Cosmic Hermit

Thanks for getting always on top in there. The game window minimizing whenever you click off screen is such a hassle. Admittedly a minor irritation, but it feels like a big deal! XP Anyhow, much appreciated.

Adding a request tab to the auction house where players can request certain items in a certain amount. A request would have a certain initial duration, but could be extended by paying gears. The gear fee could be justified in lore as the trader searching more exhaustively for the requested goods. Other players could then visit the normal action tabs and list the item or items at a certain price as normal. When the requesting player purchases the item from the main action house tab, their request would disappear and be fulfilled. This doesn't supplant the current system, as the service provided here has additional fees compared to buying a randomly listed item, or trading directly [player to player]. It augments the current system by providing a way for players to acquire items from or signal intent to players not in their timezone, or who otherwise play when the requester is not online. I think a feature like this could help make the player economy a little more robust, potentially enabling players to see demand for certain goods and possibly create niche industries for products outside of the usual commodities [steel tools, linen, fruit, vegetables]. It could also make selling meat more practical, as there is a much higher chance that the meat will be purchased before spoiling if you know someone is lined up to purchase it. More generally, it provides players the incentive to brave the trader's fees and list less common goods on the auction house.

I'll bite. I quite enjoyed building roads while listening to Sam Cooke's "Chain Gang," Ernie Ford's "Sixteen tons," Bobby Fuller's "I Fought the Law," and well I suppose you get the picture. Similar and such like ya ken? XP

@Thorfinn@Owktree I can clarify for my part. This is mostly my fault for not explaining in any real detail, but while skins and attributes are a nice touch I primarily mean behavior. I'd be nice if wolves and hyenas adopted proper pack tactics for instance. Even within "pack tactics" there's significant room for variation. Wolves would follow and surround you, when sufficiently encircled they'd attack. Hyenas would also pursue, but are more inclined to make individual attacks. I'm sputtering a little on these because it's been a long time since I actually looked into the particulars of their hunting styles. Not an excuse, I'm just acknowledging my failure. As a matter of fact that maybe entirely backwards, but the goal was illustrative in nature. In terms of new animals you can have pursuit hunters, versus ambush predators, group/solitary, territorial/roaming, etc. The animal kingdom is full of different strategies. Just like enemies in other games, the AI makes the adversary. I mentioned the moose earlier because it should be tanky, oddly fast, territorial, but not aggressive in a predator sense. It shouldn't run as easily as boars do and it may have a charging behavior like sheep, but a vicious kick as well [I have not seen what they can do in the pre, I should probably check, but this should read more as a wish list]. So to clarify what I'd like to see is more varied encounters, with more varied approaches. Not and immediate thing, coding AI can be intensive and a royal pain, but on the long term it'd be nice. The team seems pretty dedicated to realism, so I imagine they'll notice that all predators charging at you blindly is kinda odd.

I certainly wouldn't object to more varied encounters, hopefully they'll add more in the future. I imagine the moose in next update won't go down without a fight.

I'm not sure if this is entirely apple to apples, but going to a southern savanna biome and counting the number of concurrent hyena groups may give and idea of the upper bounds on hostile spawn density. The densest I saw was 3-7 groups in a 16 chunk area [4x4]. If the same logic applies to wolves in forests... yeah, that'd be a lot. I generally keep 4 stone spears on me for pest removal, but sometimes death is inevitable. I kinda like a hostile environment because it gives me something to fight in the early game, but I can certainly see how that might get annoying.

@Sabrium48 If you'd like assistance, I'm certain that the good people of these forums would like to help. It'd go a long way to resolving the issue if you provided crash logs, system specifications, your dotnet version, and mod versions. For my part I can certainly give advice on linux distro trouble shooting, but most are likely more familiar with windows.

To expand tangentially on the point about epiphytes, I think something that is generally missing from the jungles and forests are diverse structures. Currently forests have a canopy, and thin forest floor. The exception to this seems to be when bushes make up the majority of the forest floor. Having more diverse species in the canopy and the forest floor can greatly improve the character of a forest. Jungles have an additional issue in that jungles, or more to the point, rain forests have not just some of the most diverse and dense concentrations of species of any forest floor or canopy, but due to high levels of sunlight and rain, they can support additional layers. At a minimum a rain forest should have at least one distinct understory [the intermediate layer between the canopy and floor] species. In practice, they have many understory species, sometimes creating more than one distinct understory layer. In this layer you find many lichen, epiphytes, soft stemmed plants, and short trees [think holly]. This is not an exclusive feature of the tropics as many so called "temperate rain forests" also have understories.

With a few minute sof research, I found the following; the first manned hot air balloon was constructed of cotton canvas with paper glued to inside and outside of the globe so s to better retain the air. The fuel source was a mixture of straw and wool. That seems to indicate that the tech is all there. In order to produce realistic constraints on the balloon's movement, a system of prevailing air currents might be created. Wind'd tend to blow in certain directions over certain regions and the air balloons'd follow those currents. They could even be seasonal. Not certain on the coding difficulties associated there, but it's just a thought, in someone else's thought. The wind system would limit balloon use and speed, like the hot air zones, but could also coincide with other mechanics, like windmill placement. Careful consideration would need to be given to town placement to ensure both windmill power and access to the hot air balloon routes.

Just noticed this many months later. Yes the equations I mentioned only give you the literal energy content of the mass of moving air. In reality the turbine airfoils are optimized to operate with a maximum efficiency within a certain range of incident wind speeds. It's all the same issues as an aircraft wing, just turned sideways. Though you have a decent amount of pitch control on a turbine, the shape of the blades themselves can't be altered, so after a certain amount of wind velocity, turbulence and stalling [starting near the hub], aggressively limit the amount of energy you can extract. That converges on some maximum value, which theoretically might lead to a negative trend on the other side of that plateau if wind speed increased even more, but that's near the super sonic regime, and stuff tend s to break long before that. Using the energy equation as is, provides a more reasonable model for the game, without the complexity of creating an efficiency coefficient that's a function of wind speed, blade length, airfoil geometry, etc. Perhaps you could multiply it by a static or linearly varying coefficient, but landing on a number for these approximations would take some doing. Definitely not suitable for real life applications, unless you want a ball park idea for the generation capacity of some region, which is still iffy. This solution is more for this application, where precision and computational time are battling to the death in a cage match. For reality, you'll want to visit the 3d lift and drag equations, and embrace some pretty crummy integrations for the length of the blade. Then you can perform an optimization for wind speed and you'll have a more reasonable approximation.

@Thorfinn In the equation supplied [I really should've divided those thoughts into paragraphs for clarity] I still don't include anything for efficiency. Before I get to this in earnest, let me introduce the players properly. Energy is measure in joules (J), watts are the amount of energy supplied per second (W, J/s), ρ is density, the mass per unit volume (kg/m^3), mass (m) in kg, area (A) is in m^2, and velocity (v) in m/s. Just covering bases. Now to the meat and potatoes; using wind resistance, drag, will cause us some problems. Drag is a force, and while we can get from a force to energy provided we do some clever integrations, the problem with this particular force is that it's the resistance to movement of an object in a fluid. If the fluid or the object stop moving and no force is exerted on either, drag is zero. Drag is sorta like friction in that way, if I plop something on the counter and don't touch it and nothing else tries to move it, there's no friction force, but the second I try to give it a push, even if the push fails to move it, friction has kicked into gear. Why is that a problem? The approximation mentioned earlier is for the maximum amount of power you can theoretically squeeze out of a perfect turbine. In order to get that equation we basically ignored everything about the blade to get there. Here's the horrible truth, we were never measuring the blade-wind interaction from the outset, we were figuring out the power of the wind itself! It was all a lie, oh the humanity! You see, the maximum theoretical power you can extract from the wind, is all of the power the wind makes available, or rearranged, its just the power of the wind. To get a little more specific, we are figuring out the kinetic energy of the wind per second. Do you remember the equation for kinetic energy from physics? It's 1/2 x m x v2 This will help us figure out the kinetic energy of the wind as well. If you look at the original equation, (W) = 1/2 x ρ x A x v3, you'll notice some familiar faces. Let's cross out the terms that are the same between the two and see what's left: m for equation one and ρ x A x v for the second. This should clue you into something, some how, ρ x A x v serves a similar purpose to mass (m). I said earlier that density is mass per unit volume right, so it stands to reason that if we multiply the density by a given volume, we'll get mass out. So the purpose of A and v is to give us a volume. Velocity has units of meters per second, so if we multiply the area by a distance per second, we get and a volume per second [this is called a volume flow rate]. Multiply that by our density and we get a mass per second [mass flow rate]. Reassembling the equation we now have 1/2 x m/2 x v2 Let's rearrange one last time it's: (1/2 x m x v2)/s. What we have here is the kinetic energy of the wind per second: energy per second. Behold, by the power of dimensional analysis you have discovered the power of the wind! Think about it like this, we are measuring the energy of a circle cut out of wind [the swept area of the blades] as it blows by. Its like a giant tube of air in the sky that we measure the energy of as it moves for just one second. The reason why the drag equation, the kinetic energy equation, and this equation all look the same, is that they are all different applications of the same original equations. I'm not sure how far to go down this road, but they can all be derived from the equation for conservation of energy of a control volume. As for the order of the equations, that comes down to the interplay between force, energy, and power. Energy is the space integral of force. Power is the time derivative of Energy. So a watt is actually (N x m)/s. I hope the level of my explanation was not insulting, my intent was that other readers who happened to be interested might also be able to parse this. To any who made it all the way down here, I meant no disrespect by the way I explained this, I just wanted to be clearish... and have a little fun, this stuff is my bread and butta ; )

@Thorfinn Now that I have moment, I owe you some clarifications. The equation I handwavely reference is technically an approximation of the maximum theoretical power a wind turbine could extract from the wind. For this reason, the equation doesn't actually care about wind turbine geometry and just assumes an optimal blade shape. What it does care about is the swept area of the blade. If you can imagine sticking a sharpy at the tip of a turbine blade and spinning the blade a full turn, the circle the blade draws in the sky is the swept area. here's the equation in question: Power (W) = 1/2 x ρ x A x v3 I decided that for a one off comment, actual efficiency calculations were a bit out of scope seeing as the current implementation doesn't really seem to account for the efficiency of the blades either [also I was sleepy], and just assumed 100% efficiency too. As for the twist of the blades, there are a couple of reasons but the quickest one to explain is, imagine the wind from the perspective of the blade. Hold the blade still and the wind comes straight at you. If you spin the blade a bit however, the wind kinda looks like its coming at you slanted. The direction of the wind seems a little crooked because while the wind moves from front to back, you're running around in circles. The other part of it is that while the whole blade rotates at the same speed, the distance actually moved as you get farther from the hub, gets longer and longer. You're running faster and faster just to keep up. That speed means that as you get further and further from the hub, the wind looks not just faster, but more and more slanted. The blade twists to account for that.

Hello, I'd like to add another consideration to this revised windmill mechanic. I'm going to skirt around the math as best I can. I'll be using a previously established approximation for wind turbine power for the windmill here. Something to consider is that the power generated by a windmill does scale with the cube of wind speed, but the length of your rotors are also a significant factor. The power generated is proportional the swept area of the rotors, that's the area of a circle. Which means the power produced by a windmill is proportional to the square of rotor length. Don't worry about power versus torque for this particular issue, because power is just torque times angular velocity, which doesn't have a length component. This means that one windmill with 6 meter long rotors should provide significantly more torque than 6 windmills with 1 meter rotors, or two windmills with 3 meter long rotors. The raw ratio for 1,6 to 2,3 is 36:18, and for 1,6 to 6,1 its 36:6. So if your model doesn't account for rotor length, numerous small blades seem much more reasonable than they should. My recommendation is that the windmill torque is calculated by averaging the wind speed across the rotor span [just taking highest and lowest speed from height delta] and factoring in the length of rotors. If you'd like a more detailed explanation [because I admittedly did a bad job] on the math of the concept, just let me know.