Posts by Miwarre

In principle, I believe it would not be a big change, code-wise, to add more -- even all -- of the already existing textures to the already existing "wood plank" and "wood beam" items you can already 'properly' make from the saw-bench, each with its own 'proper' cost.

This would take the cheating away and would greatly increase the building possibilities.

In a first stage, each could still cost 1 lumber, as now. Then, stone-looking planks/beams would cost stones, metal-looking would cost metal and so on. Of course, "wood plank" and "wood beam" would no longer fit as names, but this is also easy relatively easy to change (as there are not many localizations yet).

In fact, at least from outside, it seems so a little coding investment for so a big improvement that I wonder it is not the case to raise its priority a bit. Hint, hint... @red51...

A further step, of which some hint already leaked, would be the possibility to paint items with any RGB colour.

@YakMe comments, suggestions and descriptions are suggestive and inspiring. The idea of custom stories or of sub-stories (possibly not even over-complex to implement if they ultimately rest on a text file with a chain of permissions or similar) would address some of my concerns, primarily the boredom of repeating again and again the same story from scratch for each new world you create or each new server you join.

My points were primarily these two:

1) Time scale: Palaeolithic lasted half a million years, if not more, Iron Age lasted two millennia and half (and in sense is still going on) and so on. I can accept to forfeit this scale and instantly jump to the next step, once the preset conditions are met: after all, as YakMe said, this is a game, not a course on History of Civilisation.

2) Relevance of population. As I said above, from, say, 2nd-1st c. B.C. (Republican Rome) to early XVIII c., the technology base did not change so much.

Just an example: Most of the buildings around me are built, today!, with reinforced concrete and bricks; 1st c. B.C. Romans did know concrete (the ceiling of the Pantheon is in concrete) and could make iron bars, so they could have made reinforced concrete; and of course, they made bricks, an incredible amount of bricks (they even established the first well known standard system, so that bricks made all over Roman possessions could be used interchangeably). So, they could have done most of the buildings I see being made today! around me.

Why they didn't? Because they did not need it and/or could not afford it. Not because of the cost, but because of the implied population requirements. What did change all over those centuries and centuries was the amount of population and the distribution of its density. This is what allowed to diversify more and more the skills and the jobs, deepening the knowledge and the experience:

You can't have a master metallurgist if there is not another hundred or so of persons (probably much more) providing him with food, wear, heat, bricks for his furnaces, wood, coal and so on and so on. You can't have bricks and coal, if there is not a hundred or so of persons for each brick-maker and miner, providing him with food, wear, heat... You can't provide your peasants with decent quality iron forks, rakes or hoes without a corresponding number of skilled metallurgists... and the implied population base quickly escalates.

This is where most 'civilisation progress' games miserably fail: knowledge and technology work like magic, independently of any reasonable social context. It can be simplified (this is a game), it can be streamlined, but it has to make some sense in some way, otherwise it is just magic under another name; then, why not simply add magic to the game?

3) Some random comments:

How does all of this affect contexts like RW? In general, it ultimately requires a 'social ecosystem' going on before, above and beyond the player(s); it might be hinted at by simple visual and procedural elements (no need for the programme to automatically generates a visible 2-million people town!), but it has to be there, both in single- and multi-player modes.

On a similar plane, YakMe spoke of tribes. It is a fascinating idea which could bring the very concept of multi-player above the mere exchange of sword strokes or in-game chatting. But when in a (individually run) server you can't hope to routinely have more than twentish peoples, it evaporates quickly.

So, I am not necessarily against this "evolutionary" concept. I hope it will not be too boring and it will make some sense.

Thanks! M.

Hoping it might be useful for debugging, as the programme already seems quite robust and reliable (I had only 3 or 4 crashes in almost 300 hours of play time): this NPE just occurred while in multi-player (server DAY [ONE], if it is relevant, which I doubt).

Error message pasted below; errorlog and info (renamed) attached.

Linux 3.13.0-24-generic Java: 1.8.0_91 amd64 0.7.0.2_28 -H:1536-DMemDirect=1024-XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=1024m -D:null (Steam)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Error occurred during application-update (11)
java.lang.NullPointerException
at U.z.run(SourceFile:143)
at commons.JIWApplication.update(SourceFile:113)
at com.jme3.system.lwjgl.LwjglAbstractDisplay.runLoop(LwjglAbstractDisplay.java:152)
at com.jme3.system.lwjgl.LwjglDisplay.runLoop(LwjglDisplay.java:192)
at com.jme3.system.lwjgl.LwjglAbstractDisplay.run(LwjglAbstractDisplay.java:233)
at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:745)

Quote from Chrisx84

know what would be great, being able to have a option to stream a radio station into the game for all to hear. And to make it even better, make a api for lua so us scripters can do some funky stuff like with area protection.

Lot A is playing a rock station while Lot B (next door) is playing a blues radio station.

Hi (former) neighbour! This reminds me of another nuisance of real world noisy environment: the guys who force on you their musical tastes by driving around with windows down and music at top volume. Scripting interfaces are always good, but I would find this annoying and I would ask for an audio setting to turn it off (or for it to be lumped in the music audio setting).

Quote from zfoxfire

Are you seeing my criticism of the music to be disrespectful?

Not at all. The sentence I was about to write might sound disrespectful toward the effort of people(s) involved in creating that music and I am sorry about this.

Not sure to understand which the main topic is here.

A) If it is about adding to RW a track player, than @YakMe considerations about copyright on formats and codec licensing are top priority, commercial-wise. The source of the tracks (supplied by the user into a defined folder, downloaded from the Internet in real time, ...) is secondary and in most cases transfers any copyright issue on the track suppliers themselves.

B) If it about adding a musical notation gadget to enter notes and have them played, then I would like to raise a word of caution. Since almost ten years I collaborate with an open source musical notation software project and the complexities of such an endeavour are much, much greater than the casual user may suspect. To have a barely decent result (one would be worth listening at) with a simple song (say, guitar, bass and drums), the notation aspects one has to consider are HUGE.

In addition, as such a gadget would need a collection of samples for the playback, the size (and potentially the licensing cost) of it could also be HUGE. The size of a decent piano only patch is measured in hundreds of megabytes (let's be frank: the current piano is fun as a toy, but its sound sucks, as well as its tuning!) and a minimum provision of instruments is likely to approach the gigabyte. True, lots of sample collections exist smaller in size, but they also suck!

So, I would NOT suggest this path as it is likely to leave most users unsatisfied.

Quote from YakMe

Personally I don't know I leave music off in most games including this one.
I only leave effect / ambient sounds on.
I hate constant noises in games like going into a city in game all I hear is same conversations and humming like it's a meat market.

Hear, hear! I'm glad someone else expressed exactly my feelings (as I tend to have heterodox opinions...).

I also always turn music off in all software, hate ambient music in 'real world' situations (shops, restaurants, elevators, ...) and enjoy the silence, when possible, with a little addition of natural noises. Even natural noises might be disturbing in the reality (there is ore specific bird in my garden which whistles a single note call every few seconds and might go on for hours: if it catches your attention once, you risk to go mad!) and I would prefer even them to be rather low in volume and far apart in the game.

About the music itself, being an amateur musician myself, I understand it might sound disrespectful and I am sorry, but do whatever you like, as @YakMe, I will keep most likely it turned off.

Quote from zfoxfire

I chatted with Red a few nights back and he confirmed that he is going to add sticks and stones. They're likely going to spawn randomly and can be picked up like in The Forest. Around that time, we will start a new game barehanded, without the iron axe and pickaxe. We will then have to craft primitive tools and work our way up to finally crafting that anvil.

A blunt plug to another thread of mines, which attempts to explain why the "improvements" described or implied above might not necessarily be a wise choice, at least not for everybody and not unconditionally. ...

Hmmm... I'll try again, raising the bar and attempting to be a little bit more 'provocative'. Two considerations:

A) Not every time! Things seem to solidify somehow on this topic (see for instance this thread) and the "civilisation progress" path seems to grow rather articulated. Out of curiosity, I might like to go down this path once or twice, but I for one would find incredibly boring having to do it again and again for each new world (in single player) and on any new server (for multi-player). This would significantly reduce my interest in RW. A way around could be a way to carry the technology/knowledge level reached by the character across worlds.

B) Technology. And? The idea that the 'progress' of human kind has been primarily driven by technology advances seems to me quite a misconception. Structural technology advances -- those inducing paradigm shifts -- have been rather few and far apart in human history. Taking away all the differences in styles, tastes and customs, it is rather easy to see that, for instance, from the time Iron Age was enough established (approx. X century B.C.) to, say, the time steam was not diffused yet (approx. XVIII century A.C.?), technology, at its roots, did not change that much.

What mainly changed was the availability of resources, primarily the density of population: how dense and in how many places -- let's call them 'towns' -- it was dense enough. This allowed specialisations to appear and, over time, experience to widen and deepen, if transmission from generation to generation was possible (which in turn requires specialised contexts and jobs). Most of the things daily available in the time of, say, Newton were -- in practice or in theory -- already available to Republican Rome citizen, because they already did them, or could have done them, should they had the need and the required population density.

So, this step took more than two millennia to complete. The previous steps (Bronze, Neolithic, Palaeolithic) took many hundreds of thousands of years.

It should be clear that compressing all of this in a few hours (or minutes!) of game play of a single player (or of a dozen players in MP) is entirely arbitrary and unrealistic; to my perspective it also makes little sense, as it is not so different from including magic.
__________

In summary, I understand that this is just my perspective (but I believe not to be alone in this) and other perspectives exist and are as much legitimate.

If these perspectives attract enough customers to make the project viable and sustainable, I am glad for the dev team which deserves all the success for its efforts and for the brilliant results achieved so far.

But RW would loose myself (and all those with similar feelings) along the way, if this path becomes the predominant way to enjoy RW, without recurring to some 'cheat mode' of some kind.

Thanks again for reading, M.

Quote from YakMe

River: Salmon
Snow / Plains: Wolf Pack / Deer
Plains: Cougar aka Mountain Lion <-- use same model as tiger just change texture

As you yourself anticipated with your North American perspective, this might raise a problem: very little salmon over most of Europe, rather trout (possibly a generic oblong fish would be enough); as well as no cougars or lions (of mountains or not) at all. Topical literature notwithstanding, interaction between humans and wolves has been in most cases quite reduced: in the past because of the rarely overlapping environments, more recently because of the semi-extinction of wolves.

Possibly some kind of configurability of which animal can appear where is needed?

While respecting your perspective, I would like to remind that there are other perspectives as well. For me the lack of monsters, zombies, etc. does not make the playing boring at all, as it allows me to concentrate in (hopefully) better building and landscaping.

Creative mode and fly mode are choices: if you do not like them, you are free not to use them (I personally try to use them as sparingly as possible). More additions are on the way, from dynamic water to some kind of transportation, to NPCs (which I look forward to) and dungeons (which IMO I believe not to fit that much the RW paradigm and I hope they will not be a necessary step to enjoy RW).

I agree that survival is too on the easy side in 'easy' contexts. On the other hands, it is too deterministic in hard encounters: meet a bear or a tiger and you only can run away or die. Possibly some 'simple' tunings of some parameters (like for instance the nutritive values of foods) and some not overly complex additions (like some armours or defence) would already help. Also, I would welcome some effect of the different biomes on the player health and efficiency (the programme already monitors the player body temperature, which is different in the various biomes, so there is something in this direction already; but currently this datum is not propagated to other vital parameters).

Most of these however are fine tunings and (more or less) final touches, which seems reasonable to postpone until major additions are implemented.

Thanks for the reply, @red51. I feel reassured, that it wasn't my fault...

Two comments on VorNet:

1) I am not 100% sure about the daylight command: I understand some prefer to work during day light, but I for one actually like the day/night cycle, as it gives me a perception of the flowing of the time. I believe changing the day time should be consensual among all players, not at the mercy of anyone unconditionally.

2) I did not notice a way to earn more money in addition to the initial amount. Do you have plans/ideas for this?

An extension which would be very welcome by most builders -- I assume -- would be the possibility to "buy" woodplanks/beams with custom ID (as in "^item qty id") with an equal number of unprocessed lumbers or standard woodplanks/beams (they all correspond one to one).

The cost would take the cheating out of the process, still allowing max building flexibility for 'regular' players.

What do you think? would it be possible to automate such a function? would be worth of a specific, separate script?

Looks intriguing and promising!

I keep reading posts discussing a kind of "civilisation progress" as one of the important coming features of RW. If I get it correctly (and correct me if I don't), it should be some kind of "career mode" or vaguely RPG oriented path which would lead the player, mainly on the technology side, from pre-historic tools and techniques to modern day technologies.

From one side, this might be a good thing: it seems to appeal many users and would give a sense of purpose, which is motivating; particularly if, as I assume, it will be fairly articulated and with a good number of steps and/or a reasonably wide and deep technology tree. In other words, if it does not turn out to merely be a varnish or a pretext.

From another side, however, this 'evolutionary' perspective is only one of the ways to look at the sandbox world concept and has some consequences. It mostly depends on how it will implemented and about this we can only speculate. However, some consideration can be made.

1) If it will require enough commitment and engagement to be rewarding, it risks to distract users from sophisticated or ingenuous or 'beautiful' building and crafting tasks. If everybody is busy advancing in technology (maybe looking for rare items which unlock this or that knowledge), then the aesthetic or realistic achievements one can already see in the game as it is now would definitely suffer. We may risk to see the same cave, the same pyramid, the same [put you item here] over and over again, because they are the shortest way to proceed to the next technology advance.

2) This "career mode" would not appeal to everyone; possibly, given what it is possible now in RW, a good number of players came (or stayed) precisely because of the freedom and variety RW allows in building and may not appreciate to be constrained along a given path (I for one certainly would not).

3) It would heavily affect multiplayer interaction. If every player of a server is required (or only has the means) to use the same materials (initially only dirt and stone, I imagine, later bronze, more later iron and so on), the server will become encumbered with rather similar replicas of the same things over and over again and everybody will be busy on his own path, paying little attention to the others. If, rather, the server will advance in technology as a whole, the first comers will have all the fun (or all the boredom, according to the individual tastes) and the late comers will find many (or most) of the steps already accomplished.

4) Or it might be possible to specialize, who knows. This could be stimulating and suit individual preferences: one player would specialize and advance in carpentry, another in metallurgy or farming or herding and so on, leading to trading and some complex form of interaction. Fine! Except for the fact that, by choice, RW has no big central server where many players gather and any specialization is likely to be found, but only many user-maintained servers, many of which are going to have a limited number of players and may end up with a limited number of specializations.

One can continue, but I think the pattern should be clear.

For what is worth, if this progress concept is indeed implemented, my suggestion is to make it optional or one of the possible modes, leaving a more 'pure' sandbox mode still available, so that one can start with photovoltaic panels or carbon fiber already available, if one likes so, being free not to use them if one want to recreate an ancient Egypt or mediaeval Saxon environment (side note for clarity: I make a distinction between a 'pure', 'human' sandbox mode and a 'godly' mode like the Creative one we have now: the latter is basically cheating, while the former should keep some degree of realism).

Thanks for reading, M.

Finishing and polishing date from quite a remote antiquity, look for instance at bone (or ivory, where available) ornaments of the Neolithic, which are harder to work than wood (an example here; older ones can be found, I think). So this does not seem to me a problem.

Rather, I think it is quite clear that such a tool would not work: the rope binding would get loose or even break and the stone blade would fall after a few strokes. A more solid joint is needed: the more archaic stone tools were simply hand held (from the lower Palaeolithic down to possibly the Aurignacian culture approx. 50k years ago); more recent ones (Neolithic) either had a hole for the handle to pass through or a triangular/trapezoidal outline (larger part in front to hit with) to fit and get stuck into a hole of the handle (like this one for example).

This is about the "ramp inner corner" block shape, i.e. the penultimate shape, right before the pyramid, shown abandoned on ground in the screen shot below.

It seems to me that it lacks an orientation. For instance, in the screen shot below, I could not find a way to fill the two corners of the sloped frame around the door (nor the two other corners of a (hypothetical) whole frame).

This shape can be flipped upside-down to fill a down-looking slope corner, but not sideways to fill a side-looking slope, like this one; note that the ramp shape can be flipped sideways, in addition to up and down.

Didn't I look hard enough or it is really missing?

For what it is worth, me too I totally agree with this suggestion, which would significantly enlarge the building possibility with quite a limited addition to the repertoire of shapes and no new special case in the code.

As a side note, three points to note:

1) The angle at the tip of the slope is not 22.5° but ca. 26.565° [<= asin( 1 / sqrt(1^2 + 2^2) ) ].

2) As @zfoxfire hinted at, four more block shapes would be needed: the 'upper' and the 'lower' half of both the inner and the outer ramp corners, for a total of 6 new blocks shapes.

3) Possibly, three block shapes would be enough, if the 'lower' half of ramp, outer corner and inner corner could be placed at two levels (1: ramp bottom at block bottom, 2: ramp top at block top, simulating the 'upper' half), similarly to what is possible now for the "half block", so no new coding case. This would work fine when looking from outside/above, but would leave 'steps' when looking from inside/below or sideways.

EDIT: In the formula above, I skipped the "sqrt"! Corrected.

Since my post above, I spent quite some time on this server and I am very happy: admins are always present and very supportive, there is some infrastructure but not overwhelming, the area protection system is graciously enforced and well maintained. Definitely a valuable addition to the Rising World community!