One of the things I’m most excited about for Stonehearth is the engineer class. I’m going under the impression that we’ll be able to make machines/mechanisms (turrets, giant gates, trains, etc) and be able to have some sort of power grid to control all of these things as such (wires with levers/buttons/etc). However, one cool thing I’ve thought of is the ability to make these in-game “templates” that the engineer can install in to a circuit that will perform a certain logic gate, depending on how you arranged the template. The best part about it is that you would actually have to make the logic gate in order for it to function as such.
For example, say you told your engineer that you want to make a new template. It could bring you to this new UI that shows a dot matrix or something, with a “-” sign on the far left and “+” sign on the far right. Then, you would have things like wires, inverters, diodes, etc off to the side, and it would be up to you to connect the “-” to the “+” using those things. If you can successfully send a signal through, then you’ve made a template, but as I’ve said, what the template actually does is defined as how you wired the circuitry. From there, the template is now a physical object the engineer can place in the world’s circuitry and will function as it is defined. The best example I could think of is something like a 3-way switch to a door. As long as you could make an xor gate template and install it in to the wiring with the 2 inputs leading to it, you’d have a 3-way switch in-game.
You wouldn’t have to do this every time tho, because once you make the template once, your engineer could “remember” it and could quickly make it again if need be. Thus, not making this process too tedious and will add a lot more depth to the engineer by not adding a lot to him/her. You could also allow the templates to be installed right to your game and have the engineer take time to “research” them instead, if you don’t want to make them yourself, but this way you could allow the player to make their own logic gates to be used for the machines they make and just add on to the laundry list of moddability to the game.
It sounds like a good idea, but I think the idea of logic gates would go along the line of mods seeing the fact that your talking about wireing. Still a very good idea for a mod
Haha I knew someone was going to say it eventually…but I also just love electrical engineering! I think it would be a great addition on top of the mechanical engineering that could be added in. I saw another post of someone suggesting catapults and adding in trajectory physics, which I think would be another awesome idea. Engineering in general can be a very interesting topic when it comes to game mechanics
If dwarf fortress and minecraft has showed us anything, its that given some form of land manipulation and detection, someone will build a 16 bit computer.
Even if they dont add mechanical templates like u said, if that make it possible to make some form of logic gate with the machines (minecraft style) you can use either in game or mod building template
you could have a saboteur and have them be able to sabotage the logic gates and things, and it maybe a mini game involved in them like in bioshock with the security override things
They’ve said that the farming minigame they showed in the kickstarter campaign is not part of the full game. I believe Tom has also said they don’t intend to put minigames in, though I can’t find a reference for that right now (ohai @SteveAdamo, font of all knowledge
Having said that, I certainly haven’t heard them say that they don’t think they’re a good idea. I happen to think that they’d be a great idea for some situations and would be supported quite well by the modding infrastructure they’re providing (think dungeon exploring and perhaps deciphering codes, or lock-picking minigames, or…)
On the topic of Engineer capabilities providing logic systems I think it’s a great idea. Even though you can jump into Lua to create a complex mod that’s a big step for people not familiar with programming. Minecraft and others have shown us that given simple tools even unsophisticated players (in terms of computing/programming ability) can do cool things.
On the Farming Mini Game: The mini-game that we showed in the video
was a super-quick prototype to test farming mechanics. It won’t look
like that in game! Farming in game will look like this: http://i.imgur.com/Tn8FiPw.jpg We’re building these prototypes because
it’s about 100x faster to try out new gameplay ideas in a cheap,
throw-away version, then when we find something that is fun and
awesome we go and implement it in the real game. Also, Derek says “I
was hoping to see if there will be a way to not have the minigame so
we can focus more on the simulation.” Derek, you’ll be happy to hear
that the “minigame” is exactly dealing with farming-related
simulations like water tables, nitrogen levels in the soil, and
weather. It’s not at all like you’ll plant a farm and BAM!
FARM-BASED-MINI-GAME pops up. Maybe the way we showed it in the video
was deceiving. If this kind of deep simulation problem solving isn’t
your thing, fear not!, you can just ignore all the complexity and do
something basic. It means your farm will produce way less, but hey,
you put in less work. Let me give a concrete example. MrMuddyPants
loves farm games. I mean he LOOOOOVES them. His goal is to build big,
prosperous fields and trade his extra crops for the other goods he
needs. So MrMuddyPants spends a lot of time optimizing his farm
layout, building irrigation pipes, paying close attention to the
fertility levels of the soil, and rotating crops to take advantage of
the seasons. He’s rewarded with bountiful crops year after year.
YouMadBro, on the other hand, is all about building the biggest,
baddest fortress on the block. He cares not a whit for farming, but
still needs food. So he places a bunch of farm plots, assigns them a
crop, and pretty much ignores them after that. His farms produce
wayyyy less than MrMuddyPants’, but they consistently produce a
meager, base level of food. If the two had similarly sized
populations, YouMadBro would have to compensate by getting food from
another source like hunting, trading, or plundering.
This is a cool idea I like the mod idea. I know this is an old thread but still pretty cool. The concept behind it seems pretty basic. At bare minimum just a universal NAND or NOR gate could be put in. The controllable objects/turrets/trains that you talk about would be where the actual effort would come in.
