Thanks for the reply and for looking into the matter.
In fact, the issue is gone; it lasted approx. one hour and half / two since I tried the first time this morning (and of course I have no idea since how long it was going on).
It might have been something with Steam, but other Steam-based games were unaffected, so it might be something to keep an eye on, just in case RW turn out to be more sensible to these glitches than other applications.
Thanks!
Issue fixed "by itself" after an hour or so. Possibly it was really something with Steam, we'll never know...
For me, it is fixed now.
This is rather difficult to explain in words, but I'll try.
While experiencing the error reported in this thread, I Alt-TABbed to another process to write down some notes in order to report the error.
1) The error msg dlg remained on top of everything (not surprising, usually can be managed)
2) No mouse cursor appeared (it was hidden in the RW launch screen), making quite hard to use any other application or even dragging the error dlg out of the way
3) It was not possible to Alt-Tab back to the error dlg to acknowledge it, shut RW down and go on. In fact, I ended up turning the machine off with Ctrl-Alt-Del (luckily the keyboard was not grabbed).
Possibly it is not super-important, but being forced to turn off a machine to recover from an error msg is not very user-firendly...
This is an error I am getting this morning while trying to start RW up. The message goes on tellign that either the Steam serverr are not available or there is problem with firewall/antivirus.
No error log created: info file attached (renamed to info.txt).
Linux Mint 17.3 here, no firewall or antivirus at all! And in any case, RW was starting a few hours ago.
Possibly it really is a Steam issue, but I can reach Steam contents both via Steam client and browser. Any suggestion?
EDIT: forgot to mention: I can start other Steam-based games.
Probably unexpectedly by some, given my previous posts, I think a fuller utilisation of animal parts would be a sensible addition: killing a cow only to grab two steaks is such a waste! Ant this, mind, regardless of epoch. A measure of gory details could be a reasonable part of the process, unless this would affect the game rating and, indirectly, its presence on the market.
I had to look "sinew" up in a dictionary but, indeed!, we need them!
Well, if you die and didnt create a cache of spare tools then i guess you would have to start over. Thats a result of poor planning.
Agreed! If someone dies while carrying all his tools, ores, stones, furnaces, and so on, he has to start over and fully deserves it!
But: you start a new world: you start from scratch, great! You join a server: you have to start from scratch, fine. You create a new world to try different settings: you have to start from scratch, well... You join another server: you have to start from scratch: oh no, again?
QuoteRegarding the creation of cutting tools, in the real world you would spend hours of hand grinding stone on stone to create a shape. I'm not suggesting we sit in game for an hour to make one stone. [...] I want so see something not as tedious but fairly complex so we should reduce the time and focus on the crafting recipes.
Agreed! Except for the fact that the majority of archaeological findings do not show generic stone tools ground one another, but specific kinds of stone (those with more defined 'cutting planes'; sorry I lack the English terminology on this) accurately chipped in order to create a cutting edge. Anyway, the details are secondary and may be lumped in the "this is a game, after all" category.
QuoteI am curious of what your ideas are regarding how we should implement primitive crafting.
In a sense, me too! Basically, my feeling is that we should not. Not before Bronze Age; stretching somehow, not before late Neolithic. Before that, the mechanics (social, temporal, technical) would be so different from what can be reasonably implemented in a single-player (or limited-multi-player) game, that the result would be largely pure fantasy.
QuoteI do like the idea of making bricks with our bare hands. Clay pots would also be nice to have.
Clay and bronze were important in bridging from stone to iron; it would be hard to do without.
Hi Miwware,
For 1a my idea was only a suggestion for the technical issue of how to hide that transitional moment in game when objects in the field respawn or change. For example, if you stare at a tree in game for hours, at some point that tree has to be redrawn as it matures. There are only 2 or 3 states modeled for trees in Rising World. I dont know how this is currently addressed. Maybe the tree redraws the next time its in your visible range. I havent kept a game open 5 hours or so just to see how its handled.
If I remember correctly, I got -- by pure chance -- the moment a plant (I think it was a tomato plant, but likely it applies to all plants/trees) changed of shape. Much like the ores in the furnace change instantaneously from ores to ingots. It isn't particularly realistic, but to my feeling it is quite acceptable as a decent approximation of a continuous process in a game.
So, if I would see a stick or a piece of stone popping up on the ground in front of me, I would not be particularly disturbed; I do not expect this to happen often, as the spawn rate would be relatively low and you would be mostly looking elsewhere.
QuoteFor 2a. I was referring to primitive tools made of stone, not the iron tools [...] Once we are able to craft a workbench then we can use the currently implemented approach to making an anvil and then making the components for iron tools.
And in 2b, as I said, we will have primitive stone tools that we can use for mining more stone to make the furnace. The stone tools will surely have less effectiveness and durability as iron.
I don't think it possible to effectively cut generic stone with generic stone tools. You may possibly crumble it -- also destroying the tools in the process --, but not cutting in a usable form. In the 'real history', things were different, as the work time available was much greater, as much more 'players' were available. So, complex methods using stones (lots of them!) to start to fracture specific kinds of stones, like schists, and then wood sticks and poles as levers; which would be overly complex and making little sense in a game like RW.
Also, a link is missing in this chain: brick. In many ancient (say, Bronze Age) civilizations knowing some kind of metallurgy, furnaces were not make of stone, but of bricks. And bricks can be made (almost) bare-handed.
I think an actual crafting tree should be written down, and check it can actually be traversed without containing too many too obvious inconsistencies.
But one question still remains: how many times are you willing to repeat that same craft path from scratch? How does this affect game longevity?
Two questions.
1) Simple, by "after sleeping", you mean that the character actually has to sleep for sticks/stones to regenerate and carcasses to decompose (or whatever it was) or that a day/night cycle has to complete? The first does not make much sense to me as I do not understand how the behaviour of the character when he's doing something else may affect the 'spontaneous' natural processes.
2a) More complex. Let's assume we start bare handed. To make a pickaxe, we need an anvil (and some extra iron for the pickaxe head); to make the anvil, we need iron; to have iron we need a furnace and iron ore; to make the furnace we need stone (quite a lot of it). How are we going to collect the needed stone and iron ore without a pickaxe?
2b) Let's assume the above is solved by some trick (the kind of things I like to call "magic in disguise"). Before we can have a pickaxe or a sword or any effective tool, we need to collect at least 128 stones (at least easy to find), make a furnace, collect 32+n iron ores (less easy to find); smelt it; make the anvil; make the tool. This may easily take several days of game time and a few hours of play time. Which is fine in itself (the first few times)! But:
- in the meantime we will be expected to be harassed by bears, lions, bandits, and so on, without any effective attack/defence tool yet.
- how many times this can be repeated (new world, new server) before becoming utterly boring?
Many ideas and details are great, suggestive, appealing, ... in themselves, but the whole of the game play should always be taken into account.
We are currently preparing a stats page, it should be ready soon
https://stats.rising-world.net/
Great! This is user support! Thanks!
For a little while, a web site has been up at http://www.rw-stats.com/ listing running servers with player stats, players with play stats and some other details I have forgotten.
I wonder if this would not be something that JIW could take on, as an official extension to either the forum or the main web site, as they presumably have direct access to all the relevant data. I understand that some data may raise privacy issues, but I imagine that a careful choice of the shown data could minimise these aspects and/or that players logging on a server already (implicitly?) accept that their stats are logged and used.
The usefulness of such a service could be in:
*) no need to start RW to check -- for instance through a smartphone -- if a server is up / updated (not secondary with the WONDERFUL rate of updates going on!)
*) additional data, including history, to compare servers, with respect to the limited amount of info which can fit in the RW server list and which is necessary an instant snapshot with no previous history.
*) more I cannot think of, but someone else certainly will!
Anyone else would like this? Comments? Criticisms?
@Mlwarre That's a shame ETS2 and your Linux box. Have you seen this link ? http://blog.scssoft.com/2013/0…x-beta-of-euro-truck.html
Thanks for the info, but the post is from more then 3 years ago and that beta is over since long.
Speaking of coincidence... while @ArcticuKitsu was posting his message, I was buying ETS 2! I cannot actually comment on it, as it does not seem to work on my Linux box; I tried browsing their web site but the support seems limited to an e-mail address: another big plus of Rising World!
I noticed the same thing yesterday night. Steam version on Linux Mint 17.3 with an ATI HD 5770.
Scalable blocks will be great! As well as the other improvements to the construction systems hinted at or disclosed here and there. All of them require more or less extensive changes to the code and/or to the world file format and/or to the data base, though.
On the other hand, as I said above, extending the plank/beam repertory with the other existing material textures (stone, marble, plaster, metal, ...) would require no -- or very little -- change to the core of the programme, to the DB and to the worlds, as they already exist (as they can already be used, but by 'cheating')!
It would 'simply' be a matter of extending the UI lists and providing a cost for each, which could also be conventional in a first stage. I can only see the matter from outside the development of course, but basing on my 30+ years as a developer, I doubt it would take more than half a day of work of one person. And the usability gain would be huge.
Yes, the game only uses Bitmap fonts. OpenGL has no built-in support for vector based fonts, so we decided to stick to Bitmap fonts, which are sufficient in our cases. We also reduced the character set to a minimum in order to get the best quality for the fonts (without having to use larger images).
Thanks for the explanation. I understand the rationale behind the bitmap choice (of course, there are ways to support outline fonts in OpenGL, but require some framework and/or additional libraries, which may be overkill in this case).
However, I believe the decision to stick to a 7-bit character set will have to be revisited sooner or later, to support user interaction in any other language than English and/or once more localisations will be added.
Thanks for the reply, @red51. I supposed it was a matter of lacking programmatic support as non-ASCII characters leave no track in output, not even the "missing-glyph" glyph.
Then, after your reply, I looked more deeply and discovered that in RW bitmap fonts are used, implemented as DDS surfaces, each with a *.fnt descriptor, and apparently only contains glyphs for the 32-255 code point range. I don't know if there are external constrains (jMonkey?) which forced such a choice; in itself it seems rather unconventional, as 8-bit fonts are a thing of a now rather distant past...
Anyway, even this does not fully explain the issue: the characters actually output are limited to the 32-127 range, in fact a 7-bit font. The characters in the code point range 160-255 are lost somewhere midway.
At least on Linux, the in-game chat only supports basic ASCII characters.
Shouldn't it be the case to support a wider range of characters? I understand that non-ASCII characters may raise issues in file/folder names and world names become folder names, but in many other places, from the chat to character names, most Unicode characters should not be a problem, also given than Java has full Unicode support built-in.
As strange as it seems to me, this has not been discussed apparently: I searched the fora for the term with no result.
I am generally a fan of permadeath and I would love to see it implemented in RW in a stricter way than now: Currently, it mostly amounts to losing your inventory, and even this only if you don't retrieve and spoil your body soon enough.
In a stricter implementation, dying would entail not only loosing the inventory no matter what. but also resetting any knowledge / level / skill may be implemented in future updates; once character customisation will be added to the game, a dead character should be recreated from scratch. On servers which grant special privileges to players (after a time or after a task is completed), all these privileges will be lost.
A possible metaphor to be used as a guide line could be the "heir metaphor": the new character is the heir of the dead one, may inherit his physical possessions (anything the dead built and/or land allotted to him on servers), possibly through a 'tax' of some kind which has to be 'paid' (after collecting the necessary resources) or a task which has to be completed before inheriting.
This should happen universe-wise, not simply world-wise: the previous character is dead and the new character should replace the old in all worlds and in all servers that character may have visited (of course, the 'tax' or task -- if implemented -- has to be repeated in each world or server). Of course I don't know the technical details, but I believe Hive authentication gives a way to implement this universe-wide death in a feasible manner.
If technical reasons (like DB searches and matches) require keeping the same name, it is ok.
As I understand this may have a rather big impact on the game play and playing style and may not suit everybody taste; so some optionality may be important, but I cannot imagine how, given the "universality" of the character death, as I see it.
Comments and criticisms are welcome, of course! M.
