jorb wrote:complete reliance on third party clients to be playable
What is it that the default client so badly misses for it to be "playable"?
Depends on the type of player involved (pvpers will want things that make pvp clearer/more reliable, farmers will want things that make farming easier in some way, etc, and understandably some of these things you guys would be against in a vanilla experience), but off the top of my head here are a few things that are, in a way, gamebreaking to the point where you can simply die to not having them handy.
1.
A drink keybind (the current worst offender IMO)Simple enough. You press it, it basically triggers your character to drink from their hotbarred/in your belt waterskins until cancelled by another action or your stamina filling up (what characters already do with some ingame activites that drain stamina, except a way to trigger it manually).
Why? Because having to dig through your inventory/belt and spend seconds figuring out what waterskins you can drink from vs just pressing the key can lead to a lot of mistakes and slowing down while being chased.
But in general, its also a convenience feature for certain other ingame situations. Also there's currently a kind of horrible quirk with how hotbars work where if you go into combat your 1-9 keys re-bind themselves to use combat moves, so even a diligent person that hotbarred their waterskins will instantly find themselves unable to drink using them. Its counter intuitive and IMO a giant newb death trap.
2.
Bounding boxes This one is in the same vein as toggling tile gridlines, which thankfully is now a thing in the default client. You toggle it, it draws a flat polygonal shape (usually built from connected lines, similar to gridlines on tiles) at the base of the object that represents its bounding box. Its a convenience tool for precision building, and also sometimes an useful thing in PVP to figure out where you can walk and where you can't.
Why? Because it has been included in every custom client since legacy, and in order to build pretty things its simply necessary, as the alternative is trial and error trying to place things down. As for the PVP aspect, certain trees/structures are notorious for having misleading hitboxes compared to their ingame model. I can't remember examples off the top of my head, but I've definitely seen visually smaller trees that have significantly bigger hitboxes than visually larger ones, etc.
3.
"Flatworld"You press it, the world toggles between a completely flat version of it vs not.
This one is understandably a bit debatable for a vanilla experience, but the gist of it is is that elevation can sometimes become visual noise when trying to move around in hilly terrain (and here I go again with this, but specially in PVP). Mountains are a nightmare without this feature.
4.
Hiding treesYou toggle it, trees become hidden and instead are rendered as a flat polygonal shape that represents its hitbox (or similar minimal representation of it that still tells you "there's something here you can't walk through").
Why? Because visibility when running through forests can be bad to the point of being detrimental if you use a client without this feature, vs players that do have it. Again with the PVP thing, but it's flat out impossible to do PVP with trees blocking your vision constantly, and having to rotate your camera to try to see what's going on. As for newer players, it's the age old tale of dying to boars/players hiding behind trees, and overall it's just annoying in my experience to go through forests with so much visual obstruction (your trees are great, and I can understand being against something that takes away so much graphically from the game, but this is still very much an issue that needs addressing with the client, if not with the ugly ass coloured squares on the ground so many of us are used to, then with some other sort of compromise that fixes the problem, maybe rendering trees as stumps, or shorter versions of themselves? Maybe making the tree become increasingly transparent from its base to the top of the model?).
5.
Differentiation between dangerous "deeper" ocean water tiles vs safe-to-sail-in tilesI can't remember off the top of my head why this suggestion was dismissed before, I imagine it has something to do with the shader that draws the ocean tiles, but with a simple client mod you can alter the hue of the dangerous tiles to appear visibly darker and make them stand out from the safe tiles.
Why? Because the ingame warning when crossing into dangerous ocean tiles is honestly not enough. Both the fact that the "ding" sound that plays is the same that plays with any other system message (like a friend logging on, you toggling tracking, etc), and the fact that you can also simply miss the warning message on the bottom left. You only get a few seconds to react and correct the mistake you've made if on a rowboat or similar smaller boat, and the fact that you have to constantly look at your minimap to not die is IMO a bit of a newb trap and just kind of awkward/inconvenient/unintuitive regardless.
jorb wrote:I am thinking about trying to pull together some major Valhalla engagment during a livestream to see if we can catch it that way. We need a windows minidump of the program when it crashes to get anywhere.
Sounds like a great idea, I hope this happens and would be glad to participate. The crash bug is a squirrely bastard so maybe some other situations will be needed to trigger it than just regular valhalla (like simulating a village with kilns, structures, trees and whatnot). The challenge I see with this would be instructing people to apply the registry hack to enable minidumps, but I'm sure a lot of these PVP autists can figure it out.
by shubla » Tue Nov 09, 2021 12:35 am 
