Dalas120 Wouldn't power conduits do that too?
The crux of the idea behind power conduits is that I can balance them independently for each different reactor size, making conduits more effective for larger reactors than small.
Dalas120 If it worked balance-wise (which I'm still thinking about), do you think it would be ok for crew to carry 2 plasma batteries at once at a slower movement speed?
Oh, you mean like they walk slower while carrying batteries? I'm not necessarily opposed to this, though there are some wrinkles that would need to be solved, such as how it works if a part doesn't need both batteries.
Dalas120 And a really crazy thought: crew is one of the biggest performance bottlenecks, right? So what if you only got half as much crew from each bunk, but crew could carry twice as much? Would large ships become twice as easy to simulate?
Certainly halving the number of crew would be a big performance boost, though there's so much else going on (physics, AI, weapons, thrusters, etc...) that it's not like halving crew would double framerate. And there would doubtless be lots of ripple effects to game balance, such as increasing the proportion of crew that are manning parts and decreasing the effect of crew congestion.
Incidentally, I've just finished some pretty major crew performance optimizations which should improve things. In realistic situations I'm getting 50%-100% better FPS, and in extreme unrealistic situations FPS can be 100x better (my ship with nothing but crew's quarters and 15K crew went from 3 FPS to 300 FPS).
Dalas120 A quick request on priorities: shields should lower priority than weapons. Right now crew will keep funneling power to shields (especially empty shields) even after guns are out of ammo. Shooting back is almost always more important than trying to power shields, since whatever took your shields down in the first place is still attacking unless you can blow it up.
That makes sense.
Dalas120 is the game already good at figuring out walking distance?
Only over short distances (5-10 tiles or so). Over long distances it uses a very rough approximation.
Dalas120 If so, do you think it would work for each crewman to estimate when they'll reach their target reactor (using current congestion, not predicting congestion), then record their estimated arrival time on a "schedule" for the reactor? If a crewman is deciding which reactor to go to he can compare how busy the "schedule" is vs how far away the reactor is, which doesn't sound very calculation heavy (to me at least).
Maaaaaybe... Recording estimated arrival time and estimating how much ammo/power will be there when they get there is probably viable, at least as a rough approximation that is probably "good enough". My biggest worry, from a performance cost standpoint, is that the rate of rejection (when a crew decides a reactor is too busy to use) will be much higher, meaning crew will more frequently have to search for a farther reactor over a larger area, which is an expensive operation.
I'll think about it though, it's worth looking into.
Lafiel as seen before rendering multiple ammo carried by the crew also had a huge performance impact
Just a heads up, 0.14.5 is changing this so that crew will only ever render one ammo sprite. If you need to show a crew carrying multiple ammo, you'll need a separate sprite for that, just like how ammo sprites work in parts.
For reasons I've discussed many times previously, I'm pretty against adding additional layers to ships, regardless of whether they're full decks or just conduit/subsystem layers, because it makes it harder to understand what's going on in your ship.
This is something I've thought about a bit and haven't ruled out, though it would certainly be a major change. I generally prefer it to conduits for many reasons, but it lacks to the ability to be balanced independently per reactor size. It could be a cool feature in its own right, but doesn't really solve the "large reactor" problem.
SpaceCat only concern here is cosmoteer getting a bit too much "factorio"
I'm not sure it would be a bad thing to have a bit more Factorio in Cosmoteer. 😉 (Though obviously there's an extreme at which it becomes too much.)
nop In my case I prefer shields having priority,
Ultimately I plan to let the player customize the priorities. The real question is what the default should be. Right now defenses (shields & PD) are higher priority than weapons. I'm tempted to just make them the same and call it a day.
samepage I think the power conduit should be a new "door part" that can be placed between a power source and a optional. The "door" can only transfer plasma cells between them one at a time (with a relative slow transfer rate of 1 cell per second). Crew cannot go through the power conduit (Obviously). Then we add a 1x1 power storage called "capacitor". The capacitor can store up to 3 plasma cells, and can be used to transfer power if linked by power conduits.
It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't really solve the original problem of making larger reactors more useful.