Walt My concern is primarily that, because you can only see the crew in one level at a time, it will make it harder to tell at-a-glance what your crew is doing and how well your ship is functioning.
That is hard to do even without z-levels when you're looking at ships like the Ragnarok. That's the thing about big ships. They are complicated. or at least, as complicated as the designer him/herself made it. making it complex design will make it complex to utilize, that's just logic.
Walt 12cylindersofpain you could make this ability to look through a ship dependent on having a ship with sensor
I actually like this idea a lot.
well, i thought that wasn't a problem at all from the very beggining. Since you're using space radars to locate enemies from ridiculous distances through space noise, might as well analyze the how the waves refracted through the enemy ship and "have a look inside". But you can mask whatever is over an observed level with a transparent silhouette and make the observed level (for targeting) as if it's the "new top of the ship with odd shadows over it", if you get what i mean.
Walt It will be much more of an issue with Z levels
As i said on the first one, it'll be as complex as the designer creates it to be. Every Ship has a system, and trying to take it to a space battle without even knowing how it works wouldn't work anyway. I think this complexity would be part of the game. Not a hinder, but a challenge for pro-ship-designers and pro-ship-players.
Walt So how do you target something on an enemy ship that isn't on the top level? Unless you can view the insides of enemy ships, which is a pretty big rule change.
as i said, i see no problem in seeing inside an enemy ship. There isn't much leverage you can gain added to what you would find out by just... looking at it. You can easily tell where is everything without actually looking inside it. But if you must hide the inside of enemy ships, you can do as i said above, with shadow silhouette masks for above levels and such.
Walt If I let players build bigger ships, then they will build bigger ships, and then they'll complain to me about bad performance and leave bad reviews on Steam.
Quite honestly...? My computer is pretty crappy, and i run it around 25FPS. That's very good. I don't think a gamer PC would struggle at all to render Cosmoteer. Now, Office computers might have a problem dealing with it, but... i don't think your target costumerwould be casual gamers with crappy computers. I think your main audience is the Master Race PC Gamers, pretty much all equipped with, at the very least, a decent graphics card. I don't have a very good one, so i don't know how Cosmoteer performs on a good GPU. Honestly, if it doesn't do much better than on my PC, You might want to look into video card compatibility with your engine.
Walt Online won't be like Minecraft in that you have huge servers with lots of people in them. They will be (assuming it ever happens at all) small matches with battles not any larger than you currently see in Bounty Hunter. Not really any more CPU-demanding than singleplayer.
Well... I have some ideas for Online Dedicated Server gameplay, kinda like Factorio. Also, kinda like Factorio, compatible with Lan gameplay and single player modes. It's all the same objectives, but played differently.
Walt It'd be super weird if AOE only effected one level, IMHO.
Well, it'd be realistic enough, IMO. But if you must, you can just track where it exploded in that level and reproduce a smaller version of the explosion one level higher and one bellow. That would be more than enough with little enough coding, i think.
Walt I think that problem #2 (user interface) in my above post is a solvable problem. Like, if there were no other problems with multiple Z levels, then it'd be worth making the U.I. a bit more complex, and perhaps worth breaking the "can't see inside enemies" rule. However, no one has answered #1, #3, or #4 to my satisfaction. So I'm still not convinced.
As i said, 1: it's not really easy to tell at a glance anyway, it'd be as hard to tell as the ship would be complex. It's a designer choice. That's like saying "well, let's not do a gear box because people would get confused around it" when making a car with automatic transmission. The crew would still be smart, and would still navigate. Only when actualy designing a ship that would be any close to necessary. But your Minimum and Recommended crew number and Energy sources are very well crafted, in my opinion, to handle that. When fighting complex enemy ships, one would assume you have a rather equaly complex ship as well, or at least a scary big complex swarm of not so complex ships. overall gameplay would be still rather balanced, you'd just add another level of gameplay, as i see.
3:
Hodyn Walt It requires some fundamental rules to be re-thought. How does the physics determine what level a projectile hits?
By determining where it was targeting when it shot. any weapon can target any level. Melee weapons (to be implemented, as i'm aware) would target only their own level, since there's no targeting with them. but if a weapon on level 2 targets something on level 3, it would be as if it was on level 3 to shoot it's projectile. (in short, the projectile would be fixed to a level, even if it misses or hits something else)
Walt How is AOE damage applied across levels?
It's not. At least not for now. Implementing AOE across levels is not really a requirement, it'd work just fine without it. (as i've stated, some minor unrealities are part of the whole "it's a game" concept)
Walt How are the "no construction" zones handles with multiple levels? (Being able to completely encase a thruster inside a ship makes no sense.)
well... if there's something above or below it (namely, on the same (X,Y) value) you can build there, and if there's an adjacent piece (just like when building in 2D only) you can build there as well.
About the "completely encasing the thrusters", i don't know what it has to do with the "no construction zones", but as i said before... let them encase their thrusters, so what? it's working well enough so far.
For when a ship is mangled to pieces, multiple level ships would work the same, but to make things easier, you can set a level to be an anchor (lvl 0) and then people would be able to build above and below (lvl -1; lvl 1; lvl 2; lvl -3), and 12cylindersofpain 's idea for the U.I. is more than enough to represent what level you're currently looking at. When a piece breaks out, if it's from level 2, it'd remain at level 2, nothing on level 1 and 0. you could cap the maximum levels to reduce processing stress (-7 to 7 should be more than enough, and people would be able to mod that cap just like they mod max ship size) so... yeah...
and 4: Low-end computers aren't really most of your demographics target. But still, My crappy PC without a dedicated GPU of any quality runs it fine enough. Better than i expected, and i used to play GTA V maxed out on this babe before its GPU burned out.
About 1: if it's still not enough, you can make something to track where crew is more concentrated and "draw" greens where crew is walking just fine, thank you, red where they are bumping into each other or walking against a moving walkway and blue where it is walking along the moving walkway. That should be enough to debug crew management while designing the ship. Designing complex ships is a complex thing, I don't think you can alter that with game mechanics.
Walt Can higher levels overhang lower levels? No physics/mechanics reasons to forbid this, but could cause unclarity/confusion when, for example, a shot passes underneath an overhang and seems to just disappear.
they are space ships. Gravity has no damaging effect on their structure. Overhangs are actually expected. And when a bullet just goes under something, players will know they went under it. when they go over it, players will know they went over it. worst case scenario i can think of is a player targets something in the floor above or bellow, changes floors and doesn't realise they changed floors after that. They'll quickly notice that and either target something else or go back to the floor they were before accidentally changing floor view.
Walt How does ship-to-ship collision detection work? Do the levels collide independently, or is each ship treated as if all their levels are "compressed" into one for the purposes of collision detection?
you could either fix their levels to separate layers or make it dynamic. Players would be able to choose where to anchor it if it were dynamic, but if not, that's okay, would be a pain to implement that anyway. Because you're adding melee, and it will be based of collision, the first option (floor based collision) seems to be the best choice. Players wouldn't really complain about it either. whatever you choose, they'll just accept it as game mechanics and would mod the other option either way. If you're feeling extra crafty you could put that as a checkbox when generating a world.
About the dark images, i'm suspecting it's because i have Flux running all the time, and maybe it's messing with how the game takes a screen shot. I actually don't know how the game generates those images, if you could share the source code for the blueprint generator i could try to debug it. (no promises, though lol)
EDIT: I hope it's not too long lol