Engineering Tech-Preview Notes
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I was able to try out the Tech-Preview for a bit before they shut the servers down. I didn't have time to extensively test engineering.
If it's not obvious, the image in this post is from CitizenCon. We aren't allowed to post any video/images from the test, but we are allowed to talk about our experience. Here are some of my notes.
The game didn’t run on Linux. I was getting an error code: 2147483905
Being able to turn on/off individual thrusters is back!
It's definitely useful for anyone who is flying a ship where thrusters have been damaged. You can at least try to balance out a damaged thruster by disabling the opposing thruster. I did not see a way to overpower any thrusters on the engineering console just yet.It sounded like fire wasn't working in every ship, but it definitely did in the Corsair.
I couldn't start a fire by shooting the power plant directly with handheld weapons (I pumped a few magazines worth of ballistic and laser ammo into it). The shots seemed to just go straight through the power-plant and other modules. I attempting to repair them and it didn’t show any damage had occurred. Other players mentioned that they had success doing this in other ships (although they wouldn’t recommend using a grenade launcher to do it).
My backup plan was to turn off the coolers entirely, then use afterburners/ship weapons to overheat the components. This plan worked very well.
Initially I was given a Smoke Detected warning on my HUD. I ran back to the component room, but I couldn't see any fire, I could hear it though. Most likely the smoke effects aren’t in yet, and this is what I suspect caused other testers to think that fire wasn’t working.
I went back to the pilot seat and attempted to overheat the ship again. This time, when I returned to the component room, I was met with a raging inferno. It looked like the fire either started at the cooler, or at the power-plant. It was awesome.
The fire does damage the player, and the room temperature definitely spiked.
Note: Fires at an outpost at Pyro did not give off any heat and I was not burned by walking through those fires.A word of warning, the ship doors won't open with any buttons when the ship power is off. The only way to open them is to get the power flowing again, or to use an engineering terminal to override the doors. Hopefully they give us a way to force the doors open in a powered off state. I’m assuming they’ll have a fix for this before it goes out to the larger player base since it’s one of the top feedback items. I’m hoping they add in a new animation/tool for forcing unpowered doors open. Just letting the doors open/close as usual wouldn’t give the same feeling.
The fire did spread out to other parts of the ship. It eventually burned out the other components, but I was able to repair them with my multi-tool and bring the ship back to life.
I used the fire extinguisher to put out some of the fire, and for the rest I tested out venting the ship.
There was no explosive decompression when opening any doors, but you do notice the atmosphere/oxygen levels falling rapidly when a door is open.
On the corsair at least, the life support system was able to handle the side hatch being open. The immediate room with the hatch only dropped to about 70% atmosphere or so, but once the power was out and both the hatch and the rear cargo ramp were opened, the air was quickly vented out and the fire went out very quickly.
The pilot can see a quick overview of modules/items on a ship and turn them on/off.
The engineering terminal, gives you a lot more control over individual items on each ship. You can click on any door to open/close it. It shows a bit of an indicator of whether a room has air or not. You can click on any weapon to toggle it on/off. You also have little indicators that you can hover over to see what fuses/power relays lead to what items.I couldn’t tell if the fire burned out the fuses, or if the fuses were destroyed by disabling the coolers and overheating the ship. Either way, I would recommend having a few spare fuses on hand.
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I was able to try out the Tech-Preview for a bit before they shut the servers down. I didn't have time to extensively test engineering.
If it's not obvious, the image in this post is from CitizenCon. We aren't allowed to post any video/images from the test, but we are allowed to talk about our experience. Here are some of my notes.
The game didn’t run on Linux. I was getting an error code: 2147483905
Being able to turn on/off individual thrusters is back!
It's definitely useful for anyone who is flying a ship where thrusters have been damaged. You can at least try to balance out a damaged thruster by disabling the opposing thruster. I did not see a way to overpower any thrusters on the engineering console just yet.It sounded like fire wasn't working in every ship, but it definitely did in the Corsair.
I couldn't start a fire by shooting the power plant directly with handheld weapons (I pumped a few magazines worth of ballistic and laser ammo into it). The shots seemed to just go straight through the power-plant and other modules. I attempting to repair them and it didn’t show any damage had occurred. Other players mentioned that they had success doing this in other ships (although they wouldn’t recommend using a grenade launcher to do it).
My backup plan was to turn off the coolers entirely, then use afterburners/ship weapons to overheat the components. This plan worked very well.
Initially I was given a Smoke Detected warning on my HUD. I ran back to the component room, but I couldn't see any fire, I could hear it though. Most likely the smoke effects aren’t in yet, and this is what I suspect caused other testers to think that fire wasn’t working.
I went back to the pilot seat and attempted to overheat the ship again. This time, when I returned to the component room, I was met with a raging inferno. It looked like the fire either started at the cooler, or at the power-plant. It was awesome.
The fire does damage the player, and the room temperature definitely spiked.
Note: Fires at an outpost at Pyro did not give off any heat and I was not burned by walking through those fires.A word of warning, the ship doors won't open with any buttons when the ship power is off. The only way to open them is to get the power flowing again, or to use an engineering terminal to override the doors. Hopefully they give us a way to force the doors open in a powered off state. I’m assuming they’ll have a fix for this before it goes out to the larger player base since it’s one of the top feedback items. I’m hoping they add in a new animation/tool for forcing unpowered doors open. Just letting the doors open/close as usual wouldn’t give the same feeling.
The fire did spread out to other parts of the ship. It eventually burned out the other components, but I was able to repair them with my multi-tool and bring the ship back to life.
I used the fire extinguisher to put out some of the fire, and for the rest I tested out venting the ship.
There was no explosive decompression when opening any doors, but you do notice the atmosphere/oxygen levels falling rapidly when a door is open.
On the corsair at least, the life support system was able to handle the side hatch being open. The immediate room with the hatch only dropped to about 70% atmosphere or so, but once the power was out and both the hatch and the rear cargo ramp were opened, the air was quickly vented out and the fire went out very quickly.
The pilot can see a quick overview of modules/items on a ship and turn them on/off.
The engineering terminal, gives you a lot more control over individual items on each ship. You can click on any door to open/close it. It shows a bit of an indicator of whether a room has air or not. You can click on any weapon to toggle it on/off. You also have little indicators that you can hover over to see what fuses/power relays lead to what items.I couldn’t tell if the fire burned out the fuses, or if the fuses were destroyed by disabling the coolers and overheating the ship. Either way, I would recommend having a few spare fuses on hand.
Thanks for the write up, sounds like a good start. Think it'll make it in Q1 next year or is it too raw for that?
Being able to turn on/off individual thrusters is back!
Freaking finally! I really wish they didn't remove features until they have a working replacement but eh, at least it's (almost) back.
Hopefully they give us a way to force the doors open in a powered off state.
I've seen people mention that shooting the door open works in these situations (as in, during this test). Not the best option but it's something, for now.
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Thanks for the write up, sounds like a good start. Think it'll make it in Q1 next year or is it too raw for that?
Being able to turn on/off individual thrusters is back!
Freaking finally! I really wish they didn't remove features until they have a working replacement but eh, at least it's (almost) back.
Hopefully they give us a way to force the doors open in a powered off state.
I've seen people mention that shooting the door open works in these situations (as in, during this test). Not the best option but it's something, for now.
I would guess this is a Quarter 2 release. They've got a lot of work already lined up for 4.4 and engineering doesn't seem to be a part of it.
There are about 235 vehicles in the game at the moment, and they had less than 1/4 of the ships available for engineering. A decent number of those only had engineering partially implemented.
I'm assuming this rework of the ships will bring them all up to the level of having physicalized components. That's going to be a lot of work for a number of teams.
They want ship armor working before engineering goes out, it sounds like they're close to getting that in though.
I've seen people mention that shooting the door open works in these situations (as in, during this test). Not the best option but it's something, for now.
Nice! I wish I had known that when the servers were up. It would have saved me a bit of time.
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I would guess this is a Quarter 2 release. They've got a lot of work already lined up for 4.4 and engineering doesn't seem to be a part of it.
There are about 235 vehicles in the game at the moment, and they had less than 1/4 of the ships available for engineering. A decent number of those only had engineering partially implemented.
I'm assuming this rework of the ships will bring them all up to the level of having physicalized components. That's going to be a lot of work for a number of teams.
They want ship armor working before engineering goes out, it sounds like they're close to getting that in though.
I've seen people mention that shooting the door open works in these situations (as in, during this test). Not the best option but it's something, for now.
Nice! I wish I had known that when the servers were up. It would have saved me a bit of time.
They already said that single seaters (and possibly some of the older ships without physical components, I think?) won't have full engineering in the first version, just a basic repair option accessible from MFDs, so that will shorten the list a bit. Armour shouldn't be too much of a blocker either since we're not getting the full maelstorm implementation, just some number crunching for now. Probably not enough for a "quick" release but still.
Even with that, Q2 sounds about right. Oh well, we've survived this long.
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I was able to try out the Tech-Preview for a bit before they shut the servers down. I didn't have time to extensively test engineering.
If it's not obvious, the image in this post is from CitizenCon. We aren't allowed to post any video/images from the test, but we are allowed to talk about our experience. Here are some of my notes.
The game didn’t run on Linux. I was getting an error code: 2147483905
Being able to turn on/off individual thrusters is back!
It's definitely useful for anyone who is flying a ship where thrusters have been damaged. You can at least try to balance out a damaged thruster by disabling the opposing thruster. I did not see a way to overpower any thrusters on the engineering console just yet.It sounded like fire wasn't working in every ship, but it definitely did in the Corsair.
I couldn't start a fire by shooting the power plant directly with handheld weapons (I pumped a few magazines worth of ballistic and laser ammo into it). The shots seemed to just go straight through the power-plant and other modules. I attempting to repair them and it didn’t show any damage had occurred. Other players mentioned that they had success doing this in other ships (although they wouldn’t recommend using a grenade launcher to do it).
My backup plan was to turn off the coolers entirely, then use afterburners/ship weapons to overheat the components. This plan worked very well.
Initially I was given a Smoke Detected warning on my HUD. I ran back to the component room, but I couldn't see any fire, I could hear it though. Most likely the smoke effects aren’t in yet, and this is what I suspect caused other testers to think that fire wasn’t working.
I went back to the pilot seat and attempted to overheat the ship again. This time, when I returned to the component room, I was met with a raging inferno. It looked like the fire either started at the cooler, or at the power-plant. It was awesome.
The fire does damage the player, and the room temperature definitely spiked.
Note: Fires at an outpost at Pyro did not give off any heat and I was not burned by walking through those fires.A word of warning, the ship doors won't open with any buttons when the ship power is off. The only way to open them is to get the power flowing again, or to use an engineering terminal to override the doors. Hopefully they give us a way to force the doors open in a powered off state. I’m assuming they’ll have a fix for this before it goes out to the larger player base since it’s one of the top feedback items. I’m hoping they add in a new animation/tool for forcing unpowered doors open. Just letting the doors open/close as usual wouldn’t give the same feeling.
The fire did spread out to other parts of the ship. It eventually burned out the other components, but I was able to repair them with my multi-tool and bring the ship back to life.
I used the fire extinguisher to put out some of the fire, and for the rest I tested out venting the ship.
There was no explosive decompression when opening any doors, but you do notice the atmosphere/oxygen levels falling rapidly when a door is open.
On the corsair at least, the life support system was able to handle the side hatch being open. The immediate room with the hatch only dropped to about 70% atmosphere or so, but once the power was out and both the hatch and the rear cargo ramp were opened, the air was quickly vented out and the fire went out very quickly.
The pilot can see a quick overview of modules/items on a ship and turn them on/off.
The engineering terminal, gives you a lot more control over individual items on each ship. You can click on any door to open/close it. It shows a bit of an indicator of whether a room has air or not. You can click on any weapon to toggle it on/off. You also have little indicators that you can hover over to see what fuses/power relays lead to what items.I couldn’t tell if the fire burned out the fuses, or if the fuses were destroyed by disabling the coolers and overheating the ship. Either way, I would recommend having a few spare fuses on hand.
This sounds amazing! Thanks for the summary .
Albeit the error code, the client still started in Linux right? Just like nowadays I get immediately an error when I hit start but in the background the game starts up.
For the closed doors on power down, I hope we finally get a use for the cutter Multitool attachment.
The ability to turn off thrusters, oh how I missed it when they removed it with the new MFDs. Glad to see them back.
