v1.21.0-rc.4 - Story Chapter 2 Redux

[yanlong]

On 8/15/2025 at 8:10 PM, Maelstrom said:

That question gets asked a lot.  I don't understand why people are so enamored with steam.   It's extra annoinace to me.  Buy game from publisher on steam platform (which is only place to buy said coveted game) and have to download steam app to my computer in addition to the game.  Every so often the steam app fires off when I don't want it, I just want to play may game gosh darn it!

Maybe I'm just a gumpy old man, but all the new and "improved" way of doing things doesn't seem all that improved to me.  It was much easier to just buy a game through distributor of choice and enjoy game free from other people's fingers invading my pie.

Steam is a particularly useful software for most people. And steam “Multiplayer mode” can greatly improve efficiency and stability

 

[Krougal]

11 minutes ago, yanlong said:

Steam “Multiplayer mode” can greatly improve efficiency and stability

 

Yeah, I don't know how much use it would be for VS, but that is another great feature, letting Steam broker the connections instead of having to exchange IPs and fwd ports and handle authentication. Just click on invite a friend to join your game and boom done.

 

[yanlong]

11 minutes ago, Krougal said:

Yeah, I don't know how much use it would be for VS, but that is another great feature, letting Steam broker the connections instead of having to exchange IPs and fwd ports and handle authentication. Just click on invite a friend to join your game and boom done.

 

For computer novices, this does save a lot of trouble and time, and Steam also achieves low latency for cross-border networking in multiplayer mode.

[Rudometkin]

9 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Going to have to call @Rudometkin in here so he can explain the intent is an uncompromising survival game.  

I'm mostly staying out of this thread because of possible spoilers. But yes Vintage Story is an uncompromising wilderness survival game.

Tyron built Vintage Story precisely to be uncompromisingly challenging, with little to no regard to what people say. He saw to it that the official trailer of the game makes the challenging nature clear. The trailer has over 1 million views. Tyron decided that the first thing these hundreds of thousands of people would see, is this dialogue:

If you only do what is easy,

Your life will be hard.

Prepare yourself

For uncompromising

Wilderness survival

It doesn't get more straightforward than this.

[clseibold]

23 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

That's inherent in the Perlin function. All it does is define a curvy line between two points. The parameters determine how curvy the line is, and, consequently, the "traversability" of the terrain generated. A good way to think of it is a radio wave. Imagine the first octave is the base frequency, the carrier wave, and the second octave is the signal you are piggybacking on top of that, to add finer details. Now recurse that; add another octave to the signal, in essence making the signal itself a carrier wave for this third octave. The more octaves you use in your Perlin function, the finer the degree of detail the resulting wave exhibits.

First of all, there are two ways to make the land more traversible in the perlin noise function: change the frequency (like I mentioned before), or change the amplitude. Both work. Now, onto the more important stuff.

I don't remember giving the impression that I didn't know how the perlin function works. I'm well aware how it works. It was, in fact, my point - they changed the parameters of the perlin noise function(s) (you can overlap multiple perlin noise functions) to change the traversibility, and one of the ways to do this is to change the frequency, to spread out the land.

Which brought me to my point that I was originally responding to, which is that just looking at the land is much harder with a spread out land, which is why visualization tools are useful. Please don't take my words out of context.

23 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

It seems odd to have to repeat it; obviously, they did not intend to have the "realistic" terrain some users expect, but rather something that conveys the level of catastrophe the world endured, the un-worldliness of the setting. This wasn't just some minor zombie apocalypse that affected only the people; this was truly earth-shattering, shaking the very land itself in bizarre ways. There's no other reason to have landforms like "realisticflatlands" and a plethora of other flatlands, by implication, non-realistic. If they wanted something more earthlike, they would have done so. Perlin noise parameters that give earth-like results are pretty easy to find on-line. Have been for at least the last 25 years. At one time I used one to generate D&D maps.

You are assuming that every person who dislikes the generation wants it to be more natural. That's all I'll say on that. It's a big assumption.

You're oversimplifying worldgen, and thus using that simplification as the basis for why you think everything is completely planned out and perfect. And yet the developers just modified worldgen to make it more traversible, which means they believe they didn't get it right the first time. Which is fine, because that's how actual development works, not the romantic version you're trying to paint.

If the game is open source, then that's cool. I don't remember seeing its source code on github, but I didn't look very far. The mod api being open source is not the same thing, btw.

Regardless, not sure why you're being so condescending and presumptive towards me. Especially when all I said was if people found world gen issues, they can report them to the devs and they can figure out what to do with them. For you to imply I don't know this is a apocalyptic survival game, or that I don't know perlin noise when I had just told you I used it to program a game (from scratch), it's a really disrespectful tone. And for no legitimate reason too, other than to get back at people you find dumb. Well I'm not dumb, I just have different opinions than you.

P.S. You'd think that when I use words like "amplitude" and "frequency", you'd realize I know how perlin noise works, considering these are literally part of the perlin noise parameters you're talking about.

Edited August 17, 2025 by clseibold

[Thorfinn]

4 minutes ago, clseibold said:

If the game is open source, then that's cool. I don't remember seeing its source code on github, but I didn't look very far. The mod api being open source is not the same thing, btw.

If you've seen the api repo, all you have to do is go up one level to their main page with all the repos.

6 minutes ago, clseibold said:

Regardless, not sure why you're being so condescending towards me.

Not sure why I come off that way sometimes. I offered information at the level of understanding you seemed to be. In any event, it should help people who are less knowledgeable, and interested in changing worldgen, and understanding enough  background for it to make sense. But, really, it didn't occur to you to check up one level from the API? And I'd point out that the reminder that the API is not the same as the game source is even more condescending.

 

9 minutes ago, clseibold said:

And yet the developers just modified worldgen to make it more traversible, which means they believe they didn't get it right the first time.

That does not follow. That may mean they just compromised.

[clseibold]

19 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

I offered information at the level of understanding you seemed to be.

No, you're presuming my knowledge level without regard to the hints of information I've already provided that suggest I already knew that making the land more traversable would be done with the freaking perlin noise parameters! Which is exactly why you're being condescending - it's not just your tone, but your belief in other people being stupid that is driving your tone.

For example:

19 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

But, really, it didn't occur to you to check up one level from the API?

It did occur to me. And I had checked. I didn't check very thoroughly before because I didn't care, and I shouldn't have to care. What I can see is a vsapi, some mod examples, the survival mod, a repo for a build of the vintage story server, and the issues repository. And that's just at first glance, but usually the main source code repo would be in the popular repositories section. 

See what I mean by condescending? You're trying to tell a person who already knows how perlin noise works how it works. You're trying to tell a person who bought the game what the game is about. You're trying to pull in other people to this conversation to do the very same thing. And now you're telling me how to look up stuff on github, as if I haven't used github for decades now, especially considering I already explicitly told you I'm a programmer.

You clearly think everyone except yourself is stupid. Honestly, that's your own problem. I don't have to prove myself to you, of all people.

Quote

That does not follow. That may mean they just compromised.

Either they wanted to make the change, or they followed user feedback. Either way, it goes completely against your argument that the generation was completely planned and perfect, because taking user feedback usually means you find some value in it.

Edited August 17, 2025 by clseibold

[Thorfinn]

This is what irks me about what the world has morphed into. Everything is taken as a personal insult. Almost no one extends the benefit of the doubt, and assumes malice as the reason behind anything he takes offense to.

Peace.

[clseibold]

43 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

This is what irks me about what the world has morphed into.

Just have to say, this perfectly demonstrates exactly what I was talking about. From my perspective, your condescending tone comes from viewing the world cynically. You are not offering the benefit of the doubt to other people, and now you've taken your interactions with one person as an exemplifier of the entire world.

I have been trying to be nice here, but it is not lost on me that you felt the need to explain what the game was about to a person who bought the game, and then insulted my intelligence when you gave me the loaded question "it didn't occur to you to check up one level from the API?" after I already said "but I didn't look very far", a statement that suggests that I consciously chose not to look very far in the first place. If I consciously chose not to, that means the thought did occur to me.

But how you went from me consciously not choosing to "look very far" to me not knowing how to look at Github repos is really the entire problem here. You went from someone choosing not to do something to someone not knowing how to do something. 

I really don't care anymore. I'm just providing my point of view. To reduce it to "everything is taken as a personal insult" to suggest the world is terrible and everyone else is the problem is cynical, and it tells me you don't care about other people's perspectives, only your own. And I think this is consistent in how you dismiss user feedback, too.

Regardless, I don't want to spend my time arguing with you. Maybe the world isn't nearly as bad as you like to think it is, and maybe people are rightfully upset about things not because they are stupid or aren't extending the "benefit of the doubt", but because your actions do matter in the world and all humans have responsibilities. How you make someone feel, how you talk about them, how you interact with them, how you convey their actions or thoughts, do in fact matter. Think on that.

I'm not choosing malice as the reason for your actions, I just think you view yourself high above other people, frankly.

Edited August 17, 2025 by clseibold

[Thorfinn]

22 minutes ago, clseibold said:

You are not offering the benefit of the doubt to other people

See, that's exactly what I'm talking about! How the hell do you know what I'm thinking? What my intentions are? You simply assume the worst, whatever will most piss you off.

Peace.

[Krougal]

21 minutes ago, Thorfinn said:

See, that's exactly what I'm talking about! How the hell do you know what I'm thinking? What my intentions are? You simply assume the worst, whatever will most piss you off.

Peace.

This may be the pot calling the kettle black, but you frequently do come off as condescending, and honestly in this discussion I agree with @clseibold.

It generally doesn't bother me, as even when we disagree, I feel we generally have good arguments and you still bring something to the table.

I know at a very high level how perlin noise works, but I was not going to get involved in the discussion since I don't care to get down in the weeds of it either, however your assumption that the devs are satisfied with the world generation is fairly presumptuous.

They might have compromised? *GASP* In this "uncompromising survival game"? How dare they!

They might actually take feedback from their customer base to heart? Bastards!

Here is my moment of condescension: </sarcasm for the people too stupid to understand it, cause I know your trained monkey doesn't get it>

Edited August 17, 2025 by Krougal

[Krougal]

Oh, and furthermore, read the flippin'roadmap:

https://www.vintagestory.at/roadmap.html/

Improved world generation

• Very large scale patterns that alter the current world generation
• Regions of distinct flora and fauna
• Richer caves
• Experiment with river generation
• Rich ocean life
• Procedural dungeons