Desktop Tuesday: Complex Rooms

@SirAstrix
Here is how I feel about this situation. It’s the third time as far as I know, that you’ve come with major criticism about the game or its development (Good Job, this is valuable :slightly_smiling_face:), but every time I read something like this :arrow_down:, and it puzzles me:

I could go into the details with these instances (for instance: I didn’t think @MelOzone’s reply (that one which you were greeted with) wasn’t meant in the way you interpreted it.) But that is for later. What I do see (and it’s a good chance that I am bad at reading the situation) is that your frustration with the game’s development sits deep.

Now I firmly believe criticism should be allowed and considered, so I try to understand your frustration every time. But the more and more I try, the less and less I understand about what your problem is.

Let me start with things I see happenening. It is very well possible that I completely missjudge how you think here, or what is going on, but please don’t take it personally or as an implication that I think you are wrong, cuz that is not what I’m saying.

  • It seems to be one overarching frustration, which the problems you bring up are only examples of, rather than the thing at fault (which would be gone if you were to fix it).
  • If that is the case, when you criticize an example of it with the pent up emotion that belongs to the overarching thing, people react with a calming reaction. You know things like “It’s okay for things to change”. I understand that you might be fed up with those kind of arguments, but it is hard to talk about other things in such circumstances.
  • you seem to think that you cannot voice your opinion, and that there is a general feeling that one cannot voice his/her opinions. What makes you think that.
  • In fact I think I know what it is, but I don’t want to say that it is definitely happening. It is that the emotional reactions trigger replies more focussed on the emotion, rather than substance, which reinforce your idea that substance is put aside, and thus that your criticism or criticism in general is not welcome here. Thing is though, that other people find a conversation focussed around emtion just as annoying as you do, and thus they want to heal that, which means continuing with the non-talking about the substance.
  • You believe that stonehearth now is a different game in some way, from what it was advertised in the kikstarter days. What, concretely, does that mean. I don’t want “its like leauge of legends in kariko village” kind of answers, because what does that mean exactly. Maybe it is an in your eyes unbalanced focus on certain gameplay aspects, or the lack of certain features, or something else. It seems that you had expectations (probably justifyable ones, looking at your statement that it came from the way it was advertised) of the game that haven’t or aren’t going to come to fruitition. What specifically are those things, because I am missing them.

Lets keep it here for now, to avoid making too much assumptions about your thinking.

BTW this post was started before SirAsterix wrote his second to last reply. Just so you know.

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At the same time though, we have to talk about it now, because the dev’s will likely move on after it is finished. So every bit of criticism needs to be done now (edit: or must wait until a quite some time later, when they revisit it.). Despite that though, it is certainly worth taking into account that it is not yet finished.

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Well, we can conjecture and guess at it all we want, but we can’t know yet if this limits people any less/more than the current building UI/UX.

It might be as simple as taking an eraser to the wall and forming it to how we look after building it as a square first.

Watching the videos of the building tools shows me SUPER fast how to make a very quick circular look by drawing out 3 squares in very short order.

-Draw original square
-Draw rectangle intersecting one direction slightly wider than the wall (creating a bump)
-Draw the same rectangle at 90 degrees

  • Done.

Repeat steps 2&3 again (slightly wider) to create an even more circular look. Of course this depends on how walls end up interacting, but it could be SUPER simple and way more intuitive than the current builder. This appears to make it pretty easy to create those cool looking designs on those screenshots you showed. But we’ll see.

Go back and watch the videos and see if you can see what I see.

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No we don’t. The whole game is Alpha, nothing is finished. You honestly think they haven’t thought about most of this stuff before they even made the video? They just happen to include users in the process and get feedback to validate the concerns they already had, to prevent bugs and other crazy stuff that may have been overlooked, just in case.

This is the most clear way you have worded your problems with the new editor, combined with your latter reply. This cleared it up a lot. Before it seemed to me that you had a problem with the editor looking like that of the sims because it was from the sims. This is not really a problem for me. Not I know that you didn’t like it because the editor of the sims is suited to square buildings, and it is that property of that solution that you didn’t want copied from that game, rather than the game it came from.

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No, no no, :calmly: I didn’t mean it like that. Of course they will come back to it, but it will take a while. I realise I said it very deteminedly, and that was the wrong tone. I meant it more in a way of, if you have improvement idea’s than it is better to name them now, because things are more flexible now. I was going to give an example, but I an’t remember excactly what it was again.

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Thanks for pointing this out again, I forgot to reply to it.

They can always leave the wall tool in there, and even include a curved line tool or circle or ellipse tool in the future. I know I would like to have those tools as well, so I don’t see why they wouldn’t be added eventually.

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We’re keeping a form of the wall tool, to my knowledge; it’s important to be able to create a free-standing wall for certain use cases as we currently understand them. Broadly speaking I’m not opposed to a circle or ellipse tool for laying walls, but keep in mind that if we were to pursue that it’d produce the jaggied/aliased results that you would see in, say, MSPaint. We don’t currently want to move away from cubes as our base construction asset, so don’t expect a tool that lets you create a nice, rounded, cylindrical room.

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Maybe you didn’t see it, but when discussing the present builder I frequently used the term “inherently broken”. It’s hard for me to explain how I made that conclusion. It’s more of a “programmer experience” and “intuition” thing. Brackhar already tried to explain it once, with an example of bridges.
Long story short, in the old builder some programming and design decisions were made on early stages of its development, and these decisions greatly limit its ability to be “fixable” now. Imagine a car with an incorrectly designed engine. Sure, you can endlessly patch it. But then comes the moment when the only way left for real improvement is to replace the engine entirely.
Speaking of computer games, Bethesda games prior to TES5 use Gamebryo engine, and it has, for example, some inherent bugs concerning complex lighting. And you can’t “fix” these bugs, they are too deeply ingrained in the code. The only thing you can really do is to move on to another engine. Something Bethesda eventually did. A kind of changes Radiant does now.

Obviously you’ve never been to Steam forums >_>

What I’m trying to do is offer a “dual-use” tool - a tool that fits the general style aesthetic @sdee outlined but also can be used to simplify designing round or diagonal rooms that you talk about. Building a “circle” from a square with extrusion is faster than building it one-floor-block-at-a-time.
Speaking of which,

Currently we don’t know what tools create walls in the new editor and how they do it. It is surely desirable to have something at least equally easy to the old editor. After all, it’s all for the sake of improvement. As @nikosthefan rightfully noted, we need to discuss it now and voice our concerns. It is good that you’ve voiced yours, and I mostly agree with them. Still, I can’t state “it was X, now it is Y” because I don’t know how it is now - there was no DT about it yet. By the way, it would be great to see how the team plans to do it in one of the nearest DTs.

Precisely.
@SirAstrix, in all honesty, it may sound funny for you, but in real life I am a very self-doubting person. For me, encouragement is a fuel to keep my passion going. And, unlike you, I see positive comments following updates not as a bunch of “Yes Mans” cheering every word of the devs but as people showing other people that they appreciate their work and encourage them to go on.
I also have this subtle feeling you are more frustrated about the game as a whole. Something I can relate to sometimes, really. Still, discussing it for me borders on discussing (criticizing, blaming) the person instead of discussing the game. And that’s something I’m anxious about and not fond of.

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But that doesn’t have to mean that all is lost. Instead of focussing on getting the bad stuff out of the system, you can focus on getting the good stuff in of the new system. In the case of the new editor not being as suitable as before to non-square buildings, you could argue that a wall tool (with specifically the option to only place a pillar included) is necessary in the new editor, or other features which effectively get the same ease back.

I am a very self-doubting person myself as well, and appreciate thanks and compliments for the work I do. But I also believe that you should be able to criticise things based on merit. Peoples work is not an extension of their self, it is an extension of their effort. I still value compliments, but as recognition of fruitful effort, rather than something that my ego likes, and that is how I view criticizing others as well: If people have goodwill to do good work, then they will appreciate constructive critcism. So don’t hesitate @MelOzone.

Or the Desktop Tuesday comments on stonehearth.net or YouTube. There’s almost always somebody asking why the team is doing this instead of that, when that is obviously more important from their point of view. I think I once saw someone who thought the building editor right now was perfectly fine ask why they weren’t adding multiplayer yet.

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Oh, don’t even start about that. People ask about it on Steam all the time. Every. Friggin’. Update.

I was more talking about frustration here. Pointing at it may be seen as telling “the problem is not in the product, it’s in you”. And… at this point things tend to get ugly.
I’m not a paragon of tactfulness, so I just try to avoid these situations altogether, for better or worse.

Something I have yet to learn.

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That is true, though in these cases it might be useful to start messaging explicitly where implicit messaging doesn’t work. (And I have experience in implicit messaging not working. … :slowly: yeeaahh it hasn’t always been pretty). In this case that means saying you are frustrated, and then why that happens, instead of frustratingly saying what is wrong, which indeed comes easily across as blameful, especially with a little emotional bad luck on the recieving end. And then there is always the option of explicitly denying the tone as your intent in advance. (i.e. I don’t mean to to…). I’m sure you’ve seen me do it a couple of times here on the discourse.

I apologize then, as to me it felt like it was a dismissal of what I was trying to say, in a passive aggressive way.

This is so true on MULTIPLE levels. My biggest (but not only) problem is the secrecy that has arose since @Tom left. And anymore, this spider webs into a couple other problems I have with the dev team in general. Getting to the point, by biggest problem is that I feel like they’re treating us like we’re stupid, and that’s honestly my biggest pet pieve in life.

The reason I feel this way is because of all the indecisiveness showed on the forum. Just in this thread alone, @Brackhar, who’s supposed to be the lead developer, contradicts @Sweet. So who’s right? Go to any other thread that involves @Brackhar debating an idea, and you’ll get the exact same double talk, or when any of the devs are directly confronted, you get cherry picked vague answers. If they don’t want to answer, it’s pushed away as “an idea that’s still in the works”.

My second leading problem, is exactly what I asked above;

This forum is supposed to allow the users to voice their concerns with the direction the game is going, to in turn help better the game. But lately, all I’ve seen or gotten from anyone, even other users anymore, is that this is the new direction of the game, deal with it. Hell, @Sweet basically said it when he made the comment about Stonehearth’s style. So how is this about the users / players anymore?

I know I can voice my opinion, and as you’ve stated, I do. The problem is though that except for a small handful of other people, and even then on rare occasion, I’m the only one voicing my opinion. And because of this, it’s basically gotten to the point of “oh great, what’s he going to rant about this week”. If that weren’t the case, then why are my questions half the time ignored anymore?

As for anyone else, you tell me. Why is it no one else has a problem with the changes going on? Why is it that only 3 other people have stepped up to say that the lack of direction bothers them? And why is it that when people do voice their concerns about things, they tend to be indirectly told to shut up by other users, such in a way that @genboom is doing now?

Let’s take a look at the Kickstarter for a second, the pitch that I agreed to back.

ks1

In this first part, it states, “Starting from procedurally generated terrain with dynamic AI encounters, Stonehearth combines city sim and good old combat with infinite building possibilities.” Yet with this new building UX, we’re being told too bad on any building possibility that has angled or round walls, as (and I’ll keep quoting it), it’s not Stonehearth’s style. Sorry, but to me, these two ideas clash, and with the latter being the way it is now, that’s not the Stonehearth I backed nor the one I’ve sunk hours into.

The next part says in big bold letters, SANDBOX, RTS, and RPG. Yet how many times lately has it been said on the forum and in dev streams that they’re trying to get away from an RTS? That’s kind of a third of what the game is supposed to be. And if it’s a sandbox, then why am I being limited in what I want to do with possibly having to worry about what color house my Hearthling is going to like? Why am I being limited by the editor’s redesign? Why am I being told I have to play within a certain parameter?

Following that, again in bold, it talks about CO-OP and PvP. Now Co-op has been confirmed more or less, at least they’ve stated they’re working on it. But PvP has been danced around, and then last night’s dev stream, @Rabid_Llama and @sdee straight up said that PvP probably isn’t going to happen as that goes against the warmness of Stonehearth. So again…another part of the pitch removed.

Next part, stretch goals.
9 of these goals either have something in the game or are documented enough that they will (hopefully) be in there one day. That being said, I don’t know what the animal trainer would be (shepherd?) so I’m leaving that alone. And again, we’re back to PvP Raids that has been stated multiple times is off the table. Seasons has become a maybe, a very very soft maybe after it was talked about to death back in the day. And festivals was a suggested idea a few weeks ago that “would be nice to add”.

So all this said, the “new” direction the game is going in is cutting even more out of what us backers were promised.

Do I want to build a conquering empire? F%&K YEAH I DO!!! Oh wait…it’s a small town simulator now. Welp, can’t do that either.

So as it currently stands, almost HALF of everything I put my money towards has been thrown out the window for a dozen different reasons, and that list keeps growing. And yet I’m expected to be happy about that, because “change can be good”. This is why I say it’s becoming a different game that I didn’t back.

@Sdee stated a long time ago that she wanted Stonehearth to be basically your way of creating your own, living breathing version of Kariko Village from Legend of Zelda. Where you have the RPG shop workers, a living town, etc. Well that’s fine as that would fall under the sandbox part of what this game was supposed to be. But then in discussions like this one, when talking about ways to redo combat, you get a lot of League of Legends ideas being pulled in. I’m sorry, but when you run the numbers, and add “this group go here, that group go there, you go through the middle, and everyone activates their abilities”, it sounds a lot like a bigger version of LoL, but with one person controlling the whole side rather than 5. So that’s where that part comes in.


This is where my concern comes in though. Each time you draw a new square, the game is looking at it as it’s own room that can be pulled away, or has to be added to another room. So, as I said earlier, you’re up to 6 squares to make one corner, and with the history of everything else, do you think that’s going to go with Stonehearth? And that number will keep increasing as the size of the curve increases.

And your example works for small curves. What about a 32 voxel curve? It wouldn’t be just 3 or 6 squares. From my count, you’d have to have a minimum of 10 to make the circle, not including more if it’s not a perfect circle.

With the current editor, you don’t have to do as much, as well as with the auto-wall tool, it registers it as one entity / room, not multiple that have to decide how they intersect.


@MelOzone, this is the type of Yes Men I was talking about…


I don’t care if it looked like it was from Eve Online (though that could be an improvement…), my problem with it being copied from The Sims is that we were told multiple times that it wouldn’t be a copy of The Sims 4’s builder, but instead a tool designed for Stonehearth. Well…I’m not seeing the difference as it’s pretty much a 1:1 translation. I even quoted one of the times above.


Um…when @Sweet flat out says they’re not going to, because it’s not the style of Stonehearth, I’m going to say no to this comment.


Free-hand wall tool, or auto-wall tool? Having the free-hand tool does make it a little better than all squares, but the cherry on top would be keeping the auto-wall tool too.

And that’d be awesome if y’all added this. But from previous comments made by your team, it now sounds like you and your team aren’t on the same page as far as this new building UX.


And his example was about the engine of the game, not the steering wheel. The way the game builds the buildings, maps out how they should be built, etc., isn’t the concern here. The concern here is the player experience, in the way that they tell the game what to do.

Take our current builder UX for a second. If they were to fix the Undo bug that everyone hates (and breaks things more than not), and add the room / wall tool as shown in the new UX to it BESIDE everything that’s already there, what would be so bad about that? It’d still let people that are building monuments and such with the current one…well the current builder, but also add the kiddy gloves for anyone who isn’t familiar with it.

But they’re not doing that. In fact, it’s been stated MULTIPLE times that it’s too late to do that, even though they kinda want to.

Personally, haven’t, but I’ve heard the horror stories. That being said, I’m pretty sure the devs don’t hang out there either, as they try not to favor Humble Bundle or Steam.

Debatable. If you have the ability to stretch a corner out with a circle tool, then yes. But if you have to click each part of the wall and move it individually, then no.

The reason I see it that way is because of the lack of people voicing their thoughts or concerns with the game. If it were “YAY, awesome game, but…”, then I wouldn’t say it’s a bunch of Yes Men. Unfortunately, it’s only the first half of that though.

And don’t get me wrong, I’ve got 2200 hours into this game (probably a third of it AFK), and love many parts of it. @Albert’s progress on water is my favorite part currently, and watching @Allie do what she does with art is probably a close second. And if the development were coming close to an end, I’d be pissed and sad at the same time.

That being said, that’s why I voice my opinions so profusely. I don’t want this game to start hitting the same roadblocks Minecraft did, and anymore, I see one after another starting to form. The two biggest I’m currently seeing is this User Experience redesign (not just the builder) to make it more n00b friendly, as well as the “well if you want that, you can mod it in” statements. When it gets so easy to do things that it’s no longer fun for advanced players, it becomes a game full of children, as Minecraft became. The fun then kinda leaves it from there as the devs then turn to make it easier and easier for their “users” to use it.

Same with mod content. It’s been stated a couple times that they don’t want to add user content for legal reasons. That’s understandable. But at the same time, we’re not getting assurances that what people mod in won’t get it’s on Radiant version. So being that @BrunoSupremo made his archipelago mod, will we never see a fisher class now?

And I know I’m not the only one with similar concerns. So why aren’t people voicing that?

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Right now, there are two important groups who have a say:

  • New players, who notice the annoyances and confusion we’ve gotten used to (even though I wouldn’t mind them) and who this building overhaul was really started for
  • Old players, who have got to make sure that the new building editor is at least as capable as the old one. This is the assurance we’ve been given on Chris’s streams, but not as much in this thread.

But I don’t think this is just for new players. I’m guessing the team’s also annoyed at the building editor for a few reasons:

  • Chris (and I imagine most of the programmers) are probably tired of trying to fix building over and over and it never quite totally working.
  • Allie couldn’t get her first attempt at building templates to build, and so she had to settle with the less detailed ones we have now. All the templates required a lot of trial and error - of course, they still don’t build sometimes.
  • The UI’s a hold-over from Tom, and it seems like no one wants to touch it unless they completely replace it (except to throw in stairs, which I feel made it more of a mess.)
  • People are already complaining that there’s not enough visible progress, so just redoing the building editor behind the scenes wouldn’t help. Redoing the building editor entirely gives them an excuse for it to take long, and excitement from a certain group of players.
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So, let’s be clear on this for a moment. As far as I understand the art vision of the game, we have no desire to move towards a place where we move away from cube voxels as our core building component. This means that we won’t have natural support for angled or rounded wall segments, as that would require us to have voxel faces that aren’t aligned to 90*.

Now, in reference to whole walls that are rounded in aggregate, but still made out of individual cube voxels that are orthogonally aligned (like in the image you linked), that’s a different matter. Nikki and I haven’t discussed that pattern in depth as of yet.

Sometimes what you read as contradiction is not actually there, as I think is the case here. But sometime there is contradiction, and that’s a natural part of having an open dialog with developers. We’re working on this game with you guys, and through our conversations with you and with each other we learn new things about what’s important, what our players value, and places we may have made mistakes. We could adopt a route of having a very controlled messaging, where the only things that we discussed with players are things that are 100% decided and where any statement has been filtered through multiple layers of marketing and community writers to make sure that there’s no false implication present. A lot of studios choose to go that route, and do so successfully. We however believe that having the developers involved directly on the forum, and the resulting conversations that it generates, is the best way and fastest way to build a healthy game. This can result in us sometimes saying the wrong thing, but I would 100% prefer to live in a world where I can come on here and talk to you directly about the issues that you are having as opposed to only sending out press releases every 4-6 months.

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Sorry, I’ve not seen this particular discussion because I personally think the existing combat should be tweaked evolutionarily, not “redone”, so a phrase about “turn-based RPG combat” for me is ridiculous.

I also apologize if I wasn’t clear enough. All I did was trying to adapt your general idea of “adding instruments for “nonconventional” buildings” while also trying to soften your words a bit.

I suppose Sweet is. As far as I understand, Brackhar tries to define the direction, but sdee and Sweet and other people directly working with code know better in what state it is, what it can actually do and how can it be improved, realistically speaking.
But you’ve raised a valid point. Indecisiveness also bothers me. I’d like to her more or less defined position, if only to point out the things I like (or not). Then again,

If they decide on something, then at some point change their decision (for whatever reason), the fans expecting one thing will get another and will be frustrated. Just as you are now. So from what I gathered when listening to sdee, Radiant is now more cautious about making bold statements and loud promises. It’s arguably more honest, but as you’ve noticed, we run into another problem here - the devs are now afraid of showing “early prototypes” because they feel that possible drastic changes later will drive folks away. And early prototypes are prone to drastic changes.

This issue for me is split into two.

  1. Is it possible with the new editor to construct the same variety of buildings (including “non-Stonehearth style”)
  2. Is it equally convenient (or better) with the new editor to construct the same variety of buildings (including “non-Stonehearth style”)

If the answer to the second question is “no”, I will be frustrated to a degree. That’s what I’m trying to push here - trying to propose instruments to keep usability good even for “nonconventional” buildings.
If the answer to the 1st question is “no”, I will be utterly disappointed.

The problem is, I have no detailed knowledge about the inner workings of their new code. And even if I did, I don’t consider myself an experienced designer or programmer. So while I can throw an idea or two, I can’t know for sure how feasible my ideas are concerning their future code. That’s also the reason why I don’t capitalize on your “keep the “raise walls” tool” idea -

  1. I don’t know how much sense this idea has with their current data structures
  2. I’m not sure it is the best possible solution to our problem.

So, instead of insisting on a certain solution without knowing the specifics I try to voice “We need a handy tool that can make X”, leaving the decision of how such a tool should look or work to the devs.
I’m not saying what I do is the only correct choice, just explaining the logic behind my posts.

Unfortunately that’s the general deal about most complex early access projects (especially gaming projects). When they are started, often the developers have a rather vague idea about what are they going to build. As they gain experience, they find caveats they didn’t know about before. They gain experience. When the game changes drastically from the initial idea, it’s bad. Sadly, it happened more then once, so I try to accept it as an inherent risk of all Early Access projects. Especially from developers who are not yet known for many successful projects.
I want to see most on the things you mentioned earlier in the game. I missed Kickstarter and didn’t know about the game at the time, so, naturally, I take these promises more… lightly than you are. Still, I count them as promises, and I expect to get them in the end.
Otherwise I’ll be a very sad panda.

[quote=“SirAstrix, post:54, topic:31900”]
This is where my concern comes in though. Each time you draw a new square, the game is looking at it as it’s own room that can be pulled away, or has to be added to another room. So, as I said earlier, you’re up to 6 squares to make one corner, and with the history of everything else, do you think that’s going to go with Stonehearth? And that number will keep increasing as the size of the curve increases.
[/quote] That’s a concern that depends greatly on how freehand tool is implemented, how are the data structures working and how room merging is done. I’d like to hear the answer of the people directly working on the code for that.
Btw, as I got to know, tagging the right people can do wonders hint hint

Removing the freehand (and freehand wall) would be outright stupid, as it severely limits the creative freedom.

[quote=“SirAstrix, post:54, topic:31900”]
And his example was about the engine of the game, not the steering wheel.
[/quote] I thought he was talking precisely about the building editor. Was I wrong?

If my explanation about “intuition” does not suffice, I’ll try to explain (although explaining intuition is always awkward).
A working “Undo” tool requires a stack (imagine a paper list) with all operations of the player written down in the order they were made. Now, programming usually requires elements in the stack (operations on the building) to be of the same format (more or less, depending on the abstraction). Imagine a list that can only include operations presented in a certain defined format. Like a list of “only integers” or “only nouns”.
The problem is, currently buildings consist of several primitives of different type (walls, floors, roofs, slabs) - the game treats them all as different unrelated objects with different properties - and a different set of possible operations for any of them! Operations in different format defined by the logic of a concrete primitive.
We can possible write a code linking “Undo” to all the possible operations and transforming them all to the required format - but it requires a lot of work. And a lot of code. And more code means more errors, because the more complex and disconnected the system is, the more it’s prone to having errors. That’s what the programmers in my country call “crutches” or “dirty solutions”. Trying to get rid of the symptom without removing the cause - the lack of connectivity and uniformity in the data model.
As far as I understand, Radiant used this kind of fixes for some time as a temporary measure, but eventually decided the situation requires “surgery”. And reworking the data structure caused reworking in the editor (if we remove the concept of “wall” and “floor” from the resulting data, adding tools to “draw” what a human perceives as a wall essentially means rewriting a set of functions from scratch). They the devs said, “Okay, it seems we can’t avoid reworking the editor. Might as well make it good.”
Note that all of the above are only my assumptions. I’m not part of the team, so I can’t know what exactly the situation is.

So I see our task at hand as defining what “good” means for us - and trying to find compromise with the vision the devs have for their game.
I am used to the old editor but I know it has serious problems. Apart from the “Undo”, it’s the fact that the order in which you build things influences your ability to build them (as an example, you can’t add a roof, then cut a hole in it - you must first draw a “hole” with floor blocks, then add a roof, then remove a “hole”. That’s precisely what is called “dirty solutions” and it screams “bad design practice” (sorry, Radiant). It’s not something caused by a couple of faulty code strings. And again, changing that requires not only reworking the data structure but also creating a set of normal tools.

[quote=“SirAstrix, post:54, topic:31900”]
When it gets so easy to do things that it’s no longer fun for advanced players, it becomes a game full of children, as Minecraft became [/quote]
As much as I respect Minecraft, I believe “children” are not its greatest problem. The problem is, design-wise it’s a horrible game. Death is punishing as hell. Traveling is punishing as hell. Grinding is tedious as hell. Don’t get me wrong, the idea is brilliant, the sandbox is revolutionary… but from UX point, it’s a nightmare. You can easily choose a server without “children” (or create your own), but you can’t get rid of the things that are the birthmarks of the game to a point where you can barely play it with mods.
That, in my honest opinion, is what the problem of Minecraft is. Perfect sandbox, horrible game. And it is a result of Notch’s conscious design decision that you have to live with.

PS. Sorry for the wall of text. Looks like I broke the forum quoting tech.

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I had asked it before and was dismissed, by I’m going to state it again. Is there a chance it’s not the building USER EXPERIENCE that’s the problem and instead the AI’s fault for not knowing how to handle it? Personally, I just don’t see how changing the way we design the building, changes the way the game builds the building.

My only arguement would be with the forcing us to square buildings, the game can handle that better than free-hand.

So…we should let them have an excuse for slowing down the progress of development, just because they can half-ass justify it? I’m sorry, but that’s like the conversation system, and how that took 6 weeks to do, didn’t hardly benefit us, and apparently no other work was being done at that time.


If this was discussed somewhere, I apologize for missing it, as I have been referring to the style that I linked above.

I completely and fully appreciate y’all talking to us directly, and respect that y’all have decided to take that route. That’s actually my biggest reason to why I’m so active here vs many other games.

That being said, I’m not seeing how this ISN’T a contradiction:

With these two things, in my eyes contradicting each other, as Nikki has very specifically said no and you say maybe, you then took it a step further to say:

This is going to be rude, and I apologize, but I can’t think of another way to say it. @Brackhar, you’re supposed to be the Lead Designer, so shouldn’t that mean that you would know what’s going on with your team? Before @Sweet was even given the chance to make a firm statement about whether or not something would be there, shouldn’t y’all have already discussed this?

And that being said (again apologize for the bluntness), it still hasn’t been said who’s actually in the right. With you being the Lead Designer, does this mean it could still happen, or with @Sweet being the UX Designer, it won’t?

With that, it also kinda bothers me that we’re not hearing from Nikki at this time either. The question of why we’re back peddling to when buildings sat on top of the terrain still hasn’t been answered, as well as her side of what’s really going to happen with this UX vs angled / curved walls hasn’t been voiced either since you said that it could happen.

This is the indecisiveness I’m talking about being shown on this forum. I understand this editor isn’t 100% in stone and could change, at the same time, this editor has been in the works (according to y’all) for how many months, and yet this late into it, lack of communication and planning is being shown.


This wasn’t a change of color or they decided to go with a different interface than before. This is where we were sold an idea, and they later took out a large part of that idea. On top of that, something that’s been in the game for 4 years, has defined the game for many (as I showed above), and is now being taken out, is not something as simple as we may add this but decided not to.

This would be like you purchasing a truck because you want to haul your boat. 4 years later, the dealership comes to your house, takes the engine out of your truck and puts a smaller one in, and tells you it’s to make it less intimidating for other drivers. You can still haul a boat, just not as big of one as you’re used to. Wouldn’t you be irritated too?

22.5 Alpha’s of the same thing though isn’t “Early Prototyping”; 15 alphas if you only count since we’ve had this UX. By deciding to limit what the players can do after building and selling a game around freedom is definitely going to drive folks away, or alienate them (as Nikki said). Anyone in their right mind should be afraid of that much change, because it opens the door to what else are we going to lose (and I’ve already stated some on that too)? So if the devs are afraid to show us what they’re working on because of this, then that’s their own fault.

This was answered above by Nikki with the response that we still will have the voxel tool to do it by hand. So TECHNICALLY it’s a yes, but that then creates a no for your second question within that respect.

I don’t know. Riot was pretty frickin’ successful with League of Legends and countless other games. And when this game was bought, I don’t remember those promises being cut yet by @Tom. So why should we let them slack on those promises? If it were still Radiant doing this by themselves, I’d be more inclined to agree with this. But when a major name steps in, adds their people to your team with the statement that they have no intention of changing the game from what it is, I can’t accept this.

When he made that statement to me, we were discussing the rewrite of the whole game, not just the building editor.

This would be true…if there weren’t an undo button, to begin with. The undo button does work some times, especially with Auto-Save turned off. So the code is already there and functions. It just has a senior moment ever once in a while. That’s why I say fixing it shouldn’t be that big of an issue.

They chose to rework the editor because of the number of people fumbling with it. At least that’s what I’ve been lead to believe.

But what’s that vision? We can’t get a straight answer on this, so how can we in turn help?

munches on some Salt & Vinegar chips :content:

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great!
that kind of tool can sometimes be exactly what you want for terrain-conforming architecture.
really I think it should just be a single block that is laid down at first and then can be expanded upwards and outwards in either direction if you wanted to build extra thick castle walls.