a multiplayer game of parenting and civilization building
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My questions are these:
1. How do you get boards?
2. How do you get wooden disks? Are they naturally occurring?
Basically you need to get into metal working. Get some ore and make a forge (you make this from adobe, which is made from clay and hay) and from there the tooltips should tell you how to make various things. It's best to just make all the metal tools and then you can reference the tooltips off of the metal tools to see what makes what.
Boards require a "froe" I think it's called and a wooden mallet and a chunk of tree, which is cut down with a metal axe.
Wooden disks require a metal saw which I think requires a metal file. But yeah most of the metal tools are required at some point in making a cart. It's pretty end-gamey so it's near the end of the (current) tech tree. Once you have all the metal tools required it's actually not very difficult or expensive to make more. The homestead I'm at has three and a couple boxes which is plenty. AFAIK it's best to just turn all boxes into carts so they're portable.
The bottleneck resource for farming is water, so tilled rows will eventually become useless because you've expended all of the goose ponds near them. Once you're finding yourself having to run too far then you'll want to just start over with new tilled rows somewhere else that has a nice cluster of ponds nearby. Since you have to keep moving tilled rows presumably farther and farther away from your main homestead, you're going to want to invest in a cart ASAP as just a few tilled rows will stuff a cart and a backpack full of carrots. So it becomes very efficient to occasionally stop by the farm with the cart, load it up, replant it, bring the baskets full of carrots back to your homestead and then return to what you were doing. One full cart of carrots plus a backpack is probably 4 or 5 full hunger refills of food so it's a reliable way to keep your stores filled.
Haha I think I was one of those babies that starved, remembered you mentioning the running south baby glitch. Who's the other person that was working with me on the homestead with the house with the million baskets of carrots and rabbit above it? I've spent a lot of lives on that homestead now but I didn't start it. Kind of cool how a homestead lives on and some unknown number of generations of people stumble on it and continue to build it out. Will be a lot cooler when there's more things you can build and when the floor/walls overheating bug is fixed.
Anyways, for carrot farming the main thing you need is either a fired clay bowl or a rabbit skin water pouch. Need some way of getting water to the crops. Which one of those is easier depends on what biome you're in I guess, but you almost always want to build farms on marshlands to be near the goose ponds. AFAIK that's the only source of water.
But yeah, basically:
1 - get fertile soil
2 - drop it somewhere to make a tilled row
3 - get carrot seed
4 - put it on the tilled row to plant the seed
5 - get water from a goose pond using either a fired clay bowl or a rabbit pouch
6 - water the tilled row
7 - wait until it's a row of carrots
(if you wait too long it overmatures and you can only get a carrot seed from it, sometimes it's good to do this on purpose for one of your tilled rows so that you don't run out of seeds, i think you get about 5 seeds per row)
8 - pluck all the carrots out and go back to #3
food? - Only quickie wild food I know of besides berries is wild carrots, you can dig them up with a sharp stone. A sharp stone can be a little tricky to get your hands on if you're seconds from starving to death though... You can always try to plant some carrots asap, not sure how long the maturation cycle is compared to the hunger cycle but if you can keep yourself alive with some wild carrots until they mature then you should be golden at that point since there's so much water in that biome.
berry biome what todo? - It depends on what you're trying to do really. A good survival game has many paths to success and the optimal one depends on both your playing style and the environment you're in. This game is still very early in development so there aren't quite as many pathways as there likely will be, but there's still a good few ways to get food. Establishing a food source is of course the most critical thing since it's by far the biggest danger, so that usually means either planting berries or carrots. It seems like carrots are more efficient in terms of the ratio of hunger sated vs water used. Still, you need water. You can get away with just eating wild berries for a while but it's kind of inconvenient and I'm not really sure if wild ones ever grow back...
Ultimately, like in most sandbox-y survival games, picking a good spot is the most important thing you can do. I usually just sprint nonstop until I find a huge berry biome next to a huge reed biome with a bunny biome nearby and hopefully badlands not too far away... or die trying and keep looking the next life since you have nothing to lose. Make your workshop in the berry biome and your farms in the reed biome and fur/meat processing in the bunny biome. If you don't have quick access to all the biomes then you're going to be crippled in some way as you try to tech up.
Can't comment much on the baby stuff, haven't had a lot of overlap with other players. The A for hungry and Z for full thing is a good idea though.
Yeah, if you're running 2x as fast, you will arrive places way early, and the server won't let you do anything there until it thinks you've actually reached your destination.
Anyway, I think this is pretty exploit-proof, because everything is happening server-side, including move speed and timing. The client just displays it to you (in this case, displaying the moves faster and shorter than they actually are).
Ok, yeah that explains the trouble I was having then.
Maybe first-startup needs to be more interactive about measurement. It should say, "Are you ready for me to measure your framerate?" and then wait for you. After that, it should say, "I measured 60fps and vsync seems to be on, should I save this for future runs?"
So then later, it won't measure anymore, so minimizing and such won't matter.
But sheesh.... people will be annoyed by any of this stuff, because no other games are doing it.
Yeah I agree that this would not be a pleasant/impressive first few seconds of the game. Might make sense to have an option in the menu but mandatory user action on startup does seem like too much.
I think that part of the problem stems from my game recording system, which depends on fixed-length timesteps.
Probably most other games use variable timesteps, and are just constantly measuring the latest frame time every frame. But when frame times slow down (like during busy scenes), I find this to be aesthetically jarring, because it results in big jumps in movement. I think slowdown is better than bigger, stuttery jumps.
Yeah this seems like the root of the problem. Speaking as a gamer, I agree that at least for single player games I would prefer it to slow down a bit rather than skip steps... But for a multiplayer game, especially when combining it with the mechanism you mentioned about everything happening on the server (which of course, as it should) it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to have the client ever slow down to a different time-rate than the server. Lag jumpiness sucks for sure, but time moving at a different speed than the server seems worse. I was playing alone when this happened but the thought of how this might be experienced when playing with one or more other players on your screen seems really painful and strange.
I'm not sure how much work it would be to adjust the game recording system, but it seems like making the game able to handle an inconsistent/incorrect framerate in ways other than changing the time-rate would lead to a more consistent and less confusing experience. (ie, by doing the standard deltatime measurement and basing physics and timing on that) That's just me giving my own feedback as a gamer that has experienced it though, maybe others would say otherwise, and ultimately of course it's your own game and I'm sure you know what's best in the grand scheme of things.
Anyways, I've eaten up enough of your time on this but thank you for the discussion :) Looking forward to updates and once it gets to that paid state when you'll rope in a bunch of new folks! Can't wait.
Yeah those are all understandable points. The alt-tab abort during measuring sounds like a good idea if it's not much work. Doesn't totally solve the problem but it at least fixes what seems like the most obvious way to screw up the measurement.
Having an optional manual override might be nice as well, but as you said, most people probably aren't aware of this and it would be nice to find a solution that didn't require manual user intervention. OTOH, if for some reason someone's setup triggers this issue frequently, it would be nice to be able to point them to where to set it manually (or if they're savvy enough, be able to find it themselves).
Might it be possible to measure the FPS, save it (maybe even just for the current session as you are now), and then force the graphics to use that refresh rate? As you said, it would risk wasting resources or tearing or underutilizing the graphics card, but IMO all those options are better than the game running at the wrong speed.
Looks like I'm at 60fps, or that's what my refresh rate is set to currently. So yeah I suppose it picked up 30 and maybe it was only running at 2x speed. I could play... kind of... it was just awkwardly fast and there were networking issues since (presumably) everything is optimized for different timings so the network data couldn't keep up. The biggest issue was probably that I had a ton of issues interacting with things, like when I tried to pick berries off a bush it would "bounce" off the bush maybe 10-20 times before it finally resolved the action. At first I thought it was an anti-cheat mechanism that was waiting until I "reached" that location since i was moving too fast, but it's probably more likely that some sort of timeout was only waiting half as long as it should have and kept timing out. I'm not really sure but eventually I got eaten by a wolf without even seeing it on my screen because the map data couldn't be retrieved fast enough to keep up with my running. Even if that hadn't happened, I doubt I would have been able to survive let along get anything done due to the weird bouncing timeouts.
There's also a big opportunity for exploitation there since with a little practice I'm sure someone could figure out how to take advantage of moving way faster than other players.
Might there be some way to periodically sample the current time and compare it to the elapsed "game time" and make sure it's not wildly off? I suppose someone could speed up their clock in that case, lol, but maybe something like that would be a bandaid for now without requiring measuring up front and assumptions.
Maybe if I have some free time I'll derp around with the game code and see if I have any ideas. It's so cool that you have your games as open source, you're kind of a hero in my book for that haha. I hope to get my shit trained up well enough to figure out how to make something like that work someday. Game development is such a different beast from web development :'( xD
Well, I'm relatively new to game development and haven't done really low level stuff like this so I can't really offer suggestions on what the best way to handle it code-wise is... But just taking a step back and looking at the behavior, there should never be a time when the player does reasonably normal activity (switching in and out of a program is pretty normal, although I did do it at a bad time) which results in unplayable game behavior.
Is there no elapsed time that each update loop gets that you can work off of rather than assuming a framerate? Or is that just inferred from the refresh rate that the game is assuming? Surely there must be a solution to this since every other game out there handles this fine. Could it be re-measured every time a graphics change is detected? I'm not sure what kind of events you can listen on or what the standard approach to solving this is, just spit balling. Can you measure it once at the beginning and then set a graphics option in the menu and then force the graphics to be at that rate until they manually change it or restart the app?
I've only played about 6 or 7 lives so far (aside from the slew of failures when i was learning the game) so I think this is something that is probably not rare and likely even falls under the umbrella of "things that might make new players ditch" that we were talking about before. But yeah maybe it's too early to start doing hardware fiddling polish when there's still so much content and gameplay stuff to worry on, just tossing in my feedback.
I stupidly alt-tabbed while the game was starting up and doing the framerate measuing so I could restart the spotify album (I use it to help keep track of my lifespan lol) and when I started playing she was running maybe 2x or 3x as fast as normal and having a lot of trouble picking things up (kept doing that latency thingy where she bounces off an object for a bit til the server acknowledges). Was kind of useful for scouting since I could haul ass but my hunger speed might have been sped up as well. The screen was having trouble keeping up with the map data (kept getting the filler scribbly doodles) and eventually I got eaten by a wolf somehow. My poor homestead :'( :'(
Was playing on windows 8.1, graphics card nvidia geforce gtx 850m
Let me know if you need any more info!