Day 20 + -> I quit playing

Gameplay
1

dear devs and stonehearth fans.

I was an early backer of stonehearth on kickstarter because I simply loved the idea (and of course dwarven fortress back in the good old days).

i remember the first alpha with a peace of grass and heartkings / rabbits.
later the alpha builds where actually building did not work :smile:
sure there was a lot going on in the last months, so i decided to give the game another try and check the current status.
my first game was a disappointment - still so many bugs with buildings houses, especially custom houses. also, why canā€™t I find any demolish-button?
I posted a bug report related to remaining logs on the roof - and restarted the game.
like: okay, lets do some mining instead. if the game fails with building houses, my hearthlings will have to live beyond earth. the first 10-15 days in game were promising. no house built at all, just mining and 1-2 fields with crops for food.
I was easyly able to satisfy the goblins and realised the music is terribel if they decide to settle nearby. it switches between normal and combat music every time you scroll around so i had to turn off music to continue playing.
so as said, game worked fine, althoug ist still seems that ressources far (40-50 squares) away will not be transported to the designated fields although there were a lot of idle hearthlings and also some idle CPU time.
i was also able to confirm all the reported bugs like soldiers not equipping swords, workers not equipping clothes and merchaings placing the freshly bought items in the air above my fireplace.
btw merchants. If I have like 1000 gold and more resources I can handle, why does he come and wants to trade 1 fence for 4 corn? annoying . This might make sense in early game, but later, the merchant is just useless as his offers do not scale to game process and the players wealth / stockplie.
meanwhile, my patroling soldiers (still with wooden swords. ignoring full plate armor and longswords in the warehouse) accidentally killed the goblin boss, sadly i was not able to raid / loot the camp, only the bossā€™ mace. too bad, as the chest sas it has loot in it.
anyway, meanwhile , day 20+, my ā€œtownā€ (still no houses) is wealthy, I enjoy digging large halls into the ground and putting some nice stuff there for my 20+ heartlings. but the game gets slower and slower, kind of ā€œlagsā€. LUA is using 70-99% of CPU resources (win 7 pro 64 bit, Interl i7 3,4GHz, 8 GB RAM) and the game becomes less and less playable.
watching my heartlings ā€œjumpā€ is just annoying.
I m still a bit disappointed, the game feesl not yet stable and a lot of things seems to work on a pure luck basis.
trasnporting stuff to teh designated place? nope. soldiers gearin up? nope.
Finish buildings? if you are lucky. Shepherd actually having animals and not standing around idle? not for me.
I wonder how the game mechanics (i.e. pathfinder etc) can be considered as almost finished and why the devs focus on multi-floor builings instead of getting the current features to work.

I decided to uninstall the game once more and maybe come back in half a year.

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Plays Sad violin
Well you can expect that in alpha
If you do decide to come back then here is a tip for you:
Try to save every 10 minutes so when you encounter a bug then you can load one of the previous save and you donā€™t have to loose that much progress.

Well for the lag you gotta get used to it
Just hope there will be a mod that will solve the lag issues once you return

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What youā€™ve said is, well itā€™s fine right? Everyone has an opinion, and I for many of the reasons you have listed (amongst many others), havenā€™t played the game since Alpha 3 or 4, Iā€™m waiting, and I will wait as long as necessary before playing a version of the game that is stable and enjoyable.

Iā€™m sure youā€™ve seen it a million times before, but it is at times easy I think to lose sight of what the entire point of Early Access/ Alpha access is all about, and itā€™s about that annoying buggy monotonous testing aspect, unfortunately itā€™s part and parcel of where Stonehearth currently is, but because there is something there at the heart of it all, some sort of game that you can in some ways get stuck in to, that it quickly becomes less about testing and more about playing, and naturally, that quickly turns into frustration.

Let me just address what you say at the end:

I believe this has been addressed by the devs in that, firstly they arenā€™t done separately - bugs are fixed, features are implemented, bugs are fixed, features ā€¦ etc., and itā€™s a very long and iterative process, and hey, if during the implementation of a feature they end up squashing or removing bugs that they would have otherwise spent time purposely fixing, then thatā€™s a bonus. As well as this - the pathfinder as it is now, may well be considered ā€œdoneā€, in that, as a feature it is implemented, but thatā€™s not to say that the ā€˜pathfinderā€™ we have no will be like the ā€˜pathfinderā€™ in 6 months time. Things have improved dramatically since A1, and with time, they will keep getting better, (well I hope they do otherwise Iā€™m gonna look stupid :stuck_out_tongue: )

This has turned into a bit of an essay, and itā€™s more of a general response to those feeling disheartened right now, we just have to remember why we funded or purchased this in the first place, and that with our support and patience Team R will eventually get to their goals.

So you may well be right to come back to things in 6 months time, weā€™ll all be ready and waiting when you do :slight_smile:

8 Likes
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First, do what you need to do, if you feel the game isnā€™t ready for you to enjoy it come back. There are a lot of bugs as expect personally I feel the bugs are better then most early access I play, even from big studios. If you are experiencing bugs try hanging out in some of the threads or find a YouTuber to follow, there are a few of us that do regular series, we run into these bugs ALOT and have recommendations on minimizing them. Heck even just watch a series to keep up to date, and when you want to come back, a couple of my viewers say that is what they do. For the performance bug it is less day related and more Hearthling related, the issue with performance right now tends to be if you go beyond X Heartlings, I try to stay at 12. There are some other performance issues; but they tend to be because you are doing something weird like building a statue. All that being said I go back to do what is best for you maybe Alpha games arenā€™t something you enjoy and that is fine, wait until it is at a place you will enjoy the game.

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Alpha is alpha isā€¦alpha, not beta. I remember a time when playing an alpha game was unheard of and even playing a beta was somewhat rare. Just because devs have taken a different strategy and made their alphas available to play doesnā€™t mean you can or should compare them to any more of a finished product than they are.

I simply donā€™t understand the complaints. Just because you want something to be finished so badly doesnā€™t make it any more finished and doesnā€™t change the composition of what it is, an alpha. I mean, would you expect to be fully satisfied with an ā€œalphaā€ car? Letā€™s face it, you couldnā€™t drive such a thing off the lot.

The Stonehearth devs focus should be nothing more or less than it would be, IMO, than if this alpha were not accessible to us. The same steps should be taken to finish the game instead of slowing down overall progress to cater to the whims and desires of us. While Iā€™m not qualified as a programmer in LUA I have been involved in game design processes before and coordinated with programmers and itā€™s clear to me that those who are uninformed or uneducated in the overall process expect so much more from the game devs than should be warranted. How can one pretend to know what needs to be done first or how to prioritize the game development if theyā€™ve never been involved in such a task?

IMO youā€™re asking too much from a product that didnā€™t need to provide alpha access to begin with, they just chose to do so for anyone capable and interested in bug finding, suggestions, and whatever other support could be garnered.

P.S. - Just because a feature didnā€™t work for you doesnā€™t mean itā€™s inoperable universally. A number of things you mentioned are not serious problems for me in playing, if at all. As others have said, come back in 6 months like you said and things will certainly be different. But I donā€™t think anyone can accurately promise or predict anything, even in 6 months.

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I read this again and again and every time I get this urge to vent, so Iā€™ll do this here and now.

This isnā€™t Minecraft and especially not Java. There will never be mods that modify the engine, so the best you can hope for are mods that change the rendering pipeline and/or shaders to be faster (and most likely less pretty) or mods that re-write some services/APIs to perform better. In both cases, however, these changes could be ported over to the main game.

There wonā€™t be mods that can offer you a constant, significant performance boost. Not to mention that creating, or maintaining, those mods would be disastrous; they could pretty easily break compatibility with other mods because they change the very base of the game.

Donā€™t expect mods to improve the performance of the game, because they wonā€™t.

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I can say the same. I run 64bit on a full AMD build and somehow miss the majority of bugs these guys claim to have with the same setups.

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Sorry I never knew that
(Walks away scared)

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Thanks for the feedback, guys! Weā€™re doing our best :slight_smile:

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and yet another reason to love Team Radiant, they actually read and listen to our feedback :smile:

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well, yesā€¦ of course! they all love their fans! ok, most of them love their fansā€¦

but not @Doug ā€¦ never @Doug



why @Doug? why?!?

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So Ive been playing for about a week now I recently bought the game because a friend of mine was part of the kickstarter and she raves about how good it will one day be. the initial playing experience felt like i was playing a finished game, the alpha so far is incredible. after playing for a few hours though i felt like the game was slowing down, i saved my game and when i came back the next day and loaded it up error messages started pouring down the screen and a small red number in the corner grew to over a thousand very quickly. so I started up my system utilities and ran a new game and then the saved game in the background. its easy yo see that in the saved game there is some kind of memory leak happening. As someone that is new to the community Iā€™m not able to upload pictures so Iā€™ll have to do this the hard way.

System at Idle
CPU: 6%
MEMORY:
In Use: 1168 MB
Modified: 4 MB
Standby: 746 MB
Free: 6206 MB

Running a new game
CPU: 26%
MEMORY:
In Use: 2578 MB
Modified: 26 MB
Standby: 806 MB
Free: 4714 MB

  • I played this game for around ten minutes before checking on system. When I did everything was stable.

Loading saved game that had errors

  • in 4 minutes the memory crawled from the last set to these numbers
    CPU: 45%
    MEMORY:
    In Use: 6054 MB
    Modified: 28 MB
    Standby: 894 MB
    Free: 1148 MB

Max Load
CPU: 30%
MEMORY:
In Use: 7786 MB
Modified: 76 MB
Standby: 261 MB
Free: 0 MB

At this point even trying to navigate my windows in order to end the process (stonehearth) takes a considerable about of time.

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if you upload them to imgur im sure @SteveAdamo would be more then happy to embed them for you :smile:

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The game has a lot of lag for me but other than that just some bugs and alpha 8 and 9 have done a very very very good job of killing them bugs. A lot of people should understand that this game is going to take more than 10 Alpha builds to be good I hope it will stay in Alpha tell say alpha build 20. But team RE will need more money by then so mostly will be out of alpha sooner but who knows.

What I am trying to say is Stonehearth will take a long time to be bug free or relatively bug free and that is just how its going to be End Of Story no point in.

[quote=ā€œKent, post:1, topic:11740ā€]
I wonder how the game mechanics (i.e. pathfinder etc) can be considered as almost finished and why the devs focus on multi-floor builings instead of getting the current features to work.
[/quote] They work fine for me lol.

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I fully understand its alpha. But didnt the kickstarter campaign said they will ship end 2014? Maybe itā€™s the huge amount of abandoned, unfinished games being forever in early access / alpha mode but I kind of fear that stonehearth will never be done. I mean it lags. on tiny maps. with 15 hearthlings. come on. this is not something you can fix over night.

dut get me wrong: I DO LOVE the game. Iā€™m just a bit desperate and worried about the current state after years of development and a million dollars down the road.

where are the other races? where are all the other classes? the animals like mammoths etc.
where is multiplayer?

and bllodw0lf, dont tell me the game is working fine. so many placement bugs (ever tried to equip a steel or iron armor? lol) so many issues with pathfinding, hearthlings mining and then suddenly appearing on top of the mountain and starving because they cant find a way back homeā€¦so many issues with ressources (realized you cant pick up ressources which were dropped by goblin raiders on the road? or the all famous just-leave-a-piece-of-wood-on-the-roof-or-in-the-middle-of-a-ladder-after-construction-shit.
realized how often the merchant drops items in the ari above the camp fire? or how often heartlings sit like 2 blocks ABOVE a chair?
and why cant I loot that goblin chest? and why cant I remove stone garden laterns from brick walls?
also: i can remove a piece of road, but will never be able to build it again.
I could continue for everā€¦

again. I love the game. I also love the devs. but I seriously doubt the game will be finishes in near future - if it will be finished ever.

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Theyā€™ve acknowledged they are behind schedule, multiple times, and apologised for this - it is what it is, and the lesson is, as always, donā€™t put a date on things, but unfortunately with the nature of Kickstarter you have to make promises, and you canā€™t always keep them.

They know it, itā€™s improved since A1 and will hopefully improve every update from here on out - it is what it is.

Theyā€™re behind schedule, as such, everything is pushed back. There isnā€™t a long and complicated answer to this.

The thing to take away from this is that they have been as transparent as possible every step of the way, they are committed to this, they have stated that finances are not an issue, and hopefully it remains like this for a long time.

So really, my best advice is your initial thoughts. Step out for 6 months, come back and see where things are at.

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hey @Kentā€¦ you make some perfectly valid points, and I think we all (the developers included) feel a certain degree of anxiety over the development pace (all the things that have been developed, and the many things yet to come)ā€¦

I think what keeps this community faithful and positive is the vision we all have for what SH can eventually become, as well as the fanatical means of community involvement that Team Radiant provides (a dev blog and two live streams a weekā€¦ a week?!?)ā€¦

are there issues with the game? yes, of courseā€¦ but this team has proven that they care first and foremost about the longevity of this title and creating the vision we all fell in love with and backedā€¦

as has been mentioned before, performance continues to improve with each new build and if you can hold out for a while longer, I am sure you will continue to be amazed at what this team developsā€¦ :+1:

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They donā€™t work that great for me. Just found a problem where the path finding wonā€™t go through buildings apparently.

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I mean from what Iā€™ve seen at the radiant entertainment pageā€™s job openings they are looking for very few people.
Sure they could hire maybe 4-5 more programmers/artist but overloading the number of people working on the game this early on in the development cycle could possibly cause more harm than good.
Iā€™d rather them take their time and get the game out slowly, but how they want it rather than them hire a staff twice the size their current staff and have to get everyone up-to-date on a not even released game that is sure to change ways of doing things multiple times before release. Itā€™s just not smart.

I believe Radiant taking their time to get the game just right before moving on to the next task at hand is the right move and as fans of the game we should support that and just hope for the best.
I can say for sure, at least unlike some kickstarters thereā€™s an actual game to show for this one, and itā€™s really good game so far. :smile:

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I think they should just start incorporating modderā€™s works into it. Take the mod that adds water or power; those people have kinda taken what REā€™s already working on and started it. So whatā€™s to say that if RE didnā€™t incorporate it and give them direction, that those modders couldnā€™t just make those features RE has promised, but earlier than they could get to them.