haha @ you thinking im a yes man. really funny to me. I’ve just been honest here and I have expressed a lot of criticisms about the game in other threads for quite a long time, but in a much more reasonable way.
For all we know Radiant Entertainment went bankrupt a year or two ago and thats why they got bought out by Riot and they could just be interested in more data collection from early access users to fuel their next big development and abandon stonehearth altogether. in which case we would be lucky to get another update at all.
as someone who has invested in a few too many alpha games, you should take it from me that even getting to express your dissent at all is a luxury that you should use to try to work with the devs rather than go against them and alienate users that happen across your posts, because neither of those things are really going to improve the game. money is the engine that drives this thing and in the end you gave them your money for a product that isn’t finished and thats it. their reputation will be the only thing on the line as a reason for doing anything as they will survive without this game and if users don’t want it you better believe they will move on.
well I don’t know how much programming you do, but being a little bit more understanding would go a long way
you and I both know how any negative response from users can effect sales because other potential players seeing it and second guessing on buying the game. I’m not saying don’t be critical to provide useful feedback for the devs, like I said they probably already guessed most of what would be talked about before even thinking about making the video, so there really is no need for you to beat a dead horse here buddy
and yeah I meant Riots reputation when I said that.
It doesn’t matter whether I know programming or not. I’m the person that’s going to be using the product, and I’m voicing my concerns. A little understanding towards what the players want would go father than me sitting back and just agreeing with whatever the developers want.
I want to ask you to go back and read what I’ve said, in full. Because if the devs had guessed what I was going to talk about, then two of the developers wouldn’t be contradicting each other, especially two leads.
On top of that, if they already know what we’re going to say, then why would they even care to be part of these discussions? That’s wasted time they could be putting into the product.
I mean you can respond in any way you want. just saying good luck with that, as I’ve mentioned you already gave them your money lol
if you have ever done any long term modding or projects involving computer sciences I think you would be more understanding, which is why I asked about the programming.
we both have had some of the same ideas and criticisms so I don’t really know how I’m agreeing with them
devs like feedback, as do investors, but they can’t make official statements on things that they do not want to advertise as a future feature, (they hinted at this a few posts back) especially if they haven’t consulted every member of the dev team and checked all the boxes. one person does not code the entirety of stonehearth
anyway I feel like we are just talking in circles now. I may have come across as upset is because I was so exited for this building editor preview and just want it to be polished slightly and released in an experimental build soon. sorry if I seems like I was trying to invalidate your posts or something, that was not my intention at all.
I’d suggest that it’s only those who are generally supportive who will bother to hang around on a product’s forum.
I’ve tried bashing my head against a brick wall here on the subject of Linux/macOS versions. I gave up as it was clearly a waste of time. I can’t give any meaningful feedback on the mechanics of the game as the last alpha I played was 19.
My observation is that clearly, by their own judgement, the original development team got it almost entirely wrong. As a KickStarter backer, that taught me a lesson. Those who are on their first ‘game’ product are likely to be on a very long learning curve.
Other KS projects, as well as this one, have also convinced me that I should never back any project that has macOS as a stretch goal.
So, all in all, a learning experience for everyone
well in all fairness ports usually come later as it literally multiplies the workload when the game code has to be updated on multiple platforms or languages. that said, they probably could have been more clear that only at the end will it be available in a different OS, but not during the alpha.
really the original devs simply dreamed small and the new team is dreaming much bigger the result is some delay and lot of work. just glad we are finally starting to see the new team get a handle on things
I agree. I think the original devs threw the kitchen sink into the Kickstarter to get the ball rolling and didn’t really realize the potential the game had and that some of what they promised would be in conflict with that potential. During the development process they realized just having a soulless city builder doesn’t matter if the hearthlings have no life and changed directions. I’m glad they’re growing and accomplishing bigger and better things than they would have been able to otherwise. Regardless, I’m still very much excited about the game.
That’s a rather cynical view on things.
The thing is, people are not telepaths. Time and again I’ve seen people saying that “voting with your money” is the only way to make a company change something.
That is not the case.
If you do not voice your concerns but just silently “vote with your money”, nothing’s gonna improve. Criticizing is crucial.
Part of it was what Nikki and sdee described as “Stonehearth visual style”. That’s what Allie as a visual designer defines. Nikki and sdee make this vision into the game, through coding and particular design decisions, so I guess we should address questions about implementations to them.
[quote=“SirAstrix, post:58, topic:31900”]
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.[/quote]
I’ve noticed it doesn’t work for operations on some of the entire prototypes. For example,
if I remember correctly, while it can “undo” adding a roof, it can never “undo” a “raise walls” operation. And for some operations, it works sometimes. For me, that’s a hint that while some functionality is simply bugged, a whole subset of operations is currently not supported - supposedly because adding this support would involve too much “dirty fixes”.
Note that without seeing the code I can only assume the state of things. I may be wrong. It may be better, it may be worse.
I was talking about the building editor, not the whole game. They themselves state in the DT that it’s very much a WIP.
[quote=“SirAstrix, post:58, topic:31900”]
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.
[/quote] As much as I understand, the work on it actively started after the last stable Alpha. So it’s… what, two months?
This, however, is a very valid point. I may understand the hesitance to voice big decisions, bit that looks like the good moment to do it. As @Brackhar noted, with direct dev communication such misunderstandings can happen, but in this particular case you can easily sort them out.
So yes, I’d like to hear what the team’s actual stance on the case is.
To be fair it was made clear that the macOS and Linux versions wouldn’t come until beta, what wasn’t made clear was that StoneHearth would apparently be in perpetual alpha.
agreed and well said. I doubt the answer to the first question is going to be “no”, that is why I’m not voicing any concerns. (I just don’t think that will be an issue). But when it does actually happen, I will be here voicing criticsm.
Same thing with seasons and festivals. I think were just not there yet to, in a building methafor I once posted here, start making the walls of the second floor (dimensionalising content). First we need to make a blueprint for the first floor, and put all the parts and cuurent walls/rooms (current content/systems) in place, so it is functional and fun. But I expect that the second floor will be added at some point.
TBH, I have voiced concerns over game direction on this front, in this thread about the current unbalance in timescales. Since the festivals and seasons aren’t here yet, I leave it at rest, but I will dig it back up when appropriate.
@Rabid_Llama did however have an idea for PvP, in the form of (PvE)v(PvE), where both players try to survive the longest with their town, but need to cooperate in order not to lose. I am really interested in that idea, and I think it is a good thing if they go that direction next to the Co-Op direction. (Feedback for @Radiant)
Ohh, that kind of PvP (PvP combat). Also, good point, can’t argue about that.
Can’t argue about this either. These are valid points you raise here.
[quote=“SirAstrix, post:54, topic:31900”]
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. [/quote]
Given your examples I understand what you mean and why you are frustrated now. I wasn’t there at the time of the kikstarter, so I might have an entirely different outlook on the game, where certain things just aren’t as obvious as they are to you. Nevertheless thank you for taking the time to explain your frustrations to me, that really helped me understand it.
If you do it in the way you did just then, I will not be thinking this. But before, the main tone I got out of it was frustration and a general “here we go again, they’re doing it again” vibe, which (sorry) weren’t always that explainative of your frustration as that reply was. (Although me not knowing your frustration helped in that).
As far as the RTS, Sandbox and RPG combi goes. I do not believe limitations necessarily go against sandbox. A prime example of this is Kerbal Space Program, where you can build any spacecraft/rocket/boat/whatever-you-can-think-of, as long as it obeys the laws of physics. It is OK, as long as players know that overcoming the limitations is part of the game, and that is where real time strategy comes in. Now I may have a different (less combat oriented) view of RTS, but the consequence of having all kinds of systems intricately connected to one-another (including that hearthlings like certain things more than others) is that everything is emergent, and that, thus, you need to come up with different strategies every time to slay the enemies that are those systems (including, but not limited to enemies).
In that view, the current direction still looks to be on that same path, but you may disagree of course .
This partially depends on what prototype the dev’s will go with. If it is the first, then your statement about the six different overlapping rooms is valid, and that is yet another reason why I think (feedback for @Radiant) that that prototype is not a good direction to go into. But if it is the prototype that is shown in the DT, then your point is not valid. As soon as you drag one on top of the other, the rooms merge, and you will have a cross-shaped room. Doing it more often will leave you with a perfectly fine round room, and the game has no problem with it.
Your point about the amount of work still applies.
Then lets talk about the ‘nonconventional’ buildings, which have pixalated, curved (as opposed to smooth curved which isn’t going to be in game) walls. Let’s find a way to make the process of setting up non-square rooms as easy or easier than before.
Currently, to make a round room, you build both the floorplan and the walls. First you need to draw out the entire floorplan, and then the game manually puts walls on top.
If instead we can create walls, and then the game adds the floor in automatically, that would in theory be no different from the current system, provided that you can make the floorplan in the same way with walls as you could previously with floors, and provided that it is as easy or easier to design a floorplan with walls than it is with floors.
the wall tool is in essence no different from the floor tool, except that now, we immediately get walls around our floors. If this annoying, I’d advocate that we add a visibilty option in the editor that takes down the walls temporarily, while you are designing the floorplan.
but this still leaves out an essential part of the old system, which is click and add. Here you could click on a voxel next to the current floorplan, and add it. This is very useful for planning out nonconventionally shaped buildings. Because of this, I’d advocate for that functionality being ported over as well, like this:
leave the free standing room in place, if you need it for inner walls.
Name it if I missed something.
I certainly hope so, I would love the fisherman class in the game. I really do hope that @Brackhar and @Rabid_Llama will look at mods with consideration of them going in game. Especially now that lots of people will make mods with content, while the dev’s are revistiting core systems. That is an oppertunity to see how things could be, how certain things impact the game if it were stock, and I believe the devs should take such oppertunities.
I agree we’re not to a point that it should be added. At the same time, and I may be wrong, I feel festivals has turned into a “we might add that”. I do know from one of the dev streams (find it later if you want me to) that Seasons has been pulled off the immediate table, and has been put on the wish list.
I appreciate you pointing this out to me, and I’ll work on being more direct in the future. I can sell salt to a snail, but when it comes to getting one of my points across, I take a hit to charisma big time.
Looking at JUST the RTS part, and not what goes into it, then I would agree with you that it’s still there. But when I look at it, and see that we’ve lost PvP Raids, lost our kingdom for a small town, and a couple other things, then I feel the RTS is being taken out of it.
RTS can be defined multiple ways, which by one of those definitions, how the game is right now could be called an RTS as you have to Real Time Strategize against Ogo. I wanted to see more. I wanted basically what’s said in this post.
I would love this. If it were this easy to draw angles / circles, It’d make my life of a city builder easier, which I know would then make @MelOzone happy. Until we get a response from the devs on this though, I’ll keep my reserve.
Nikki owns the design of the builder, and she pulls me in as appropriate. We’ve discussed broad directional goals, and I trust she’ll create something awesome. I do not and will not operate by requiring all design decisions, big and small, to go through me. That’s bad leadership, and frankly, bad for the product; Nikki is drastically better suited to this problem than me.
We default to trust in our team, and Nikki has shown me at every turn that that trust is warranted. I have full confidence in the direction she is taking the builder, and we sync up regularly to make sure that exploration continues to fit into the broader picture.
There are some legal issues here that I don’t have a full understanding of, so I’m not really able to speak to this. Sorry!
[quote=“Brackhar, post:56, topic:31900”]
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.[/quote]
Please keep us updated. Maybe it can be included in the next DT
yeah I don’t see why this would be much of an issue as blocks are just blocks
this is done easily in another alpha game, software inc, and its probably more complicated as the visuals have to be updated after the change is made.
I think the only variable you would need to know is how tall the wall is, and of course what material and color the blocks are. are they different or do they merge with the existing wall? questions like that. in software inc you can set a default building scheme. maybe something like this would be necessary when working for different styles or theme of buildings in stonehearth so that you do not have to choose every single time you want to make an edit.
This still leaves the question unanswered but does say that we need to be communicating with @Sweet about these thoughts / issues rather than yourself. Is there a reason we haven’t heard from her, or should we just use her original answer…as the answer to the question?
after thinking about this some more. this idea works fine for editing a building that doesn’t exist, but editing one and extending the wall onto a building that was already made would be a bit more challenging to figure out what section of the roof or second story should be taken out and extended. would the entire roof need to be taken off and re-centered because thats the style of roofing on that particular building? etc. sure this could be solved but it would probably be best done with a lot of prompts from the user about design choices.
You can do that in game currently, and my thought was that if you ported over all functionality of the old floor tool, then making a room of any size and shape would be no different than in the old system. Some of the old fuctionality included click and add, as supposed to click and drag, so I wanted to put emphasys on this detail as well: that it is important that we can make (or rather, add) 1x1 rooms or 1xn rooms to other floorplans, with merging.
I think for second stories, you’d have to manually do it again for the second floor. This requires that I can start dragging a room from the side of the foundation, rather than from the top of the ground (cuz there is none). The roof though, I don’t quite know what to do with that.
the result is some delay and lot of work. just glad we are finally starting to see the new team get a handle on things
