![[gb]](/mwf/flags/gb.png "United Kingdom")
>shouldn't really need
This is obviously coming from a theoretical point of view. If you play, especially in non-trivial landscape, not having basements is really annoying:
*You can't just shovel away some pixels, cause your foundation is either gone or diagonal now.
*You can't blast away some solid pixels, at the cost of structural damage only, cause again the same.
*Any disaster like an earthquake will completely ruin you infrastructure.
*Also, in the future, enemies will just be able to move your buildings around as they wish.
It's just convenient for the player, and the last thing we wanted to do was introduce artificial difficulty, right?
Do you have any arguments in favour of not having basements?
> *You can't just shovel away some pixels, cause your foundation is either gone or diagonal now.
> *You can't blast away some solid pixels, at the cost of structural damage only, cause again the same.
Why is that a problem? Didn't we declare that we want to actively support tilted buildings? Why do we need straight floors?
> *Any disaster like an earthquake will completely ruin you infrastructure.
> *Also, in the future, enemies will just be able to move your buildings around as they wish.
Do we have granite chunks/barrels or something similar? And what about bridge segments? When in doubt, I would favour trying to make these more useful. I think there's plenty unexplored gameplay space here.
[ Easy way to appease me would obviously be a granite bridge segment ;) ]
> Do you have any arguments in favour of not having basements?
Well, first and foremost, simplicity, of course. It's been pretty much OC policy to only take over from CR that we are really convinced of. And if I remember fundaments I think of:
* Lorries getting stuck in them
* Them being the weakest part of a towers. Towers looking utterly stupid and useless without them (doors stop working?).
* Materials getting stuck in them when buildings carelessly
* Building sites getting abused for spamming fundaments
* Pretty much not being able to hit buildings with flints anymore once the fundament is gone
That's a whole lot of inconvenience just for having buildings stand stable - which they really should haven't to. In my mind they should really be a category with the whole castle building stuff, when we properly start thinking about how to introduce destroyable solid-mask stuff into the landscape.
![[de]](/mwf/flags/de.png "Germany")
>Why is that a problem? Didn't we declare that we want to actively support tilted buildings? Why do we need straight floors?
Once Clonkonaut pushed on of our windmills over - accidentally. It got stuck and we had to build a new one.
Also the flag and the elevator are two example of buildings that - ideally - should not move.
Just to address some of the problems you mentioned:> Lorries getting stuck in them
This is obviously subject to fixing it properly. Adding some vertices to the lorry so this particular stucking cannot occur.
> Them being the weakest part of a towers. Towers looking utterly stupid and useless without them (doors stop working?).
> Pretty much not being able to hit buildings with flints anymore once the fundament is gone
This is also a reason why I want (as written above):
> I'd pretty much prefer something that cannot be destroyed. Meaning the basements delivers any damage to the building and the building is always destroyed before anything happens to the basement.
So you cannot destroy a basement without destroying the building. We can easily make non-structural buildings weak enough so this doesn'*t become a problem.
> Building sites getting abused for spamming fundaments
With our changes already present in OC, this is easily avoidable. First of all, if you create a construction site in the current state of the game (meaning default tip), you wouldn't get a basement. Only the wireframe construction site that does not interact with any other object in the game. If you wanted to 'spam' buildings and therefore spam basements, you'd need to provide the needed construction material (all of it). A fair trade in my eyes.
Also with the new flags we can simply forbid constructing in the enemy flag radius.
Zapper took on the two examples I mentioned above: flagpole and elevator. I'd say for at least these two it's vital to have a basement. The elevator is otherwise easily jammed (one earthquake is sufficient). Also, falling flags do bear the risk of bad consequences; energy loss, loss of controlled space. An enemy might seek to just move your flag away if it's not possible to steal/destroy it.
The sawmill is also bad for the reason I said above.
In addition, it's very easy to effectivly jam a building, especially the wind generator, by accident. Just dig at the wrong position and it's over.
> Didn't we declare that we want to actively support tilted buildings? Why do we need straight floors?
It's still my plan to somehow include rotable construction sites into the game. Thus you could simply construct your building tilted.
> Do we have granite chunks/barrels or something similar? And what about bridge segments? When in doubt, I would favour trying to make these more useful. I think there's plenty unexplored gameplay space here.
That's due to conceptual work. Feel free to suggest something like self-administered basements. But, for the reason mentioned, I'd still strongly support basements coming along with the critical buildings like flagpole and elevator.
Last but not least:
> fundaments
I have to admit that I never heard of the use of this word in this context. It were always the terms basement or foundation as far as I've come across this. But this is due to correction by a native speaker or someone who knows. ;)
> Adding some vertices to the lorry so this particular stucking cannot occur.
That seems like the wrong fix to me. We should better make sure that objects can never get stuck on "infacing" vertex sides or something.
> So you cannot destroy a basement without destroying the building.
Should go both ways - the basement should be seen as a part of the structural building, just like the roof or a wall.
> elevator
I agree, the elevator is a structural building in my eyes. I mean, I originally proposed elevators to be "castle elevators" only - so you'd always construct a wall with a roof and a basement with it. At minimum we should try to make it less awkward to rain-proof your elevator.
> flagpole
I don't really get that one, though. Isn't the flagpole meant to be able to be de-constructed and moved easily? I would actually envision them to work very differently from buildings - becoming static-back once constructed.
> fundaments
Uhm, yeah, sorry, was a bit tired ;)
> That seems like the wrong fix to me. We should better make sure that objects can never get stuck on "infacing" vertex sides or something.
Well, yeah, if someone does this, it'd also be fine. The basic point is: This was never a fault of basements and we can see to avoid this problem in OC.
> Should go both ways - the basement should be seen as a part of the structural building, just like the roof or a wall.
Yes. And I guess as soon as you cannot destroy the basement seperately from the building, the player will get this impression. Only people coming from CR might first think this is some kind of bug.
> I agree, the elevator is a structural building in my eyes. I mean, I originally proposed elevators to be "castle elevators" only
Yeah hm, that doesn't quite catch our current approach ;) We needed an elevator and here it is, now we have to deal with this. ;)
I'm fine with making the flag static-back and only provide the elevator with a basement. That still leaves us in the need to make a basement for the elevator. In the current state (i.e. easily movable elevator, the scripting does not know this case and will do strange this...) I wouldn't recommend to release the elevator in the next version. I fear that hundreds of people will suffer from this!
The following problems/tasks are on the list then:
- Prevent buildings from toppling over. Probably an engine task? There are downsides on this though. I does look weird if a wind generator is rotated by 45° and stands on a corner, not toppling over.
- The sawmill is another corner case. There's an auto collection timer for trees. As I said, it'd be weird if a falling sawmill collects trees in mid-air.
- We have to live with the weirdness of heavy machinery and constructions such as a whole sawmill or a big brick-built foundry falling down hundreds of meters without a scratch.
> I wouldn't recommend to release the elevator in the next version.
Hm, couldn't we do a simple hack here like making it static-back as well?
> - Prevent buildings from toppling over.
I was actually thinking of a simple "
Rotate=30" or similar in the DefCore? Do we need anything on top of that?> - The sawmill is another corner case. There's an auto collection timer for trees. As I said, it'd be weird if a falling sawmill collects trees in mid-air.
Only chopped-down trees, I presume? Is that really that bad of a problem? :-)
> - We have to live with the weirdness of heavy machinery and constructions such as a whole sawmill or a big brick-built foundry falling down hundreds of meters without a scratch.
Well, on the other hand a good crash sound and a reasonable damage model wouldn't be too hard to build either? Also note that this is less weird the smaller the buildings are...
> Hm, couldn't we do a simple hack here like making it static-back as well?
I'd really prefer something where the solid ground stays intact so you can easily use your elevator.
> I was actually thinking of a simple "Rotate=30" or similar in the DefCore? Do we need anything on top of that?
Oh. Yes. Right.
> Only chopped-down trees, I presume? Is that really that bad of a problem? :-)
Highly exploitable!! You don't need to bother with lifting trees up but can just make the sawmill come down :P
> I'd really prefer something where the solid ground stays intact so you can easily use your elevator.
The whole point of the elevator is that it should be usable well no matter how far extended down the elevator case is. Why should all-the-way-up be a special case here?
> Highly exploitable!! You don't need to bother with lifted trees up but can just make the sawmill come down :P
I really look forward to people posting bug reports where they align chopped-up trees exactly so a sawmill rolling down the hill vacuums them all up. Clearly a feature.
> Why should all-the-way-up be a special case here?
Because this is usually the position where the player wants perfect function. You construct an elevator on the same height as your other buildings to lift things up to that exact same level. If the usual way was to construct the elevator above the settlement, then there wouldn't be a problem. But that's not the case.
Edit: But just to make that clear, I still agree that it's probably the best course of action to give the elevator a basement. After all, it needs all sorts of special cases anyway due to the hole in it. Just whoever does it should be aware that the width we now use for the elevator basement will probably have to be the (minimum) width of the standard castle segment later on in case we want to be able to cleanly extend this towards castle elevators.
My first shot would have been the same size the old (castle) segments were (the smaller ones).
*First of all it was a request for having basements, in irc we had a short "discussion" about them and we need them (at least as long as there are no "castle" parts). This means that from people actively working on settlement a decision has been made and this thread is just a request for basements. Please also note that I and also others have ample experience with playing with structures without basements now, whereas you as far as I can judge only know about the negative features of CR basements.
*Already in the first point, but you are not working on it and I have the feeling you did not test it either. That's of course not a reason to not share your opinion, but maybe you should be careful with your phrasing, and especially refer to all kinds of hypothetical situations which are not even there in OC yet. the Art Workshop is the last place for highly theorized discussions.
*More of the same: the best way to make your point is by implementing it and showing it is better.
*And some more, you must have noticed by now that the arguments are all about corner cases, also the ones by Clonkonaut, and are absolutely irrelevant.
So please move the discussion to General Discussions and don't take it as an offense, but it is pretty annoying to have to discuss minor stuff like this over and over again.
*Should not have pressed the Post button*
P.S. obviously I agree with Clonkonaut on most of the discussed points
> * More of the same: the best way to make your point is by implementing it and showing it is better.
Doesn't work here, same argument as so often already: Once we go down one path it's too much work for too little benefit to get to the other route.
> * And some more, you must have noticed by now that the arguments are all about corner cases, also the ones by Clonkonaut, and are absolutely irrelevant.
Yeah well, that's kind of my point. The case for basements seems shaky at best. I think we haven't really understood this.
> but it is pretty annoying to have to discuss minor stuff like this over and over again.
I don't disagree. Good game design is hard.
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