In the kikstarter Radiant mentioned titans.
So I had the idea to have Titan Elementals. “So you had trouble figthing Mountain, how about fighting an actual mountain.”
Would be cool to see a mounten titan, or a glacier one, or a big cloud or sandstorm titan.
Maybe they could personify natural disasters.
“A giant mountain in the shape of a turtle crawls across the landscape. As the titan pulls up his legs, and his collossal body slams on the surface, the subsequent earthquake breaks buildings and toppels towers in a nearby village.”
i like the idea however, the current coding for stonehearth wouldn’t allow for that kind of gameplay. I’m really looking forward to it, but also the changes upto it.
The current code of the game is too stiff and ridged to allow for such advanced gameplay mechanics it would require a rewrite of how building data is kept and a few other base systems
In my scripting thread, I managed to make a giant skeleton. It seems all you need to do to make titans happen is write them into the dungeon master’s campaign list, and maybe give them a few special abilities, like the ogres that can break down doors now. We’ve already got code for building destruction, so now it’s just a matter of slapping a health bar onto buildings and running that destruction code when their health runs out (at least, that’s what I assume you meant needed to be done when you said “how building data is kept”). I don’t know how much experience you’ve had with Stonehearth’s codebase, but I really don’t see what you mean about anything needing to be rewritten.
Then what do you suggest? So far, what you’ve said was “it’s not gonna work” without saying why, or what you’re expecting not to work, or how would the working product look.
I’m fairly certain you could make enemies the size of a small village and the only thing that may be wonky is the path finding, which I believe calculates per-square for every entity?
It’d be like fighting a mountain which, despite its size, can shimmy across the tiny 1-wide pathway dug out on the side of some other, smaller mountain.
I’m not saying it isn’t possible, i’m saying with the current mechanics the way they are it wouldn’t be to the quality of how it ought to be. I would expect a titan to truly be able to knock down a mountain not be stopped by a 2 block deep hole.
I would expect every titan to be an event in and of itself.
As far as building code, the game stores every building as one huge block of data, it doesn’t really give you the ability to break say, one wall instead of the whole building, it’s too rigid. It would be great if it worked that way but it doesn’t seem to be able to.
I support the idea, but I also feel as though jury-rigging the titans would be a bad idea also.
Aah hearthlings… Brave enough to run headfirst into a horde of orcs with swords, arrows, and magic… Yet too scared to jump over a one meter hole in the ground.
It would be pretty awesome to have a monster who could actually destroy buildings though like the goblin shacks and cathedrals, with building health scaling with how much was put into making it [so a castle wouldn’t hold together like a shack or vice versa]. It’d make you feel more pressured to actually stop enemies before they make it to your village and start pillaging it.
I see what you mean. Yeah, it would be nice to be able to destroy individual parts of buildings, but I haven’t looked through that code to see if that’s an easy possibility or not. For a smaller house, like the pre-built templates, this isn’t a problem;it would make sense for a house to just crumble if hit by a boulder. But when you’ve got a larger castle or somesuch going, it certainly presents a challenge. You wouldn’t want the whole thing to fall down like a house of cards, selective destruction would be really good there.
As for crossing ditches, I actually think that should be relatively painless to implement. In fact, if the monster in question is so big, it can ignore the pathfinder completely, and just step over anything that would be an obstacle to a hearthling as they are now.
I can remember that hearthlings devide buildings up into chuncks for building. If those chuncks still exist after the building has been built, maybe could slap a health bar on it, and then you could maybe (not a coder) destroying individual parts of buildings is possible. I can’t tell you for sure though.
And maybe there is a problem in the animations part. If the terrain under each of the legs is different in height, something will have to be done about that in the animations. This is so that the foot doesn’t go through a groundlayer, just because the other foot stands on a lower layer.
Let’s look at it more technically…
From a gameplay perspective, you probably don’t an enemy to just destroy a feeble wall and you have to end up removing and rebuilding the entire house to put it back. You could argue that the hearthlings could just rebuild said wall or other missing elements, but from a coding perspective, it’d be pretty impossible to rebuild just parts of the destroyed buildings with the way ladder placement and scaffolding works. Hearthlings build from the bottom up, so if a wall was destroyed and a roof or overhang were still there, they’d only be able to partially rebuild it before running into an error because they can’t navigate into the crevices that need rebuilt.
This way, you don’t have to mess with the building code. You would however need to make a deconstruction procedure for hearthlings to follow, (from the top down?) , and you still have to do it in such a way that all to be broken blocks get broken, and have to check that the way the game currently chuncks buildings is compatable with the entire system (AKA, doesn’t create overhangs). That is indeed going to cost time though.
