstanding) would be the most balanced and realistic approach.

Why would they be? They're just points in a 3D space, nothing else. You'd have to have quite a lot of them for it to actually be a problem. They used to be infinite back in the day, even. Performance is a non-issue. HUD-clutter though, that's a different issue.

correct me if i'm wrong (i probably am cause i'm a small indie self taught programmer) but doesnt the beacon block use the same system as the ore detectors? (i mean like in terms of you detecting beacons that you are in range of) because I've heard that ore detectors work in a performance heavy way of checking every frame (or nearly every frame) for ore

Nono, not even close. The reason the ore detectors are slow is because they scan voxel storage. No such scanning for beacons.

aaah that does make sense as scanning for all those triangles is performance heavy, makes loads of sense thanks for enlightening me. well then i can't see a single issue with this. LETS HAVE IT!!! lol

Yes, indeed. They don't scan the triangles though, but the voxels. A voxel is a 3D pixel. Or; a VOlume piXEL if you will. The actual triangles are just a "skin" generated to cover these voxels. The voxel storage is what makes it possible to easily deform asteroids (and planet segments) as you just regenerate the skin after the voxels themselves have been modified. A simplified explanation for sure, but still :D And your conclusion still stands: It's quite performance heavy.

Original beacons when added were unlimited range, but they were later range limited, then they added antennas which made gameplay sense to limit, and the beacon became basically a useless antenna you cannot connect to, then they limited antenna range to 50km ... i guess someone figured beacons are really kind of pointless unless they have an advantage over antennas, and so they made them unlimited again.

Make sense?

Stupid comment system here confusing me with input boxes when I wanted to comment on the mod and not this small thread.... Edited to remove my comment here.

The benefit of (large grid) beacons over antennas is size. If all you want is to know where your ship is, that's a nice consideration.

Beacons also use much less power for the same range.

If we could filter GPS automatically by distance spam would not be a big issue.

>if that player hasn't logged in for x time or dies and all his stuff is reset, all his beacons shut down 24 hours later, max.

Not everybody can play each day, such system is exremely prejusticed (Hellion had a lot of complains bevause of stations deteriorating withing 2 weeks), power is much better limitation because earlier or later beacon is going to run out of power and creator is not the only player who can recharge the thing.

>Infinite Range Beacons would open up the spam possibility, but can be solved by maxing the amount of beacons a specific player is allowed to build

Game is full of artificial limitations as is and there are much better ways to prevent spam. As example, rules can be set as such:

1. Only becons within 50-100Km (or whatever player sets) are visible by default
2. Beacons that are not in visible range can be forcefully set to be visible from GPS tab (and ones that are visible, can be forcefully set invisible)
3. Faction tab can have a button or setting dedicated to beacons to either hide or highlight those. So if faction is 'spamy' you can turn it off all together (sans the ones in range from 1.) or if it is important you can turn it all on.

The biggest issue with these rules will be devs needing to remake whole GPS tab (which needs a remake either way, I always end up with at least one mark for each asteroid in visinity and it is very hard to navigate the tab as a result)

I said x time, not "not logged in for 24 hours". Say you set the time to 3 days, the beacons will run for 24 more hours after that, for 4 days. Say the admin sets the time at 7 days. Thats an entire week plus 1 day of beacon run time.

Power is not a good limitation. You can power a beacon forever on solar. Thats one of the beacon spam methods of a server, to build a bacon with a battery and solar panel or two.

I like the idea of systems that deteriorate after the player hasn't been around a while. That sounds like a good way to destroy bases after a player has quit. Anything with a computer chip starts to decay 1 component at a time till the computer portions of it are destroyed every day past 1 week that the player hasn't been on or something like that, but thats an idea for another topic sometime.

If a player is being deliberately spammy, they'll not be in a faction. Neutral unfactioned player. What happens when you load up your GPS tab, to find 9000 beacons in it? How will you find the one you want to enable in that huge list? What happens if the list is so big it lags the client opening the GPS tab every time? I think the best way to handle this is to prohibit players from constructing more than a certain amount of beacons, or to make it so that they can only activate a certain number of them at one time.

Perhaps instead, players will be able to see their own beacons at all times regardless of the distance and not be allowed to shut them off, aka a spam player will be stuck with his own spam. Beacons will come with an invisible setting that toggles for everyone who doesn't own that beacon, the oldest beacon shuts off for everyone else, aka its no longer broadcasting because there is too much "noise" on that specific network frequency. Allowing a single player to have up to 10 broadcasting beacons that everyone else can see. If he sets up an 11th, the oldest one turns off for other players. If he turns off one of them, the first one to turn off in the list that have turned off, comes back on. This can be solved by setting your beacons to blink, so that they both conserve power and broadcast their position for a few seconds at a time, using timers.

A tab can also be done for beacons where each player that has a beacon, is listed. Their beacon count is also listed, you can click that player to mute his beacons with specific settings. "All beacons" "All far beacons" "All near beacons".

Factions would be listed in this tab as well with their total number of owned beacons. That would then enable you to mute player beacons or faction beacons.

Both this tab option, and the max number of visible option, can help with beacon spammers. Personally I like the max visible, as it won't limit how many a player can build, but it will limit how many they can display to people outside their faction, and thus make them need to think more critically about how they build their stuff.

>Power is not a good limitation. You can power a beacon forever on solar. Thats one of the beacon spam methods of a server, to build a bacon with a battery and solar panel or two.

A single solar produces 120KW, assuming that sun is fixed or solars auto-adjust. Beacon requires 10KW at 50Km, 2KW at 10Km, 6000Km will require 1200KW. I don't think 2 solars will be enough to power it at 'infinite' range, more like a dozen at minimum, likely far more. As such I find it to be suffcient limitation.

>I like the idea of systems that deteriorate after the player hasn't been around a while.

Personally I think 'deterioration' is the system that killed Hellion. It might look nice on paper, but in practice it significantly cuts down online-user base simply because it forces player to chose between life and game (and obviously first wins). Because people that work not always can play each day or even each week. There were instances where I had to travel a bit around staying far from home computer for more than a week (and lost a station in hellion to that). I will not join a server that has such limitation because starting from scratch each time is not fun.

Ships that aren't 'active' (don't move, don't process resources) and are far from active players have no reasons to consume PC's resources in first place (power/fuel can be aproximated and accounted for periodically on load/save/join), so there is no reason to delete (or deteriorate) them in first place (if they are consuming PC's resources, than devs need to fix it).

>Neutral unfactioned player. What happens when you load up your GPS tab, to find 9000 beacons in it?

1. Those beacons still belong to single or couple 'spammy' players 2. Beacons will be confined to fixed region in space.

As such it is still possible to filter them out. It is a question of tools and implementation. Each player can have own folder in GPS tab for example. Or grouping can work by coordinates, it is relatively simple filter to make.

Two entire weeks before deterioration even begins, is too much? If you can't play once every two weeks, you shouldn't be on someone's server dropping infinite range dots all over the place.

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You also forget other power production mods, stuff that increases solar output because cheaters cheat or people like easy mode 5 megawatt solar panels and such, or just the fact that some troll might go ahead and build these 6000KM range beacons with 12-16 solar arrays and a battery and lob them out there into space.

.

Here's an interesting scenario for you.

A beacon costs power while active. The beacon structure has 1 battery, 4 solar panels. Can produce up to 480KW.

The beacon is set to 6,000KM range, costing 1.2MW as you said. It has a timer block on it to toggle the beacon at intervals. It runs the beacon for 2.5 seconds. Shuts it down for 10 seconds. Now it costs about 300KW while constantly charging at 480KW. A spare 180KW to handle non-perfect rotations or even a computer with a sun tracking script and a gyro to broadcast filthy messages 2 and a half seconds at a time every 10 seconds.

Could go faster, 1 second broadcasts every 4 seconds.

0.25 second broadcasts every second.

I don't do spam things, but I regularly test and give balance feedback and input on games, and I consider what players might do to ruin the game for everyone else. I know exactly how they can exploit these systems to ruin people's day.

Obviously these can be solved with an active admin, but what you want is something that doesn't need constant management.

>Two entire weeks before deterioration even begins, is too much? If you can't play once every two weeks, you shouldn't be on someone's server dropping infinite range dots all over the place.

Some can play each day but then have to do a large pause for one reason or another (be that a month business trip, vacation, pc/net dies or hospital). It is common and in such situation real life will win over game. Deterioration is a bad design even for hinting at posibility of making such a choice especially since better methods are avaliable.

Imagine getting home from long business trip, logging into your favorite server where you were improving your station bit by bit only to find it gone due to deterioration? Personally I rarely have such situations (once per year top) but I still have them and I do not apreaciate to be pressed into taking such things into account when I play a game. It is supposed to be 'play when free' relaxation, not 'make sure you play it at least once a week' something.

>You also forget other power production mods, stuff that increases solar output because cheaters cheat or people like easy mode 5 megawatt solar panels and such

I don't see how they are relevant to vanila game. If server owner picks mod that improves power production, onwner will just have to pick mod that either limits range or increases beacon's consumption.

>The beacon is set to 6,000KM range, costing 1.2MW as you said. It has a timer block on it to toggle the beacon at intervals. It runs the beacon for 2.5 seconds. Shuts it down for 10 seconds. Now it costs about 300KW while constantly charging at 480KW.

That's a good point. But I'm fairly sure that blicking beacons should be easy to detect automatically without active admin intervention. And blinking, long linving, infinite range beacon is among things that normal users won't build under normal circumstances, so they can be added to list of things for 'cleaning scripts' to pick up. At least i can't think of a valid scenario where user will want to maintain such beacons short of some server-wide events.

I really think you guys are over thinking this. Original pre-gps beacons were unlimited, and never really caused an issue since only people wanting to paint a great big target on their face set them unlimited. (in which case other players "decayed" it themself by raiding and stripping it) As such 90% of the time the only beacons set unlimited were ones on the admin supplied starting base, which was usually set to disable damage and provided basic survival or economic facilitys.

As for "decay" not only is this totally unrealistic for space, it would be annoying. (even spacex's tesla will still be more or less intact other than faded color and a layer of dust that will probably eventually turn it into an asteroid in a few thousand years) Although i would live with switching out an old grids color/texture to the worn/rusted/mossy skin after a couple of Idle weeks, that would actually be kind of cool.

Harsh as it is, the main reason I could never get into Medivel engineers was the decay/tax system. At least with protection zone tokens in SE - so long as it is not attacked your space station will still be there in 2 weeks after your zone fails. In medieval engineers, the irritating need to jump on daily to mine or harvest a bunch of junk to stop everything crumbling to dust every week stopped me playing it online. Ever. Considering I would have otherwise used those materials to expand it, it became unrealistic, and unwieldy. Even the fact the tax system didnt provision some sort of global market system annoyed me no end. Adding this mechanic to SE would destroy the entire multiplayer community overnight.

As for decay. SE actually DOES have several "decay" mechanics, which considering they are entirely optional is much better.

1. Firstly - garbage cleanup has the capability to remove unpowered grids. Ok solar power does mess this up somewhat.
   
2. Secondly, under the torch mod and various admin workshop tools was the ability to periodically sweep away random grids that are not named/powered/owner seen recently.
   
3. Thirdly Garbage cleanup also has a "delete if owner not seen X number of days" feature - which much to my annoyance has deleted my entire base in the past because a small number of blocks were owned by a player in my faction that didnt log in for a month. So I turned it off.
   
4. Fourthly prior to garbage cleanup was "asteroid showers" in an earlier version of SE this effectively removed grids by attrition over time - as it would target players and grids if nobody was online. Ok this was defeated by having gatling turrets or burying bases so deep in asteroids you would get blisters trying to find your way out again but i recall never finding many "encounter ships" because they had been smashed into oblivion by meteors on some of my servers.
5. Finally - as i suggested in my post further down - a gps you dont set active, removes itself from your point list after a few minutes, a similar behaviour could apply to beacons if they go unpowered/out of range.
   

Another option that was discussed in the past was adding "derelict" grids to the "unknown signal" rotation, or in the economy system "investigate location" contracts so that bases where the owner is not seen in X days come up as a mission objective.

None of which has anything to do with if beacons should have unlimited range or behave as GPS points so you can target jump drives on them.

Some can play each day but then have to do a large pause for one reason or another (be that a month business trip, vacation, pc/net dies or hospital). It is common and in such situation real life will win over game. Deterioration is a bad design even for hinting at posibility of making such a choice especially since better methods are avaliable. 

So, because on the rare occasion that someone goes away on a month long business trip, the very very remote rare chances of that long of a trip, and on the semi-rare occasion someone goes on a month long vacation trip, or on the semi-rare occasion that someone is hospitalized or they have hardware issues lasting over 2 weeks, you don't want an autocleanup feature?

I didn't say 2 weeks and instant delete their base. I said deteriorate. 2 weeks, and it starts to deteriorate everything with computers in it. A few percent per day or some such. Taking ultimately a month to fully deteriorate everything into a dead grid with no power. Another few weeks, the grid dies completely. Something like that. I imagine admin cleanup would be more likely to delete those grids far sooner than that.

That's a good point. But I'm fairly sure that blicking beacons should be easy to detect automatically without active admin intervention. And blinking, long linving, infinite range beacon is among things that normal users won't build under normal circumstances, so they can be added to list of things for 'cleaning scripts' to pick up. At least i can't think of a valid scenario where user will want to maintain such beacons short of some server-wide events.

As I said, I think of methods of abuse, and there are methods that people can use to cause other users issues, such as spamming beacons all around the solar system to cause blips everywhere. Setting them off with different velocities and directions. Solar powered to have unlimited power.

But, whatever. I'm done arguing my point. I know for a fact KeenSWH won't modify the UI to allow us to hide player beacons or anything, they'll just tweak a line or two of code to provide that infinite range for us at the very most.

I would like to say that there is the solution to the spam/rude high range beacon that isn't useful, and it's called a "grinder". The beacon is literally a locator after all.

Yea sure, infinite range beacons would make grinders feasible when the beacons are 1AU away. Oh wait.

I also suggested moving beacons to GPS, howhever GPS tab is extremely uncomfortable to use when it has a lot of GPS markers. In the very least GPS tab will need filters (preferably folders).

I suppose a filter for source could work, say - chat/lcd | self created | mission targets | beacons

yeah, the GPS tab has needed an overhaul for a long time anyways.

I'd like such features. If Beacons was added to the GPS the following suggestion wouldn't be needed (except for the ore part). The suggestion is to make signals work as GPS waypoints for the Remote Control.

Can't use a GPS if you don't know the coordinates ;)

This is true. But if you've dropped a beacon then either you or one of faction has been there. Which would mean you should know the GPS. If the beacon doesn't belong to you and you can see it. It's a trivial matter to set a blind jump with the distance since every beacon and antenna signal gives distance info right there on the HUD.

If left as and admin check box option only, I wouldn't have a problem with it.

I like this idea. Would potentially make it more immersive too.

Yeah, well, but that's the problem with tickets that try to solve and include everything at once, especially when they include a ton more requests and suggestions in the prose than what their title suggests and in fact what makes people click their titles in the listing in the first place.

Infinity range … Personally, I would not want it. Anything with "infinity" in the name should be very, very, very carefully balanced, lest it breaks immersion, I don't see this observed with infinity-range beacons. Besides, OP did include the alternative of "(or at least greatly increased)", and beacons did get an increase of their maximum range to 200 km.

Jump-to-beacon … Sure, why not, and we got it.

The rest of the suggestions is more about the display of signals rather than their generation, so to speak. And yes, the display of signals does leave a lot to be desired, but that should not be the fault of the beacon block nor the matter of this ticket. I'd vote this request deserves to be closed as Completed.

"Beacon clutter" probably needs a new screen (or better a remake of gps) to be able to toggle on and off beacons by distance, faction, disposition and purpose.

May be some sort of a 'tag' support, that will split beacons by purpose (mayday, generic ships, generic stations, trade, shipyard, headquarters, comm relays, generic nav beacon) and a way to use those as filters.