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Parent - - By Profpatsch [de] Date 2011-01-29 21:21
Wait - I didn't mention castles. I think OC shouldn't be reduced to castles, I thought about the system in general.
And the system you suggested already exists in CR...
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Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2011-01-29 21:34
Well, and I am saying that we should not have every building duplicated as a castle part like in CR. I am saying that we should provide the player with a possibility (a creative one!!) to layout his base in a whole. Not to layout every single building :)
Parent - - By Profpatsch [de] Date 2011-01-29 22:46
The problem with this is, that every base looks different. You cant just say: "In this rectangle is the base" but there could be hills, cliffs, water etc.
It's a lot easier to implement modularity for single buildings than for whole bases.
And the connections between the buildings could be achieved by a tube system, wipf transportation or similar.
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Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2011-01-29 22:56

>but there could be hills, cliffs, water etc.


So we would have to provide the player with the means to handle those, I guess
Parent - - By Profpatsch [de] Date 2011-01-29 23:09
It would be hard for me to see most of the buildings in OC reduced to a system like the castles in CR.
I didn't hate them, but I thought they were way to unrealistic.
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Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2011-01-29 23:18

>It would be hard for me to see most of the buildings in OC reduced to a system like the castles in CR.
>I didn't hate them, but I thought they were way to unrealistic.


What exactly do you mean? I think being able to dig at a fast pace through solid earth is unrealistic - if you know what I mean ;)
Parent - By Profpatsch [de] Date 2011-01-29 23:27
Yes, I know, but too unrealistic in Clonk-ways.
Hard to explain, you have these "normal" buildings where you can see on the roofs (like 3D), but on the other hand there are the straight 2D castles. I always thought the proportions were kind of...strange :)
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Parent - - By Profpatsch [de] Date 2011-01-31 16:03
Until now I don't consider the replies as real fruitful discussion (Best example: "Uh. Why?" Really helpful).
All the other replies basically just said: "Right, you posted your idea, here's mine in a nutshell. And I think mine's better!"

If someone really wants to discuss about my ideas, you would be very welcome :)
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Parent - By bahamada [de] Date 2011-01-31 16:55
Maybe do some artwork to support your concept. ;)
Maybe some screens visualize your ideas better...
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Parent - By PeterW [gb] Date 2011-01-31 17:50
Well, I agree on some points and fundamentally disagree on most others. We could try shouting at each other (YES IT IS?), but I prefer to just stop the discussion at that point.
Parent - - By Ringwaul [ca] Date 2011-01-31 18:09

>I don't consider the replies as real fruitful discussion (Best example: "Uh. Why?" Really helpful).


You're either trolling or simply won't take criticism. "Why?" is probably the best question in this thread, because you've not explained how any of this would enrich gameplay; and no one else can see how this would be an improvement over the current system.

Why add unnecessary complication to building structures that can be done automatically? Is the player going to find this fun or tedious? You've not explained why it would be fun, so we can only assume it would be tedious.

Also, your entire argument seems to be based on "Creativity makes games better 100% of the time", which is simply not true. Creative games can be fun, but they are not the only game genre. Games are fun because they provide a challenge or goal for the player to complete. A game's playtime can be lengthened by replayability, which creativity does provide. However, Creative games are not the only ones with replayability. Why does a player not replay the same COD campaign 10 times? Because he's already completed that challenge before (though I'd like to point out the marvellous exception of 'Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time' which is still fun through numerous play-times). Multiplayer aspects in a game can maximize the replay value because other human players always provide a unique challenge. As you may notice, OpenClonk is a very multiplayer-centric game.
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Parent - By Profpatsch [de] Date 2011-02-01 11:10
I've edited my first post.
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Parent - By PeterW [gb] Date 2011-02-01 13:13

> If you place a forge under it and throw iron and coal in the funnel, clean iron will be produced, but if you place a generator under it and add a wire, it'll produce energy. And if you add another room with a funnel to the building, you could produce iron on one side and electricity on the other, in the same building.


This sounds pretty much like what we want to do, except for the "in the same building". I would just place all the "components" in the landscape, as buildings themselves. If you want, you can then build walls around it. Roughly the same result, but without the need for some intermediate "building" system.
Parent - - By ala [de] Date 2011-02-01 15:08
Ignoring the already discussed stuff: I like one of those ideas in particular (apart from the layered buildings, which I wrote a concept about 1 year ago):

The automatically generated buildings which form depends on materials (I'm ignoring the modul part as well). I would like this: The player constructs a hut, and it becomes a wooden one if he does so with 3 wood. And a stonen one if he constructs it with 5 stones and 2 wood, and a military barack with additional stones and metal. Substitutions for constructing materials, i like that. We could also show this graphically in the construction design - first wood always wood constuct the frame, and the walls wood get filled with the additional material (wood / stone / metal).

And here is another part that I like: I really hated the tower building menu in Clonkrage, "construct" => normal tower, knight tower, knight tower with right side closed,  knight tower with a drawbridge right, and two others for left - and the wooden tower! 1,2,3..7 different towers - wtf? I remember ruining my game with a wrong tower several times... So for this special buildings: huts, towers and that stuff a little modularity is just what I would want. For the rest its making the game too complex.
Parent - By Profpatsch [de] Date 2011-02-01 16:45
Hm, at last someone who likes at least one of my ideas :)

How would you define which building a Clonk should build? My idea of dragging the materials is an approach to this, but if this is too inconvenient someone has to invent a better one.
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- - By EroSennin Date 2011-01-31 17:04
The idea itself sounds okay. It would be fun to create more complex and more prettier houses. It could be a competition too.

But in Clonk building settlements is very slow. The more buildings you have, the slower it gets. E. g. if you need iron you need to build a furnace. Now you have iron to build other buildings. But to get the iron you need to get coal and ore. For ore you need flints.
This itself is a long production queue.
If you now add buildings which have to be build modularly, the production of all things will get slower and slower. (Would this be fun?)

In my opinion OpenClonk should have a settlement system where you can quickly build buildings. Like this you're able to combine settlement and melee. I want the production being faster for this kind of game.
Tubes or Wipfs would be very helpful with this.

In Clonk there are no ways of accelerating your production. I think, the more buildings you have and the more you have advanced in a level, the faster building should go.

Do you see my point?
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Parent - By Otoma [de] Date 2011-01-31 17:43
Maybe Clonk should get 2 different build Modes, a fast one for Melees and a slow one for settlements. I dont like when settlement modes are finished quickly.  Settlemend should be a longer mode where you can spend several hours for one game.
Parent - By PeterW [gb] Date 2011-02-01 00:12
That's pretty much my viewpoint as well, by the way. Creativity is nice and all, but Clonk gameplay is so varied that using it as our goal seems like a very bad idea to me. We have settlement melees, settlement leagues, and settlement just for fun. Whatever we think up should be fair to all of them.
Parent - - By Profpatsch [de] Date 2011-02-01 16:50
Yes, it's slow.

But if you want to make it faster to use it e.g. in Meele, you will have to either simplify it, or get back into the old "buying stuff with clunker made from collected and automatically sold gold" which I think nobody wants to.

BUT it would be a possibility to have different production lines, simplified ones for meele and bigger ones for long settlement rounds.
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Parent - - By MM333 [at] Date 2011-02-02 16:02
"Yes, it's slow."
Yes, and its slow already ;)
Personally i like your idea and i can, in some way, understand where it comes from. But i think it just won't fit well into Clonk, and here is why:
You mentioned Minecraft quite often, as a very creative game, and i totally agree with this! And why? Its not because of the more or less 'useful' crafting system... (sorry i dont really like it, at first it looks cool, but at the end you just follow recipes and get the output... nothing special or surprising, just complicated to recognice all them), no its because of the possibility to change the whole environment the way you want it! You want House in the middle of a little see? Just make it! Or an underground prison with monsters? Dig it! Maybe the Statue of Liberty? Build it!
But hey, thats exactly what clonk is about, changing the environment the way you want it. Building underground tunnels, fill them with water and drown your enemies. Build loam bridges to make towers (or full citys) fly in the Sky and just drop flints at the head of your enemies (god i loved the old clonk ^^).
Do you realize: i like the basic stuff much more, than the complex. I like it to use the most simple items and build something creative out of it. It may be funny to shoot an enemy down with a bow... but its much more fun to be able to drown him in a self build "monster/shark/water initialized from a jumping and rock hidden enemy" trap. Thats what, in my personal opinion, creativity is about!
You might say now, that this is exactly what you ment... no its not ^^. Its good to interact with the environment, but bad to be forced to individualice every bit of the game (in Minecraft you don't have to build a chest out of hundrest of subitems, you just take wood and its there). If you build your own 'house' in Minecraft, you could compare it with a whole 'city' in clonk. The single parts are all more or less the same, its how you arrange them and how build them 'into' the environment.

Where i have to agree is, that the building part is too simple. But its a bad solution to just put more complexity into it. A little bit is good, for instance the posibility to choose the material your hut is going to be (as mentioned above), or an easy way, to expand old buildings (f.i. you first have a normal tower with no doors and later can add a left/right or both, just as you wish). But building every hut out of tons of items wouldn't be fun, it would be work... (especially for the programmers ^^)

How to solve the Problem? I realldy don't know and i can't offer 'the' idea, but i would always bear in mind to keep it simple, but fun :)
Parent - By Profpatsch [de] Date 2011-02-03 13:12
If the material system is too complex and seen as work, maybe just select the modules as a whole and not the raw materials?

So you enter the build menu, select a module, place it on the ground, add as many as you want and then build the construction?
I actually quite like that idea, it would be less fuzzing around with a lot of materials and work much faster, while the individuality is maintained.

How do you like this approach?
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Parent - - By Nachtschatten Date 2011-02-06 15:46

> sorry i dont really like it, at first it looks cool, but at the end you just follow recipes and get the output... nothing special or surprising, just complicated to recognice all them


It's the other way round (for me*): While discovering Minecraft's recipes on your own is hard, perhaps impossible, memorising how to build a certain object is easy. On the other hand there's Clonk's traditional "list of components" that I just can't get into my head.

Let me give you an example: A pack of explosive arrows in Clonk Rage needs five pieces of wood, one piece of metal, two pieces of sulphur and one flintstone. How did I know that? Because I just looked it up. I can somehow make out that the wood and the explosive flint might be used for the arrows. On the other hand, the additional sulphur and metal, and the exact amount of each ingredient is just beyond me. I'll probably have forgotten this tomorrow, at the latest. Actually, while playing Clonk, I sometimes even looked up the ingredients of an object and forgot them later, right during the same round.
Compare this to Minecraft. A pickaxe? Two sticks and three pieces of stone (or other material, depending on the quality of the tool). Torches? One stick and a piece of coal. A door? Six planks (or pieces of metal for an iron door).

By not just having an indefinite "list of components", but giving some kind of meaning to them (because you basically "draw" what you build in the crafting grid), I find it ridiculously easy to call a certain recipe to mind, even though I haven't built such an object for weeks.

* Like I said, true for me. I'm a strong visual thinker anyway, so this concept plays right into my hands. I'm aware, though, that it doesn't fit everyone as good - as you should be, so please don't dismiss "visual" crafting as "just complicated".
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Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2011-02-06 15:58

>Two sticks and three pieces of stone


So it's actually the same issue in minecraft ;)
Why would a pickaxe be made of more than one stick? Why would I put something else than one metall on said stick?
Just one example from Clonk: A Flint is one Sulphur, a better Flint is a weaker Flint+one Sulphur!
What I get is that Minecraft and Clonk use exactly the same system except Clonk overdoes it on very rare occasions (metall for arrows)? :)
Parent - - By Nachtschatten Date 2011-02-06 17:26 Edited 2011-02-06 17:29

> So it's actually the same issue in minecraft


No. Take a look at the tool recipes. This is far less abstract - the handle of the pickaxe is just that long, hence two sticks.
Certainly, in Clonk, you could include a complex reasoning in every object's description. "Explosive arrow pack - Explosive ammunition for bow and crossbow. Needs 5 wood for the arrow shafts, one metal for..., sulphur for..., yadda yadda." Does that speak for itself, like the visual recipes?

> Why would a pickaxe be made of more than one stick? Why would I put something else than one metall on said stick?


The exact amount of each ingredient is somewhat arbitrary (e.g., crafting a brick block takes four bricks, while a diamond block takes nine diamonds), even more so in Clonk. However, in Minecraft, what you draw is what you get. With just one stick and one piece of metal, how could you distinguish between a shovel, a pickaxe, and a hoe? This is a big difference from the way crafting works in Clonk, where you choose the end product in a menu, and according to that consume materials.

> What I get is that Minecraft and Clonk use exactly the same system


I don't see how they are "exactly" the same. Apart from "building objects needs materials", I see little similarities.
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Parent - - By Zapper [de] Date 2011-02-06 17:40

>No. Take a look at the tool recipes


Ah, now I get what you mean by "visual recipes".
Yes, that does look nice. And if someone could come up with a decent concept how that could fit into Clonk (or how Clonk could benefit from that idea) it would be an interesting approach.
(Something that comes to my mind right now: In MC you always have every recipse available and you don't need buildings, right? Let's say you have a forge that makes a metal bar out of one metal and one coal (and does nothing else!) - you would not need visual recipes for that. And if you use the old recipes in one place, why not everywhere? Or: Do you really want more than one type of recipes?)

>I don't see how they are "exactly" the same. Apart from "building objects needs materials", I see little similarities.


I never played Minecraft - all I knew about it came from your post ;)
Parent - - By Profpatsch [de] Date 2011-02-07 14:08
If you want an approach, look at the beginning of this thread :P
You could implement a similar system for crafting. But please do not copy the MC system, it would seem cheap...very cheap xD
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Parent - By Zapper [de] Date 2011-02-07 17:06

>If you want an approach, look at the beginning of this thread :P


Sorry, I could only find stuff about buildings there ;)
Up Topic General / Feedback and Ideas / OC getting modular - rethinking construction and production
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