Arez
Well-known member
The animation right now is simply running in place while you levitate up or down the ladder. Even if you're not moving, you're legs are still swinging around. It looks really silly.
PC V2.0 Storms Brewing Dev Diary
- Thread starter Crater Creator
- Start date
Adam the Waster
Well-known member
It looks silly but I kinda look at it like Minecraft and just go. Ehh
Arma Rex
Active member
The expectation for animation in Minecraft, a very blocky fantasy game, is going to be much lower than for a semi-realistic first person survival horror game though.
Unfortunately, that may be an expectation, but its misplaced and unrealistic.
7d2d currently makes the voxels look "good enough" to set higher expectations. But its still 100% voxel based, 100% destructible world, includes structural integrity calculations, and comes with the associated computational overhead that design requires.
Setting expectations derived against non-voxel designs; is not an apples to apples comparison.
Dreyseth
Active member
I do get what you are saying. However, with truly random generation you would get a map that is pretty much the same randomness everywhere you look. You could end up with an interesting juxtaposition here and there, but the overall map would generally feel quite homogeneous. Such a map becomes boring quite quickly as there is no driving reason to explore further out.
Think about how the current system of town generation uses districts. It is less random, but more interesting to have residential areas, commercial, and industrial. Another layer to this is with the town size, as bigger towns or cities potentially have access to more and bigger POI's. Another logical layer then might be for Biomes to also have some POI differences.
Ideally, a change to random gen wouldn't lock POI's to certain Biomes, but rather have weighted tendencies to where they might be found. A different approach to this might be for higher tiered Biomes with a greater chance of larger cities containing more POI's.
If done well, adding logic to randomness can go a long way to help hold a player's interest rather than losing it.
I agree, I don't want to be forced into the Biomes, but I do want maps that draw me into them.
EvilPolygons
Active member
They're more blue as they run towards you and then orange as they pass you and continue moving away. They fast.
Hah! Now that's funny.
Adam the Waster
Well-known member
Riamus
Well-known member
(Sorry, this kind of became a rant...)
Towns are already larger in higher biomes, which means you get higher tier POI more often in higher biomes. If you are looking for higher tier POI, you are already going to visit the other biomes.
RWG is unfortunately pretty basic for terrain, so you are right that random doesn't give you much variety for RWG terrain.
However, you don't improve the randomness by removing randomness. And randomness isn't the same thing as being dull and boring if you have decent options for the randomness. On the other hand, seeing the same POI in every map for every town in a specific biome because you are heavily weighting the POI by tier in each biome, then that lack of randomness will greatly increased the still and boring feel of the game as you see the same thing every game.
Also, going to other biomes doesn't automatically make the game more interesting or fun or any less dull or boring. On the current game, other biomes are not much more than skins. Even in 2.0, they still aren't much more than skins. Yes, you will have certain enemies limited by biome except if they are past of a POI. And you will have different biome hazards until you get the protection, and perhaps different weather. But all of that is just skins. There isn't any reason to go to other biomes or explore the map in this game. And changing what POI are in each biome doesn't help that in any way.
Forcing people to go to other biomes also doesn't improve it. If they want people to go to other biomes, it should be done through incentives rather than punishments. Right now, there is one incentive... you can get better equipment sooner. But that is really the only thing and doesn't promote exploration as you can just hit the edge of another biome to get that bonus. Punishments include loot caps that are coming in 2.0 and POI tiers being heavily weighted to each biome so you have less variety in a given biome. Not only that, but they are making going into new biomes punishing as well... you have to jump through hoops to not die in a biome, for example. With the way it stands now and how it will change in 2.0 if you don't disable things, I have no reason to go into other biomes food much of any reason. Why would I jump through hoops or deal with hazards or weather that disrupts my gameplay?
Instead of punishments, focusing on incentives is better. Adding hidden stuff that you can find that can include some of the best equipment so that you have a reason to explore, having different loot in different POI so you have a reason to go to other POI, having scenic terrain features that can appear so you have a reason to explore, and so on. The problem is that this game uses random maps. Generated maps are notorious for being generic, no matter how much you do with them. They don't compare to have crafted maps. So devs that use generated maps really need to focus on ways to get players interested in exploring without doing it through punishments. Some games just have you needing to progress in order to move the story along or fight better enemies. But this game doesn't offer that, and I doubt it will when we finally get a story.
In the end, we get what we get, and the game is a good game overall. But it does lack any reason to explore and the changes aren't going to improve that even though they are supposed to get players to progress through the biomes. At least I can make maps without RWG and have them look much better.
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Arez
Well-known member
How is a ladder climbing animation a non-voxel design?
That can be said for a lot of requests made here.
And importance is relative. If something aesthetically positive is easy to implement then it's sense of importance changes. And neither you nor I know how difficult it would be to implement.
joshwa0816
New member
Hope you change your mind soon. It should've been tied to Occlusion setting from the beginning. I can't stand the way this looks especially the hard circle it creates as you get closer and further away
Adam the Waster
Well-known member
True but personally I would rather have extra content or QOL or buff then animation. It would be nice to have and that goes for all suggestions really
Riamus
Well-known member
Don't forget that animation is done by different people than those who are adding content or making code changes to add QOL stuff. Unless the content or QOL happens to be animation, of course. So they could easily work on that without compromising any additional things you might like to see. Personally, I'd prefer that animation to be improved over most of the other suggestions people make here.
4sheetzngeegles
Well-known member
Riamus
Well-known member
That kind of map doesn't really let you split POI by tiers. The number of POI per tier decreases as you increase in tiers. In order to split them by biome, you'd have to make the largest towns be in the lowest biome (forest) and the smallest towns be in the hardest biome (wasteland) just to have any chance of avoiding tons of duplications. And even then, there are only a very limited number of tier 5 POI, so you'd still end up with a lot of duplication even in a smaller town of only tier 5 POI. It just isn't really a good option to split things that way.
It also doesn't in any way increase exploration. Even if you have to go to higher biomes, no matter the reason, that doesn't increase exploration. It just means you move around the map a bit. It doesn't mean you're going to go check out what's off in some area of the map to see what you might find (i.e. exploring the map). It just means you move to wherever you have to be in order to progress.
Games that give you good incentives to explore are ones that provide hidden loot or quests that you might find by exploring, or hidden lore or achievements that you can only get from exploration, or even just really interesting scenery to check out or people to meet or whatever else. These things provide reasons to explore. Spreading out POI by biome doesn't provide any reason to explore.
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Old Crow
Well-known member
So we're just going to continue to magically walk-slide up ladders even after the game is eventually finished?
4sheetzngeegles
Well-known member
Any poi can be any tier, according to the way the xml is configured.
This is without a ton of duplicate naming conventions, it would be a
one time set of the the tier to sectional levels tier to poi. They have
just been left static in the xml thus far.
This is an alternate manner of tiered cities that possibly could coincide with the storm's brewing, so certain parts of each city
can have variable rules and dangers. to match the biomes. The squares in the other post were just as a visual. not a real size
representation. They were also only the quest and wilderness poi types. It wasn't a thought for now but reading what Faatal
wrote, this is what it made me think of, biomes cities progression travel following the same rules.
This is without a ton of duplicate naming conventions, it would be a
one time set of the the tier to sectional levels tier to poi. They have
just been left static in the xml thus far.
This is an alternate manner of tiered cities that possibly could coincide with the storm's brewing, so certain parts of each city
can have variable rules and dangers. to match the biomes. The squares in the other post were just as a visual. not a real size
representation. They were also only the quest and wilderness poi types. It wasn't a thought for now but reading what Faatal
wrote, this is what it made me think of, biomes cities progression travel following the same rules.
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faatal
Fun Pimps Staff
Maybe. I don't really care about what that looks like as all I want is to be able to look and shoot in any direction while on a ladder.
Riamus
Well-known member
Yes, you can make a POI any tier, but it makes no sense to turn a tier 1 POI into a tier 5 POI or vice versa. And even changing it by one tier can make POI feel wrong to people as it will either be too easy or too hard for what they are expecting at their level.
And what is the real benefit? What you're showing doesn't really seem to offer any actual benefit. Making a town of one tier of POI or a biome that uses only one tier of POI wouldn't really do anything to improve the game. It would feel forced to have to only do POI that match the biome.
In any case, if you wanted to try it out, you can make such a map in Teragon without any real difficulty. You can easily set POI to only appear in a specific biome and even set specific town types to appear only in certain biomes and set only specific districts to appear in specific town types. You can also make biomes similar to your example. Make such a map and try it out and see if it works for you.
Maybe not, but a lot of people do care about graphics and animation in games. And since the game has gotten a pretty significant face lift, leaving in stuff like that is very jarring to players. As I mentioned in my post, you could make the climbing animation look good and then just let the body rotate if you rotate even if it just appears to be standing in air at that point and even then it would look much better and it wouldn't compromise the ability to look around or attack in any direction. At the very least, you could stop the animation if the player stops moving. Right now, the animation continues even if the player isn't moving on the ladder. Unless that has been changed and I didn't notice. You can also just change the animation from a walking animation to one where the legs step upward instead so that it looks at least a little better.
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Old Crow
Well-known member
I promise, no attempt to be snarky here - is it not possible to allow players to do with, while still having an actual climbing animation? Or is that a limitation of the engine?
faatal
Fun Pimps Staff
That is a bug. I don't know if it has changed. We do have a very old climbing anim, that looks ugly and should be deleted, that possibly someone was hoping to use back then.
You may have a big old two handed weapon in your hands that you are wanting to aim/shoot or you just plain turned your back to the ladder. In either case your hands are not on a ladder and your feet may be backwards or you broke the poor saps spine twisting it 180. Ladders + freedom are hard, which is why games like Enshrouded lock you to the wall as you climb and you can't do anything except move left/right/up/down or jump off.