Omega Haxors

The save file is going to be the hardest part. I run a similar setup (very limited but extremely fast memory) and I'm constantly hitting into OOM issues when the world gets too big. For whatever reason the game INSISTS that you save to the same drive that the game itself runs on, even when you set the primary directory to a hard drive. Also I don't think RAM is as fast as you think it is. A solid state drive is going to give you pretty much the highest performance you can get, and much cheaper.

I'm driving the tank to your house to appropriate your toothbrush and other private property as we speak

I will have to admit, it's refreshing to see an AI proponent take the criticism on the chin rather than using it as an excuse to speedrun a crashout session It might be a good idea to reconsider your neo-aristocratic view of the world before it causes substantial damage to your public image. Nobody likes a snob. Ah... a capitalist. Then I'm afraid your material conditions will alienate yourself everyone here. I would encourage everyone to cease dialogue before things get messy.

Your contempt is clear here. Nothing we say is going to convince you because you've already made up your mind.

gAI is useless at everything it users could hope to accomplish. Even if you were to succeed through tons of personal effort (more than if you had just done it yourself) it would be on the backs of millions of plagiarized works. There's only two legitimate uses for it and that's for fulfilling whatever personal desires one may have, and making hilarious political propaganda like that guy who did a Pixar parody of 9/11 and made it impossible to ignore the clear IP violations made trivial through its use. Every other case it just people trying to force it where it doesn't belong. Their intentions? I do not care, but they're never any good. Oh, and I guess its main purpose which was to fabricate a justification for burning a crap ton of oiI for a dying industry just like with Crypto and NFTs before it, but that's not a topic that's necessary to get into here when there's so many better angles to hit from. There's two fundamental flaws that makes it unusable: 1) It is incapable of creating new material, only stealing 2) It only tells you what it thinks you want to hear Creativity can never come from such an environment. This isn't coming from a place of hatred, but rather of practicality, as someone who gave it a shot and very quickly saw it for what it was. You do not play with AI, it plays you. The tech behind it is very cool and I look forward to seeing where it evolves, but as it stands now? I'm not buying it.

You've proven yourself competent this far, I have no doubt that you've got what it takes to manage this well and I look forward to following its development. Having it be a separate game mode is a really good idea to expand and trial content for the main game without it turning into a 'too many cooks' situation. It brings to mind the healthy relationship between Runescape 3 and OldSchool Runescape, where they are unique yet connected through a shared vision.

People these days just aren't good long-term thinkers, i'm afraid... They don't see all that work as a permanent 2.5x increase to durability and 20% increase to speed. Back in my day you'd spend 10x that effort to get a fractional of a percent increase, because the amount of work it would cut out long-term was plainly obvious. It's not even this game, there's lots of games where most players fail to see the Return on Investment if it drops below a certain threshold of instant gratification.

Cool, hopefully integrates well with Mortal Damage because that would actually be a really interesting interaction. If not, i'll patch it so it does. Makes sense because bleeding doesn't stop instantly just because you put a bandage on. It does take a little bit of time before you get its full effect. EDIT: Works flawlessly. Well done.

I thought the same thing. Try it for yourself and tell me what you think. https://mods.vintagestory.at/whetstone If you think the implementation is crap and that you can do better: do it. Modding this game really isn't hard. Steal my code and make changes, then upload it as a fork. If you wanna do something a little more advanced there's a ton of people who've been running the circus for long enough that it's probably easy for them. They can lend a hand.

Fun fact: The saturation value of foods is equal to its real life counterpart, and hunger drain is realistic to a human with the proportions of a seraphim. If you're having issues with food, try not holding down the sprint key near constantly. You'll run through your calories way faster than necessary. EDIT: Oh right and avoid that stupid 20% hunger debuff when holding something in your offhand... hate that. Makes zero friggin sense. You have this mathematically perfect system and then just ruin it by making overpowered overunity cooking pot to counteract the fact that holding an item in your left hand somehow tires you out super fast.

The lore has the player going to the past from a time machine, so why not pull an Alucard and have a tutorial level in the future where you get shown a basic build for various things allowing you to play around with it as much as you want, then it ends with you picking your character/class and being sent to the past. It would fix the issue of just dropping you in the world while you choose your character, plus gets the player VERY invested in the story by showing them right out the gate what's going on and why they're important. The huge benefit of such a setup is that those who are new or curious can play around in a safe environment to get a hang of the various mechanics, while those who would rather figure things out as they go can skip the tutorial completely by just grabbing their handbook and then being sent into the past.

What I don't get is why anyone thought it was acceptable to have the lowest level of temporal storm spawning in end game monsters in a way the player can't reasonably avoid. I'm sure if you surveyed the average player who quit day-one they'd all have just came out of their first temporal storm.

This serves as both giving newer players a chance to get started, while also giving more experienced players the challenge they're looking for. For those wanting a harder challenge from the get-go they can set the 'start time' which applies all the modifiers up to that point at once. Modifiers are stuff like: Drifters will now throw rocks at you New enemy types spawning in Higher tier enemies can spawn more often Enemies can spawn during the day Enemies can now spawn on player-placed blocks Food will rot faster Your tools will rust Crops may die at random Enemies can attack blocks to (very slowly) break in Temporal storms exist to temporarily raise the difficulty to give players a taste of what to expect in the near future, with light storms only increasing it by a little bit, and heavy storms increasing it by a lot. The point is, the difficulty always raises over time meaning you can never get too comfortable with the current status quo. Think of it like ascensions in roguelikes, only it's a personalized experience of the game growing over time as you play it. There would be a canon list of modifiers with set times, but also the option for players to make their own modifiers or have them randomize. Play into the fear of the unknown by not telling the player when these thresholds are crossed, let the player flip when suddenly a trick they've been abusing stops working because the enemies developed a counter.

To be fair I played a much less refined version of the game so there's a pretty good chance they have addressed a lot of the core complaints I had about the difficulty. (Also in the future, please break out your sentences into paragraphs. Your posts had a lot to contribute but was pretty hard to read) My core problem with the handbook is that it should be more guiding the player towards how to play but it feels more like it wants to infodump every detail in a way that's not exactly easy to follow if you just want a quick hint to get you back into having fun. The only things that should be hard spelled out are things that can't be intuited, like controls.

They just announced they're quitting on today's stream I don't blame them either, they got stuck in a death loop on their first light temporal storm even though they were doing everything they possibly could to stay alive. I don't get why this game feels the need to make temporal storms more and more unplayable with every update while never giving the players any real means of pushing back. The lore has people dying to stuff like starvation but if the gameplay was anything to go off of, they all got one-tapped by an enemy spawning on top of them during a light breeze.

Okay this is clearly devolving into sophistry. I'm not going to engage with you any more.

Except it's not that uncompromising, is it? I can only list two times I have ever felt like I was on the back foot, the rest is just grind or artificial difficulty. It's only uncompromising if you're going in blind, which should be something that a majority of players don't do because of the discord and handbook telling them how to play. The game just frontloads all of its difficulty off the bat with very little scaling once you start getting a hang of things, and that's just a huge shame. I would consider things to be 'uncompromising' when failure comes from small bad decisions you made catching up to you, not just when the game decides to f you over because you failed to comprehend the inner workings of the game itself, or because you got one-tapped by an undodgeable high tier enemy that spawned inside of you during a storm.

If you looked at the creation date of my account you would have seen that I played a very early release of the game. But the detail is irrelevant because I'm seeing people giving the game a try now, having a hard time and being turned off because of it. This isn't even getting into skibidification and rise of American reading comprehension, though those factors no doubt play a lot into it. Maybe it's not necessary to appeal to players who literally can't/wont read, but I feel like the game should at least be playable and fun to those groups, even if it means they probably won't make much progress. What I do for my minecraft modpack is break the game into various skill brackets and ensure that no matter which bracket you fall into, you have plenty of content to keep you happy. Not all of us will be doing nuclear physics or coding a self-aware AI, and that's fine. The content exists for people who like that, while those who never played a video game before can enjoy it too, just at a different level. Players will naturally move up as they get more experienced at the game, and are free to do so at their own pace, or not at all. I've never been a fan of locking a playable game behind a skill or progression test, nor punishing players for not meeting those checks. The thing you have to realize is that something like 90% of the game when it first came out was locked behind the saw. You couldn't do anything in the stone age. Sure a lot of it got patched when the majority of the playerbase realized how much it sucked, but the problem there is how by that point the floor of the least experienced player was so high that it completely left behind the average new player. This is our chance to see first-hand what the NPE is like for an outsider coming in.

I always felt the RNG in this game was very fair, since it always gives you a chance to overcome it. The only two times I have ever felt the game's RNG genuinely f--- me over is when it spawned a T4 drifter on top of me during a temporal storm instantly killing me and that time where a drifter spawned from a rift before the rift even had a chance to spawn in fully. With everything else, there's always stuff you can do to skew the odds in your favor, sometimes outright trivializing it if you know what you're doing. For example, finding gold and silver in quartz deposits is my favorite way to get started in a new world by making black bronze and selling it for gears. In any other game that would just be a blind roll of the dice, but knowing that it spawns in quartz veins (this is realistic, btw. The piezoelectric properties of quartz are responsible) means you can fasttrack what would otherwise be an arduous grind. Even stuff like ore spawns which are pure RNG in other block games, have a rhyme and rhythm here, allowing you to find them entirely through intuition with prospecting filling the gaps. Every time I groan to myself "this sucks" it's because i'm not thinking hard enough, and once I do, then comes in that AHA moment which lets me move on. One thing I like is how often the game rewards you for noticing little details, though I feel sometimes it respects the player far too much and allows a less, um, acute player to be left with a vastly inferior game experience from not knowing a tiny detail that is never once clearly communicated to them by the game.

It's less that the learning curve is so big, it's that the game does not let you have fun until you overcome it. The whole discussion of game difficulty being conflated with punishment. Perfect example of this is how the cooking system is ridiculously overtuned to the point it completely trivializes the game once you unlock it, but it's absolute hell before. Newer players will spend more time before unlocking cooking so thus get punished harder by this design. Experienced players will know to rush cooking and therefore the bad design goes mostly unnoticed by the community at large. Speaking from personal experience, I was brutally punished by not knowing about cooking that I started getting used to the gigantic difficulty of having basically no inventory and having to spend almost 100% of my time collecting food (which was made harder by not having inventories) Learning how to make hand baskets was what I consider a reasonable jump in power (though requiring the player to make 4 is just grind for the sake of grind) as it gave me more time to do other things, but once I had the cooking pot set up, the game basically reverted to minecraft with a 64x texture pack. I was glad I could finally start to play the game, but i've been missing that early game experience ever since, and i'm sad that I will never get a chance to finish the game under those constraints.

The devteam should absolutely be watching these streams to see common pain points among fresh and blind players. A lot of the reason why this game "isn't for" so many people isn't necessarily because of the mechanics, but because a lot of bad or confusing design that is invisible to so much of us because we either got in early or had discord/friends carrying us through the early game. This is a rare chance where people will be giving genuine feedback and it would be foolish to completely ignore it. Speaking from personal experience, most of the players who I try to introduce the game to (including myself when I first started) drop off not because they don't find the game fun, but because of a specific thing that that really shouldn't be the way it is. They don't even have a chance to get into the game before something takes them out of it and most aren't going to be coming back later once they're convinced the game isn't for them.

This topic was discussed in private a long time ago, but i'd like to have it in the public record in case some random modder feels up for implementing this. (even if that modder will probably be me in the future LOL) The layer system allows you to place blocks in a second dimension overlaid over the normal game. So far it's used so that liquids (such as lava, water, and the one exception: ice) can be placed on top of ordinary blocks in the main block layer. However in implementation it is basically just a second blockmap with a bit of rendering and interaction trickery so that you can see and manipulate each one seamlessly. This is also used in Creative mode which is how the user is able to see a ghost outline when placing a schematic without needing to lag the server by constantly placing blocks (as the blocks do not move, only the reference to it). But what if instead of just a ghost outline, the blocks in this layer were able to be interacted with by the player? The concept here is that there would be a block layer which you could build a mobile base within it. You can then enter and exit this parallel universe and build within or outside of it seamlessly. The exciting part comes from how you can move this mobile base independent of the main world, driving it like an entity. By saving the blocks in a static form and moving it through a reference pointer, it allows the player to laglessly shred through the wilderness without any block updates. Not only that, but because the position is a reference, it would allow for block misalignment. Each block layer would have a grid and adhere to that grid, but the two grids would not need to be aligned. This solves SO many problems in implementation. This also has another fun consequence: you can also adjust how the world looks in respect to the player. So say you flip your base on its head by accident, now everything will be up side down. There would have to be a check for gravity blocks but otherwise it's just rendering and adjusting your player and the world's hitboxes. To make a long story short: it's going to be a port of https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/archimedes-ships except with better implementation using block layers.

An alternate game mode would probably bring me back as a modder. Almost all of my frustrations come from the design and code quality of Survival Mod, so having a better coded game mode with more of a focus on fantasy (I think 90% of Immersive Phototrophy was spent doing research to make sure it was realistic) would do a lot to entice me to return. The game's depth isn't the problem, it's got plenty of that to spare. It's the lack of breadth. There's not really a lot of room to add just filler content without it completely changing the way you play, and if there's a mechanic you don't particularly enjoy, tough s. You gotta do it. It makes sense for a Survival game mode, but most people are going to be turned off by that. Adding new playstyles is exactly what the game needs, especially if features from other game modes can start leaking in to survival if they prove inoffensive enough to include.

I got my start using decomp to look at other people's mods (and the base game) and see how they did things. Doing my own spin on it and then refining my technique as I went. Can't say I would have gotten very far if I was just going off of the tutorials and my own talent alone.

I left for a good amount of time and now I come back to hundreds of these awful notifications and it's clogging up the actual notifications I need to attend to as a mod developer. I hated them before and now that i'm not actively working they're downright insufferable. Please let us delete them forever.