PC RWG Just When you think it can't get any worse

So not true. Random is random I guess so maybe you’ve been grossly unlucky but I think perhaps you don’t realize that many old POIs have been updated with a facelift but not turned into dungeons. I can see many people with that false assumption looking at a house from outside and judging as a dungeon POI and moving on when in fact it is not.
If you’re saying that 17.2 maps in particular are bad for only spawning dungeon POIs then load 17.1 and pregenerate a few maps. Then reinstall 17.2 and play with those maps. In the A17.1 RWG maps I played there were plenty of non-dungeon POIs. Too many for my taste...
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"Dungeon-POIs" sounds criminally artificial :p . Spawns and loot locations/containers have to be completely randomized. This is only sensible in a voxel random generated world where you meet the same POIs over and over. But I do love POI design in A17 - they have done a great job with them aesthetics-wise.

 
Yes exactly, I don't know whos opinions matters so much, but game at the current state game isn't liked by most old players who actually supported the early project. If these opinions would matter TFP wouldn't be so stubborn with this direction.
For me optimal gameplay would be A16 + new additions of A17 ( A16 leveling system tweaked abit, old RWG much better than these new 8k island maps, long grind, etc ... ). If games continues going in this direction I don't think I will stick around much longer after 3000+ hours - had my fun but ARK is far what I like about survival and building game..

All A16 needed was some upgrades and additions to end game play. The balance in A16 was faaaaaaar superb to what we have now. A17 brought some sugars, but took away 75% of fun A16 had before this. All devs had to do was look at what mods are most popular around servers and players... that was the best reflection of what this game needed.

Now just being stubborn trying to satisfy ARK players ( if I wanted to play ARK I would reinstall it ) and going 180 U turn at the end of the game development??... you never make this kind of changes when the the project is like 80% done and well accepted by customers. The changes so far, for me at least, are just going from bad to worse.

Next build will bring in some mutated dinosaurs instead of zombies perhaps? YAY :crushed:
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I may not agree with this Alpha but this is ridiculous. You sound like a bunch of Yes Men. Why bother to start your own company to accomplish your dream if not to make the games YOU want to make.

By your definition they may as well have never began TFP and gone to work for Blizzard. This game is not being made FOR individuals. It is their dream, and we so happen to like it. Yeah they can tweak to public reception but you're overestimating your value if you think that they NEED to make the game the way WE want it to be made.

Start your own business and then have other people tell you how to run it and see how you feel about it.

 
I may not agree with this Alpha but this is ridiculous. You sound like a bunch of Yes Men. Why bother to start your own company to accomplish your dream if not to make the games YOU want to make.
By your definition they may as well have never began TFP and gone to work for Blizzard. This game is not being made FOR individuals. It is their dream, and we so happen to like it. Yeah they can tweak to public reception but you're overestimating your value if you think that they NEED to make the game the way WE want it to be made.

Start your own business and then have other people tell you how to run it and see how you feel about it.
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sheesh JAX I agree with both statements IDK which side of the fence to sit on lol. It is their game but one should not flaunt that imho as it gives people whom are generally giving their thoughts and ideas on the game a whirl and voicing their thoughts. But to have a dev say its my game is a kick in the bum or I PREFER yes they know its their game and they have ot their way but prolly shouldnt voice it on the forums i think personally.

they can just make the game they want and listen to the public (Their supporters) and still make the game they want without the bluntness so to speak.

WE all know they do listen tho as there are things in the game that people have suggested regardless if it was on the agenda either way that have made it into the game. Some ideas are stupid I have prolly suggested some lol myself i wont deny but regardless in the end it is just ones view and thoughts.

 
As a developer I get both sides to this and I honestly think both are right.

You have to make "your vision" as a developer, but at the same time you can't ignore feedback because you're not actually a user so it can be hard to see the forest for the trees.

  • Users usually don't know what they really want until they actually have it, so requests can be taken with a grain of salt unless it's something you agree with.
    .
  • When users actually have something though, you can generally trust their feedback on it as they're reacting to something tangible. It doesn't mean you have to do exactly what they want, but you should definitely figure out *why* they feel that way and work that into your future plans in your own way.
    .
  • If the feedback is overwhelming, sometimes you might have to question that *part* of your vision and backpedal. This happens in development from time to time, sometimes ideas just don't pan out.
     
    Even though I feel strongly about a16, I don't know that we're here yet as they are plenty of people who do like a17. It's also tough to find a solution that allows for both as they're total redesigns of core systems / gameplay, so I don't know what the answer is. Hate to be in Madmole's shoes on this one as it's a tough development challenge.


In the end, I'm trusting that Madmole is listening to everyone agonizing over the changes from a16 and working on adjustments in his own way that still preserves *his* vision of the game.

Looking forward to see how things play out with a18.

 
"Dungeon-POIs" sounds criminally artificial :p . Spawns and loot locations/containers have to be completely randomized. This is only sensible in a voxel random generated world where you meet the same POIs over and over. But I do love POI design in A17 - they have done a great job with them aesthetics-wise.
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Yes, but ...

I think it would be a major effort to make loot locations really random now, but a sort of smaller fish would be if the poi designers would generate 2-3 versions of some pois with changed loot location and path to it. It would mean 90% copy and paste to get 50% of what we both want.

 
Y'all are all wrong, except for the ones that agree with me, depending on what I'm agreeing with at the time.

Right now, a17 is my favorite version to play modded, and my least favorite to play vanilla.

Rwg is super easy to mod.

 
Yes, but ... I think it would be a major effort to make loot locations really random now, but a sort of smaller fish would be if the poi designers would generate 2-3 versions of some pois with changed loot location and path to it. It would mean 90% copy and paste to get 50% of what we both want.
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Why would it be a major effort to randomize the location of some containers? The payoff of the player not going straight/nerdpoling to specific areas/rooms and having to explore the POI for a less artificial experience, is pretty much worth some effort at least.

 
Y'all are all wrong, except for the ones that agree with me, depending on what I'm agreeing with at the time.
Right now, a17 is my favorite version to play modded, and my least favorite to play vanilla.

Rwg is super easy to mod.
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As a modder, a17 is a dream compared to a16 due to the xpath implementation. If they converted the localization.txt to xpath and added more options for AI and map generation on the fly it would be perfect and I wouldn't miss a16 cause I'd mod it into a17.

Even with mods though, I still have to prefer a16 by a long shot just due to the map generation size and non-telepathic AI. (And most gameplay is like 80% to my liking, as opposed to a17 which is like 20%, so there's much less modding for me to do.)

 
*Squinty Fry Futurama gif*

Is that really the case though? Last time I tried doing a 16x16km map my beefcake computer crashed. When I did a 12x12km it took hours and then clients took more than 10 minutes to connect and we had a ton of memory and disconnect problems. This was a17.1 both with and without the CompoPack mod to help generation issues. I gave up after that.

And that's just 12x12 or 16x16, a16 RWG was like 300x300km+

Is there a mod I'm unaware of that brings back infinite (generation on demand) maps, or at least allows for 100km+ maps?

 
Sure. The map will be whatever the file size you set the .raw file to. Trick right now is prefabs, but that's coming.

 
Sure. The map will be whatever the file size you set the .raw file to. Trick right now is prefabs, but that's coming.
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Can they? My game always died trying to generate a 16k map. I liked the circle generation better, it felt slightly more organic than a square.

 
Can they? My game always died trying to generate a 16k map. I liked the circle generation better, it felt slightly more organic than a square.
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I always feel the same way when eating at Wendy's...

 
Can they? My game always died trying to generate a 16k map. I liked the circle generation better, it felt slightly more organic than a square.
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Gotta stop thinking about the old way to generate and embrace the dtm. :)

 
Why would it be a major effort to randomize the location of some containers? The payoff of the player not going straight/nerdpoling to specific areas/rooms and having to explore the POI for a less artificial experience, is pretty much worth some effort at least.
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Containers could be randomized, but at the moment most pois are a single path from entrance to containers. There is no other location available if the developers don't want to violate their own design rules and don't want players going along the set paths to experience an empty "dead end". So I'm pretty sure the devs won't do this even though technically quite possible.

But in most pois it will be possible to get a different path with a different endpoint by just closing one connection between rooms and opening another one. An illustration of this in 2 dimensions:

Code: 
A - B - C
       |
F - E - D
|
G - H - I
becomes

Code: 
A - B - C
       |
F - E   D
|       |
G - H - I
with just two connections changed. Instead of end room I you have end room E

Doing this solution programmatically would be a huge effort, but just generating 2-4 static versions of the poi with changed paths would be a much smaller effort than building another complete poi.

 
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Containers could be randomized, but at the moment most pois are a single path from entrance to containers. There is no other location available if the developers don't want to violate their own design rules and don't want players going along the set paths to experience an empty "dead end". So I'm pretty sure the devs won't do this even though technically quite possible.
But in most pois it will be possible to get a different path with a different endpoint by just closing one connection between rooms and opening another one. An illustration of this in 2 dimensions:

Code: 
A - B - C
       |
F - E - D
|
G - H - I
becomes

Code: 
A - B - C
       |
F - E   D
|       |
G - H - I
with just two connections changed. Instead of end room I you have end room E

Doing this solution programmatically would be a huge effort, but just generating 2-4 static versions of the poi with changed paths would be a much smaller effort than building another complete poi.
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+1

This would help a lot in exploration. Even 3 variations would force us to explore much more thoroughly. With basement and roof setups, that can change a POI drastically with much less effort.

 
So not true. Random is random I guess so maybe you’ve been grossly unlucky but I think perhaps you don’t realize that many old POIs have been updated with a facelift but not turned into dungeons.
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Until I started doing the RWG version of min-maxing, and hunted down other peoples' seeds, I was not able to get a variety of POIs in any A17 RWG map.

The majority of duplicate POIs were quest POIs, though it took me a long time to put that together.

For example. If you're in a desert biome, in every city I've seen (any A17 version), 85% of the city is exactly the same POI. I'm not exaggerating; I counted once, and in a city of 35 POIs, 30 will be the same one.

And it is one that supports quests. (The one that is a trailer with a car out front, where you're supposed to enter through the roof.) Maybe that is just a coincidence.

Having said that, maybe the RWG from previous A17 versions were not this bad, and I just didn't give them enough of a go. But I don't think so.

Whenever a new A17 version drops, I usually try to generate one or two worlds, and if they're terrible, just go back to Navezgane.

I've always gone back to Navezgane.

I'm only focused on RWG right now because I'm getting tired of Navezgane, and I still want to enjoy playing the game.

I also keep an eye on the bug report section, and people have been complaining about this throughout all versions of A17. So I'm pretty sure it's not limited to A17.2. That also matches my limited experience.

 
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