gracefool Ah I see. Anyone like me who actually watches the price is likely to be confused by this, as when you try it, it looks like you just get a 100% refund. It should say something like "So long as you move and re-add parts before entering combat or leaving the system, you receive a full refund, otherwise you will receive a 75% refund."
In the tutorials, there's always a balance that needs to be struck between explaining things sufficiently and not making them too wordy. I try to explain only the minimum of what players need to know to play the game, and let them figure out the rest on their own. My sense is that the full details of the buy/sell discount system is much too complex to explain in a tutorial. While I certainly agree that its intricacies can be confusing, understanding them isn't really necessary to play the game, and I think most players do eventually figure it out.
gracefool "So long as you move and re-add parts before entering combat or leaving the system, you receive a full refund, otherwise you will receive a 75% refund."
This isn't really correct, or at least doesn't give the whole story. To be precise, it works like this:
Selling a part gives a 100% refund, unless you've engaged in combat or done an FTL jump since buying it, in which case it only gives a 75% refund.
Re-buying a part that you previously sold is done at the same price you sold it for (100% or 75%), unless you've engaged in combat or made an FTL jump since selling it, in which case you always pay 100%.
gracefool Or if that sounds arbitrary and unrealistic (because it is)
It's arbitrary and unrealistic because the whole idea of "instantly buying parts with money out in deep space" is arbitrary and unrealistic. Eventually, this whole system is likely to be replaced with some sort of resource system, and money will only be usable at space stations.
gracefool you could make it that it's a full refund so long as you're paused
No, unpaused is the default for building, and being able to build while unpaused is critically important for learning the game.
gracefool If you think that's inconsistent, then in this case consistency is bad.
But inconsistency is also bad, because it confuses players. If fire extinguishers ignore the auto-doors setting, that'll just confuse people. In this particular case, I think that the lesser confusion of having consistent behavior outweighs the advantage of not having to add doors to fire extinguishers, especially since you can just hold the ~
key to temporarily flip that setting while the key is held.
gracefool What I mean is, why not make "load ship" as similar as possible to the other versions, in every way? Or the same but just with that smaller profile icon mode?
You're talking about the Ship Library box in Creative Mode, right? The reason that's different is so that you don't have to re-open it (and wait for ships to reload) every time you want to add a ship to the game, and since it can be kept open indefinitely, it needs to be smaller so it blocks less of the screen.
What features is it missing compared to the larger Ship Library dialog, besides the larger icons and drag-and-drop? (BTW, you can access the full version from the lite version by clicking the menu button and selecting Organize.)
gracefool Does the pilot regularly re-calculate the target position according to the changing enemy speed? Surely that would be reasonable, since you've given an order that is enemy-relative, not grid-relative?
Yes, it continuously recalculates, but if the enemy changes velocity and your ship isn't far enough away to have time to compensate, then it can overshoot. This tends to happen when you aggro an enemy and it starts flying towards you.
gracefool can't you just calculate the time it would take to perform both manoeuvres, and pick the faster one? Using kinematic equations you can calculate the time it takes to rotate the ship X degrees, and you can calculate the time it takes to get from A to B while the ship is in Y orientation.
There are two things that this a bit harder than you'd think:
Maximum acceleration in a specific direction has to be calculated from the ship's mass properties and thruster configuration. The game already has code for doing this, but the calculation is a bit expensive.
As of 0.14.0, acceleration is non-constant, which means I can't use the vanilla kinematic equations and have to use an approximate solution instead. The approximate solution I've come up with seems to work okay for deciding when to decelerate, but whether it'll work well enough for deciding whether to turn or strafe needs to be tested.
So yeah, neither of these is likely to be a deal-breaker, it's just not a trivial change.
gracefool 14. If you have "auto rotate to ship" off, then the select tool grid is not ship-relative. Is that something anyone finds useful? You have to carefully rotate the ship to the exact rotation you want to select from...
This is intentional. Ship-relative selection boxes was how it used to work, and it was super confusing, people complained about it a lot.