Sign Maker (The Maker of Signs)

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Hello World! I’ve been browsing the ole forums for a while now, and decided I should contribute something for a change…

tl;dr: sign smith makes signs; aesthetic/functional

As I’m sure we all know there is a copious amount of villager progression classes. Seeing how this is a city building game, I didn’t see too many classes specifically designed towards the building of… well, cities! There are some that could be considered city-specific, ie the geomancer who may be used for terraforming a nice piece of land on which to build a city, but what after that? The carpenter, mason, and blacksmith all seem to be contributors to the city through furniture and workshops and whatnot, but does this take a secondary role to augmenting other villagers (carpenter crafting tools to upgrade other villagers, blacksmith making weapons, etc)?

Surely by now you see where I’m headed and I’m sure you’re eagerly awaiting the monumental class that will be so revolutionary that the team just has to work it into the game! So let’s do it!!!

This revolutionary class is… the sign maker! I actually prefer sign smith because it rolls off the tongue a bit easier (and you can say it five times fast). I can just hear all the jaws dropping. “Brilliant!” they say. But I digress.

So what’s this mystical smith of signs do, you say? Well… he makes signs. I originally thought this was a purely aesthetic concept, but it could have a bit of function to it. For example, let’s pretend that our villagers are dumb. Not just dumb, but D-U-M. Even though they’ve lived in this hovel/village/town/city for their entire lives, they can’t remember where the blacksmith is and they bumble around looking for it. They are pathed all over this place looking. If only there were… BOOM! Signs!

On a more serious note, you could have signs for everything - directions, buildings, even streets if you were so inclined. They could be purely aesthetic or improve a trait of the villagers using them (walk speed?). Yadda yadda.

The Radiant team has put (at least) some inkling of thought into the idea of signs - on their media page, the image in the 2nd row, 3rd column (the jail?) has a… granted it’s more of a banner, but same idea! I also made a bad one in Qubicle, but alas, being the nub that I am don’t know how to post it (and am not sure I want to)

Sorry for the novel!

Feedback? Bring it on!

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Personally, I feel like the sign smith is maybe too specialized of a role for something that maybe doesn’t need it’s own role at all. I think the carpenter (or any building class, really), would be more than capable of building signs. It’s more a matter of creating the sign object(s) and having them as an item in game.

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I like the idea, or should I say, I like the outcome of the idea, being having your own signs etc.

However, could this be achieved by say having a “Painter” class, or something similar. The painter would be able to decorate the signs that were made by the carpenter, but he would also be able to paint your buildings, armour, weaponry, etc etc.

A ‘sign maker’ class itself feels a bit of a niche class,or as @spu has graciously ninja’d above me [quote=“Spu, post:2, topic:2065”]
I feel like the sign smith is maybe too specialized of a role
[/quote]

Granted the ‘painter’ class would fall into a similar category but he would seemingly have a lot more functionality, and open up a lot more customisation for your city?

Just my thoughts on it!

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i love the idea of having signs/banners and other cosmetic items we can use to flesh out a city… im not sure this requires a specific unit to craft however… i like where @Geoffers747 is headed with a broader “painter” class too…

we have a (somewhat) related thread going on over here as well…

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Could both the sign maker and painter perhaps be combined or delegated to a customization class tree? I remember an architect being mentioned on the forums, as well as a sculptor, and they can both open new ways to customize your city and really make it ‘yours’.

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Makes sense to me. Painter provides purely cosmetic changes to the town… I’d buy it. I definitely agree with the niche thing. Guess I got too caught up in it and didn’t look at the big picture >.<

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I also thought that a painter class would be nice to have. which could make paintings and paint buildings. Because blue wooden roofs by default does not make sense to me :smile:.

I was imagining a class, which starts as a brusher which paints buildings with dyes he makes himself. Houses are build in the natural color of the material, like brown for wood, and the brusher paints them in the same way as a builder builds (voxel by voxel). Probably he has a ‘reservoir’ or bucket with dye which can paint say 20 voxels untill it is empty.

The brusher then evolves into a painter which can make paintings.

I wanted to make a seperate post about it, but since you guys brought it up.
This is a picture I made some time ago.

I even started searching how they made paint in the ancients to resemble these (and for satisfying my curiousity :smile:) :

Materials needed for painting:
Wood for stretcher bar made by carpenter
Hemp or cotton for canvas, made by the farmer/weaver.
Lead paint

part of the dyes I found:
Black: Charcoal for black pigment (need wood and gets burned)

Yellow: Yellow ochre found at ochre rocks

Red: Red ochre by heating the yellow ochre. (vaporizes the water and become red) or from plant madder.

Green: Malachite for green pigment found underground (minerals crushed, ground to powder and washed)

Blue: from plant Indigofera tinctoria and woad plant (lower concentration)
Dye is obtained from the processing of the plant’s leaves. They are soaked in water and fermented in order to convert the glycosideindican naturally present in the plant to the blue dye indigotin. The precipitate from the fermented leaf solution is mixed with a strong base such as lye, pressed into cakes, dried, and powdered. The powder is then mixed with various other substances to produce different shades of blue and purple.

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not only have you done some great legwork in putting together how a painter might work (+1 internet points, by the way), you’ve also thrown in a voxel beret, and a french mustache… here, have another internet point!

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That mustachio. I can’t even. I wish there was a mustache icon.

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yay, 2 internet points :smile:

Closest I see is is :man:, but is not a real epic moustache, More the am-too-lazy-to-shave moustache :109:.
They have a epic beard one :neckbeard: heheh.

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lol Somehow I think that I would be mining for days and find nothing but painting materials. But its a great idea, not only you can level him up to make better paintings (and use the paintings for decoration or trade) but you can use him in the customization of the buildings as he goes along with the workers to paint all the blocks you chose to be painted.

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was just watching the recent flash stream, and these caught my eye… im sure i’ve seen them before, but the signs look great… thought this might be a good place to show them off… :smile:

as it stands now, the carpenter makes these…

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