Game Development: Iced Bait

[DonVelD]

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 trees
You 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 tiles
I 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.

^^^^^ Pretty much this, also speaking of hiding trees, adding an option to hide any object you want would be neat but I understand that might be controversial lol

Also, changing the opening indicators to show off their colors and percentages more (like the same red background on them could just be changed to the corresponding opening colors) and adding a hotbar for F1-F10 keys or numpad too would be great.

Other stuff I like in custom clients is (be aware that its a list of stuff that I like, not stuff that SHOULD be added - but still most or all of them added would make lifes easier):

-Circles under players in your team, and red circles under aggrod players
-List of actions to automatically pick (like you rightclick a food item and it picks "eat" right away, stuff like that)
-Auto display claim borders, or just remembering that you picked that option
-Alerts on meeting unkinned players or some animals (like whales that you absolutely can miss if you're hunting them without a bot)
-Running speed on login, almost nobody uses walking speed afaik
-Hourglasses and damaged objects having percentages
-Picking critters and closing gates (not the palisade gates btw) on bind
-Not taking out the steel if shift+rightclicking the steel crucibles
-Party members on the map so you can find them much easier

Obviously theres more but thats the stuff that came into my mind first.

I am thinking about trying to pull together some major Valhalla engagment during a livestream to see if we can catch it that way.

Please do this, I'll join and its a great idea over all, because there's no other way to fix it right now.

[SnuggleSnail]

-List of actions to automatically pick (like you rightclick a food item and it picks "eat" right away, stuff like that)

Kinda off topic but it's retarded that anything with only one option like picking foragables or eating food has a flower menu, and IMO asking for auto select with these things is like asking for a faster horse instead of a car

[DonVelD]

-List of actions to automatically pick (like you rightclick a food item and it picks "eat" right away, stuff like that)

Kinda off topic but it's retarded that anything with only one option like picking flower or eating food has a flower menu, and IMO asking for auto select with these things is like asking for a faster horse instead of a car

Yeah i think so too, eating was the first thing that i thought of. I meant stuff that has more options

[pawnchito]

complete reliance on third party clients to be playable

What is it that the default client so badly misses for it to be "playable"?

What strpk0 wrote is definitely a step in the right direction. A lot of what the custom client provide are QoL updates that would make Vanilla more appealing. I'd love to use custom client but theres no way I could manage a base with it alone.

[Pommfritz]

-List of actions to automatically pick (like you rightclick a food item and it picks "eat" right away, stuff like that)

Kinda off topic but it's retarded that anything with only one option like picking foragables or eating food has a flower menu, and IMO asking for auto select with these things is like asking for a faster horse instead of a car

idk there would be so much stuff I would missclick eat etc as a new player if it would always auto choose the only option. Some stuff I'd rather keep for later or just see if I can study it as well etc. I usually create the auto select option once I know what exactly I can do with the item

-Not taking out the steel if shift+rightclicking the steel crucibles

^this is so annoying and happens with everything but I think it's more related to lag
I think the servers are laggy as shit where I sometimes just stay in place for 1-2 sec before it moves me somewhere else (more or less worst case, sometimes I also just get thrown out of the client and have to relog and then it's normal happens once every 2-3 days)
10-20% of the time I feel like playing with terrible lag (feels like 200-400ms, I don't have anything that shows the latency)
most of the time it's normal but laggy servers 10-20% of the time I'm playing is not great and I think another major issue for doing anything really. My internet connection is pretty sick so it's not that, if the servers are located in the EU I shouldn't have any latency issues.

-For some client fixes, something that really annoys me is that if i want to attack something I'm just locked into place because I need to press my button for attack, click on the animal/ player and then rightclick so the sword goes away until I can move. I want to be able to move and attack a player and keep moving, it's possible but the way it is it's really inconvinient. Could just make the sword disappear after I clicked on something to attack so I can smoothly keep moving.
-making cliffs easily visible is another thing, it's not even so much about pvp although it obviously really helps there too but especially running through forest you just get stuck everywhere, random trees, cliffs, sometimes I'm not sure if it's lag or a cliff thats blocking me (especially with a cart or something) You can see it on the minimap but you have to scroll pretty far in and would just be nice to see it propperly ingame since cliffs blend in pretty well with the normal ground.
-make very deep ocean and deep ocean look different, this was already mentioned here.
-make it possible to hide or show certain marks on the map. For example make a menu where you can select to show the different marker colors and questgivers, different kind of local ressources (not sure if questgivers are marked in vanilla). But my map has become a huge clusterfuck of markers for quality nodes and all sorts of random stuff that you kind of want to have a note on. Hide and show all doesn't help with anything at this point.

honestly I don't even remember much of what was going on in the vanilla client but it was a huge relief when I played on Ender client I'm pretty sure it also increased the performance a lot (had a lot of stuttering before). Crop growth indicators, draw paths, drink shortcut, auto select options, the inventory/ container table where you can see qualities on the side etc helped a shit ton when sorting stuff not sure what else.

You can probably add many features like this to the vanilla client and leave the default options to represent a more vanilla experience. Once people get into the game and scroll through the options to optimize their gameplay they can turn things on and off how they want. I don't see a problem with this at all, even flat world, make the default option to not be flatworld but you can change that in the menu somewhere, all good xd

[Joshk80k]

I want to express my appreciation at Dev reception to the community's feedback lately, I especially love the reduction of the more tedious aspects of this game, the closer we get to me not feeling punished for not botting/having multiple characters for each avenue for progressing, the better. I know we're late in the world but I am going to resub to support you guys.

[Massa]

-List of actions to automatically pick (like you rightclick a food item and it picks "eat" right away, stuff like that)

Kinda off topic but it's retarded that anything with only one option like picking foragables or eating food has a flower menu, and IMO asking for auto select with these things is like asking for a faster horse instead of a car

This would be a very nice little thing but I can see how it autoselecting EVERYTHING could potentially be problematic, especially with things that potentially have multiple options, or things like buckets.

But foragables are a good start.

[DDDsDD999]

complete reliance on third party clients to be playable

What is it that the default client so badly misses for it to be "playable"?

These aren't that important, but would be nice:
You can't tell how far away the next season is.

Localization.

The font is terrible and unreadable.

No truffle/pepper indicator on food.

No lp/h on curios, the most important curio stat.

Pinging things so you can highlight something for your party.

The combat UI is terrible, why would I want these buttons to block things specifically around my character. Every single moba has the UI off to the bottom or side for a reason.

You guys messed up the keybinds for transferring/dropping from inventory so one of them is wrong. I think drop all is like shift alt or something stupid.

[jordancoles]

complete reliance on third party clients to be playable

What is it that the default client so badly misses for it to be "playable"?

Player alarms, hiding trees/rocks/random bullshit on screen, 'flatworld' to remove elevation so that you can actually see ridges and actually move across mountains quickly, night vision, gridlines, auto-drop for ore and stones while mining, a hotkey for agroing nearby players and switching targets, improved information on food items such as total FEPS it will provide, harvest-replant scripts, more hotbars which use the f1-12 and n0-9 keys, a hotkey to drink water out of any vessel in your belt or inventory that you have bound, improved maps, holding alt+left click to set multiple points on the world map which allows for long pathing to other continents and whatnot... the list just goes on and on and on. I just banged out all of those without stopping to think at all and now I'm stopping without finishing because I lost interest

Default is just so fucking dogshit, bro. Download Ardennes bootleg or something and just copy everything that you see 1:1

[Nightdawg]

Download Ardennes bootleg or something and just copy everything that you see 1:1

You don't even have to do that, I'm confident literally 9/10 client devs are willing to help you with the code, rather than wait for you to spend 4 weeks to do another BROKEN black(very visible lol) grid lines while they can add like 20 features in those 4 weeks (which was literally the case btw, all custom clients had all of the features in the new render, in less than 5 weeks)