PC Alpha 18 Dev Diary!!
- Thread starter madmole
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Callum123456789
Active member
I know this is a random thing but who came up with the name the fun pimps? I have always wondered this
Dimpy
New member
I mean, arches are already a thing you can do in the game and they significantly increase structural stability. Right now however, the most efficient shape is an exponential curve, while in real life I believe it's a parabola. This might be due to the fact that the SI system has no force redirection; force always travels in taxicab geometry. Maybe there would be a way to fudge it with weird math, but how exactly would could you leverage this for performance gains?
The Gronk
Colon Pounder
To be fair, if the community kick up enough of a fuss things sometimes get replaced. In this case it's the replacement of a single mesh, possibly with a spinny animation, not exactly the most time consuming of jobs.
Can I interest anyone in a torch? Perhaps a pitchfork to go?
The Gronk
Colon Pounder
There are no performance gains although you can limit the extra calculations to a certain extent.
The feature that this mechanic would allow is to run something like a sewer or cave under an office building without it collapsing upon spawn. It would also solve a lot of problems the earlier iterations of caves had where they would collapse as you walk over them.
Mechanimal
RangerRedd
Well feature lock is in for A18. This may seem like a trivial change, but I doubt it at this stage, especially since they'd have to redo and test it on every single POI with a quest, sounds like a ton of time and testing to me. So I'm not expecting this part to change until A19+, although it would be nice in an A18 update down the road, who knows how complex this could get depending on what they want to do... which could trigger another MF explosion, and I imagine we all want to avoid that now that we're so close to Kraken. So we can spitball some ideas here, sure, but we probs won't dig too far into it until the A19 dev forum is up and moving. I can deal with another season using the placeholder.
PO_Man_3849
New member
Just so I'm clear here, in place of the bouncing exclamation point, you would be OK with a gravestone in front of a house that serves what purpose?
"But it has a crack in it that looks like a 7, yippeee!"
I apologize for sounding harsh, I was not in a good mood away the time...
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Roland
Community Moderator
I think it should just activate when you get to within 50m of the location. That allows plenty of time for other players to join your party as the nearest quest destination I've seen is in the 200m range. It also means you won't be able to witness the change. By time it comes into view it is reset for the quest. It also means you won't be able to do the POI before manually activating a rally point to reset it for the quest.
Automatic activation at 50m is the ticket.
Automatic activation at 50m is the ticket.
Mechanimal
RangerRedd
Hmm, sounds worth a try, although I double-dip some of them now I am not super thrilled about it, kind of ruins the believability of the world as a real place, pullin a Matrix level reset like that. I mean I get it for the quest, but between that and the hologram marker it introduced 2 very "gamey" feeling aspects into A17 that weren't there before. Yes it bruised my precious precious "immersion", but I deal, just would prefer it snap back a bit where possible. Doing a POI twice just doesn't feel right, but I can't ignore that sweet loot. Tis conflicting.
So, one thing I think we'd need is for the system to check POIs before putting up a quest just in case someone has laid down a bedroll or LCB in the POI. Like, it should not show up as a quest at all, that would help avoid those kind of annoyances, and/or disaster if it just reset a POI regardless. I know this can get tricky in MP games, especially on servers, but I am very much a POI base adapter, what we have now is good enough, but having them trigger automatically once a player gets close enough needs to be addressed. I do love the new POIs, a ton, but making them off limits is ridiculous and I avoid any and all servers that prohibit it. Maybe there can be some server settings to help manage it, but that idea in general sounds interesting, let's see what MM thinks, I know I've seen this topic in the forums before, just been awhile...
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khzmusik
Well-known member
Are you talking about the quest itself activating, or the marker appearing? I assume the former (since the latter doesn't really solve what the other forum users are complaining about, which is the marker's design).
If so - I am against this, for one reason.
Often, you use POIs as houses or bases. Many POIs are not revealed as quest POIs until later game stages. So, if you've set up shop in one of these, and you've lived there for a while - suddenly your base for the past 40 ingame hours has been reset (i.e. replaced) and all your stuff is gone.
EDIT: It may be true that the quest system ignores POIs with either land claim blocks or bedrolls in them. Still, this can lead to a lot of stuff being lost - say, if you set up a chest outside the structure but within the POI boundary.
With the floating icon, you can at least reject the quest or get all your stuff out before starting it. You couldn't do that with your suggestion.
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Mechanimal
RangerRedd
Yeah that is what I was getting at, and actually you CANNOT start the quest, even by choice, if a bedroll is present within it. It will not, cannot, reset or start, and it should stay that way.... iirc, and I am pretty sure. Once I had a bedroll across the street and it was still too close and would not allow me to start the quest without removing it first, so I believe it is a thing, for that reason. Def need a way to avoid resetting, I learned my lesson the hard way on first run of A17. I got to a house POI, set down a storage in the driveway and dumped all my stuff to clear my inventory for looting before starting the quest... and... POOF mothafuggaaaaa, gone. All my looty booty goodness vanished right in front of me. I got learnt, it hurt, but was effective and now I keep my loot drops in safe areas, usually across the street or in a nearby empty area.
Why not just use a flare-gun?
You get the quest.
Trader gives you (the initial person who accepted the quest) a flare-gun.
Tells you it is only good for 1 shot.
Tells you to fire it off in the marked area (painted circled 'X' on the ground), so they know you made it to the place.
Fire off the shot, it starts the quest.
You get the quest.
Trader gives you (the initial person who accepted the quest) a flare-gun.
Tells you it is only good for 1 shot.
Tells you to fire it off in the marked area (painted circled 'X' on the ground), so they know you made it to the place.
Fire off the shot, it starts the quest.
Dimpy
New member
So basically you want a column of vertically adjacent blocks to have more horizontal load than the sum of their parts? That would make deeply underground tunnels more stable, but it seems like it would be easier just to program the tunnels to generate only where they won't collapse.
Mechanimal
RangerRedd
Also an idea worth considering, though I'm pretty sure we're getting into A19 talk now, soon anyway, but this will give TFP some good options to consider for when the time comes.
FileMachete
New member
I think Mechanimal is onto something on the 5 to 1 meat; an Icon and Name change.
Have the Icon look like a few hacked, smallish, pieces of meat and call them "Meat Pieces" or "Chunks of Meat".
Heck make it look like a few strips of bacon, I mean -nobody- wants to see _1_ piece of bacon on their plate
SI works from bedrock up, right? But I'm assuming SI only gets calculated in some left-righ, north-south grid, or on 'changes' or chunk loading, and only where there are blocks that need the SI calc'd.
So the scan finds a player placed block, only rarely is that block touching bedrock. So the SI calc, right now, drops down one square at a time to see if there's a load bearing block below, if yes, keep going down a block, repeat all the way to bedrock.
If there isn't a load-bearing block at any point then that stack is marked 'no vert support', and relies on side support.
(likely don't have that all correct, but enough for this to make sense)
So might it be possible for the SI 'scan down' bit to instead check if there were say 6 blocks of non-player placed 'rock', and call that fully supported?
Have the Icon look like a few hacked, smallish, pieces of meat and call them "Meat Pieces" or "Chunks of Meat".
Heck make it look like a few strips of bacon, I mean -nobody- wants to see _1_ piece of bacon on their plate
*Note: I'm not asking this question to ask for caves, I'm simply curious about how the SI works.
SI works from bedrock up, right? But I'm assuming SI only gets calculated in some left-righ, north-south grid, or on 'changes' or chunk loading, and only where there are blocks that need the SI calc'd.
So the scan finds a player placed block, only rarely is that block touching bedrock. So the SI calc, right now, drops down one square at a time to see if there's a load bearing block below, if yes, keep going down a block, repeat all the way to bedrock.
If there isn't a load-bearing block at any point then that stack is marked 'no vert support', and relies on side support.
(likely don't have that all correct, but enough for this to make sense)
So might it be possible for the SI 'scan down' bit to instead check if there were say 6 blocks of non-player placed 'rock', and call that fully supported?
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