Hello Lonewolf,

Thank you for the feedback! I know this mod can be a bit of a pain to work with. Both duo to the lack of user feedback and the constand lag spikes. I'm working right now on ways to give the user more feedback but I'm limited the ways how can do it. I'm thinking about utelizing the custom 'hud' a bit more to give the user more feedback about what is happening. But I don't want to bloat the screen full text walls that no one wants to see.

As for the guides: I think we have solved that! The new wiki offers us a way to make much easier to read guides and also provides us with tools to easier update certain things. Last but not least the wiki is also publicly accesible. So people can write there own pages if they want to (Obviously this will be moderated by the team).

As for the lag, my hands are still tight. I had hoped they would fix the havok callback with DX11 and solve some of the thedius net code that grinds the simulation speed to a halt. But sofar the improvements in that area have been less then significant giving this mod 0% more wiggle room to do its thing. Ofcourse I try to put in smart tricks to spread the load as much as I can. And the mod does monitor your system in a attempt to not make the simulation speed drop. But this comes at a cost of inteligence. In other words: if this system is given free reight computers would have no lag from this mod at all. But the ai would be so dum that every ship would crash or swing off into deep space.

anyway to sum things up: We are still working on this, updates are slower but therefor better tested then with sector 15. And if you have any suggestions for feedback to the user please: LET US KNOW!

Indeed there is a lag in the basic game. I thought that DX11 would improve things a bit but we are still not there. One day we will be but not today. For me the game runs smoother but needs a better hardware configuration. It runs great but does leave you little room for weaving in the AI code. So we have programming environment where the mod could be experiencing difficulties. Beyond your control. Either due to the current game build or the users hardware capabilities. You hands are tied by the capabilities of the users setup. All you can perhaps do is measure the programming environment. Display messages linked to procedural calls. Or give us a proper debug report we can paste into the forum that tells you how mod is setup.

As a suggestion there should be a option to switch on verbose reporting of mod variables in a user friendly way. If for example the AI is gathering resources tell us how long it takes in text on the screen. This has the benefits of

1. Letting us know that the mod is working away in the background.

2. Gives you a clue if the mod fails. We can can give you information that might help you debug it.

3. It scares the crap out of players when the time to first attack counts down. If fact any message that reports AI development progress brings the drama of conflict.

Please let us help you. People posting that mod simply does not work is not helpful. If only we could give you better feedback. Some on screen data reporting might give you the clues needed to boost performance.

I would love to give you guys a useful way of reporting the mod state. But yet again my hands are rather tight yet again. Currently the mod has a function that writes information to a file (you can find it in %appdata%/spaceEngineers/storage/Space_Sappers. But this document is incomplete as its written async. So if your game crashes the last lines are not written. I'm working on improving this and I hope to publicly announce it with the next patch (I got it ready but duo to a in game bug with the sound blocks right now I cant release it just yet. I hope it gets fixed tomorrow and then version 1.1 can go live).

For user feedback: You will notice a considerable change after the next update now that I'm working on the lore part. Phase 1 will go live soon and supply the user with some custom event to introduce them to this mod. With both spoken and written texts (ingame) the user will be made aware of the pending doom and how he can defend himself against it.

The 'countdown' is actually not a bad idea and rather easy to implement. I might put that in with tomorrows update if I can finish it in time.

As for monitoring the system. As I explained above the mod is already monitoring the system environment. It has access to the same information as you can see when hitting shirt+f11. But I can't resoundingly scale the AI down to save on speed as ships go out of control. Making the AI rather crap and have him crash his ship all over the place.

What I am doing however is rewriting the AI's tactic. Phase one of this will hopefully go live with the next patch and it will change the AI from a rusher to a steamroller (meaning less but bigger ships).