Archived Suggestions

[saatsch]

Hey all,
first time poster here.
Gratulations to your great project here, so happy that you're doing it open source ! You are helping make the world a better place, thats my honest.

Here are my suggestions:

• I saw in the developers forum that you talk about UI elements placement. I read massively.joystiq.com regularly and from the opinions that i read there, I think that people value the ability to move UI elements to their likings very high, much higher than skinning. From playing WoW myself and reading about it on the net, I know that the (important) health bar should be near the action buttons and nearly every player has moved it there. A little left of the middle, right of the middle being the enemy. Here are some examples http://ninjalooter.de/6502/wow-komplette-ui-pakete-fur-ein-brandneues-interface/spartanui/

• I also read that you are planning to store some data along with each block. Are you planning to make a property where one can flag the block as indestructible ? It would be so cool if one could divide his game into sandboxing-zones and other zones where it is possible to develop content like encounters, or tell a story. Because I think when you want to put a storyline or such into the game you cannot make it into an area where other users can kill your NPCs or destroy/alter the environment around them. Also with indestructible blocks one could limit the size of the game world. I think limiting the world size is a must have (maybe you already have it?) because maybe somebody wants to cluster their server and assign game world zones to nodes in the cluster so that a truly scalable server architecture can be implemented.

That's about it for the first time. I am working on a hobby game project myself where I could at some point use your work but I am far away from being able to show something off. And I am also not starting with the display but with the object design side. So there is no overlapping yet. I will keep monitoring things here and maybe I can also make a contribution someday.

May the source be with you !

Saatsch

 

[Immortius]

I saw in the developers forum that you talk about UI elements placement. I read massively.joystiq.com regularly and from the opinions that i read there, I think that people value the ability to move UI elements to their likings very high, much higher than skinning. From playing WoW myself and reading about it on the net, I know that the (important) health bar should be near the action buttons and nearly every player has moved it there. A little left of the middle, right of the middle being the enemy. Here are some examples http://ninjalooter.de/6502/wow-komplette-ui-pakete-fur-ein-brandneues-interface/spartanui

This is a good point. At the moment our UI system is quite crude and messy, but I'm just starting a replacement UI system so I can look at support this as part of that (or it may have to wait for a some modding improvements, will see).

I also read that you are planning to store some data along with each block. Are you planning to make a property where one can flag the block as indestructible ? It would be so cool if one could divide his game into sandboxing-zones and other zones where it is possible to develop content like encounters, or tell a story. Because I think when you want to put a storyline or such into the game you cannot make it into an area where other users can kill your NPCs or destroy/alter the environment around them. Also with indestructible blocks one could limit the size of the game world. I think limiting the world size is a must have (maybe you already have it?) because maybe somebody wants to cluster their server and assign game world zones to nodes in the cluster so that a truly scalable server architecture can be implemented.

Implementation-wise, there are a few ways to approach this. Block data is one, but might be a bit expensive memory-wise (using memory per block is a big multiplier). If regions are fairly coarse then it could be handled at a chunk level, or by designating regions as with min/max x/y/z positions. Ideally this could be done by introducing a new system that works with the damage or block events, cancelling them as appropriate - this would allow for not just indestructible blocks, but blocks that can only be worked with by certain players, groups, or only mobs, at certain times, whatever makes gameplay sense.

I'm not sure why this would be a requirement for limiting the size of the game world though - unless you are thinking indestructible walls around the edges? But that can be done by having types of blocks that are indestructible, rather than being able to mark any block as indestructible. Or perhaps just having chunks past the edge of the world just water forever (at least until the math starts breaking down).

Anyway, thanks for your feedback and suggestions.

 

[Cervator]

Hello and welcome saatsch ! Appreciate the suggestions and I look forward to us making progress toward them

Using zones to flag an area with special permissions makes sense and probably wouldn't be terribly hard to do, if somebody wanted a goal for something to contribute ...

Big "world zones" to help actually using a server cluster - that's probably a little ways off, but if needed one day it'll probably materialize

Also, there may or may not be a variant chunk gen sneakily being developed doing that exact water forever thing to encourage finite worlds ...

 

[ivan1509]

Hello i m new to terasology but i like it so i would like to help with something ?

 

[ivan1509]

I would just like to ask you guys will the game always be free or will it cost?

 

[ivan1509]

And here are some suggestions: It would be great if you guys can make some of your own mobs not like copying zombies and that stuff,and it would be awesome if the player could edit his guy.That s all from me today .

 

[Cervator]

Hi ivan1509 - the core game will always be free and open source. Some contributors might later want to make additional content packages that aren't free, but everything you need for the base game will be free forever

More mobs are coming, check out the Light & Shadow thread for one unique theme we're working on. Some of those creatures can be spawned in-game right now with the right modules in place.

Probably there will be game setups where you can pick what race/creature to play, customize, etc. That'll come one day!

 

[ivan1509]

When you guys make this it will be awesome !I mean if you make it

 

[Wolfgange]

Perhaps if you could have a config file to place UI elements (Which would be easier to code) and then people would post their configs on a forum topic. Then the most popular config in a poll of all the uploaded config files would be set as the default.

With this method, eventually in the future, a graphical ui customization tool could be created that would simply automatically set the configuration file.