Stonehearth goes 1.0!

[sdee]

http://www.stonehearth.net/leaving-the-nest/

Happy to answer any questions you all have here and on stream in 30 min.

[Kittyodoom]

Animal Trainer

A prototype exists, but we were never able to make it satisfying from a gameplay perspective. Cut from the game.

Magma Smith

We have investigated this, but whenever we think of something they would do, it seems to work better as part of the blacksmith or geomancer. Cut from the game.

Engineer

Currently available.

Aww…

Geomancer

Will be in the 1.0 release.

Seasons

Will be in the 1.0 release.

Oooo…

Dwarves

Cut from the game. Sorry about this one; we were daunted by the amount of work required to significantly re-imagine gameplay for subterranean dwellers.

AWWW!! Okay, anyone willing to try to mod this, I am most happy to start throwing model assets at you for it…

[No_Name]

i’m going to cry (adding more characters)
need this crying face with a smile xD

[DaniAngione]

in shock

[dalabo]

So there will be updates for Candledark and Frostfeast?

Festivals

Candledark and Frostfeast were completed as mods by the amazing community members Froggy and RepeatPan. We’ve also included town celebration events as part of the town tier quests, completing a building, or re-embarking.

[Banto]

Kinda sad to see this happen. I’m really happy you made this game and all the effort and hard work you put into this game. I imagen this game could have become really successful with more time and money to invest in it. It’s kind of the Minecraft RTS game with a ton more potential.

I hope for alot of big things by the end of this month for 1.0 else a bit disappointed considering there is very little gameplay content. It’s fun to design but defiantly needed more content and a lot of stuff.

Only read about half of the text so far tho. very long
Read it all now

[Solus]

Steph crying on the stream Breaks my heart.

My heart and thanks go out to all of you! An amazing team, thanks for all the hard work you put into this. It’s crazy and strange to see a game you and the community have invested coming to a close.

There’s a lot of things that could be said here, things missed, things gained, and so many others, but overall, thanks for the fun ride, good luck on your future endeavors and the finishing of Stonehearth.

[Moai]

It is a tremendous achievement, what you guys have got here, and with the resources you were given. Best with everything.

[apoch1999]

very very disappointed… as part of the kickstarter we were promised free range of movement across multiple biomes, dungeon quests, global quests, and a sprawling adventure… so far we are limited to a small region in relation to the entire world and quests that amount to “defend the settlement”…this game is in no way near complete in accordance to what was stated at KS.

[sdee]

@dalabo

So there will be updates for Candledark and Frostfeast?

No updates planned, alas. But the most recent versions of them should still run with the current version of the game.

@Solus

There’s a lot of things that could be said here, things missed, things gained, and so many others, but overall, thanks for the fun ride, good luck on your future endeavors and the finishing of Stonehearth.

Thanks so much. I really appreciate all the support over the (now many) years

@Banto

Kinda sad to see this happen. I’m really happy you made this game and all the effort and hard work you put into this game. I imagen this game could have become really successful with more time and money to invest in it. It’s kind of the Minecraft RTS game with a ton more potential.

I hope for alot of big things by the end of this month for 1.0 else a bit disappointed considering there is very little gameplay content. It’s fun to design but defiantly needed more content and a lot of stuff.

Yeah, goodbyes are hard! Thanks for all the streaming. For the end of the month, and since we started the beta, expect, the titan, the northern alliance/glacier, the rabbit people, the geomancer, seasons, performance, bug fixes, and some probably early form of the mac port.

@oldmacman

After all the protestations about how finishing the Windows version would speed up the ports, someone has decided that Linux users deserve nothing.

Yeah, that would have been me. The mac port really did get a speed boost, but given the existence of wine wrappers, we traded the linux port for more fixes to building, which nobody else could do. I’m very sorry for everyone who backed as a statement about Linux support. if this is you, please reach out to us via Kickstarter DM and we’ll see what we can do to make it right.

[paulthegreat]

Any chance that the Ember library being used will be upgraded to a more recent version? 1.8 is older than the oldest version of documentation on the official website (1.10).

[epicdude312]

@Kittyodoom

Okay, anyone willing to try to mod this, I am most happy to start throwing model assets at you for it…

Count me in! I was actually planning to make a couple dwarven kingdoms to go with some of my biomes anyway, and I’m a terrible modeler, so I’d be happy to have models made by someone who’s actually good at art

[Scal]

I really enjoyed this game and what it could be and I have a profound respect for everyone involved.

That said I remember when people were worried when Riot acquired the Studio and some important people left Stonehearth’s development. I won’t say they were right, but I can’t exactly say there were wrong either.

I’m not angry, just disappointed.

[Jade_Elizabeth]

This is really surprising. This doesn’t feel early access but it doesn’t feel finished either. It’s missing something.

[Clawdius]

Stonehearth isn’t a bad game, for the genre, but I feel like it is still quite buggy and doesn’t perform well on my machine. I guess I need a better CPU, but the fact that the live team is going to be composed of three people fixing bugs… Makes me think that I either get a huge number of bugs (maybe I’ll blank my install and drop a fresh install or something?) or the game is still going to be super buggy. I have mostly been running the unstable versions for the last few years though, and that’s kind of what they’re for… but when I’ve checked back on the live versions they’ve always racked up a dozen or so errors very nearly as quickly as the versions I was playing so I’m not really sure what I think about that.

It’s a shame that the simple gameplay promise of a large world to explore in multiplayer and complete quest modules as a means to progress didn’t pan out. Whether it was engine issues, the complexity it would have added, or whatever… mod support doesn’t feel like it’s quite what was promised in the Kickstarter. The game is pretty wide of that mark, which is disappointing. That being said, I’ve spent a lot of time with Stonehearth and gotten a lot of enjoyment from it when I wasn’t beset by bugs.

I call to mind the quote by Niccolò Machiavelli

“For since men for the most part follow in the footsteps and imitate the actions of others, and yet are unable to adhere exactly to those paths which others have taken, or attain to the virtues of those whom they would resemble, the wise man should always follow the roads that have been trodden by the great, and imitate those who have most excelled, so that if he cannot reach their perfection, he may at least acquire something of its savour. Acting in this like the skilful archer, who seeing that the object he would hit is distant, and knowing the range of his bow, takes aim much above the destined mark; not designing that his arrow should strike so high, but that flying high it may alight at the point intended.”

Since Stonehearth was trying something more often done with far less complex graphics and spaces, in an engine made by the team, and not just building effectively voxel Dwarf Fortress in a standardized engine… I feel like it’s taken what they were able to do and sunk a lot more time (and likely funding) into Stonehearth than it was ever expected to require back during the Kickstarter. I’ve backed a lot of Kickstarter projects, and I’ve seen some fizzle away or worse. Radiant gave a definite good faith effort, and in the end even if it wasn’t practical to deliver on some of the original vision, and with mods and over time maybe some more of the potential of the game can be realized.

I’ve got really high hopes for a fairly stable 1.0 (especially given the list of additions, Geomancer, Clan Amberstone), and while I haven’t given multiplayer a shot yet that’s why I bought the game in the first place so I’ll have to take a crack at it. I’d have loved to see the team stick around and flesh out some cool drop-in campaign stuff, randomized to fire after the initial campaign ended. Caves that open up with enemies to fight, enemies that come from under the water or beam in through teleport gates or what have you, try to simulate a bit of what was hoped for with modules… but that’s nothing that can’t be attempted by the community I suppose.

For what it’s worth, I would probably still have bought the game if I hadn’t backed the Kickstarter, and I might have been happier with what was here if I hadn’t had visions of huge kingdoms and massive enemy conflicts, sending armies out to deal with module quests and so on stuck in my head all this time. After having loved that initial idea so much I can’t help but be a bit sad to know Stonehearth won’t be that.

[DaniAngione]

Now that I’m a little less crying inside, I’d like to call dibs on the Dwarven kingdom mod if no one minds

ALSO, to all great modders out there, let’s keep this game alive through modding? Please?
If Neverwinter community managed to keep it alive for more than a decade, we can do that too, right?

[sdee]

@paulthegreat

Any chance that the Ember library being used will be upgraded to a more recent version? 1.8 is older than the oldest version of documentation on the official website (1.10).

IF WE DID THAT WE WOULD HAVE TO BASICALLY UPDATE THE WHOLE UI. (Sorry, it’s a sore point for everyone who has worked on the the UI. Which is the whole dev team. We really wanted to put an item in the game called The Ember of Eternal Frustration after all our pain with the updating views, but eh, life is short and who knows, maybe the Ember people might play it and feel bad. )

@Scal

That said I remember when people were worried when Riot acquired the Studio and some important people left Stonehearth’s development. I won’t say they were right, but I can’t exactly say there were wrong either.

I talked a bit more about this on the stream tonight, but the tldr is that Riot has other priorities right now, so we couldn’t be in development forever. That said, Riot’s mission is to be the most player focused company in the world, and the executive team really wanted us to do right by you, and have a sane plan for finishing the game in a way that did justice to your investment. So… here we are, at the end of the sanest plan we could find.

@Clawdius

For what it’s worth, I would probably still have bought the game if I hadn’t backed the Kickstarter, and I might have been happier with what was here if I hadn’t had visions of huge kingdoms and massive enemy conflicts, sending armies out to deal with module quests and so on stuck in my head all this time. After having loved that initial idea so much I can’t help but be a bit sad to know Stonehearth won’t be that.

Yeah, I hear you. If there’s a FOURTH lesson I will personally take from this, it’s to really clearly define what you’re building before you build it. Or tell people to back it. T___T. There was just so much room for interpretation, that it couldn’t be all the games everyone envisioned, and in the end, we chose something more people focused and intimate, than something kingdom focused and huge.

[Scal]

When I read the title “Leaving the Nest” I got excited, I thought it was going to be about a new update which would let us explore other lands…

Edit:

@sdee

I talked a bit more about this on the stream tonight, but the tldr is that Riot has other priorities right now, so we couldn’t be in development forever. That said, Riot’s mission is to be the most player focused company in the world, and the executive team really wanted us to do right by you, and have a sane plan for finishing the game in a way that did justice to your investment. So… here we are, at the end of the sanest plan we could find.

From an economic point of view - I understand.
From an emotional point of view - I grieve.

[sdee]

Right also, I just made a post to a steam thread about this; if you have a save where perf is bad even though you’re at the min or recommended spec and/or if something is weird, make a post about it and SEND IT LIKE, RIGHT NOW.

[epicdude312]

Well, I’m still getting this: Extra, bold lines appearing in grid view

Not sure whether it’s something with the game or something with my graphics card. I haven’t had any problems in the games I make with OpenGL (in C++), and as far as I know, this game is made in OpenGL (unless it’s DirectX?) using C++, so I don’t really know what’s up…

EDIT: Forgot to mention that I’m getting this in A24+ stable. I don’t know whether this is fixed in unstable, but it’s late right now and I don’t really have time to test it out yet.