We're post release! Quickly, do new features!
I just pushed some stuff into the heavy-resources branch for testing purposes. This thread should now be the feedback thread for further refining the idea.
Idea
The idea behind heavy resources came with Ringwaul's carry heavy lib and spicing up the mining from 'throw 50 objects into lorry / by hand' to 'carry few, big objects around with a little hassle'. Main feature is that veins now blast to big chunks of material:
Changes so far
- The following material will spit out chunks: Rock, Coal, Gold and Ore.
- The Blast2ObjectRatio / Dig2ObjectRatio have all been increased (i.e. you need to mine more pixels before an object spawns).
- Chunks are worth several pieces of little material lumps: Rock (5), Coal (4), Ore (4), Gold (3).
- Producer buildings will split chunks automatically into the smaller objects.
- All buildings that need rock to construct have been changed to be built from rock chunks.
- Carry heavy objects will disable scaling / hangling when being carried.
Testing / Feedback
Playtesting settlement scenarios will be the next step. Pay special attention towards the following:
1. How is the mining process perceived now? Do you think it's better than with little objects?
Starting your settlement should now be considerably easier. Constructing a Foundry is just one chunk of rock (instead of 4 rocks). One chunk of coal + one chunk of ore will serve you with 4 metal; enough for a Wind Generator + Flag + Sawmill.
2. What do you think on disabling scale / hangle?
The thought behind this is that you have to put more thought into your mine shaft again. Maybe even clear a path for a lorry in order to carry more than just one chunk. But at least shape the shaft in a way that you can make your way back out without scaling.
Now this is probably the most controversial change. It will also affect other carry heavy objects (the Boompack, the Barrel / Powder keg, Crate) - I don't know if it actually breaks any scenario that needs the Boompack. The whole idea came up when the Lift Tower was still under development. Back then, the prospect of having a building that could drag hard-to-carry objects along everywhere made it feasible to obstruct transportation. Now, with the rope development stuck, we might reassess the concept. For a start, I leave the obstacle in the game.
For players, this downside isn't that unperceivable: After all, carry heavy objects block your regular inventory and you can clearly see how they take up both your hands on the model.
3. What do you think on balancing?
The material outputs in Clonk have been well established for years. Changing the ratios is not an easy step. Do you think the material-to-chunk ratio is okay? Do you think the amount of chunks needed to run a settlement are okay? Since you can easily get more metal with less effort, we might want to increase metal need for high tier techs / buildings.
Also important: The chunks now simply weight 3, 4 or 5 times the little objects, making them especially heavy. Are they too strong a weapon or an unfair death trap?
4. Is the splitting / construction with logs nice?
You can't manually split the chunks right now. That's why I changed the rock-dependent buildings from taking rock to rock chunks. In order to get nuggets, you have to put the (gold) chunks into a Foundry first (probably biggest flaw). I'm open for ideas!
What is planned?
Introduce the logs from Fungiform's sketch. Trees will split into logs when chopped down. Logs will serve as construction material for low tier buildings and can be processed into wooden planks in the sawmill. Planks are construction material for high tier buildings / techs.
2. Get some nicer (and different) models for the chunks
Simple graphics to do for whoever wants to do it!
Okay, some questions from me on the concept you wrote here:
1. You said that the chunk size should be dependent on the material (Rock (5), Coal (4), Ore (4), Gold (3)). The more transparent and simpler way would certainly be to say 1 chunk = 3 pieces for any material. Is there a specific reason for that?
2. The firestone, ice and snow material do not yield chunks. This seems inconsistent to me. Why not?
3. Currently, one can throw away carry heavy objects just like normal objects. Will this stay the same?
4. What about swimming and rolling? Will it be disabled also? (Clonk walks on the ground, play Kneel animation instead)
Regarding the disabling scaling and hangling thing, you raise most concerns yourself already:
+ scenarios were not designed with this in mind, a major change to game balance
+ will break some scenarios, backwards compatibility problem
However, I find it interesting enough that we should try it and see how it plays out.
Another issue I see is with the splitting up stuff. I'd find it best if we somehow found a solution that would completely eliminate the "smaller" objects... it feels like loose change. Loose change that will accumulate in each of your production buildings: "Yeah, we have here, 0.75 ore left in the foundry, and 0.25 coal in the workshop". Whats worse than one wallet full of small change?
> Oh, I thought you were already calling for playtests. I failed to find the repository.
Switch to 'heavy-resources' or 'remotes/origin/heavy-resources', whatever you get. The files are uploaded and ready to be played.
1.
No specific reason, no. Just me feeling this was right. Three for all is equally good.
2.
Firestone: I need more input for that. Since you designed firestone to be the starting point for your mining efforts, one should always be able to easily get firestones right from the beginning. How do you do that with chunks? We need an easy way to split chunks then. Otherwise you don't have the necessary mining equipment ready.
Snow / Ice: Wasn't aware that these two supply you with stuff. I will change them, too. Although, snowballs are more like the fool-around-objects that should again be easily accessible, aren't they?
3.
I guess so, unless it proves to be bad in any way. However, you can't throw them as far since your throwing power gets reduced.
4.
Haven't thought about that. Possible to do, yes. But I'd rather wait if scale / hangle disabled turn out to be good. I'm not sure with swimming though. What should happen instead? Sinking to the ground, being immovable (kinda stupid)? Or drop the heavy stuff automatically (might be annoying)?
> Another issue I see is with the splitting up stuff. I'd find it best if we somehow found a solution that would completely eliminate the "smaller" objects...
Not sure. It is possible, I guess. You'll get your metal or gold bars in sets of 4 then.
>Three for all is equally good.
What if it randomly spawns chunks of let's say 3 distinguishable sizes. A big chunk contains 4 items of the material, a middle one 3, and a small one only 2. All would reduce the physics of the clonk (mainly walking speed, throwing distance and jump height) depending on their size.
>Firestone
It would be cool if huge firestone-chunks had a really really big and unpredictable explosion radius. So It is really dangerous to mine with them, especially when you can only throw them a few pixels far. You could still mine with them, but it would make it more attractive for layers to produce special mining equipment like handpiece-big firestones or dynamite in the chemlab.
Of course you could still use huge firestone chunks with a catapult to nuke enemy bases. :)
>Snow
I want to build a snowclonk with big chunks of snow! \o/
>3.
I think you should only throw big chunks a few pixels far. Because of the firestone idea I wrote above, but also for logical reasons.
Also walking speed should be lowerd drastically.
Jumping: maybe a few pixels high.
In water you should be able to walk around on the ground, that would be funny. :)
And no scaling and hangling when carrying. The only way for obstacles is an elevator (wich is the most useless building atm), or a ropetower, or convayorbelts, or something.
Lorries could contain up to 10 chunks and because of wheels you can push and transport them much faster than carriyng manually.
> Random Sizes
Something bugs me about this. So by sheer chance, I could get double the amount of gold out of the same amount of gold pixels? I'm not against distinguishable sizes (at least, not yet ;P), but they should be spawned in relation to how much material was removed (-> also something where better explosives could have a subtle effect).
1. You don't get your climbing and hangling back if you put a heavy resource into a building via "E" menu.
2. I have one piece of coal here which I can't pick up, other pieces work fine.
3. Interaction-bar-distance is too small.
UPDATE
ad 1. - doesn't occur anymore for some reason
ad 2. - i can't pick up most of the coal EDIT: Stupid me, seems that the coal chunks spawn slightly to low and you have to dig them free. That flows into 3. now.
> You don't get your climbing and hangling back if you put a heavy resource into a building via "E" menu.
Keep me posted whenever that happens again. I did something to prevent that but maybe it's not working properly in every case.
Hopefully fixed now!
Minor flaws:
-some wrong animation display while jumping with the object (guess it's still unfinished)
-It looked weird when I pushed a tree while I carried a gold chunk (this was possible)
-as for controls: If a lot of objects for interacting are on one place (like 10 stones, a foundry, a lorry) - it can get a little tricky. But I'm not too skilled with the controls, so it might go smooth if you have the practice.
-We needed a "normal" coal-piece to build something and the big coal didn't work. I think it was the energy-saver-thing. So we put the coal into the foundry, and took out a small coal piece for building.
>1. How is the mining process perceived now? Do you think it's better than with little objects?
>Starting your settlement should now be considerably easier. Constructing a Foundry is just one chunk of rock (instead of 4 rocks). One chunk of coal + one chunk of ore will serve you with 4 metal; enough for a Wind Generator + Flag + Sawmill.
This works pretty nice. I liked carrying stuff around, instead of throwing like 100 items. Less objects seemed to make it easier, also the start was easy and we got resources quickly. However, since the chunks give so much material we didn't have to mine as much as usual I think, this is actually not bad. But changes things - and you can get very rich from just one gold ledge (guess you can make between 700-1000 gold from one normal-sized mine). For ore it was OK I think, for coal - we had far too much coal over.
Also: Since now the clonks carry less objects, lorries are even more unnecessary. But that's again not a bad thing.
>2. What do you think on disabling scale / hangle?
>The thought behind this is that you have to put more thought into your mine shaft again. Maybe even clear a path for a lorry in order to carry more than just one chunk. But at least shape the shaft in a way that you can make your way back out without scaling.
It felt logical - and I liked this too. But it's not that much of an obstacle. Perhaps because we did dig paths which you could easily access while jumping, there was little need for climbing. But I guess that's the natural way anyway - because jumping over the map is faster (and more fun) than climbing.
>3. What do you think on balancing?
>The material outputs in Clonk have been well established for years. Changing the ratios is not an easy step. Do you think the material-to-chunk ratio is okay? Do you think the amount of chunks needed to run a settlement are okay? Since you can easily get more metal with less effort, we might want to increase metal need for high tier techs / buildings.
>Also important: The chunks now simply weight 3, 4 or 5 times the little objects, making them especially heavy. Are they too strong a weapon or an unfair death trap?
Less of the map must be used for mining, but this again is not bad I guess. As for weapons: We didn't try to use them as weapons, but mining is much more dangerous now. I played pretty reckless and lost 3 clonks and also killed one of Andriel with some pressure wave. But again: That's not a bad thing.
>4. Is the splitting / construction with logs nice?
>You can't manually split the chunks right now. That's why I changed the rock-dependent buildings from taking rock to rock chunks. In order to get nuggets, you have to put the (gold) chunks into a Foundry first (probably biggest flaw). I'm open for ideas!
The only thing here is that there is far more rock, than you'll ever need for buildings. And you can't deposit it and rock becomes stuff that lies round quite a lot. (hm actually, that is also true for normal rock chunks).
As for using it for buildings, that was no problem and worked out fine.
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So all in all, I had quite a good impression. Nice work!
It also had a cool atmosphere, I felt like an ant if you carry all those big junks around :)
> some wrong animation display while jumping with the object (guess it's still unfinished)
Yep, that's it. I took a very old model that's unfinished or broken. Wasn't bothering too much with the graphics here.
> It looked weird when I pushed a tree while I carried a gold chunk (this was possible)
I see. That's a problem, I think. Should be disabled as well.
> as for controls: If a lot of objects for interacting are on one place (like 10 stones, a foundry, a lorry) - it can get a little tricky. But I'm not too skilled with the controls, so it might go smooth if you have the practice.
Hm, yeah. Well, you can use the mouse and click the appropriate button!
> We needed a "normal" coal-piece to build something and the big coal didn't work. I think it was the energy-saver-thing. So we put the coal into the foundry, and took out a small coal piece for building.
Ah, okay! Forgot that. Well, that was Zapper, crazy enough to have coal for building material. Who could possibly suspect that :C
Apart from that, I'm mostly concerned with balancing the richness in material.
Since transporting up one big chunk of rock is not exactly 5 times more time consuming than to transport a small one and ala mentioned that building up a settlement now is much faster, I'd even suggest to test how it works out if the amount of materials needed for construction is increased again. E.g. if before heavy-resources a foundry cost 5 rock and now one big rock, make it perhaps 3 big rock now.
A nice solution for the splitting-up-stuff I mentioned would be if resources in general (including processed ones like metal) were carry-heavy, so you even build stuff in the workshop directly from the big chunks. Of course, if the game gets too sluggish after that, one needs to trim the balancing back a bit. E.g. convert logs to "3 sticks" in workshops.
P.S: Ah, something I should mention since the controls-branch will probably, hopefully also be part of the next release. IIRC the clonk's inventory should be reduced to 3 items with the new one-handed controls.
Another thing is that stuff like skulls/chests etc. could be drawn before the solid material (or check wether there is solid material for each pixel of the graphic at the rendering process, dunno what's faster/less complicated). So you find it randomly and don't see them before.
In fact that carry-heavy objects are getting more important and one things even to enable climbing/etc. I'd like to raise once again an idea of mine, not because of self-advertisment but because I think the idea still fits and could be usefull.
the jack-in-the-box-elevator-thing
>But what use is left for the split-up objects, then? Do we still need those as real objects that are lying around?
I guess as production material?
For metal, it would be easy though: just let the foundry spit out more than one bar for every chunk of ore.
For other things, the chunks always define the minimum material requirement. You could not have an object that requires less than one chunk of stone to construct.
I don't really know whether that's a bad thing, though: you would just not have the chunks as material for tools at all - it works out for gold and ore easily, since those are converted into bars first anyway. No idea about coal and stone. I think we could get away with not using coal for constructing tools. Same for stone probably?
It would be another story if wood was carry-heavy. But I guess that's currently not the case.
PS: I guess I am for removing the little objects for stone/ore/gold/coal.
But I'm not a fan of having different resources being handled differently. "ok this is a large metal beam, but because I use it to build tools and it has one production tier more, I can carry it, but I can't easily carry the rock, because.. uh.."
Just a though here: We also might consider making the "small objects" a unit. So a chunk of rock would still be "worth" "5 Stones", but could not actually be split into objects. But feeding it into a production building would add "5 stone" to its available production material. It's very similar to how gold works in Clonk Rage: "Object-Gold" is worth 5 "Money-Gold". Getting those out of production buildings again might be tricky, but in the first stage we can simply not allow it. I would then apply this to all the resources we have. So a wooden beam is worth 5 wood, a metal beam is worth 5 metal, etc pp. this would allow for "smaller" production requirements.
>"ok this is a large metal beam, but because I use it to build tools and it has one production tier more, I can carry it, but I can't easily carry the rock, because.. uh.."
Yeah, the line between a tool or a non-tool is quite a fine one.
Is loam a tool or carry-heavy? Probably a tool, I'd say. Why would metal (with very similar functionality) be carry-heavy then? My naive suggestion would be that only the raw ressources are carry-heavy. That's straight-forward for the player to understand.
Also the splitting imo sounds too complicated for the little gain. Just have stuff construct from (at least) one raw chunk or use refined stuff (metal f.e.)
> It would be another story if wood was carry-heavy. But I guess that's currently not the case.
But that's a definite todo.
Wood as the most basic resource should probably not require an obligatory building like the sawmill.
"Should" because a) that was the reason why we can currently obtain wood directly from a tree with a hatchet and b) that was one of the topics for the pick-axe discussion ("make the start easier and require less buildings/stuff").
If we would start to use chunks of wood directly for tool-creation, we would have the problem of the minimum cost again (one hammer would need a whole chunk of wood).
> 1. Make wood a 'heavy resource'
> Introduce the logs from Fungiform's sketch. Trees will split into logs when chopped down. Logs will serve as construction material for low tier buildings and can be processed into wooden planks in the sawmill. Planks are construction material for high tier buildings / techs.
"Low tier" would be everything that's needed for basic settlement (sawmill, tool shed, tools) or doesn't need wood at all.
I am not talking buildings here. Not problems with the buildings. I am talking about items and tools.
* except for a realism approach
Most of the items that are "small" are in packs anyway (arrows, spears, ..).
Btw, for "high tier" stuff I'd prefer if you would need to combine resources instead of just turning your logs into planks. Similar to how you combine ore and coal into metal.
The general idea was just to have one more step of crafting for building advanced stuff.
Might as well be a metal gear that's required, or refined iron, or advanced alloy, etc.
Machine block just sounded right, because it is more general than all that stuff, and I stole the idea from Industrial Craft and GregTech. :p
But course only if that plays out well.
This is quite different from the current gameplay, but I don't think it would be too hard. After all, in CR you could only have ONE rock in the hand and only had a builtin shovel. With this change, you'd have ONE rock but still 3-5 tools/explosives.
(metal, gold bars, planks [when done], ...)
IF metal was carry-heavy instead, I could still profit from the foundry in my mines - because I need to carry 2 heavy resources (coal, ore) only a short distance, and could then transport carry-heavy metal to the surface.
>I could carry 5 of them to the surface while scaling and jumping around without a care in the world
Well, what's the distinction between a tool and a "normal" product? Is loam a tool, because you construct bridges from it? Is metal a tool because you can do the same?
I think the animation played when picking up and dropping carry heavy items takes too long. It's annoying now that you need to carry a lot of heavy items, and it's very annoying if you just want to drop something temporarily to dig away some other materials. I'd say make it at least twice as fast.
One thing spoiled my fun though, I tried to put into the foundry a big coal while still picking it up, this rendered my clonk uncontrollable afterwards, ruining the round I played :(
Seemed to be stuck in some invisible menu, movement keys did not respond anymore.
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