Idle animations

Well, my understanding would be that the idling animations could be applied to everyone. Or, it might be better to think of your workers as civilians. Obviously we’re still a few months out from Beta and as such the only units we have really seen in-game through the streams are the base workers.

Whenever I’ve played games like this, primarily Timber and Stone and Gnomoria, I will inevitably end up with some units not having something to do, I suppose if you could run everyone at 100% efficiency so that they are constantly doing something, then yes you might not see the idling animations; that would be quite a feat in itself though!

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They will idle. Different idles add depth honestly. I’m going to be watching my workers closely - rule of the iron fist will make sure they don’t idle under tyrant FinKone.

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The devs are calling the guys “standard worker” or so. But actually I think of them like the “civilians” you might refer to @Sarhifigus. They will go out and execute what you want from them, so standard or basic worker is fine I guess. However, they only do what you tell them to do. In case the trees you wanted to be chopped are gone, I would expect them to wait for new orders. I would also expect that the basic guys cannot do too much (apart from collecting basic resources and building houses). As soon as you want something more specific, you will need to promote them from “civilian” to a profession.

So there will be a lot of room for them to idle around… as long as you do not keep them busy 100% of their time… and that might be difficult because you might need to wait for some special items or resources before you can continue building that house you want to have next, etc.

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Also, I don’t know if there will be a complex tax system in place (I assume there will be seeing as an economic empire is one of the end-games described by Tony in livestreams), but if there is, civilians/standard workers will play a key role in a city’s economy. (higher pop. -> more taxes -> more resources/$) Because of this you may not be able to find work for all of the citizens you use exclusively for income, who will inevitably be idle for extended periods of time until needed for actual labour.

As a side note, I’ve read back on my post and realized for the first time a gigantic loophole in popular Facebook strategy games. If production buildings (sawmills, mines, etc.) require a base number of population to be reduced to represent the workers needed to run them, then your population stat only counts those without work. So… how do they pay taxes? 0.o

Hm… let me question why there needs to be a currency at all in the game? If everything you can produce will require resources and you base the trade on exchange of goods, maybe you do not need money at all in the game. And if for any reason you do, you could also substitute it with a rare ore, like gold… couldn’t you?

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Never really thought of it like that. To be completely honest, my thotchoochoo left Stonehearth when I had that Facebook epiphone. I agree though, in hindsight taxes couldn’t really play a part in Stonehearth’s resource production oriented economy. This reminds me of communism for some reason. LOL

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Instead of a currency there could be simple frontier style trading i.e. you got furs, I want furs, you want wood, here it is. So maybe instead of timber and stone style where it’s a set trade you could bargain, (Everything is given a value, 4 feathers=2 logs) all you’d have to do is use an equivalent valued object.

Ok Guys thanks for all the comments but replies are no longer needed can @SteveAdamo or @Geoffers747 please close this thread as it’s run it’s corse

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The Devs have said once or twice that when Idling the villagers would find a way to occupy themselves by playing with a toy or something along those lines.

Speculation time:
Does this mean that Mer Burlyhands who has just finished building Fort Rybilton will stand back with his fellow works and…well the conversation would be like this I’m assuming

Mer: Ahhhh the beauty of it…
Worker 1: I’ll say Great Job lads
Worker 2: Yep

awkward cricket chirp

Worker 1: well I hear that a house needs to be built on the south side of town
Worker 2: yeah and I got some logs to chop what about you mer?

Mer burly hands sits on the floor playing with a small wooden horse

Mer: NEEEIIIIGH


The point is what are the lil residents going to do? maybe fishing unless that becomes an actual profession I’d like to say hunting but I don’t know

anyone?

The devs are planning for some idle animations, e.g. workers playing with balls… maybe even together if there are two close by. Maybe even the pets will interact in a way with idling settlers.

You might find the following two topics interesting in regards of idling players (don’t get distracted by the name of the first topic :wink:) …

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I thinks an open and a merge is in order here!

Edit: And done.

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I would love interactive idles, as in multiple taking part like @voxel_pirate…would be pretty nice. And again as @voxel_pirate said, it would be nice to interact with the pets. Maybe chasing them or something fun. And then it’s just added with the pet if you should own one. :smile:

What I’m talking about:

So I was wondering about this…

What if our little voxel people, animals and even enemy mobs could/would do random stuff when they have nothing important to do? We already have the eating and sleeping which is great, but it can be improved further. Like listening to two peasants having a conversation or watch one of them counting the stars at night or see one of them going away from the others so he can meditate or do something else. Stuff that happens randomly and which gives us a smile whenever we catch one of those animations which makes the world feel alive. I’ll explain:

How:

For the playable characters (the little voxel people) It could happen by a random chance when they (the characters) would do something that wasn’t and can’t be ordered to them.

The actions would vary depending on:
1 the class (carpenter, trapper, peasant, etc.)
2 the kingdom they belong to (from the 3 plus the dwarf kingdom)
3 the time of day (night, morning, etc.)
4 the character gender
5 the character personality
6 the character health (if they’re sleeping in a mean bad or in the floor they might faint, while a starving character might hopelessly try to find worms or look for bugs to eat)
7 any other variable which I don’t remember or didn’t thought about

For the enemy mobs or monsters it could also happen by a random chance when they’re not trying to destroy your village or doing another mean stuff. Watch a monster for some time and he might do something which you would never expect, like a very ugly monster deciding to pet a rabbit (then eat it later, maybe)

The actions would depend on
1 the type of monster
2 if the monster is seeking the player villagers or if he just wanders somewhere
3 if the monster is sociable (lives in a group) or not

The animals behavior would be much like the monsters

Why:

Well… for many reasons. It would give more life to the game. It would grant a lot of those wtf moments we have in some few rare games. It would give a reason for you to look around your town other than to just find that sneaky carpenter to make stuff for you. It would turn the game into a very interesting sim, in a sense. It can be done with the right ammount of animations, interest and dedication. If not added to the native/vanilla game this could appear in a mod, but I would prefer the Stonehearth creators to do it. It would give you more reasons to spend time playing and more reason to care about the individuals inhabiting your world.

How this is different to scenarios:

Scenarios don’t seem to be focused on individuals, they’re focused on giving the player a history. Get too much wealth and raiders might attacks, how you deal with them will trigger another events, etc. The sim I propose is much more focused on each individual

If you read it all thank you.

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From the beginning the intention was to do this.

welcome aboard @Scal! :smile:

i’ve merged your post here, and will tweak the title a bit as well… i think you have some great ideas on how varied the idle animations can be…

Sorry Relyss I didn’t wrote it for this topic. Adamo moved when I failed to realize that there was a thread like this. I still hope my topic is salvageable though

i certainly think it is… :smiley:

for one, i had never considered idle animations for mobs before… which i think would be absolutely hilarious to see, and add a nice bit of character to the game… :+1:

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Well we know idle animations to already be in the game for humans, with more likely planned…

For mobs? I’m not sure. I’m still a bit unclear on how we will see mobs, as it is a city builder so is your fog of war only going to really reveal your city and its surroundings? And therefore mobs would unlikely actually be visible to you when they aren’t attacking your city. If we could see further away…maybe. If we could see goblin encampments or something then definitely.

Animals I believe will also have idle animations. As it is, the bunnies already have one.

my best guess, the fog can be cleared using your various exploration-types units… when the landscape is revealed, and perhaps only when you have a unit occupying the space, mobs within the area would be visible…

as you mentioned, standing around a camp, perhaps… or just milling about in the forest, etc. either way, it would be neat to see them randomly idle with a varying number of animations… :smile:

Yeah, it is interesting because it really does depend on how mobs and fog of war work. If we took Civ as an example, there are three states for fog of war: Visible, Explored and Unexplored. Visible is within/near to your territory or where your units can see and shows you everything; Explored where you have been but isn’t currently visible and you can only see the landscape features; Unexplored, where you haven’t been and can see nothing. If SH were to use a system somewhat similar to this then I don’t believe there would be a need for mob animations, as if they were in your territory or around your units as the (hostile) mobs would likely attack, no? (this is where my lack of understanding about the mob system does leave things somewhat unclear). The other two zones wouldn’t be able to show mobs. So either the mobs would be attacking you (therefore no idling) or you can’t see them.

Now it is perfectly plausible that SH might decide that Explored would show mobs. In this case it would make perfect sense to give them idle animations.

Or of course they may use a totally different fog of war system. I don’t know. I very much like the Civ one and it’d be awesome if they put a similar one in, but it is a topic I might try and craft a question out of for the next livestream…