Other Announcements
There will NOT be a stream this Thursday, 2/16 as the team is traveling down to LA to give a Stonehearth update to the rest of Riot Games. We’ve made a lot of good progress this year, so we’re really looking forward to showing them all the things we’ve made together with you.
There’s a bunch of other personal and work-related travel coming up for all of us, so here’s the DT and stream schedule for the next few weeks:
Week of 2/13 – No stream on Thursday, 2/16.
Week of 2/20 and 2/27 – No Desktop Tuesdays, but streams should happen on Thursday 2/23, and 3/2
Week of 3/6 – Neither Desktop Tuesday nor Stream, as the team is heading to Boston for PAX East
Week of 3/13 – No Desktop Tuesday, but stream should happen as usual on 3/16
With any luck, DT and streams should resume as usual on the week of 3/20.
Woohoo! This is a major step forward for players who like to build high on mountains, where items can often fall off the edge of the accessible areas. Of course it’s also going to be great for those of us who want to build walls and moats but still have enemies show up for… uh… “educational purposes” by which I naturally mean Archer target practice, but overall I think we’ll see a lot of improvements to peaceful play stemming from this change.
Speaking of future improvements, I think you guys have just accidentally created a “stuck hearthling warning” system. If the topology service is able to know which entity is trying to path, and where it’s trying to path to, then you can have it listen out for any time that a hearthling fails to path to the firepit or their bed. In that case, the service can hopefully send an alert to the player, something along the lines of “[hearthling name] is stuck and can’t get back home!”, probably as an event. That way the player can follow up the event and figure out a rescue plan.
With any luck, that could also be expanded to make enemies a little smarter when they’re locked out of the town. If the pathfinding returns as impossible, they could up and leave earlier than they currently do… or they could alternatively call for reinforcements (archers and heavy units that can break down doors) in the hope of getting in.
I like the idea of a TFITW (Timmy’s Fallen In The Well) system, though I’d be even happier if there was an optional auto-rescue system wherein any Hearthlings with the ability to construct ladders could use that ability to get the Hearthling unstuck; I expect that would require a good bit more code though.
And more than reinforcements, what I’d like to see from enemies is the ability to respond to moats and walls with bridges and ladders. Nothing terribly fancy or complex, but having the goblins and orcs dealing with such obstacles could make things interesting. But then as I think about it I can also see the larger stone golems (less so the treemen given their attitudes towards deforestation) flinging rocks at walls in a semi-random manner until an impromptu staircase is formed. So.
Path Finding also do work when designing a building?
Noticed when you have a bigger town that it’s kinda slow to place slabs. A lot of work is done in the “astar” when placing each block
I feel like this update was for me