Energy Dash 1.0

Yea, i was into that a lot!

That moment when you got crazy techs instead of dash and PJ... That moment was like christmas.

Oh, and i would propably switch the ball techs with a cloak tech tree with defense cloak, stealth cloak, healing cloak and all of them would drain energy while active.

 

Even if the multi-jump is same height as pulse jump, I use it because I don't like using ropes. I have not got a grapple yet... Regardless that one is useful in the sense you can change direction of jump quickly. Makes getting up a mountain a little easier than a single pulse jump.

I also use the floatation device as you call it when I go to visit ocean planets; makes for a fast surface travel without have to also hold up, or in the vehicle sent put down vehicle then pick it back up after each island.

Can't say much on the other techs... Rocket jump I don't like in the first place. Dash I can't stand, and switched to sprint. I use sprint to cover fluid terrain in my colony, or certain places that would allow for then length it is; although it really not much of a boost, still covers ground ok speed better than walking from my flags at my colonies.

Would be nice to have other techs, and that much I do agree; maybe some will see return in future, even if it is something you have to find in order to unlock.

 

Sorry for not being cool, everyone.

 

yeah, that cat avatar really bumps you down a couple levels.

 

Lets say its 1.0, and we still havent heard of any positive changes to techs and platforming, what would you recommend, or suggest to the devs as to make improvements on said matter?

 

I wouldn't lol. I haven't played recently to make a proper opinion on the techs in question.

what I do know is that they're probably not going to change it in the next 6-ish days, and that - if any change does happen - it'll most likely be post-1.0.
going about changing these techs would require quite a bit of work, weeks of coding and testing. this close to release, I don't see it as a change they're willing to invest in if they themselves can use these techs just fine during their playthroughs.

edit: lemme expand on my thoughts a bit. I put it behind a spoiler wall just in case people don't want to read my silly thoughts about criticism and this thread specifically and whatever. but if you do, it's there.

criticism is never bad unless the "criticism" isn't really criticism. I'm a musician, I want to be a touring musician. straight-up life goals. well, I got into an argument with a good buddy of mine and half-way through it, he said my music was uncreative without specifically detailing what song or what parts of the songs were uncreative, be it my vocals or chord structure. that isn't criticism, that's blatant disregard.

I told you this story because I feel like it can relate to the multiple years of criticism this game has received, good and bad. when people aren't be facetious or rude, detailing what they see as wrong or "broken" from an unbiased perspective, it makes sense. there's no bias, there's nothing personal against what they find to be wrong. but when people say things like, "I don't like it 'cause it impedes my movement," or - uh let's use some of the story feedback - "I don't like it because I think it's dumb/sucks the fun out," it sounds sorta entitled. I hate to use that word, but OG forum folk will know where I'm coming from.

so, in the instance where someone said that the air dash tech is inherently lame because it stops forward motion in a game about move-to-explore, that makes sense because it disables your ability to keep moving and exploring, if only for a moment or two. however, when you get to the point that you insult the developers' intelligence because you don't like they recent design choices, you - and sometimes an entire thread - lose all credibility. you shouldn't expect an answer if you think they're dumb, that's dumb lol.

like, one dude said that some techs are ripoffs? if I use a chord progression that sounds exactly the same, no deviation, that's a ripoff. if I use some of the same chords in an altered movement, that's an homage. or an unintended sound-a-like, but whatever. it's not valid critique because they're not telling you why it's detrimental to gameplay, like the air dash apparently is. sorry, but you don't have to use any of the morphball techs lol.

and then you asked where I stand, and I felt like a gave you a very short-handed and rude answer. I apologize. but through my 3 or so years on this forum I've seen people criticize the unholy penguin out of this game not because something is inherently wrong in the design or coding, but because they didn't like it for some personal reason like it's not hard to them or they liked the butterfly tech (seriously? find a high enough area and bypass EVERYTHING, as if that's a good thing for a game like Starbound) or - no joke, I've seen this - they don't like pixel graphics lol.

Starbound isn't my game, it's not my creative vision. as one "creator" to another, I dare not break down someone else's work if I haven't a great understanding of the picture I'm being shown. I've had way to many people, best friends included, do that to me in the past for selfish reasons and then they demand a response like they're deserving of one lol.

now, of course, on a whole this thread isn't as decisive as some others I've seen. still, even recently I've witnessed discomfort and even near-hatred for this game like it killed their pets, and it's lame. luckily, what we have here is not a failure to communicate but - as you can see on page 1 - people are outright insulting the developer's intelligence, even suggesting they're kill "fun" for fun or something, and that's not cool. it's not criticism, it's not valid, it's a bunch of jack diddly doody is what it is.

 

IMO, they wanted to prevent easy planet exploration with Dash+PulseJump+Bounce cheesy tactic. It's no coincidence that they got rid off old powerful Dash at the same time they created hoverbikes, used for more expansive and less powerful exploration.

 

I bet the slow travel speeds have something to do with them still haveing problems with chunk loads on planets.... In /admin, I traverse some of the planets in the unstable version, and the chunks are barely keeping up with loading.

I think their old engine isn't up to snuff to keep up with the speed we want to move. They spent too much time in development, and the engine is showing it's age.

 

and probably wrong again. the unstable we play and the unstable they play is still slightly different. they've said in a video advertising the release date that the version we're playing, that does keep updating slightly everyday, is still back a few pegs from the full actual version for lore/gameplay reasons.

also, remember. computer specs count a lot.

 

Hmm, but you are aware of how the available techs function? if you did not have a chance to try them before, and only from the most recent stable build, it might make a difference in your view. When Hoverbikes were introduced, they also changed the flexibility and usefulnes of techs we had early game, I suspect to make us favour late-game content and make it seem we had progressed from point A which would be simple tech usage to point B, which would be more advanced, complex and more "awesome" in comparison.

On a side note, I wouldnt say this thread is very "critic" as such, this is more a discussion than anything else.

 

I've played the latest Stable branch, but it's been a very long time since I have which is why I declined a true opinion on the subject of techs.

 

Well, at least the game has the saving grace of modability. I've recently modded the dash tech to retain momentum and allow you to jump while ground dashing so I could do a Mega Man style dash jump again. At the same time though, I tend to air dash pulse jump off a cliff and die a lot. Still a bit annoying that they keep nerfing it but at least we can undo those nerfs ourselves.

 

I love those dashs though :s.

Lookin forward to that mod at 1.0 actually

 

Someone made one for stable already I believe. I made mine for nightly, though I haven't been on for a few days so I need to check if it still works.

I also feel like there were some bugs with how it read the json file as there were some fields that didn't seem to accept the flags being set to false so I had to edit the lua file which shouldn't be necessary if the appropriate boolean values stored in the json file were set to false; so I'll need to recheck if it will work with just editing the json file (of course I could be messing up somewhere, still new to modding after all). Though I guess for the dash jump, you would have to edit the lua file since there doesn't seem to be a field for the jumpingSuppressed boolean in the json file. You could easily edit the two and include it in the json file for easier access though.

I'll detail the changes I made (or will make) though:

Code:

"maximumDoubleTapTime" : 0.25,
"dashControlForce" : 2000,
"dashSpeed" : 50,
"dashDuration" : 0.15,
"dashCooldown" : 0.8,
"stopAfterDash" : true,
"groundOnly" : true

You'll find this snippet in the dash.tech json file in /tech/dash. "stopAfterDash" is what controls whether or not momentum is kept. Changing it to false is should let you keep the momentum after the dash ends.

It is supposed to make it so that this part of the dash.lua file not run:

Code:

if self.stopAfterDash then
    local movementParams = mcontroller.baseParameters()
    local currentVelocity = mcontroller.velocity()
    if math.abs(currentVelocity[1]) > movementParams.runSpeed then
      mcontroller.setVelocity({movementParams.runSpeed * self.dashDirection, 0})
    end
    mcontroller.controlApproachXVelocity(self.dashDirection * movementParams.runSpeed, self.dashControlForce)
end

Since it is supposed to just check whether or not the variable is true or or false and run it if it is true. So if the variable is set to false in the json file and it retrieves it via:

Code:

self.dashCooldown = config.getParameter("dashCooldown")

Then setting stopAfterDash to false should make it not run the momentum cancellation code.

For Jump Suppression:

Code:

mcontroller.controlModifiers({jumpingSuppressed = true})

In the lua file, this snippet is what is preventing you from dash jumping. Simply changing it to false would let you dash jump again. There's no value for it in the json file but you could probably add one like so (haven't tried this yet, I just set the value in the lua file to false but it SHOULD work):

Code:

"maximumDoubleTapTime" : 0.25,
"dashControlForce" : 2000,
"dashSpeed" : 50,
"dashDuration" : 0.15,
"dashCooldown" : 0.8,
"stopAfterDash" : false,
"groundOnly" : true,
"suppressJump": false

Code:

self.suppressJump = false

self.suppressJump = config.getParameter("suppressJump")

Code:

mcontroller.controlModifiers({jumpingSuppressed = self.suppressJump})

This set up would by default not suppress jumping on dashes. If "self.suppressJump = false" was set to true instead of false, it would by default suppress jumping on dashes. It then changes the value to what is in the json value from the first snippet.

Though it is mute due in the way I wrote it since by default it is set to false so changing false to false wouldn't change anything. If I were to have it change to true or have it be set as true by default, then it would change things.

Finally, in the third snippet, it takes the boolean value and uses it to determine whether or not to suppress jumping during a dash.

Hopefully I wrote my lua correctly, still new to it.

 

Personally though the loss of momentum with dashes might have been a bit annoying.... I think it was likely because of a potentially long due rebalance of the old air dash+double jump+bubble cheese technique of exploring planet.

And technically, if you look around, it's not like a similarly fast mean of exploring world is totally gone.

What a lot of folks seem to not have noticed is that the Sprint tech does more than just "running"; you can actually still perform regular jumps with that tech and not only do they not break the sprint but very much carry it's high speed momentum. Coupled with an appropriate jump tech, it's almost as fast as the old technique.

In fact, I used to like mixing the new Sprint tech with the new rocket boost tech because the later(which is directional) has such a vertical climb when used to jump upward that I often rarely needed to use ropes all that much(plus the "boost charge-up pause" effect sometimes come in handy when misjudging a jump and falling down a chasm. Coupled with the directional effect, the pause often allow me to just boost/rope myself to safety in the middle of a fall).

There's still interesting means of non-vehicles based explorations, they just happen to be slightly differently balanced and handled than before without the all-powerful safety net of the old bubble which means one still has to show some actual care.

(mind you, I'm not dissing the bubble and it likely could be an excellent mod. It WAS hilariously exhilirating to speed bounce around with the thing. Otoh even someone who loved it as much as I did would agree the thing was overpowered, really)