Hey Everyone! I hope you are all enjoying our latest Alpha 18 update to Steam Unstable, which automatically fills in the holes left by removed houses. It took us a bit of investigation and a few false leads to get to this particular solution, and the twists and turns of that ongoing story is what we’ll be taking a closer look at in today’s Desktop Tuesday. In the meantime, our team now switches its A18 focus to bugfixing, some long-term performance/art projects, and our team trip to Seattle for PAX, where hopefully we’ll meet some of you in person!
Restoring Terrain
Recap from the video:
- Before last week, removing buildings left unsightly holes in the ground.
- As of last week, removing a building now restores the terrain that once was there, thanks to Albert!
- How did he manage this? Well, Albert already has Stonehearth remember all the places that your hearthlings have altered the ground, so that he can show you where YOU have dug in x-ray mode.
- To get instant-refill working for landscape scarring, he just had to remember a little more data: what used to be in that hole. And then, when a building is removed, the building has to remember the region (really regions, for performance reasons) that its foundation takes up, and then submit that to the terrain service, and then poof, the terrain service puts back the land that used to be there.
- Ah, but what about the divots left by the goblin camp? That requires a different solution. First, that divot wasn’t dug up by you; it was dug up by the goblins, and so it wasn’t already being stored for x-ray mode.
- We’ll need to remember that data, probably as the game master creates the divot, and then find some way to have your hearthlings put all the dirt back.
- Putting the dirt back is where the feature gets really complicated.
- Originally, we’d planned to implement a dirt tool in Alpha 18, which would act much like the building tool: you’d dig into the ground, you’d get dirt as a resource back out, and then you’d be able to build structures with it, much like the slab tool.
- We even did some mockups of what this could look like. Unfortunately, the dirt tool turned out to be way more complicated than we expected.
- Problem #1: UX. Adding the dirt tool to the building UI felt like it was overcrowding the building UI. However, moving it into a separate terrain section meant that we’d have to find new conceptual homes for all the features we got along with the building UI, like eraser and undo.
- Problem #2: Gameplay. How much dirt should you get when you dig into the ground? Should you get a lot of dirt? Just a little dirt with a lot of stacks inside? If you got a lot of dirt, the way you do in, say, Minecraft, what would all those objects do to the inventory cap? Yang JUST did all this work to get memory usage for objects down; do we really want to blow that all on dirt objects? Should you get the opportunity to filter dirt out? Suddenly, this feature was not just building but also mining.
- Problem #3: The building code. Terrain is not currently hooked up to the building editor, so what Albert has been doing since adding the terrain back under houses is figuring out how it should work with (your favorite!) scaffolding and pathing and all the other complex building systems Chris has been working on all this time.
- We’ll have to solve these problems one at a time. For example, if Albert gets some of the basic elements working, perhaps you’ll be able to see Hearthlings fill in goblin divots through an intermediary tool, like a special dirt pile that appears in goblin camps.
- As we solve the inventory and UX problems, perhaps they’ll be able to do more, until one day we get back to the Geomancer, where all our conversations started.
- We’re currently not sure when these features will make it into the game, but we’ll keep you posted, and in the meantime we’ve addressed the immediate problem, which was holes left by buildings. We look forward to your beautiful villages and towns!
Other Announcements
Streams happen as usual today (Tuesday) and tomorrow (Wednesday) of this week. Then our whole team flies to PAX, so we skip streams on Thursday and Tuesday of next week. Streams will resume on Wednesday, 9/7/16.
We’re also going to miss Desktop Tuesday of next week; DT will return on Tuesday, 9/13/16.