Informations about the OLD Beacon-System

Do you plan to prevent the liquids from flowing out of the beacon ? Otherwise it would be possible to build a beacon over someone elses and ■■■■ him up any way …

Obviously.

But there are many protective beacon issues to consider. What happens if you fire an explosive arrow into a beacon? What happens if an explosive arrow lands just outside the boundary of a beacon? Fluids flow in / flow out of beacons?

Ideally we’d not need to restrict the gameplay by “magic” beacon rules - but it seems like this will be necessary.

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I tested this already (by accident honest! :worried:) and it has no effect on a beacon you have no control over.

Outside the beacon boundary … not so sure!

testet this some time ago … nothing happens. the explosion radius dont damage anything within a strange beacon.

Yep - because we added the code to do this test - just imaging the griefing without it!!

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Apparently they already thought about that scenario.

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We’re able to place beacons directly next to someone else though right? If so, I guess you could still potentially claim an adjacent plot higher than someone else and have water run off your plot and into theirs?

Would it be possible to have some form of collision detection for water / lava blocks, so that if any run off encounters a beacon you don’t have any control over, it automatically removes the source block, both from the world and the offending players inventory?

Edit: Or instead of just removing the source block make it cause some damage to the source location - kind of like an Oortian electrical charge travelling back to the source :wink: people will soon learn not to do it!

I don’t envy you guys having to look at all possible avenues for grief prevention! Unfortunately, there will always be people that get a kick out of making a nuisance of themselves.

Edit 2: Actually, thinking on this further… instead of having the beacons as just a necessary means to stop griefers, why not actually tie them into the lore of the game. Instead of just being an invisible beacon that has no real grounds in the game, why not actually make it into a powered device. I’m not thinking of a device that runs out of power - it’s Oort tech after all :wink:

Entwining this further into the existing logic/mechanics, you start with a one power source capable of powering one beacon plot. Then, as you progress through the game, instead of just being magically awarded more plots, you acquire more power crystals (somehow… I’ll leave that bit up to someone else!) which you can either add to an existing beacon to extend the range / number of plots it can ‘protect’, or to create new beacons altogether for placement elsewhere.

At least then the beacons would have actual real world meaning. It may be a little too sci-fi for boundless, but we’re using machines anyway… why not ones that deploy some sort of protective field :wink:

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@james @Vastar @Heurazio

“Often travelled paths shouldn’t regen” This is a statement that is a bit… double sided to me.
Because on one hand it is a good idea on the other hand it is not.

The problem

It allows for often travelled places to not be regenerated, BUT this doenst only include paths, this would also then include holes, or things removed in the terrain or whatever. The second problem is how it is done. for example does it only stop regen for those precise Blocks you touch? what if there are 3 blocks making a path, then obviously they need to not regen either. Which mean it is safe to assume that if this was done, it would most likely be a certain pattern around you. Should we have it go upwards too? if no then how about people who might make a “Grappling hook road” which is a road in the air, would that never be possible? So if we assume that it goes up a little does that mean we have to physically touching or atleast be very close to the grappling road, in which case it wont matter. But we can compensate for that by expanding the area of things that wont get regenerated. Now by doing this we run into another problem and my biggest problem, depending on how it is done. First thing, we would have to decide if being near a thing RESETS regeneration or PAUSES regenration. Say that it takes 24 hours for something to regenerate. a path is 12 hours into the regeneration progress. it can either be made so it pauses when you touch it, which seems useless or it resets to 0 hours into the regen process, which is the most likely. This leads to the problem. Again remember, we assume we have a square area around us which doesnt regenerate, we do not know the size but if we want cool paths and tunnels and stuff it would have to be rather big. Which leads to the problem of…

Caves: Imagine that a cave or cave area or mountain. Person X goes there to farm stone, ores and gems. Person X knows that he wont always gets ore and gems at the spot, and he knows that it takes 24 hours to regenerate. Now imagine that person Y just goes through the cave, looking for stuff. he wont find anything because it has been mined, BUT even then he restarts the regeneration, now person x comes back 12 hours later and it still hasn’t regenerated but he ALSO restarts it. and the cycle continues. This situation can be applied to a variety of things, but the foundation of it is basically There is no logical way to make a difference on paths often travelled who DOESNT want it and then just places people visit for other reason who WANTS those places regenerated

The argument against this though will most likely be “But that just means people have to check other places” True, but the problem is that if all it takes to stop regeneration is a single person then it will lead to problems, then the counter argument to that is “But we said often travelled places, how about just getting more people?” The problem with this is that those people have to use it WITHIN the regeneration period. and either you can set it so low that we run into the same problem as above, or set it so high that most things which should benefit from the system wont.

I still hold to regenerating everything outside a beacon But make a special type of “Infrastructure beacon” which can be shaped in a special way and be used for things such as roads and paths, but be more expensive to create than the average “building” beacons. To counter for convinience you can increase the price to be double or triple the price of placing a normal 8x8x8 beacon.

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@james: had some ideas … like to hear your opinion :slight_smile:

like shields in star trek ?

Yes , and No …
Star Trek shields would deflect anything, whereas the beacon would just protect the contents from being moved/altered by others not programmed as a friend. I guess you could potentially make it deflect projectiles like explosive arrows.

Well that´s true, maybe beacons could act like a one-way-valve, liquids can flow outwards from a beacon but not inwards (or the other way around). :smile:

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I believe the devs had noted in the past that they’ll add the option to enable/disable world regeneration within beacons. I believe this would also apply to objects like water/lava which flow into it. Either that, or they won’t be able to flow into them in the first place.

Every time I think about regen (which is actually pretty often!) - I always come to the conclusion that it has to happen consistently everywhere. So if, for example, we think that roads can some how be spared - it always breaks down. I once thought that roads with “street lights” should be spared - hence allowing players a way to connect their towns + builds. But it’s always possible to abuse any variation from the default regen rules. So I’ve concluded that if we want or need a variation it’s best to solve it another way. (For example, by having a second type of beacon (somehow) designed for protecting roads.)

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Yes. this. this would be great.

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I… uh… literally posted exactly this idea just minutes earlier. I promise, I’m not peaking in the studios windows or anything! (At the moment…)

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Cough i posted it 6 hours ago Cough

I get very competitive on my ideas!

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But I was working, not reading!

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Maybe a small information for all of us :smiley: this is FAR OFF-TOPIC :smiley:

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My intention when I talked about the regeneration stop wasn´t to suggest a way to allow the building of roads but rather to enable a way for the game to give you a subtle hint on the player activity in the area (which is definitely necessary in a game of this scale).
I thought about it as the B< equivalent of littering. A place that is crowded with small holes and pillars (littered) could tell you that you are at a place with a high player activity whereas a perfectly regenerated spot would tell you that you´ve found a place that has a lot less player activity an therefore was able to regenerate.

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Sure I get that.

Then the question is: do we want our cities messy and our countryside pristine?
Or: Both pristine?

The regen has 2 main purposes:

  1. To inject resources into the economy.
  2. To allow all players to feel like they’re exploring the world for the first time. (No caves littered with torches, no nerd poles, etc.)

If we want to let players know how busy an area is - then maybe there is a better solution somewhere else. For example, the minimap could support some SimCity style density / heatmap views.

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