Design: About Oort Shards, Portals and Warps

Let me put it simply.

in my eyes anything, a guild should do, should be done in the actual world, if you want to see how instanced guild worlds work i would recommend looking at trove, i find it very very sad.

i see absolutely zero reason for it to be in a seperate instance, zero, i would even be against it because it just means more meaningless work from the devs, what would the point of having that stuff in a seperate world be? what is the good part? the reward of it? anything that are guild related could just be craftable, so guildbank is a block you craft, recruitment boards is something you craft etc etc, as somebody else mentioned i dont think guilds should have any sort of universal vaults, but i would like for guilds to be able to spent resources on bigger vaults/chests that guild leaders can control settings for, so individual vaults, not global.

please, do explain to me what the good side of having a seperate town for anything guild related be. i can say the bad is more work for the devs, it would ruin quite a bit of immersion and it would make guilds feel like a disconnected part of the game, nobody would need guild towns if everything they needed is in a seperate ‘‘world’’ anyways :confused:

Our general philosophy with a lot of this stuff is to provide some rules and let it be up to the player. In this case:

  • Guild leaders want to protect some valuable assets
  • Guild leader places a new Beacon
  • Guild leader adds other important guild members to that Beacon
  • Chests/stuff/items put in area and protected with locks (and locked doors)

Done.

If you want to totally prevent physical access to an area the way to do it will be:

  • Place a Beacon
  • Build a wall to encapsulate area you want to restrict access
  • Build a door
  • Place a lock on that door

Done. Only Beacon members will be able to access this area.

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Is this a confirmation that you can lock doors and chests? if yes is it just a virtual lock meaning only people with token in it can use it, or a physical lock where you can make keys for it? (easy to make simple system or a bit harder to make immersive system)

Yes. Locking means only members of the Beacon can access this thing. Think of Beacons like plots in a grid, they specify permissions. Locks are simple, a thing either has a lock or doesn’t. Locks themselves don’t store permissions, the Beacon does.

Sharing stuff with everyone
Eg: you and I are in a Beacon, there is an unlocked chest, anyone in the game can access the contents.

Sharing stuff with a select group:
Eg: you and I are in a Beacon, there is a locked chest, we can both access it and the contents.

Keeping stuff totally private:
Eg: I am in a Beacon, nobody else has permissions, there is a locked chest, only I can access the contents.

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Right, how agile are beacons going to be? for example how can you split up permissions in a beacon, say i would like to have next to eachother but only certain people can go in each door, if they are in the same beacon then everybody would be able to use the doors, or maybe i would like to have a treasure room where some people can use some chests but a section of chests are only for specific people.

and the most important, what if i have a guild and i want everybody to be able to place stuff in the chest but only higher rankings or special people can take from it normal guild bank style or allow people to take a certain amount of things each day, all of these things are they possible to make without having permissions on the actual chests? would you guys be willing to consider special guild chests or vaults that have more space and have specific restrictions which can be put on them?

TL;DR: Maybe i want somebody to use some of the doors in my house but not others, would that be possible?

In this design, you can’t (and you shouldn’t need to, because you’d create a new Beacon next-door).

We want players to always understand what a lock is going to mean for them – we don’t want players to see locks and think “hmm, can I open that?” and then have to interact with it to find out. A really good way to solve this is a consistent rule set per Beacon. You already know if you’re a member of a Beacon or not, which means you know instantly whether locks work for you or not. We hope it’ll be easier to understand than a different set of rules per lock (which we did consider originally, but this feels more solid).

Beacons 2.0 (not the current implementation) are going to be distributed on a grid of plots across the world. The resolution of this grid is still to be decided, but it’ll probably be something like 16x16 blocks.

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So you want a treasure room? Beacon off an area, invite all your friends. Choose where you want to store your treasure and place a Beacon there, but don’t add your friends to that Beacon. You can place Beacons edge-to-edge so they visually appear as if it’s all the same village.

FYI: we’ll probably change some of the terminology, it might be that Beacon isn’t the best word to describe this functionality.

any chance of having flexibel beacons? like a system where you can choose precisely what you want to beacon in terms of size, so you could either have a 50x2 beacon for a long road or you could freeform if you want to build an entire building within the beacon, and then the price of the beacon would be more expensive the more you capsule in?

or will it only be one set sized of beacon that if people want more to build on will have to put side by side?

Can you place a beacon inside of a beacon?

  1. wouldnt that kinda the ruin the point of beacons
  2. why in the world would you do that? XD

i hope you mean place your own beacon upon your own beacon, if anybody could beacon a beaconed area that would kinda nullify the other beacon wouldnt it?

of course you’d need permisson in a beacon to place a beacon in it.
What I’m asking is if you have a beaconed area you have permissions too and you want a room only for yourself. Could you place a small beacon inside of that to make that room?
Because as I see it, there’s no other way with the current system you could achieve that.

Yep, that’s how they work.

So you set permissions for a 1x1 plot size Beacon, and then you can create a new one if you want a different set of permissions, or you can extend the existing Beacon to cover a larger area with the same set of permissions. We’ve thought a lot about this (really, quite a lot of design time has gone into this) and we think it covers all use cases.

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And no, we’re not going to allow nested Beacons in Beacons. You can achieve the same thing by leaving a space (or removing a Beacon) and then set different permissions. So there’s really no need for nesting.

Nice, that is precisely how i imagined the best way to be, after beaconing up an area are we going to be able to change those ‘‘parts’’ of the beacon, so say as kuma asked before, if he wants a room in the beacon, can i go into an already existing beacon and mark that up as a ‘‘seperate’’ beacon or ‘‘section’’ with the special rules? or is there no way to overwrite the beacon once placed?

also will we be able to extend beacons over time so if we need more space and we have the materials we can drag our 10x5 beacon out to 10x10 ?

You’ll be able to remove plots and re-Beacon them.

Also here’s an example that would be covered by the current system (top down view, obviously)

The greeny-blue areas are all shared between Me, Kuro and Zould. I also have private plots. Zouls also has private plots. Kuro also has private plots. Zouls and I also have plots that Kuro can’t access. Kuro and I also have plots that Zouls can’t access.

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That sounds insanely awesome, thanks alot for explaining it Ben :smiley:

but how do you beacon them then? or rather what is the price, if i want to change part of my beacon to kumas do i have to remove them and pay to rebeacon? and when i dont want him anymore do i still have the ability to remove his access, or is that part officially his until he doesnt want it anymore?

PS: this is really good information and i would highly recommend making a devlog about it, (and moving this entire discussion to it, something only mods and devs can do, since its getting a bit off topic compared to portals)

Will do when we’re ready to share more of the Beacons, it’s much easier to show on video. Soon.

Beacon-ing is as easy as placing a block. There is in-game visualisation of what you’re claiming or enlarging.

We’re holding this back until the new GUI is ready, the placeholder GUI solution just wasn’t clear at all, and we don’t want players getting frustrated or misunderstanding this system because we haven’t built out the GUI well enough. It’s not too far off though.

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sounds promising, look forward to it.

It sounds very promising and yes it’s much clearer in a video^^

You’re basically making all of my dreams come true with all of this information about beacons. The time you all spent in design and development seems well worth it, everything sounds amazing!

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