Those questions might be worth to be put into their own thread.
I think @Thorbjorn42gbf is heading into the right direction. World regeneration should be a really slow process that forces player (and the community as a whole) to explore more than just the direct surroundings of their homes and the capital area.
Ideally the world regeneration would automatically adjust according to the active players on the world within certain restrictions to encourage exploration but also guarantee that you can always find some resources if you are trying hard enough (either by exploring further into the wild or digging deeper than the others).
A resounding yes to this. It would just add so much to the atmosphere of the game if frequently used paths would be clearly distinguishable.
Additionally it would be neat if world regeneration would never happen in plain sight of a player.
But world regeneration donāt work in beacons if i remember correctly ?! if i grief a beacon with lava + water because iām able to come over it and place them, this will not be regenereated because itās within the beacon.
Yep ā¦ thatās the problem. And this become espacially problematic with liquids that combine to granite like lava + water. Either the devs need to remove this behavior or find a way that one is not able to flood my buildings with liquids.
thatās a good point i havnāt thought about yet.
Iām with you at this point. I like to add that i think we need also a LOT more plots. But that will be shown by the survey. At the moment itās hard for me to imagine how the beacons will work over all (guilds, friends, mining, trading ā¦)
Thanks, that would be cool. Can you provide the data as coordinates of the beacon corners ?
as i mentioned in an other post about power-cores iād like to see mining and terraforming as a sort of environment polution. maybe, if the polution is to high a titan apears and starts to regenerate the world and protects the space like a guardian of the nature.
For minor polutions (like mining for copper or something that is minimally invasive) i think 2 days or maybe one day would be a good regeneration speed. imagine you have a nice mine with copper (8 blocks) under you base and you can come back all 2 days to dig them. but this is a tuning aspect ā¦ if the speed is to fast it might harm the economy.
I like this. like paths in the forrest. you can clearly see where people walk often ā¦
thatās what i wantes to imply. but how can you keep track what is player placed and what is natural ? at the moment, placed blocks are not trackable to a player and maybe i like to build in a waterfall ? (donāt know if there are ānaturalā waterfalls at the moment but itās most likely that there is someone somewhere)
lets assume that user IDs are āonlyā 64-Bit Pointers (maybe they are 128-Bit GUIDs). Letās also assume that worlds have a fixed size from -4096 to + 4096 = 8192 on X and Z axis and 255 in high (Y axis).
this are (8192^2 * 255 =) 17.112.760.320 Blocks. If you track every block with an 64-Bit ID for whom placed it it is 17.112.760.320 * 64 Bit = 127,5 GB only to store this information.
An other approach would be to store the informations in a seperate table wich would be an enormous calculation effort if you need informations for blocks because you need to cross-join two big tables everytime ā¦ so this is unlikly!
letās continue with the approach to store the informations for every block. even if this is a small storage value in todays times you have additional costs for this. You need to change your cache-optimization because it is unlikely that you need the information every time so itās most likely ācold-dataā. Furthermore you need to load and store the data evertime you work with blocks whereby the RAM is loaded. overall you need much faster / stronger servers only to store this ālittleā meta-information ā¦
iām not the engine-architect of turbulenz and this is going off-topic ā¦
but normally you try to avoid special cases like this. normally you would try to strore similar informations in similar tables. if you start to make that one block āspecialā from the data perspective you are not able to store it with the other blocks (because it would be de-normalized data) therefore you need a new table, new calculations, keep track of additional datas that need to be fetched and so on ā¦ all in all i donāt see a chance that the builder/creator of a block can be tracked easily because the cost / benefit ratio is too low.
(this are all only assumtions, itās up to @james to give a final answer )
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 ā ā ā ā him up any way ā¦
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 weād not need to restrict the gameplay by āmagicā beacon rules - but it seems like this will be necessary.
Weāre 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 donāt 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 people will soon learn not to do it!
I donāt 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 furtherā¦ 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. Iām not thinking of a device that runs out of power - itās Oort tech after all
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 (somehowā¦ Iāll 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 āprotectā, 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 weāre using machines anywayā¦ why not ones that deploy some sort of protective field
āOften travelled paths shouldnāt regenā This is a statement that is a bitā¦ 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 āGrappling hook roadā 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 ofā¦
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 hasnāt 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 āBut that just means people have to check other placesā 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 āBut we said often travelled places, how about just getting more people?ā 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 āInfrastructure beaconā 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 ābuildingā beacons. To counter for convinience you can increase the price to be double or triple the price of placing a normal 8x8x8 beacon.
Yes , and No ā¦
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.
)
) and it has no effect on a beacon you have no control over.
people will soon learn not to do it!