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The recent talk about quest modpacks has been very interesting to me. A while ago, inspired by Blightfall I started working on something similar in hopes of capturing what made it good while fixing the problems. To me the main issue is the supposed focus, cleaning the world. Not the idea of it but the implementation. From the way the system is designed to reward you with badges as you progress I get the impression that the cleaning was supposed to be something you do gradually over the course of the game. However at the beginning the player doesn't really have good means of reclaiming meaningful amounts of land, and once they have progressed to the point they can make and fuel dawn machines the only thing left to do is just wait for them to do their thing. Cleaning the world is not something the player can really do by playing, rather it's something to just wait for once you've already finished everything. I don't intend to imitate Blightfall there but on conceptual level I do like claiming the world piece by piece. Another modpack that gave me ideas is Crash Landing. The gist of it being that you are stranded on a scorching hot desert and desperately need water to survive. It was captivating at first but pretty soon the water mechanic becomes just endless repetition dragging your waterpack to the crafting grid to refill it. And so this modpack also falls apart. Still, despite their failings I really like the sense of hostility their worlds present, and I think I've found a way to improve on them.  The basic design I've come up with is this. The world is divided into progressively Hot areas, and the player needs to find ways to upgrade their Coolness to enter them without bursting into flames. The main benchmark of progress is your Coolness, as areas and resources are gated behind it. Your UI will also always display it, telling you how close you are to the endgame. There are still a bunch of things to implement but I hope to put out a demo version in a reasonable timely manner. If you have any opinions on the thoughts I've written please let me know. Especially if you can see problems in the progression system.
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Oct 7, 2015 23:11
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:05 |
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The debuffs and consumables are something I thought about. Keeping track of consumables felt like it could get annoying but now that you said it, the risk vs reward aspect of it does sound nice. For heat debuffs I'll probably have there be a step before instant death so you don't die right away if you stumble into too hot area.quote:You could also do stuff where like actions generate heat from exertion (I'd just tie that to hunger if you do it - basically using up hunger shanks turns them into heat bars) and have, in addition to the actual heat of an area, varying amounts of world hostility in terms of the mobs. So a really peaceful, scorching hot area might be easier to handle than a slightly cooler but heavily infested area where you'd have to fight constantly and could never take a break to let your cooling kick in and cool you off. The programmed temperature of the infested area would be lower than the peaceful area, but the effective temperature would be higher because of how much heat you'd force the player to generate. I'm not quite sure if having the current Hotness depend on so many variables is a good idea. Feels like it might get annoying, but who knows? quote:Jvie, you might want to take a look at how Twilight Forest gates its progress and the systems used within. It might be fuel for your fire if anything else and it is A Good Mod... even if it utterly ruins servers with its (imo better) world gen. I've played TF... never all the way to a boss though. I'll need to do that. quote:That would have been a cool way to gate Blightfall too. Make areas too tainted to enter and let the player counter it with tech or magic (magical wards or space suits) and for the endgame stuff you need a combination of things. This would alleviate the problem of Goonrushing all the secret stuff on the Goonfall server for example, where in the first iteration we basically teched to the endgame in two days. My thoughts exactly. Jvie fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Oct 7, 2015 |
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Oct 7, 2015 23:32
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That does sound interesting. Your idea would for there to be at least three variables. Heat of the area, the player's cooling capability and their current heat. The player's heat level would normalize towards the ambient temperature while the cooling reduces it by some number of units per tick. fake edit: Oh you clarified it while I was typing. I used to be pretty set on my old idea but you present yours very well. I liked mine for the sheer simplicity but your arguments for soft gating are winning me over. I'm really looking towards testing these things and seeing how it works in practice. Sadly I still need to implement more things before any kind of proper playing is possible. I'm pretty set on making the world feel weird and unfamiliar so I'm doing totally custom world gen and its a pain. quote:Either way you go, please god have keep inventory set to true. Losing your poo poo on death is awful and would be doubly awful if it means you no longer have the suit you need to get to the spot where you died. I actually had some ideas related to this. I agree the player shouldn't lose things that tare total pain to make on death, but just enabling keepInventory might be a missed chance. Let's say that in the beginning your inventory is not kept in case of death. However, some quests reward you with items you can use to permanently make inventory slots deathproof. You should get enough really early on to make your equipment slots permanent but the "unlockers" would be a good rewards for the player through the game. Jvie fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Oct 8, 2015 |
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Oct 8, 2015 00:07
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quote:So I'm guessing the main method of progress is wearing sunglasses and preforming sweet tricks on a skateboard? Sunglasses definetly are in. The terms Hotness and Coolness came from when I started to settle on heat being only dependent on the area you are in. If it was just heat it would seem weird if standing next to an open fire didn't increase it. So I decided to make it Hotness. Kind of like heat, but not quite. Something... else. The difference would get explored in the map's plot.
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Oct 8, 2015 00:18
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Magres posted:everything's cooler at night, but at the cost of having to worry about mobs everywhere. I was actually going to make it be eternal daytime but I really like the thought of players going on a mad dash to get something from a hot area before the sunrise.
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Oct 8, 2015 00:48
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I wrote some stuff about death and items in an earlier post. I think something similar to Blightfall's currency system would also be good. Edit: That'd put the player on pretty slippery slope. VVVVVVV Jvie fucked around with this message at 01:10 on Oct 8, 2015 |
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Oct 8, 2015 01:06
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I found Blightfall's teleport network to be pretty good solution. I intend the world to be pretty large so there's room to hide stuff. Would it sound annoying to have a cost attached to the teleporters? I thought of it like, the first N waypoints are free to activate but after that you need to feed energy into the network or any waypoints past the first ones get deactivated. I'd ike there to be stuff for the player to actually use their resources and big reactors for rather than just watch energy cells fill up. Teleporters are probably what I'll go with. Altough if Thermal Dynamics gets updated with those transport pipes... Edit: I'll try to implement a kiddie waterslide at some point if it doesn't turn out to be a massive pain. I might sound like I'm serious about this project but trust me, I just want to put all of my stupid ideas into Minecraft. Jvie fucked around with this message at 01:25 on Oct 8, 2015 |
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Oct 8, 2015 01:22
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A bit more on that resource thing. Like I said, I'd like to give the players an actual need for the kind of production capabilities they have access to. Agrarian Skies kind of does that with the hoarding quests but I'd like to do something more naturally tied to the game world. For example, the cost of maintaining the teleport network would probably go up exponentially with each waypoint to give a strong incentive to scale up your power production, or decide carefully what places you want to have fast access to. Another idea I had was a portal to a different dimension kinda like the Botania portal in that it takes a lot of power to open but justa small amount to maintain after that.
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Oct 8, 2015 01:33
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Agent Kool-Aid posted:have it so that portals take you to a frigid planet and your goal is to try and equalize both in temperature using components from each other. This sounds dangerously lot like "make two maps." I'm lazy.
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Oct 8, 2015 11:59
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I think a good way to do it would be to have a some "basic" teleporters that can get you around places but they aren't all that convenient for the real meat. Then you have damaged teleporters that you can tag and teleport to once you get to them but can't teleport from them until they are fixed, which can be various degrees of expensive. Lastly what about a rare-ish item that, when combined into a recipe more expensive than any repair job, lets the player make their own teleporters? Or possibly just have player teleporters be very expensive. Dividing teleporters to something like transporters and beacons sounds good. I'll probably make ones placeable by players dungeon loot. Having the teleporters require visiting them for repairs sounds like it'd make players angry but I'll probably make the network have some needs you can pipe in through any node of it.
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Oct 9, 2015 15:36
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ToxicSlurpee posted:What I was figuring on was using it as a mild resource sink if players teleport a lot. As in, if you teleport to a secondary or tertiary beacon a lot it has a small chance to break. If it breaks you need to feed it some resources to teleport away from it. What I was figuring on was that you can teleport to anything you've visited all the time but some things can prevent you from teleporting from. That'd pretty much mean that you would always want to keep repair materials with you if you teleport. I fear it'd turn into annoying busywork. I'd rather have the network work more consistently so players don't start to resent it.
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Oct 9, 2015 20:36
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DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:Personally I don't really like the "woops random chance you have to spend resources!!" thing for teleporters. It'd be nice if to get teleporters working you had to create local self-sustaining power grids; nearby portals could just need e.g. an ex nihilo crucible + magma dynamos, or even for you just to put saplings in a tree farm, but the weird difficult-to-reach ore mountain (c.f Blightfall floating city) could need an entire turbine big reactor that plugs into that dangling coolant pipe. Making the player to build stuff around each teleporter sounds like it'd get old fast. I'd rather have the network accept resources from any node so the player can just upgrade their base. quote:I've got no idea how you'd enforce that other than stealing Material Energy's gimmick and basically have the "fix teleporter" quest require you to turn in all the ingredients you'd need, and in exchange get an AE2 spatial card with the required setup on. I'm not sure if I understand you. I thought you meant that each teleporter required on-site power so the player had to build stuff near it to provide that? Or do you mean that the player should just provide the materials for the setup? Enforcing stuff shouldn't be a problem. I'm implementing the teleporters from scratch so I can make them demand whatever to activate.
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Oct 9, 2015 21:07
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Willheim Wordsworth posted:If the teleporter breaks, a panel somewhere pops open and smoke comes out. You have to punch it for 10 seconds to fix it as a little convenience fee, but once you get tech infrastructure up you can park down an autonomous activator and not worry about it anymore. I don't think those kind of malfunctions would add anything to the experience. The player would just get frustrated and mutter "this crap again?"
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Oct 9, 2015 22:46
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Glory of Arioch posted:rather than saying "this teleporter needs to be powered by nether star generators" you could just do it Feed The Beast style and say "the liquefied nether star generators are out of liquefied nether stars, please insert 512 bucketsworth to continue" and then in a bedrocked/warded area have the thing output to a tank and put a comparator on it and when the comparator hits 15 you go Yes. If you want the player to do a specific thing then just check for that specific thing. I guess the picky teleporters could also be implemented by making them not accept power from ducts, only directly from adjecent generators so they can check what they are being fed by. I'm still not a fan of the idea of making each teleporter have so specific tastes, but I'm going to add other resource sinks as well. DOWN JACKET FETISH posted:I think it would be better to have the player encouraged to branch out and do different things, rather than simply go for the most efficient way of churning out shitloads of RF at each juncture. Maybe have it so each teleporter has like a preferred input but you can bruteforce it for more RF from another source, I dunno. Or if you make the "do different things" directive come as part of upgrading a base's central computer or something (e.g. a Mana Diamond to unlock this teleporter, that one needs a Redstone Energy Cell) I guess that could work. I do want there to be incentives for variety. Speaking of RF, I'm very fond of the feel it has in Blightfall. After the very beginning you are never really in a position where you can't get as much as you need, but it still feels precious since you can't just scoop up some coal off the ground and be done with it. You have to spend something for it, either reputation or rare yellorium, or put in the effort to invent and build a rube goldberg contraption to make it with Botania. I'd like to replicate that feeling. One thing I thought of was making the mana fluxfield the main way for generating RF since Botania has a variety of interesting ways to produce mana. Another way could be making it so that at least in the beginning the player's best way to acquire RF is to scavenge energy cells from ruins.
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Oct 10, 2015 00:03
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So I have been working on and off on that mod/modpack I mentioned some time ago. Its still not really done but I put together a small alpha of it to get some first impressions. Its on technic if someone feels like giving it a try. There isn't really much to do and no mods yet beyond the my custom things and HQM for some introduction. http://api.technicpack.net/modpack/candyland-alpha-1 I call it Candyland. 
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Dec 3, 2015 03:36
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McFrugal posted:Wow you're not kidding about this being an alpha. http://api.technicpack.net/modpack/candyland-alpha-1 quote:Anyway, the new blocks look fine, and the mobs I got from those spawn eggs look ok too. You didn't include NEI so I can't easily tell if any new recipes are present- the creative tab just shows that there are items, not how to make them. Its still really bare bones. I'm mostly trying to hammer out the very first things the player does when starting a new game, securing basic materials and getting to the desert area. I made this alpha mostly to get opinions on how intuitive and interesting the process feels, so the quests are mainly just small hints. There aren't really any recipes other than the wool clothing and flint tools since the items added so far are mostly loot found in the world. EDIT:  Jvie fucked around with this message at 15:42 on Dec 3, 2015 |
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Dec 3, 2015 15:23
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Glory of Arioch posted:no seriously, i genuinely don't understand why anyone would consider computercraft bad, please explain I was responding to that earlier video.
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Dec 3, 2015 18:18
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Am I right in my assessment that Immersive Engineering, Mekanism, IndustrialCraft, Botania and RFTools are the major content rich mods out for 1.10? I've been working on a quest modpack for a while, staying on 1.8.9 mainly for Thaumcraft but the various upgrades make switching over to 1.10 really alluring. Maybe ditching Thaumcraft is worth it? Its already had a lot of time in limelight thanks to Blightfall. Leaving it out could be good just to keep things fresh rather than doing just the same things over again but I'm not sure how much stuff the other mods would offer in comparison. Thaumcraft does give incentives for major construction projects which I like... Am I missing some major 1.10 mods?
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Aug 31, 2016 21:53
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I'm not an expert but I guess you can recreate the client pack and server folder with the new forge version while taking care to copy over any mods, saves and configs from the old version? Just follow the instructions for making a technic pack, and this place seems to have basic instructions for setting up the server folder, minus the stuff past step 7 which seems host specific.
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Sep 3, 2016 21:55
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 05:05 |
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Have you tried raising the amount of memory allocated to java in the launcher?
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Dec 4, 2016 02:00
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