What's the max range we can see a trader flag?

warmer

warmer

Hunter
I like to nerd pole up 40-50 blocks and get a lay of the land. In cities I do this to try and spot the trader flag.

How far away is that flag going to appear?

Knowing this would be really helpful in gauging if I "should" be seeing it near me or not.

Anyone know the specifics?
 
Sounds like an easy thing to test (and potentially necessary to self-test depending on how much settings will affect it ...)
Just dm and god mode, fly towards a know trader until it pops in.
 
Lax said:
Curious, other than the trader anything else you look for when up there?
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Usually water/roads/POI/Trader
theFlu said:
Sounds like an easy thing to test (and potentially necessary to self-test depending on how much settings will affect it ...)
Just dm and god mode, fly towards a know trader until it pops in.
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I Put a block down when I notice it pop in and did a few experiments. It's MUCH closer than you would think for a flag. About the same distance as a car popping in. A flag should be a static model at a distance like POI so we can spot it and just have the physics wave it once we are 75-90 blocks away. THE ENTIRE point of a flag is to identify something at a great distance.
 
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warmer said:
Usually water/roads/POI/Trader

I Put a block down when I notice it pop in and did a few experiments. It's MUCH closer than you would think for a flag. About the same distance as a car popping in. A flag should be a static model at a distance like POI so we can spot it and just have the physics wave it once we are 75-90 blocks away. THE ENTIRE point of a flag is to identify something at a great distance.
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The majority of blocks have a very similar view distance. The only real difference is terrain and anything inside a land claim if you have dynamic meshes enabled. There are some differences, but they aren't very significant, imo. And I'm not sure that making it simple to just nerd pole up and find a trader in a large city is a great option, though I don't really care if people cheese their own games. Considering they made traders only at the gateway tiles again instead of inside towns like they did for one version, they are already easy to find by just following the roads that connect to towns, so it's a minor thing anyhow.
 
Riamus said:
And I'm not sure that making it simple to just nerd pole up and find a trader in a large city is a great option, though I don't really care if people cheese their own games.
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Why have a flag and tell people to look for it at the beginning of the game if it's not intended to be a visible landmark? It's contrary to the first first thing you are told about White River.

one of the most basic elements of survival is going high to look for distant landmarks and assess your surroundings. doing that vs. getting a floating map marker in your vision to the nearest trader is far more realistic lol
 
Considering it tells you where the first one is, and if you get a quest to find the next trader at each quest tier, that will also take you to them, it isn't really necessary. And you can find them by following roads, so it also isn't really necessary. In the end, it's just a way to keep performance down by not showing anything too far away from you. You can always change your LOD setting to see things further away. They could change the flag view distance, but it isn't really a big deal, imo. It doesn't bother me at all if they did.
 
Riamus said:
Considering it tells you where the first one is, and if you get a quest to find the next trader at each quest tier, that will also take you to them, it isn't really necessary. And you can find them by following roads, so it also isn't really necessary. In the end, it's just a way to keep performance down by not showing anything too far away from you. You can always change your LOD setting to see things further away. They could change the flag view distance, but it isn't really a big deal, imo. It doesn't bother me at all if they did.
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I understand what you are saying, it's just silly to me that something that has been used for centuries isn't used properly in a game that tells you to look for them. A static flag would be fine and that wouldn't hurt performance. They already show you radio towers at a 1km, surely they can show a static flag and pole at 250m.
 
warmer said:
They already show you radio towers at a 1km, surely they can show a static flag and pole at 250m.
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The could (probably) even show a dynamic flag in the middle of the static "3D mesh" they're showing for unloaded chunks. It would need to implemented separately.. it would make sense, look decent and draw "natural" attention to traders; so I have nothing against the idea.

But I wouldn't be able to guess if TFP has even considered doing something like that yet, it's quite far into the weeds :)
 
I don't look for flags since there are other POIs that have them, but I can recognize the trader compounds from quite a distance, maybe a km depending on fog, haze, other buildings etc.
 
seven said:
I don't look for flags since there are other POIs that have them, but I can recognize the trader compounds from quite a distance, maybe a km depending on fog, haze, other buildings etc.
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Yeah, they are easy to spot. There are only a couple POI that have a similar look to them from a distance.
 
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