I think at some point everybody had this expirience:
You want to play in groups or a small community but everybody wants to build his/her magnificent piece of advanced architecture (commonly known as “base”) in different enviromments.
The first one on a hill in the plains, the second one wants to build a treehouse in a jungle, the third on the side of a snowy mountain range, the fourth in the middle of the dessert, and so on (yes, it’s a little bit exaggerated but I hope you know what I mean ). This makes labour divison and trading some kind of impractical and obstructs a vital, cooperative community.
So my suggestion is some kind of cheap transportation within one planet like portals or warps.
Also I could imagine vehicles like paragliders/balloons/airships or potions (or abilities) which allow the player to run faster or even fly.
I actually had a plan once the game went live and portals were a thing. To create massive portal chambers. So you can jump to a planet, then there setup the portals of all the allies you have on your home planet. Then at the home planet you have a portal chamber for allies in the other planet. Or something like that. Since I believe you can link portals to specific coordinates, but from another world not the same one. There might be portals for the same world though that you can make, I am not too sure.
I’m still so much in favor of a map chamber (maybe also, because I’m building this hidden underground temple room atm). On the one hand it is not really necessary because we have a sort of maps in form of planets in the sky right now, which is just so great.
On the other hand it would be great to have a plain surface map shown on a giant plate or table. Those could be found in temples, domes or hidden caverns.
Those could be connected to more information, as for example an indicator where someone is on the planets surface right now, or where more populated areas can be found. Or even where the portals and warp spots are located.
Warps/Portals don’t work on a single world right now, not by design, but due to technical limitations (we need to refactor a bunch of crap before it can work properly).
Non-walking/running modes of transport are definitely on the wish list and suitable to our physically implemented world tech. Movement speed can increase but not orders of magnitude or the streaming becomes a burden. But simply being above the voxels (even at the same speed) is refreshing for exploring.
But as Luca comments the first step will be to enable within world Warps and Portals.
So if you’re lost or far from home you can quickly construct a Warp and get home. (This is why we’re not adding any teleport home option because we want you to warp home, warp to the shops, warp to the capital, warp to your friends, etc.) This is the Boundless way.
I am just curious though, was my idea of creating portal rooms a good one? I mean more so, would it be possible in the final live version to have say 5-6 portals all within like a 30x30 area. Cause I feel like creating a portal highway would be really a really cool thing. Take you to markets, special caves, even create temporary portals that will connect to Titans.
Having multiple portals in a single location is definitely part of the plan. But the engine will need to limit how many are open and rendering. Firstly the client would need to be able to handle it and secondly we’d need to make sure the servers can handle having many “observers” connected. This can lead to many extra server updates flying around. So many portals - yes. All open at once - unlikely. But we’ll automatically switch which portal is live, so as you walk away from one towards another it’ll spring into life. All part of the LOD system.
That sounds really cool. I was thinking when I first read that not all can be on at once, using the spark generators as actual power generators for the portals. So you can just put in the fuel and the one portal connected to it springs to life. All the others remaining shut off since they aren’t being powered. Or creating like a complex signal system (similar to how redstone works in minecraft) that when a new portal is active all others shut off.
I love the idea of playing around with portals, and having multiple portals in a type of ‘Portal HUB’ area rather they have to be manually activated, or there is some kind of system so you only load the ones in your field of view
@james Does this mean the 500 coin cost to open portals will eventually lower? or possibly even be free to traveling to points of a world you are already on once being able to warp to a different point on the same world is implemented?
the 500 coin cost is temporary, the cost will depend on distance travelled on some curve or another. so shorter distance = cheaper, and in terms of worlds, the moon worlds will be cheaper to travel to than the ring world, neighbouring rings worlds even more expensive, and worlds in other regions much more expensive.
). This makes labour divison and trading some kind of impractical and obstructs a vital, cooperative community.