Marosia

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LittleSoul
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Re: Marosia

Postby LittleSoul » Sat Apr 01, 2017 2:59 am

This week's progress is a little different from the rest. After starting on developing the crafting interface I realized I needed to optimize a few aspects of the design, so I went back to the drawing board to sketch out some solutions.

This began with re-designating/designing some skill types. I've taken out lockpicking (it will instead be dependent on the dexterity attribute, and has been replaced with building), mechanics (now carpentry), and farming is now called harvesting. I have also made facilities a type of building instead of a stand-alone type. Harvesting is related to the strength attribute, and is built through the gathering of ingredients, herbs, wood, and fish. Building is related to the knowledge attribute, and can be leveled through working on projects for creating buildings (houses and facilities), and machines. The carpentry skill is related to the knowledge attribute and can be leveled through working on projects to make containers and furniture. While I was making these changes I updated the look of the skills section, because I thought it was too dark and cramped for easy reading before.

What I ended up with was a consolidation of both freeform and recipe types of crafting under one menu. Basically, almost everything is treated as 'freeform' crafting (you select which ingredients will be used) with broad requirements, for which I will give a few examples in the attached pictures.

Most items will require (or have optional) types of resources. For example, crafting a knife will require one of any stone, and one of any wood (there are multiple types of both, all of varying qualities). The quality of woods and stones are predetermined, and higher quality types will result in a higher quality knife, which in turn means a faster project completion time.

Basically, what you need to know about quality is that resource quality is predetermined, but character-made item quality is determined by skill level + ingredients.

Food, weapons, armor, healing potions, and clothing have the option to add more resources than their requirements. For example, to make a melee weapon, you need at least one metal. You can optionally add fabric, or gems, and you can keep adding metals until you reach the max limit of 5 total resources to create the item. The benefit to adding more than one metal is that it can raise the overall quality of the resulting weapon, and it is also useful for aesthetics/customization.

This is assuming you have the appropriate machines and tools available.

There are a few item types that are processed through machines (if you have them) which appear in this menu, such as string or fabric. These have more specific requirements. For example, to make one silk cloth you need two silk strings and a loom. There are only a couple of these 'processed' item types. These include fabric, string, metal, animal feed, and animal products. There is an one example of this in the attached pictures as well.

The crafting menu will only show you the items which you have at least some requirements met (tools, resources, or machines if applicable). This should keep the menu from getting too flooded with stuff all at once. I've attached some sketches of the design I will be building over the next week so you have some idea of what to expect. To get a full view/understanding of the various crafting possibilities you may not yet have access to, everything will be documented in the wiki so you aren't completely dependent on what is around you to see what is possible to craft.

All the changes from the redesign have already been addressed in the code already (such as skill names, and so on), so I can get straight into the new code such as crafting logic and the interface without anymore delay. Final sketches of the different types of craft menu types you will see are attached, but they're still rough so they may yet change.

That's all for this week - have a great weekend!

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Arval
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Re: Marosia

Postby Arval » Sat Apr 01, 2017 12:53 pm

So, in other words - you have moved from the split system you had to something more like to Faery Tale Online's model?
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LittleSoul
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Re: Marosia

Postby LittleSoul » Sat Apr 01, 2017 7:56 pm

No, it is still the same original system I had, it just isn't split. I noticed too many similarities between the two, so I wanted to make it that much less confusing by consolidating it. You can still customize and create your own combinations of ingriedients to get different qualities of the result for food, weapons, armor, clothes and potions. For most of the rest of it, the required materials were made general instead of specific so that no matter what kind of wood or stone you have, you'll be able to make a knife. It's consolidated in that instead of having ten different knives, there is only one with varying levels of quality (depending on what quality of wood or stone you used and your skill) which optimizes the database. It makes things faster and less cluttered. Processed resources are the only items that require very specific item types.

The only aspect like FTO is that you will only see what you have the ability to create which was planned from the beginning, but that is just to keep the menu from getting cluttered. Otherwise you'll have giant drop down lists for things you can't necessarily make.

Sorry, I should have put a tldr up there.
MonkeyPants4736
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Re: Marosia

Postby MonkeyPants4736 » Sat Apr 01, 2017 8:19 pm

Are you planning anything that allows every room to have a window or other method to communicate with people outside? A one-outside-window seems to motivate people to cram industrial machinery into the front room, which makes it hard to create cozy living spaces/public social spaces that might also be desired in the front room. Do you have a magic solution for this?
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Re: Marosia

Postby LittleSoul » Sat Apr 01, 2017 8:48 pm

Yes, actually. I plan on having windows in the game, but they will work like this:

When you have the right materials to craft it you are able to select where it accesses conversation.

You can have more than one window in a room.

Every room in a house is able to have a window which can access conversation from outside (main area).

Every inner room is able to have a window which can access conversation in the room before it.

This should address the issue of room bias when placing items, furniture and machines in the house, and is a bit more realistic.

As an unrelated side note, there are no fixed machines in the game. They can all be dragged around, so if you ever wanted to redesign a room layout it's an easy task.
Arval
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Re: Marosia

Postby Arval » Sun Apr 02, 2017 10:59 am

LittleSoul wrote:Yes, actually. I plan on having windows in the game, but they will work like this:

When you have the right materials to craft it you are able to select where it accesses conversation.

You can have more than one window in a room.

Every room in a house is able to have a window which can access conversation from outside (main area).

Every inner room is able to have a window which can access conversation in the room before it.

This should address the issue of room bias when placing items, furniture and machines in the house, and is a bit more realistic.

As an unrelated side note, there are no fixed machines in the game. They can all be dragged around, so if you ever wanted to redesign a room layout it's an easy task.


Is there no way that, by leaving an inner door open, you immediately gain access to the happenings in the neightbour room?
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Aduah
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Re: Marosia

Postby Aduah » Sun Apr 02, 2017 5:48 pm

Arval wrote:Is there no way that, by leaving an inner door open, you immediately gain access to the happenings in the neightbour room?


That is something I always wished cantr had, I think it would be a cool addition.
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Greek
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Re: Marosia

Postby Greek » Sun Apr 02, 2017 8:27 pm

LittleSoul wrote:It's the same problems people have with inflation today, because money might as well be thin air - it's just digital numbers without any inherent value that is tied up with a real resource. Like gold. This makes it very tempting for people who can create money to just make more every time they need to pay for something or cover their debts. It's what a lot of governments do in real life, to pay debts, and it ends up in economic collapse. I want the economy to be able to be manipulated, not necessarily destroyed. At least not globally, for a while.

So I'll be sticking with money being related to limited metals because the economy can be managed more easily on my end, and metals are not easy to get or infinite.

Seeing hyperinflation in a game would be a quite nice experience, in my opinion. As long as there are multiple currencies, then it's a problem of a group of players, not of the game in general.

Having a single global currency will encourage introduction of a global goods value system, similar to Cantrian day-of-work, which is one of the biggest troubles in the game. Ofc it depends what people actions are meant to be simulated, because it's necessary to simplify some areas of the gameplay to focus on the others, but I find something like that fairly limiting. It's better to try to mitigate the problems already visible in Cantr, because most likely there will be enough of new ones.


How is location hierarchy represented (rooms etc)? What database engine is used to store them?
‘Never! Run before you walk! Fly before you crawl! Keep moving forward! You think we should try to get a decent mail service in the city. I think we should try to send letters anywhere in the world! Because if we fail, I’d rather fail really hugely’
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LittleSoul
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Re: Marosia

Postby LittleSoul » Sun Apr 02, 2017 10:36 pm

Aduah wrote:
Arval wrote:Is there no way that, by leaving an inner door open, you immediately gain access to the happenings in the neightbour room?


That is something I always wished cantr had, I think it would be a cool addition.


That's a good idea. I will look into doing it this way. I think it may be possible.

Greek wrote:Seeing hyperinflation in a game would be a quite nice experience, in my opinion. As long as there are multiple currencies, then it's a problem of a group of players, not of the game in general.

Having a single global currency will encourage introduction of a global goods value system, similar to Cantrian day-of-work, which is one of the biggest troubles in the game. Ofc it depends what people actions are meant to be simulated, because it's necessary to simplify some areas of the gameplay to focus on the others, but I find something like that fairly limiting. It's better to try to mitigate the problems already visible in Cantr, because most likely there will be enough of new ones.


How is location hierarchy represented (rooms etc)? What database engine is used to store them?


Hyper inflation is still going to be possible, it will just be the result of characters manipulating the system, not caused by the system supporting imbalance unintentionally by design. Someone intent on controlling money supply, or monopolies on the metal to make it, will be able to do so, and would be able to drastically change the value of money based on what they allow to circulate. It just isn't an easy task to secure all sources, and to collect a majority of the circulated money and metal. There'd probably also be a lot of opposition from other characters since there's only one currency type tied to one metal type that is used universally.

A universal value (fixed, and unchanging, like the cantr day) is not really possible unless it's decided arbitrarily by society (just like we do in real life), but that is unlikely unless they are all part of the same community (like a town, kingdom, or an empire) because the rate of collection isn't based/fixed on a hardcoded value, or a tool. It's based on skill level, so between five people you could have five different rates of collection for any given resource, or five different qualities of any given item created.

The value of gold for one person is more likely to be different than the value of gold for someone else because there is not a single rate to base it on that -everyone- could absolutely agree is fair. This is because of the quality property on all goods.

Resources collected by high skilled characters have a higher quality. Quality of a resource determines how useful it is in crafting other items - higher quality resources result in higher quality items.

Items created by high skilled characters, with high quality materials, also result in high quality. Quality of an item often determines how useful or powerful it is. A higher quality knife will help you work faster. A higher quality weapon will do more damage. Higher quality food filled you up more, and so on.

Since the quality of the item directly affects how useful it is, high quality items will naturally be more valuable than low quality ones. So the value fluctuates naturally, which should keep the problem of universal value becoming fixed for everyone from occurring.
The currency will be universal, the value will not.

Location hierarchy is fairly straightforward.
A character always holds the information of where it is. What base map tile it is on, whether it's inside a building, or on a road, and which one.

The base layer is always the map tile. They're always on a map tile, unless they're a child character hanging around in the nether waiting for parents, pre-spawn.
All the rooms of a building are connected to each other. They know who they belong to, and which other rooms belong to the same building.
I haven't worked on roads yet, but it won't be very different.
That's all there is to it for locations. I try to keep things as direct as I can.

I'm using MySQL with the InnoDB engine. Foreign keys almost solely dictate connections between tables, and that's all I've needed from its specific features, so far.
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LittleSoul
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Re: Marosia

Postby LittleSoul » Fri Apr 07, 2017 10:55 am

I am moving into a new home this weekend and will be very busy with upcoming personal events, so I will give a more detailed post at a later point this weekend when I have more time. For now, I wanted to share a couple of screen shots of the work in progress on crafting.

Disclaimer: None of the details are final. I am still testing and developing this crafting process, but the layout is more or less finished. You can't set a name for tools or other more common items, which is why you don't see it here, but for weapons, food, clothing, potions, and armor you are able to.
I'll definitely get some screen shots of what crafting those sorts of items looks like when development reaches that point, since that's where this system truly shines.

I will get into more about that likely near the end of the weekend. Thanks for the support!

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Arval
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Re: Marosia

Postby Arval » Sat Apr 08, 2017 9:38 pm

Alright LittleSoul. Can wait, no rush :) You also have right to enjoy your holidays!

I will save my doubts for when the complete update's up.
Hommer
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Re: Marosia

Postby Hommer » Sat Apr 08, 2017 10:09 pm

Arval wrote:Alright LittleSoul. Can wait, no rush :) You also have right to enjoy your holidays!

I will save my doubts for when the complete update's up.



Id have to say im quite excited for a playabke version of this game
Arval
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Re: Marosia

Postby Arval » Sat Apr 08, 2017 10:44 pm

Playa-what?
Chemosh
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Re: Marosia

Postby Chemosh » Sat Apr 08, 2017 11:04 pm

Arval wrote:Playa-what?

Playable
Arval
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Re: Marosia

Postby Arval » Sat Apr 08, 2017 11:13 pm

Chemosh wrote:Playable


Thank you. And yes, so do I. But of course, this is a game of just one person, all alone. And it has not been until now that LittleSoul has started to make so fast and big improvements. At this pace I am certain, that if not by this year, the next will have a beta available.

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