The state of Floating Cities DLC in v117733

[Pesky]

v117733

A recent complete rewrite of the 'collapsing' algorithm is an almost entirely successful attempt to put an end to parts of a ship hanging in the air. It works far better than the original algorithm, making a lot of the complaints on this forum obsolete. Occasionally it fails and you have to go back up and repeatedly chop the hanging area in half until you find that one floor or wall piece which is holding the rest up. A major improvement in the game, but not yet perfect.

In ships in the original game and various DLCs there are still hull pieces which cannot be removed because they think that another piece, which is actually far away, is holding them in place. This seems to be 100% repeatable for all players, and I don't know why it's still a problem.

The game urgently needs an existing facility extended. When you try to crane out something which has pieces blocking the crame, or pieces attached, those pieces flash red so you can figure out how to solve the problem. But sometimes the problem isn't a object, it's a connector, usually a welded strip. If those pieces flash too, it would be a big improvement, not only for the players but for the devs trying to figure out what's wrong.

There are still steam pipes which spit out steam when not connected to a boiler. There are still electric boxes which, for some players, cannot be turned off. :-(

A particular feature of information panes, where the size of the text starts small and grows to normal size, requires rendering a font at many different sizes. It happens so quickly I don't think most players notice it. From what I observe, the rendering of those different font sizes takes up time and caching space, and I think it's all wasted.

The Floating Cities DLC

Once again, the design of the DLC ships is excellent. They exploit the same game engine but feel different to anything we've seen before. The introduction of three new types of wall panel works well, and breaks up the predictable standard flat walls. I enjoyed various big round things which I won't spoil for those who didn't get there yet.

Bugged ships. I managed the first Floating City okay. In the second ship, the north (furthest from the sea) section got me in a highly bugged state and I never finished it. And two a hull pieces high up in the starboard of the third ship cannot be detached, meaning that everything under it is fixed in place.

Single-piece floor panels. Normal floors were 2+3 pieces plus 2 connectors, making 7 pieces for every square of floor. Make it just one piece instead ? Fine. But please be consistent. If you do it for some, please do it for all of them. Because as the DLC ships are now, I have no idea what floors I can stand on as I work, or what walls I can knock down without the floor I'm standing on disappearing. Sometimes I have to work through three layers of floor. Other times I knock down the two walls either side of me and suddenly fall two stories, then have nowhere to stand while I try to get to the next wall panel.

There's a new type of compound floor with a sharp angle in it, designed to fit over or under a new angled wall panel. From directly above you can't see the rivets in this floor because there are connectors in the way. It's very annoying.

The safes ? Hugely annoying. Opening 600 (? feels like a thousand) safes while you're trying to clear up litter is not fun, and it interrupts something that /is/ fun. Please make safes optional with one selection when you buy the ship, or remove them entirely. I'll gladly give up the money found in them. Whoever thought safes were a good idea never played through a single Floating City. Remember the 'pipes' minigame in _Bioshock_ ? Same thing. By itself, one is fun. Hundreds of them when you're trying to do something else ? Just annoying.

Big boxes and big shelves needing an extra hit, like things attached to walls ? Also annoying, though not as bad. It interrupts a meditative process of clearing up rubbish. You are rudely jerked out of your calm meditation by having to hit something. Bleh. Also, there are a few chairs and wires and other things scattered over various ships which need that extra bang, though I think those are unintentional. Even more annoying because they look identical to things that don't need that extra bang, so you don't know you need to do it until you need to do it.

Floating Cities DLC replay value ? For me, none. I'm not opening all those safes again. Make them optional and fix some other problems and I'd love to replay all three ships. Repeatedly.

The ugly

The fundamental approach of the game is still a terrific one. The ships are designed in an inventive and fun way. It's all ruined by bugs. Whoever is in charge of quality-control at Hypnotic Ants must just walk through the ships and not try to disassemble them. Or perhaps they set publishing schedules and stick to them even when they find bugs.

Devs, please find two computers near the minimum and maximum specs specified for the game. Have devs or testers play each ship on both computers. (They can swap off on computers, I don't want to condemn one person to the slow computer for every ship.) Every time the player says "Why did that happen ?" or "That shouldn't do that.", fix the bug. Otherwise every Steam review of the game is going to mention the bugs, and every screenshot will have been taken to show a bug.

[Valk]

I feel like this should also be submitted as a review for the new DLC on the store page too not gonna lie. Insanely informative.

[battlecruiser2004]

The safe cracking was unnecessary, the effort to open them for mere pocket change hardly feels worth the time spent. It also doesn't help that the sweet spot for the locks are notoriously small and hard to find (at least the lockpicks are unlimited, thank god for small favor) Besides, lockpicking with a bobby pin just feels archaic when you have a blowtorch and demo charges, either of which should be able to break open a safe in short order. I get the whole "treasure" angle is for immersion purpose, but the overall monetary value is just too low to be considered as such (it'd have to be at least 4 figures)

The Floating Cities ships also have some issues. Size wise, it feels more like it's taller than bigger. I mean, they go through all this trouble to create a 2nd dock (with 4 cranes I might add) to accommodate these large ships, yet they're underutilized in the case of the 3rd, and largest of the 3 ships. The 2nd ship, while very good length wise, only has a few decks fore and aft, while the midsection is a gigantic void. Think of it like a large fish with the majority of the meat taken out. Sure, the overall size certainly is bigger, but without any fillings it feels bare bone.

[Pesky]

I agree with those points, battlecruiser, though I'd go even further.

Opening the safes in situ is silly. You wouldn't do that, would you. You'd stack them on the truck unopened, then take them back to a specialist opening service. And putting that in the game would defeat the point of having them in the first place.

And your point about the void is also accurate. You have a ship which has a fun and complicated set of decks high up, and also a lot of staterooms, and then nothing where you'd expect to find machinery halls and cargo space. I like the machine spaces in the ships in this game. I like the puzzle of trying to work out which order I can get at the machines to get them all out without damaging any of them. I do not like taking apart hundreds of identical staterooms. I learn nothing and there's no puzzle to it.

[MeTaL GuArD]

The physics algorithm apparently can change where parts of the ship are still attached inbetween saves. I was working on the first ship from Floating Cities, and planned on tearing down the entire upper deck in one go. I had two panels left holding the whole thing up, so I saved before I did it, then realized some objects were destroyed when I tore it down, so I loaded and found them.

After loading, however, the deck did not disassemble when I took out the two panels that kept it together before. It was frustrating, but I was too far along to quit. I started breaking some floors from underneath, but nothing worked.

Then I picked up the stuff that was already laying on the ground, and one of THESE was apparently holding it up, because it just suddenly broke up behind me while I was aiming for the truck. No idea what actually has to happen for the algorith to mess up this hard.

[Pesky]

That reminds me of something that used to happen in an older version of the game. The game wouldn't let you use the winch on some hull pieces because it thought that they still had a piece of floor attaching them to the ship. But that piece of floor was actually already detached, and just lying somewhere on the ship. Once you'd picked it up, the hull was released. But there was no way to tell which piece it was, and the animation for the hull becoming loose never played, so it really depended on you just checking occasionally whether that piece of hull was now loose.

I have no idea if this bug is still present, but I haven't seen it for many versions so it may have been fixed.

[MeTaL GuArD]

I'm also going to add that the first Floating Cities ship has a lot of issues with hull welds hiding behind thick dividers that are part of the structure, preventing me from winching them. It's primarily the lower levels that suffer from this, at least one section on each side, probably more. I didn't check all of them as I was mostly finished looting the ship. The ability to highlight these connectors like it does with regular floors would help pinpoint problem areas.

[Lowjohn]

Those pieces stuck inside the hull *can* be cut, from the inside, through the hull. They're not supposed to be there, they're fixed in the next version, they were actually fixed in the RC for the DLC and then *reverted* on live. It's very frustrating.

[TeDiouS]

I'm on the third cruise ship & once completed I'm not sure I'll go back to them.
To me they are just too big.
I prefer the smaller, more challenging, ships.

[MeTaL GuArD]

Originally posted by TeDiouS:

I'm on the third cruise ship & once completed I'm not sure I'll go back to them.
To me they are just too big.
I prefer the smaller, more challenging, ships.

So far, I think the submarines were my favorite. A lot of interesting loot, unique elements to crane off, generally very fun. The battleships were second since there were also interesting items, but less of them than on the subs. Then I think I would rank this DLC as #3, and Steel Giants #4 (only Pobeda was interesting, the other two were basically vanilla ships, just larger).

[Lurus]

Not a fan of the floating city dlc so far.


The ships cost too much for the contracts payouts(I personally believe that just doing all 3 contracts should always earn you more then the cost of the ships)

They really nuked the money of the game like a year or so ago when all the contracts payouts got reduced and some fairly substantially.

The top level of most ships is too high to throw to the truck from making unloading crates super frustrating and with no more capability for a larger crate extremely time consuming.

The last ship also has pieces that require the winch but are too high up in which the winch cant physically reach to pull down so prevents progress in some areas as I like to pull down the sides as I move down so I can had easier access to the truck.


Im also having pieces of like walls that are completely disconnected just floating connected to nothing but a few other walls and like single hammer points holding it up. The wall should fall when its no longer connected to the floor not just hang because i didnt hit one corner of it.

[TeDiouS]

I actually gave up on the third ship.
I'd collected enough to complete the three contracts, had enough income from the safes & scrap I had collected to make a $5,000 profit so just gave up on it & started a different ship.

[Valk]

Originally posted by TeDiouS:

I actually gave up on the third ship.
I'd collected enough to complete the three contracts, had enough income from the safes & scrap I had collected to make a $5,000 profit so just gave up on it & started a different ship.

To be honest, I think you can say that about most ships in the game though. Most of them are more effective to just restart for contracts than do a 100% salvage, with there being no actual benefit to doing so. Metal sale is just....pathetic compared to contract value.

[TeDiouS]

True but most other ships I've enjoyed removing completely, leaving just the bare ground - floating cities not so much.

[MeTaL GuArD]

I now have an issue on the second ship of Floating Cities where the physics engine responsible for dropping disconnected items seems to have given up completely after I collapsed the entirety of the front half. By now, I did my best to pick up all of the loose metal still lying around, but when I try to dislodge the leftover rooms in the middle section, the engine visibly struggles - All of it hangs in the air and the game starts dropping them 2-3 pieces at a time... And after a few moments the game crashes. This newest attempt it didn't crash, but the entire structure still hangs in the air, disconnected but unable to drop down. I grabbed what I could out of the air, but I'll probably try reloading and seeing what happens.

[bluecaz]

I said exactly the same thing, there is NO way these ships have been play tested all the way through as they would realise that massive section of ship does not winch for NO reason, or that 40 connectors are behind immovable objects. Its sloppy at best