Thorfinn

Huh. I figured it was doing much better than that. I'm not basing that on anything in particular, other than some major content providers giving it love and standard industry figures on the effects of that. And, really, $20? Less than a couple "Value" meals?

Are they growing now??? Huh. Guess that's a reason to play a world a little longer. Never knew that was a thing.

The purpose of brass is mostly to stretch your copper when making lanterns. If you have zinc, you might as well use it up. I wouldn't go out of my way to find it, no, but if it's handy, why not take it home rather than look for yet more copper? Every nugget of zinc you have is one fewer nugget of copper you need.

When could you make iron and steel spears?

I don't have any idea what that means. But, really, I'm an AI skeptic. You don't have to read very carefully to realize I doubted it could do a good job, but I was open-minded enough to consider it, and figured someone here would know. Yeah, or you could try being open-minded enough to think of me as a person. Yeah, I know, class struggle and all that crap, but you could at least pretend to be tolerant while you haul me off to the camps. Incidentally, while there still is not an answer, I got one in about 10 minutes on fiverr.com. I'll see starting 24 hours from now what a half-dozen artists think looks sufficiently surreal for what I'm looking for. Couple hundred dollars is all. Should have done that right off the bat, I guess. The gig economy has never let me down.

Probably it does. The way Tyron has things coded, it could be coded at "mod" level, but it would be more clunky than fleshing out the engine and dealing with the instance-specific stuff at the "mod" level. If Team Adventure has a decent code jockey, they might well decide he is best used to update the combat engine, which will also be used for VS 1.22. That's what Tyron has taken on -- managing the development of the engine that will be used on at least two different games. So he's got to think more generally about what functions should be engine level and which at game level. And even if Adventure is spun off, we get to be beta testers! Schwing!

Yeah, I was thinking a more surreal aesthetic. But I've kind of lost interest. Remembering now why I sold off my company.

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.