DLC? 1st person view and gameplay elements

Hi folks. :slight_smile:
We are investing so much time in building our villages, Underhome or Treedwellings… So much love goes into these.
Stonehearth is actively increasing the levels of love on the planet, at least for this nerd here.

I’m linking an older post but am reluctant to resort to dark magic in leathery, sticky books and so I’ve opted not to reply there and “bump” it, but rather to make a new posts to consider the matter.

A. I, for once, would very much like to experience my own settlement from the very eyes of my Hearthlings without cramming the camera into wierd angles that include evil Slice magic.

B. In multiplayer, there could be a gaming routine that introduce the incoming players as “Visitors” that take contracts from the session manager and are controlling a single character.

The arguments mentioned in the previous posts are as follow:

By ceetheman

  1. Fun way to explore the city from a different perspective
  2. Take control of a footman or archer and take part of the action!
  3. Help build, mine, carry stuff, for tasks that you want to micro-manage
  4. Explore!
  5. Talk to citizens (like they are NPC)

By coasterspaul
6. Finally be able to look inside rooms, add furniture other stories in the way.

Most of the arguments against have to do with the usual “it’s impossible\too hard to do” which is the older brother of “dead game” meme.

Lego games did it and did it well so if it’s a dev goal all these “reasons” do not amount to much.

Since it was not I’d pay for a DLC that adds these features and do it well, I want to visit random lands and help new players as a FPS character, that would hit the spot alright! :slight_smile: .

Please share your thoughts on the subject if relevant.
Thank you for reading!

The OP:

Breaks my heart :broken_heart: to be the one to come here and shatter all your hopes and dreams, I can tell from your first paragraphs that you’re loving the game and having a blast with it, and this is a very passionate post/idea, however…

… I mean, these are not excuses. These are facts, I’m afraid. Game’s official development stopped back in 2018, which means that anything like a DLC is 100% out of the question. And no amount of money in the world would change their minds on the matter, believe me: we’ve tried.

Nowadays, all you have are mods. Could mods do something like this? Could a mod achieve all these ideas? The short answer is “yes, but… no”.

The long answer is: “Yes, but it would indeed, as said above, be a lot of work. Doing something like a “first person camera”, where you just control the camera around like a first person game, that would be rather feasible and way more likely. But the moment you start wanting to add gameplay features to such a mod, like actually attaching such a viewpoint to an actual, existing hearthling; allowing you to control more than just its movement but also fight, work, mine, etc… This becomes a really deep hole. We’re literally talking about “modding” an entirely different game into a game that already has very known performance/stability issues; Not impossible, but very, very complicated. And then when you finally suggest this as a multiplayer thing, and even worse, as a random multiplayer thing (entering the games of others/randoms), we’re talking the need for servers, which the game doesn’t have; we’re talking a nightmare of compatibility because different games will have different mods active; we’re talking something that is, on this particular part of the idea, pretty much impossible.”

So that’s it, it’s not a matter of excuses, of people saying it’s too hard, of dead game memes or even of money. It’s a rather real limitation, and just goodwill and positive attitude won’t change that. :glum: Just think of other apparently “basic” ideas people have come up with dozens of times, things like mounts. There’s a reason why, after all this time, there’s not one single mod in the game that adds mounts. Some things are simply too complicated or complex to be done within the limitations of the engine/game you’re working with. Not impossible, but complicated enough to make any who tried so far to give up before they’re done :forlorn: So I’m afraid unless you find a really passionate or dedicated group of people interested in making this idea come to life, or get yourself into modding, it’s not happening. If you want to give it a try and start learning, this is a great place to start:

My only advice is to start small; Don’t go straight to that idea. Learn things first, master the basic, make simple mods and then your chances will be much better :jubilant:

In the ACE Discord Server you’ll find people that would be willing to help you learn/give you advice when needed, I’m sure of it! You can join it here: Stonehearth - ACE

As for the list of reasons you provided, 6) actually has solutions in-game. With ACE you can set up slice view to cut buildings, so you can see the interior of each floor individually, if you want to.

First and foremost - Thank you for the time you took to reply and address my post in such detail!
I’m coming back to the game after a while and have been out of the loop.
I wish I’ve had the time for modding having three jobs and being a father of toddlers. :sweat_smile:
Wife and I got married at the start of 2018 and with babies and work I just didn’t have the time to pay attention to the state of the game but the longing stayed, lol. :slight_smile:
I know about the guide and I remember Bruno as a great and helpful guy, thank you all the same for sharing it as it may come handy for posterity.

I was opting for a DLC because the complexity of a development effort such as this would not be a likely task for a Modding crew.

It is my hope still that with enough expressed interest the Folks at Riot Games might take notice and invest in Radiant Entertainment so they can address the kinks that might be still in the build and develop new features.

Regarding the complexity of the mod\DLC - Creative thinking is required, no doubt. The mod does not have to be an attachment of a cam\gui to an existing hearthling.
It could be a different entity that only apply to MP users who would join or to a “Summoned unit” with a different functionality, leaving the old setup for entities ingame intact.

Anyhow, this is a debate worth keeping alive since I’d hope to see the people with the big purse having another look over Stonehearth.

Now I’ll go back to the game and look for a way to sort my mods ingame… The internal mod loader is somehow messing up my loading order.

1 Like

Yeah, that’s what I meant that is not happening. :forlorn: Radiant doesn’t exist anymore at all, former members are now all over on different jobs/companies. So there is not even where for Riot to invest. They’d have to make a new team. But they literally don’t want to hear about Stonehearth – like, literally. People have offered to buy the rights, people have offered to maintain it for free, even, and they’re basically “Nope, we don’t care” :merry: So I guess if you knocked on their door with 10 million USD they might listen, but if you have 10 million USD I’d suggest you just make a new game :jubilant:

Users can’t touch the loading order at all, it is automatically defined by the game based on some rules. The first mod is always radiant, then stonehearth and its official faction mods northern_alliance and rayyas_children and then the rest is loaded based on assigned dependencies (a modder can define what other mods should load before their own in the manifest) and then alphabetical order of the mod’s namespace.