Thorfinn

Incidentally, notice anything? Not a single WAG yet. Lots of righteous indignation, but not a single guesstimate. Not a single, "Well, I could probably put together a high quality granite gravel texture in 8 hours."

Thanks. That was my impression, too. I couldn't see how the code could be greater than the coder, but I had not kept up on it, and thought it was possible. You can already program it to create a texture. It would not be that hard to code a requirement that a texture be tilable. What there is not is an algorithm that the code can use to determine if this one is any good. If they are good enough to get away with it, good on them. I generally just fired them, as most weren't half as good as they thought they were. And a workforce that's walking on eggshells afraid of offending someone is not a happy workforce. Better off getting rid of the easily offended. Of course it is. So is yours. Or didn't you realize that?

I'm aware of that. The same is true of computer code and engineering designs, yet most of them are not prima donnas. Most are more like Scottie from Star Trek. It's just a different attitude. I don't have the patience to deal with it, so when I owned my own company, I hired a guy to handle them while I dealt directly with the engineers and programmers.

And that's why people usually avoid artists if at all possible. Engineers, programmers, scientists, etc., generally don't get touchy if you use the wrong word to describe what they do. They just give an estimate, maybe padding the estimate a bit to make up for being offended. It's not like anyone is holding you to it, and everyone expects it to really take at least 3 times as long but without it, you can't even get order of magnitude guesses. And we decide AI is probably good enough. Seriously, you don't think that if I just wanted a bunch of black squares, I could have figured out how to do that? Maybe 30 seconds for the first one, and a few milliseconds for each one thereafter?

Figured it wouldn't be very good, but I didn't expect it to be that bad. Answers my next question: is it worthwhile to generate then retouch? If an artist were drawing in her favorite style, whatever that is, how long would it take to generate, say, 5k 32x32 images? Each edge tilable on the other three edges. Are we talking weeks? Months? Years?

That's not the level at which engines work. I don't know what your background is, but think of the engine as establishing a framework, and the game as implementing the specific instance.

Anything can be implemented, especially things that cannot exist in reality. Liking where you are going with this. One thing, though. A weir pretty much has to be a block. One could, in theory, create every permutation of enter and exit, and force the player to choose the right one, but I really think it would be better (and easier, I'll be honest) to make it a block, where it, in essence, has a gate everywhere it needs one. This is basically how flowing water works now, so it has the advantage that it's consistent with the game. Could you make it user-settable? Sure, and I can see why that might be useful. But if people thought things like steel production was complicated... Let me think on it. Maybe it won't be as confusing as I'm imagining it.

I think it's high time people start accepting that there is a VS game and an Anego Engine. The Adventure Mode will have a different "aesthetic" -- it's not going to be the gritty survival palette of VS but something different. And I think people underappreciate Tyron's passing mention of improving the combat of both games. That means improving the engine, and that means he most likely hired a coding-level programmer in addition to the scripting and graphical coders he hired to put together Adventure Mode. That should be thought of as awesome news! If the Adventure team prioritizes combat, that means their guy is going to be doing engine-level work. And don't underestimate what diverse results one can accomplish with an engine. Valheim is a modded reskinned Gwent is a modded reskinned 7 Days 2 Die is a modded reskinned Cities Skyline is a modded reskinned Subnautica is a modded reskinned Superhot is a modded reskinned My Time at Portia is a modded reskinned... you get the point.

Highly doubtful. If that's what he wanted to do, why did he start on VS? Non-compete? If there were such, it would have lapsed years ago, assuming it would have held up in the first place. So why didn't he switch over then? Do you really feel screwed over? Look at $20 titles (regular price) on Steam. Can any of them hold a candle to what you already have in VS? [EDIT] It is, of course, possible that expenses without revenue could sink Anego. I have no idea what their cash flow situation is, but, evidently it is good enough that hiring them on to work on VS is an option. You do kind of have to trust that he would cut the side project loose if that situation changed.

And still die. Just die sore and exhausted.

I don't have any firm number because permadeath deletes worlds when you die, so any game I died rather than quit does not get totted up, but I probably have 3500 hours in the game. I know, get a life, but still. Being retired gives you a lot of spare time. Anyway, that's, what, about a half cent per hour? I'd be willing to call it even.

Has anyone tried this? Or know of games companies that have? Do they have to do a lot of final edits, or is it some slight retouching?

That is a blast! It's quite refreshing to go from the game mode where you play as the alpha predator, to where you have to think as prey or you die. You likely die anyway. Everything is faster than you, most is both tougher and hits harder. I'm sure you can adjust that, but just playing defaults on the Phanerazoic and Stone Age mods, it's like you are playing a completely different game.

You might be able to. There's a command I forget (because I've never used it) that lets you redo character generation. I'd bet if you enter chargen, and esc out, you get your autopause back.

Same as many, maybe most startups. Perfectionism. Not saying, "That's good enough for now. Let's get this other part of the roadmap implemented." Look at the placeholders in VS. If they listened to everyone who wanted, say, combat "fixed" (which everyone defines differently), VS would be in the same boat as Hytale. The 80/20 rule is essential. Work on the 20% that gets you 80% of the benefits, not the 80% that gets you 20%.

In which case, the money is not an issue. If they are working on VS, they will not be selling any Adventure, and, evidently, cash flow for just VS is enough to carry.

Because of why it failed.

Run the numbers. Let's say the 4 coders will run $400k in payroll/expenses. At $20 a copy, they only need to sell 20k copies a year, 2k copies a month, 50 a day, to break even. And my guess is $400k is pretty generous. But you are correct that it is up front expense, just like any startup. The upside is, of course, is the influx of the fantasy player base. And, let's be honest, a player base which has been extraordinarily patient in waiting for Hytale. If they can even get the textures ready and a few models, they can have a playable proof of concept very quickly. The core engine functions are complete enough that the gaps can be worked around, so all they need to work on is content. And with a proof of concept/playable demo in hand, the streamers will do all the marketing that's needed. If it does well, great. If it gets panned, well, maybe the Adventure Crew has to find a different job. They don't have wealthy backers to support them indefinitely. It's all on their shoulders.

1.21 is about to drop. We are well past 1.0.

Wait a minute. Seraphs aren't left-handed? Shoot, that dyslexia thing is kicking in again, isn't it?

TBH, I see this as an unalloyed good, though I wonder a bit about whether it's the right organizational structure. I understand why, I think -- coders gotta pay bills, too. The way this is, Tyron and several coders work on the engine, the rest of his VS team, particularly the artists, work on VS, and these new people work on Adventure. Nothing has changed, except that maybe Adventure needs the roadmap re-prioritized. Off-hand, the herbalism system is going to have to move forward, maybe fishing, and automation and steam will move back. I'm indifferent to the order. OK, maybe I have one criticism -- that is a truly silly name. Maybe it means something different in German or something. No game engine locks itself into a single game. Like it or not, that is death. Kind of like you saw with Hytale. It's high time Anego started diversifying.

Just for convenience, https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/26042 If you decide to add a link, and I notice it, I'll delete this post. Or at least null it out.

Very cool! It's none of my business, I know, but do you own the textures so you can just port them over? Or is all that going to have to be created from scratch?

Oh, one thing that is not intuitive, but I believe is on the Wiki is that the first two ingredients determine which recipe is being cooked, so the first two have to be unique. So if you wanted to be able to make porridge with milk, and not cause problems with frumenty, grain would have to remain the first two, because that defines porridge, and milk would be just an optional ingredient, minimum 0, maximum 2.

You should post a comment to the Tailor's Delight mod page. Tels has released a version for the prerelease and thinks it's working. Wouldn't surprise me if the oven refactoring that is messing up vanilla pie making is causing problems with EF, but I really think that should be broken up into sub-modules. It's just too much code to try to maintain all in one chunk. One problem brings the whole thing down.