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ShubiMaja

Very Important Vintarian
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Everything posted by ShubiMaja

  1. Bread is boring. Sandwiches Rock!
  2. Imagine taking a walk through a town. You begin your walk in the market, stalls stocked high with assorted merchandise occupying the stalls. Behind them are various warehouses filled with goods used to restock the market. You take a right and pass by the local farmer. Large canisters of milk rest near the grazing cows ready to be processed into cheese. A towering silo casts a long shadow across the cows and as you pass by you can hear the sound of grain pouring into carts which will carry the grain to the mill located just down the road. As you veer left you hear the sound of hammering and before long a giant heap of black coal blocks out the sun, right before you are blinded by the rays of sun glancing off several tall stacks of iron and copper ingots next to the smithy's anvil. This truly visual and immersive experience sounds like one out of a fairy tale. You would never expect to have this experience in a video game with purely player created content unless there were truly talented builders with the vision and patience to make it happen. And yet, every one of the scenarios in the above scene are ones that would naturally evolve and emerge out of daily necessity, but for one thing: The existence of magical storage .aka. The chest. The bane of emergent building. The chest solves the problem of the farmer, the merchant, and the blacksmith effortlessly. There is no need to keep your milk containers close to your cows or even have any containers at all. No need to have silos located near a market, or to even store your grain in a silo. No need to store charcoal outside, and no need to keep large amounts of ingots in piles. The chest solves all of these problems, effortlessly, and cleanly. Put everything in a room full of wooden boxes and you're done. So how could one promote emergent building? The solution is seemingly simple: assign the properties of density and volume to everything in game. But of course nothing is ever that simple. On the one hand, emergent building is a sight to behold. Requiring users to store everything in containers which hold items only proportionate their own volume is a tempting idea. But the cost to the player in tediousness may be too great. And what is the point of a system that nobody will experience? So I propose a system which is a balance between the ease of use we know today, and the restrictions which result in the awesome emergent builds described above. Allow magical containers that hold more than their own volume to exist, but with limits. The system is comprised of the following principles: Every item has volume volume is based on the number of in-world physical voxels in an item Every item is made from a basic kind of material Every material has a fixed amount of density Magical containers are enchanted to store more than their own volume Inventory is limited by both weight and volume Maximum carry weight is determined by player strength Max carry volume is determined by inventory container properties Example Volume full block: 32 x 32 x 32 = 32768 half block 32 x 32 x 16 = 16384 crock pot 10 x 10 x 10 (roughly) = 1000 1 candle 8 x 4 x 4 = 128 Note: These calculations are generally straightforward for blocks that can be placed in world. But are far from simple in some cases as seen in the example below hay: placed hay: 3x(2x2x2) + 4x4x4 = 88 hayblock / 6 = 5461 Example Density Airy: (feathers, straw) 0.005 Wood: 0.5 Ice: 0.9 Water: 1 Processed Stone (bricks, cobble): 2 Light Metal: 3 Medium Metal: 11 Its possible that some of these values or materials exist already in order to determine a particle or item's buoyancy. Magical Containers Magical containers exist in order to make the game playable and reduce the pain of real world restrictions. The ideal strength of a magical container can be examined in the following way: A standard wooden chest can hold at most 4x4=16 stacks of 64 full block items (smaller items may have higher stacking limits). This means a standard chest can hold at most 1024 times its actual size. This gives the standard wooden chest a limit multiplier of 1024. The maximum number of voxels that can be stored is 33,554,432 Assuming we halve this amount to 512. This would mean that players could store just 512 blocks ( 8 stacks ) (or 16,777,216 voxels) in each chest. But given a lower volume item like candles which have a voxel volume of 128 which is 0.0039 the volume of a full block , a wooden chest would be able to store 256 times as many candles (512 x 256 = 131072 = 2048 stacks of 64). Now that's alot of candles! So clearly, a balance must be struck in container strength in order to allow a reasonable amount of large items to be stored without increasing the storage limits of smaller items to insane boundaries. One potential resolution to this issue may be to create magical containers for specific item types. For example, a dirt pile may be a large multiblock structure that has a magic storage multiplier of 512, but may only contain dirt. I believe there are many ways that this idea can be tweaked and configured in such a way that will encourage emergent builds without sacrificing on play-ability to the point where nobody builds in the first place. Please feel free to comment or provide feedback below. References: https://www.visionlearning.com/en/library/General-Science/3/Density/37
  3. I would love to see additional challenges and systems introduced into the world such as the ones you mentioned. I believe that every new system we encounter increases the variety and depth of our potential experiences (or deaths )
  4. I appreciate that there must be a careful balance between making things immersive and keeping the bar to entry low enough that people will actually play. If the game is too difficult or brutal at the beginning then fewer people may want to play. So perhaps the breathing and stamina systems can be scaled down to the point where it is not a major hurdle that affects our lives in a brutal manner -- but rather a small nuisance that brings depth to our experience. You may never practically run out of breath while running. But if you run a *really* *really* long way for a *really* *really* long time, there will be realistic consequences for that. In this example, the idea is that your average player who doesnt run marathons for hours would never run into this hurdle. *However*, if we are talking about mechanics that will only affect hardcore players, then I propose that we should introduce a skill system that rewards players for their efforts and allows them to mitigate the negative effects for a cost. In example, someone who in fact does run marathons every day, should find that their constant practice pays off, rewarding them with gradually larger amounts of breath and stamina. This way: - New players are barely affected and not turned off - Active players are affected in a realistic and immersive way - Active players are rewarded for their efforts and provided a way to mitigate the small amount that the mechanic affects them. You may then say, well if the system will be scaled down so much and even granted a mitigation path what is the point of a system that so barely impacts my life? The answer is that subtle realistic features make all the difference when it comes to immersion, whether in regards to systems or graphics. Its the reason why the game *feels* more immersive when leaves sway gently in the wind or the water laps lightly against the shore. These tweaks are not strictly necessary, but they subtly enhance the quality of the game's immersion. So too when it comes to systems. Its true that breathing is only truly necessary as a mechanic to simulate our respiration system (such as we do for hunger). But adding a slight connection between breathing and stamina for example is the kind of subtle feature that would make you feel just that much more involved and engaged in a living, breathing character, in a living breathing world.
  5. I suggest we add 2 seperate systems : stamina, and breathing, both of which affect each other for example: stamina: - lose by running - lose by swimming / treading water - gain by resting in a bed - gain faster by drinking herbal teas - gain faster by meditating breath: - lose by running out of stamina - lose by swimming underwater - lose faster by being at high altitudes - gain by standing still - gain faster, the more stamina you have (scale breath gain by stamina) This will create some of the following scenarios: - running a marathon will cause you to run out of breath - running out breath from running (while having low stamina) will cause you regain breath more slowly, causing you to realistically need to stand still while panting as your stamina regains and your breath regain rate slowly scales up with your stamina - hiking too high in the mountains can cause you to black out if you move too quickly (stamina affects breath regen) - swimming too fast underwater will cause you to run out of air faster cause you to blackout more quickly.
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