A Discussion about the decision to pickup Hytale and include it into Vintage Story as a Mode instead of making a separate game, & on if picking up Hytale is a good idea. RESPECTFUL RESPONSES ONLY.

[Krougal]

1 hour ago, CastIronFabric said:

so we should just lock this thread because nobodies opinion on this matters.

 

It's just the usual sillyness that tends to happen in these kind of threads.

It should always be understood that opinions are like assholes, and in the end devs are going to do what they decide to do.

It doesn't mean we don't have any influence over that (some products more, some less). These things just really shouldn't need to be said.

People still like to parrot these meaningless phrases, either to make themselves feel better, validated or just because they are tired of a discussion.

I think Echo just has "topic fatigue"

[CastIronFabric]

13 minutes ago, Krougal said:

It's just the usual sillyness that tends to happen in these kind of threads.

It should always be understood that opinions are like assholes, and in the end devs are going to do what they decide to do.

It doesn't mean we don't have any influence over that (some products more, some less). These things just really shouldn't need to be said.

People still like to parrot these meaningless phrases, either to make themselves feel better, validated or just because they are tired of a discussion.

I think Echo just has "topic fatigue"

near perfect response about someone who is being hyperbolic.

 

thank you

[Echo Weaver]

Yeah, conversation fatigue from decades of game forums.

Just so long as everyone here treats the devs with respect if this comes up again on another official thread. Nobody has enough access to information about the dev team to have any idea what they're talking about, period. 

 

[Katherine K]

On 8/19/2025 at 11:19 AM, CastIronFabric said:

Just fork the game out to a separate experience and go....share updates just like Space Engineers and Medieval Engineers did.

That doesn't work quite like this in practice. Even in Keen's case, ME and SE didn't quite share the features. ME is a bit like a 1.5 version of the engine. And it's a big part of why the update to SE2 took such a separate path. They share parts of the engine that might even start out as exactly the same engine, but they always diverge.

I've worked on several games that shared an in-house engine forked to two separate branches. Notable examples include Star Trek Online and Neverwinter at Cryptic and Marvel's Avengers and [Redacted] at Crystal. Even when both games are pre-release, as was the case when I worked at Crystal, the changes from one branch don't always make it to the other. We struggled with that at Crystal, because each project is running on its own schedule, having code locks at different times, meaning features can only be cherry-picked at specific times. If something got dropped, and it's not critical for your game, do you go back and pick it up? Or do you worry about getting features you do need for the game ready?

And it gets so much worse post-ship. Neverwinter ended up with its own animation system, that internally was known as v2. And we had a core team responsible just for the engine. And I still basically had to maintain two separate animation systems until I got a green light to back-port v2 to STO like two years after Neverwinter's release. And it was a project.

 

VS is in an amazing spot regarding this. Engine and game mode are genuinely separate projects. Survival's entire code is up on github posted officially, because it's that separate from the engine. You actually have to have the engine team maintain features for both in parallel, because you're not just starting with a common code base, you are sharing the engine. And sure, when you release it to the public, you could make them separate executables and have them marketed and sold separately. But this has nothing to do with how the game is made. That's just about the wrapper, the presentation. The game would still be made as an adventure mode on top of the shared VS engine. That's what we're talking about here. Wasting time at this juncture pretending that you're treating them as separate games would be performative at best. At worst, it'd actually be demotivating to the teams working on it.

[CastIronFabric]

14 hours ago, Katherine K said:

That doesn't work quite like this in practice. Even in Keen's case, ME and SE didn't quite share the features. ME is a bit like a 1.5 version of the engine. And it's a big part of why the update to SE2 took such a separate path. They share parts of the engine that might even start out as exactly the same engine, but they always diverge.

I've worked on several games that shared an in-house engine forked to two separate branches. Notable examples include Star Trek Online and Neverwinter at Cryptic and Marvel's Avengers and [Redacted] at Crystal. Even when both games are pre-release, as was the case when I worked at Crystal, the changes from one branch don't always make it to the other. We struggled with that at Crystal, because each project is running on its own schedule, having code locks at different times, meaning features can only be cherry-picked at specific times. If something got dropped, and it's not critical for your game, do you go back and pick it up? Or do you worry about getting features you do need for the game ready?

And it gets so much worse post-ship. Neverwinter ended up with its own animation system, that internally was known as v2. And we had a core team responsible just for the engine. And I still basically had to maintain two separate animation systems until I got a green light to back-port v2 to STO like two years after Neverwinter's release. And it was a project.

 

VS is in an amazing spot regarding this. Engine and game mode are genuinely separate projects. Survival's entire code is up on github posted officially, because it's that separate from the engine. You actually have to have the engine team maintain features for both in parallel, because you're not just starting with a common code base, you are sharing the engine. And sure, when you release it to the public, you could make them separate executables and have them marketed and sold separately. But this has nothing to do with how the game is made. That's just about the wrapper, the presentation. The game would still be made as an adventure mode on top of the shared VS engine. That's what we're talking about here. Wasting time at this juncture pretending that you're treating them as separate games would be performative at best. At worst, it'd actually be demotivating to the teams working on it.

Let me put it this way.

I do not know of any game that does a 'mode' that is an entirely different experience.

The closest thing I can think of is 7 days to die with a story mode which is a handcrafted map instead of random.

I do not know if this game is going to be a story mode or not but I do not know of ANY developer that creates effectively what is an entirely different game experience and world by installing it into the existing fork of the game

Zero..

Now...consider this. The new 'mode' as a mod means when you play that mode you will have to turn off all your other mods or you will have to create a new data folder with a link that points to just this instance of the game experience. All game files share the same mods.

I do not think that is a seamless experience for the players

 

also, I think you understand that if you have one full complete game code all the way up to the UI and you have to write conditionals for every single thing you display, every single game loop reactions that its going to be a mess really quick.

Not to mention are we going to just skip over the entire mechanics of forging if the new game mode does not have it? How about cooking? temperature control etc etc etc.

Unless the game is going to have pretty much nearly all the same game mechanics then we would have to write code to skip code that should not even be in the project to begin with. Then you would have a code base that effectively has EVERYTHING both game modes has and then you would have conditionals on pretty much every single method in the game.

 

I suppose you could create all the methods for one game mode and leave all the methods alone for the existing VS experience. Yes you could do that, however at that point the question becomes...why? why would one not fork instead of creating a full set of methods for one mode vs the other mode.

I have seen this done, I have rearchitected in some cases because (for example) we really did not need one PROC that tried to do everything, not only was it a coding mess, it performed bad.

Edited August 21, 2025 by CastIronFabric

[CastIronFabric]

19 hours ago, Echo Weaver said:

Yeah, conversation fatigue from decades of game forums.

Just so long as everyone here treats the devs with respect if this comes up again on another official thread. Nobody has enough access to information about the dev team to have any idea what they're talking about, period. 

 

I want to point this out for observation sake, please do not consider this an attack just an observation. I considered not saying anything but it just feels wrong.

You previously just told me (paraphrased) 'this is how the developers are going to do it and that is that'

now you are saying we do not know what the developers are going to do for sure.

 

[Dark Thoughts]

On 8/12/2025 at 5:46 PM, cosmobeau said:

Do we sincerely live in an era where when people are upset over a decision a company makes, in a industry that has failed products all the time, is called "outrage culture"? Lmao 

Your posts tone & length over a completely hypothetical scenario with a bunch of made up straw man arguments is definitely outrage culture.

On 8/13/2025 at 11:52 PM, Teo9631 said:

Consumers these days. You don't have a shred of critical thinking. I really hate to be offensive, but...

No buts, you already thrown an insult at me so you can't hate to be offensive that much.

On 8/13/2025 at 11:52 PM, Teo9631 said:

We are upset because we bought an early access product and we expect it to reach a full release one day.

Maybe wait for a full release before you buy then? I don't even know how many years & decades we have to explain this to people like you. Buying into games that are unfinished is always a risk, regardless of potential other projects or not. And you're not entitled for Anego Studios, or any other development studio, to only work on one single project that you personally are interested in. It's their company and their budget to handle how they see fit.

On 8/13/2025 at 11:52 PM, Teo9631 said:

There are some clear indicators that this decision was made more on sentimentality than rationality, which brings us a risk of jeopardizing the product we invested in.

You can say the same thing about VS being born out of sentimentality, just like any other video game with passionate developers. Otherwise this would've simply stayed a MC mod, or never even got that far anyway, since it was obviously very heavily inspired by TFC.

On 8/13/2025 at 11:52 PM, Teo9631 said:

Another thing is that anything even remotely connected to Hytale smells like trouble. Just look up the game's development history—there was clearly an extremely high level of incompetence involved.

You think Hytale is cursed because it was mismanaged? If you have that little faith in this development studio, then why even bother with Vintage Story?

On 8/13/2025 at 11:52 PM, Teo9631 said:

What is there to not understand? There are literally no simpler terms to explain this to you

Maybe try to be not so illogical. Then people can make more sense out of your future points. Until then I just see the typical entitled whining that I've seen way too much over the last decades of video game development.

[Koobze]

I don't think there's anything wrong with the approach, and it has been successful for many other companies - just look at the big names like Unreal and Quake? They started as a game engine and game built together before at some point diverging into an engine that's worked on by one core group, and multiple games using that engine - some built in-house and some licensed to other developers to use. Seems like a really great template to follow.

[Thorfinn]

1 hour ago, CastIronFabric said:

I do not know of any game that does a 'mode' that is an entirely different experience.

This was an aspirational goal with minetest back when I was submitting hundreds of PRs for it. It looks as though they reached more or less that point , and renamed themselves Luanti. Incidentally, lots of the same discussion came up there, and I ended up walking away because some people got positively vitriolic about insisting no one produced games this way.

[Echo Weaver]

1 hour ago, CastIronFabric said:

I want to point this out for observation sake, please do not consider this an attack just an observation. I considered not saying anything but it just feels wrong.

You previously just told me (paraphrased) 'this is how the developers are going to do it and that is that'

now you are saying we do not know what the developers are going to do for sure.

What I was trying to say is that nobody has enough information to judge the devs' decision.

I don't claim to know the devs' decisions in any detail, just that most of the decisions they make as they pursue the project will be based on information we don't have.

[CastIronFabric]

14 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

This was an aspirational goal with minetest back when I was submitting hundreds of PRs for it. It looks as though they reached more or less that point , and renamed themselves Luanti. Incidentally, lots of the same discussion came up there, and I ended up walking away because some people got positively vitriolic about insisting no one produced games this way.

So I know of some mods of games that turned into separate games (such as this one).

But I am unaware of any project in which an 'entirely different game experience' was incorporated into the existing game as a mode.

I know SE has 'scenarios' and 7 days to die has a dedicated story map but I am not aware of any game by name that does what we are talking about here which is to create an entirely different game experience.

I would like to know some names of some games that I can refer to in order to have a better understanding but again, not a mod of a game that was eventually turned into a game later nor a senecio, but a game mode that was from the start explicitly designed to be 'completely different experience'

maybe the Roblox platform is a good example? I do not know Roblox very well so I can not say for sure.

Edited August 21, 2025 by CastIronFabric

[Thorfinn]

11 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

What I was trying to say is that nobody has enough information to judge the devs' decision.

That is a way culture has evolved which does not typically have good outcomes. Hayek called it the local knowledge problem, that unless you are intimately involved, in the smallest details, you cannot rationally make a good decision.

Or as we put it when I was a kid, before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. Because then you are a mile away. And you have his shoes. 

[CastIronFabric]

1 minute ago, Thorfinn said:

That is a way culture has evolved which does not typically have good outcomes. Hayek called it the local knowledge problem, that unless you are intimately involved, in the smallest details, you cannot rationally make a good decision.

Or as we put it when I was a kid, before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. Because then you are a mile away. And you have his shoes. 

ok I do not want to beat a dead horse here but here is what @Echo Weaver said originally:

I do not read that as someone who is saying 'we do not know what the decisions are' but rahter 'here is the decision as discussed and that is that'

did I read it wrong?

I'm sorry, but you don't have to agree it's a good idea. What you think just don't matter.

The only people qualified to make this decision are making it. This ceaseless armchair quaterbacking is pointless.

The only way anyone's opinion matters is if they start their own company and do it their way.

[CastIronFabric]

2 minutes ago, CastIronFabric said:

ok I do not want to beat a dead horse here but, here is what @Echo Weaver said originally:

I do not read that as someone who is saying 'we do not know what the decisions are' but rahter 'here is the decision as discussed and that is that'

did I read it wrong?

Quote

 

I'm sorry, but you don't have to agree it's a good idea. What you think just don't matter.

The only people qualified to make this decision are making it. This ceaseless armchair quaterbacking is pointless.

The only way anyone's opinion matters is if they start their own company and do it their way. 

 

 

Edited August 21, 2025 by CastIronFabric

[Thorfinn]

5 minutes ago, CastIronFabric said:

But I am unaware of any project in which an 'entirely different game experience' was incorporated into the existing game as a mode.

But that's exactly what minetest was. Just a standard voxel game, similar in structure to VS, but coded in Lua rather than C#. When I parted ways, the core group (typically a bad organizational structure; minetest was no exception) was contemplating pulling all their game code and bundling it into what VS is evidently calling a "mode", which is a little confusing, because so far "mode" uses the same assets, just different settings.

Yes, I think it's going to involve the use of a few more directories. I also think that is going to be transparent to the user. That's just a part of being EA -- you have to be a little accepting of works in progress. If you are not, maybe EA is not your thing.

[Echo Weaver]

15 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

That is a way culture has evolved which does not typically have good outcomes. Hayek called it the local knowledge problem, that unless you are intimately involved, in the smallest details, you cannot rationally make a good decision.

Eh, I don't think you can take an absolutist position on this either way. You can never know everything that might be useful, but if you know next-to-nothing, your opinion is probably worth less than the pixels used to display it. The world is filled with people talking out their butts, and it doesn't make their insights useful or their decisions "good."

I spent years in a sort of existential crisis on how one could have confidence in one's opinions on big issues enough to say, advocate or demonstrate, when there is no way to have ALL the information that would inform your opinion. The conclusion I reached is that big opinions should be reached with caution, not because having an opinion on imperfect information is bad, but that once you really jump in on an opinion and act on it, your ego is involved and it's going to get more and more painful to change course.

Adventure Mode, of course, is not what I'd call a big opinion . I think it falls into the category of, "The lower the stakes, the bigger the drama," or something.

Having opinions on what's IN this game makes perfect sense, even though we have very little knowledge of what led the devs to make the decisions they did. We have plenty of experience on the outcome.

Having a strong, emotionally invested opinion on Anego's business and structural decisions is just making stuff up and then fighting about it.

15 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Or as we put it when I was a kid, before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. Because then you are a mile away. And you have his shoes. 

Edited August 21, 2025 by Echo Weaver

[CastIronFabric]

6 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

But that's exactly what minetest was. Just a standard voxel game, similar in structure to VS, but coded in Lua rather than C#. When I parted ways, the core group (typically a bad organizational structure; minetest was no exception) was contemplating pulling all their game code and bundling it into what VS is evidently calling a "mode", which is a little confusing, because so far "mode" uses the same assets, just different settings.

Yes, I think it's going to involve the use of a few more directories. I also think that is going to be transparent to the user. That's just a part of being EA -- you have to be a little accepting of works in progress. If you are not, maybe EA is not your thing.

I looked it up and I think you are incorrect.

minestest is a gaming engine. Not a standalone full game that also has another stand alone full game experience attached to it.

lets all try to be in good faith here, please.

 

[Thorfinn]

3 minutes ago, Echo Weaver said:

Having opinions on what's IN this game makes perfect sense, even though we have very little knowledge of what led the devs to make the decisions they did. We have plenty of experience on the outcome.

That's very true. Only you have the specialized knowledge of what you find to be good and bad points of the game. Thus the value of player feedback. That does not need to be an endless repeat of the same points. Sometimes I'm guilty of that, too. I try to refrain, only repeating myself when I think my interlocutor has misunderstood my point, but I'm human. *Shrug*

[Thorfinn]

1 minute ago, CastIronFabric said:

I looked it up and I think you are incorrect.

minestest is a gaming engine. Not a standalone full game

LOL! It is now. It wasn't a decade ago.

Your Google Fu has failed you, Grasshopper.

[CastIronFabric]

Just now, Thorfinn said:

That's very true. Only you have the specialized knowledge of what you find to be good and bad points of the game. Thus the value of player feedback. That does not need to be an endless repeat of the same points. Sometimes I'm guilty of that, too. I try to refrain, only repeating myself when I think my interlocutor has misunderstood my point, but I'm human. *Shrug*

this is circular.

in one case its 'nobody knows what the decision is'

then its 'this is the decision they have made'

then back again. or I am reading this completely wrong.

[CastIronFabric]

Just now, Thorfinn said:

LOL! It is now. It wasn't a decade ago.

Your Google Fu has failed you, Grasshopper.

if you want to say the internet is wrong that is fine.

but I think we both know what I am actually referring to when I say a separate game experience within an already established game 

[Thorfinn]

1 minute ago, CastIronFabric said:

this is circular.

in one case its 'nobody knows what the decision is'

then its 'this is the decision they have made'

then back again. or I am reading this completely wrong.

You will have to ask someone else. I haven't been following that particular part of the discussion that closely.

[Echo Weaver]

5 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

That's very true. Only you have the specialized knowledge of what you find to be good and bad points of the game. Thus the value of player feedback. That does not need to be an endless repeat of the same points. Sometimes I'm guilty of that, too. I try to refrain, only repeating myself when I think my interlocutor has misunderstood my point, but I'm human. *Shrug*

BTW: "You" in that essay was the general you, not your opinion in specific. As I think about it, I could have been more insulting than I intended 

[Thorfinn]

7 minutes ago, CastIronFabric said:

but I think we both know what I am actually referring to when I say a separate game experience within an already established game 

Yes, and that's what minetest was!!! What can't you understand about that?

7 minutes ago, CastIronFabric said:

a separate game experience within an already established game 

That's what they were struggling with, because they did not want that engine to only ever be minetest. As the name suggests, it was a test case for a minecraft-like implementation on a more generalized game engine. Their decision was to remove the minetest code from the engine download, and make you find the original game in their ModDB. Or maybe they went with GameDB. I don't know how that all turned out.

Because of how they structured themselves, it meant that no game ever "shipped" complete -- you had to download both and engine and a game. Which I thought would probably be too confusing. Not why I left, but about the same time.

Edited August 21, 2025 by Thorfinn

[CastIronFabric]

8 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

Yes, and that's what minetest was!!! What can't you understand about that?

That's what they were struggling with, because they did not want that engine to only ever be minetest. As the name suggests, it was a test case for a minecraft-like implementation on a more generalized game engine. Their decision was to remove the minetest code from the engine download, and make you find the original game in their ModDB. Because of how they structured themselves, it meant that no game "shipped" complete -- you had to download both and engine and a game. Which I thought would probably be too confusing. Not why I left, but about the same time.

sorry I cant weigh in on that example intelligently because everyone I look on the internet it says minetest is a game engine, not a game. Even their own page says that as a title.

I am not saying you are wrong, I am just saying I can not address that example intelligently.

 

having said that I think what we are talking about here is fundamentally different. I think there is a difference between the question of 'should we have Medieval engineers be an option within Space Engineers' and that of a game engine designed specifically to be modded into different game experiences.

I guess Roblox is another example. I am not sure VS is really that but maybe it could become something like that.

 

Edited August 21, 2025 by CastIronFabric