Game Development: Frolick in the Camomile

Announcements about major changes in Haven & Hearth.

Re: Game Development: Frolick in the Camomile

Postby loftar » Thu Apr 20, 2017 2:48 pm

Granger wrote:- JVM running out of memory and going into a busy loop garbage collecting? This added to thermal throttling might well bring a client to a near halt.

Ah, yes, that's another thing that I considered but forgot. It's a bit hard to reason about what it means without knowing what memory settings the involved were actually using, though, and custom clients are bound to have their own memory settings.

Granger wrote:- Many warriors seem to have customized shields/clothing: Maybe the GPU is running out of local memory when many textures are needed (for objects with sketches) and the driver resorts to swapping textures to main RAM to render the frame? This could explain the extremely low framerate NOOBY93 is reporting for being in a bigger fight?

That's an interesting idea that I hadn't considered. I'd like to believe it shouldn't be a problem, since even the largest allowed textures (512x512) don't take more than 1 MB each, but who knows. If this is an issue, then it should also be reproducible by hanging a large number of different paintings in a room, each using a different, large texture. I don't think it should matter if the contents of the painting are complex or not.

Granger wrote:- You're using Linux while he's using Windows, right? Might be something in the driver stack.

Jorb tried on his Windows system and had results similar to mine, though, so I don't think that should be an issue. If anything, it may be conceivable that there are nVidia/AMD differences, but I have no AMD hardware so I can't test that.
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Re: Game Development: Frolick in the Camomile

Postby MightySheep » Thu Apr 20, 2017 2:54 pm

So youve made it so theres no risk to PvP and yet the game still can't actually run big fights? Nice!

Perma death was the only reason I played this game.
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Re: Game Development: Frolick in the Camomile

Postby Potjeh » Thu Apr 20, 2017 3:10 pm

Potjeh wrote:9FPS when moving in centre of my hermitage with no other hearthlings around. AMD FX-6300 CPU, AMD Radeon R7 370 (4Gb) GPU, 8GB RAM.

Yeah, looks like your game really hates AMD.
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Re: Game Development: Frolick in the Camomile

Postby qoonpooka » Thu Apr 20, 2017 3:17 pm

This will include a re-hash-with-clarifications of my post in the last update's thread, as well as comments on this one, because it seems Loftar missed the central line of my argument.

Specifically: It's not that I think this makes permadeath too hard to achieve on a target - I suspect this, but I'm combat n00b so I don't actually have the authority to speak on that specific.

My point was more that my personal experience of H&H combat has never involved PvP permadeath. I've been knocked out and robbed blind three times, but never murdered (fully expected it to go that way as I was being chased, mind you). To the extent that Permadeath is the result of PvP combat, it is the result of players' choices. If you want to see more KOs and less black skulls floating in the air, aiming game changes at the calculus being made by a victorious combatant seems like a good way to go. Making subtle adjustments to the consequences that attach to certain kinds of murder (or all murder, if you want to hurt people seeking to avenge themselves just as much as aggressors) rather than simply trying to make achieving permadeath more of a chore is, I feel, a much stronger way to go. You preserve the "wild west lethality" feel of the game without adding grind.

BTW: 30 seconds to loot is a VERY small window if the fight is more than 1v1 AIUI that's basically one attack cooldown. I think a KO'd person using the HF option should leave their stuff in some kind of reasonably-persisting container marked as owned by them. Theft scents won't stop someone who wants your stuff and beat you down for it anyway. Otherwise you could escape with all your stuff while your attacker is fighting your buddy. That's a short stick for an attacker to hold.

There is a second consequence of HF-as-escape-from-death: defenders in a siege are risking WAY more than their attackers. In fact, attacking is now extremely low risk because when you lose, you're back home, behind your walls and your claim shield. As a defender, you're also back home, behind your broken walls and depleted claim shield, and now you're wounded to boot...

If by "we want more PvP" you're saying you want more sieges, you'll probably get them this way, but the risk-reward balance makes the defender's position extremely unattractive here. Attackers should have to ante up more. Being an aggressor should have good reward potential, but also come with commensurate risks. Breaking an aggressor's siege should come with more benefit than simply "I get to live another day until they try again."

loftar wrote:Nidbanes now disappear if they knock their target. Obviously, Nidbanes can still only gather skulls from targets that actually die.

This seems to remove the utility of nidbanes entirely. From what I understand from discussion of them, they are trivially easy to defeat as it is, and once they've been sent, you can't ever send another one for the same offense - and thus you basically get to deliver a minor nuisance in return for permadeath-murder. If that's the level of satisfaction you'd like to be available to victims then great, you're there. But the whole point of Hearthlaw, at least from this player's perspective is to provide a cost to violence. Consequences attach to the acts, and someone engaging in that as a lifestyle is living dangerously. Removing the risks that attach to permadeath, but making permadeath more of a chore, just adds a minor inconvenience for griefers - one they will swiftly optimize around to boot. Players are infinitely more ingenious than game devs, period. Always have been, always will be. This isn't a sleight against devs, it's just a matter of numbers: players have more brains to throw at the problem than devs do.

loftar wrote:We realize also that there were a fair amount of people skeptical to this change when we floated it in the last patch, and have a great deal of respect for that. This could be a bad move, but after discussing it through a million times we've felt that A) The consequences are not entirely predictable, so we have to try it out to find out what it actually implies, and B) The potential upside of this change is yuge -- potentially increasing both player retention and pvp -- while the downside of trying it is fairly limited, and under those circumstances we kind of feel that we have to try it.


Mad respect for this position, btw. I definitely support trying something out, seeing how it plays, and then reviewing further changes or reverting these away if the outcomes aren't what you like.

Also, this game is explicitly in alpha still, ain't it? I really don't get people complaining about changes being made to an alpha product. Welcome to alphas, yo.
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Re: Game Development: Frolick in the Camomile

Postby Granger » Thu Apr 20, 2017 3:21 pm

Potjeh wrote:
Potjeh wrote:9FPS when moving in centre of my hermitage with no other hearthlings around. AMD FX-6300 CPU, AMD Radeon R7 370 (4Gb) GPU, 8GB RAM.

What window size do you run it?

I noticed that when running Haven with maximised window on a 2560x1440 display it's slower FPS wise than running in a window covering only 1/2 or 1/4 of the screen. Specs are: i5-3570@3.4GHz, NVidia GT 730 (4GB) passive cooled GPU, 32GB RAM.

@qoonpooka: you met the wrong (or the right, in your case) people to survive being knocked out by a random stranger.
Last edited by Granger on Thu Apr 20, 2017 3:35 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Reason: typo
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Re: Game Development: Frolick in the Camomile

Postby qoonpooka » Thu Apr 20, 2017 3:32 pm

Granger wrote:@qoonpooka: you meant the wrong (or the right, in your case) people to survive being knocked out by a random stranger.


I don't follow?

The gist of this post seems to be "we want people to feel like they can safely get into a fight with someone if they are so inclined."

To achieve this objective, an attempt is made to give the loser the ability to escape with his hearthling's life.

This benefits both the victim of a bandit's assault as well as the poor sap with 10AGI/15MC and a Q4 shield who thought he could just walk up and rob John Q. KUNG-FU MASTER.

In either case, the result is only death if the victor wants it to be. The devs' effort here is to make inflicting permadeath effectively impossible without siege or re-optimizing your combat strategies around that.

My counter-suggestion is to adjust the incentive structures that lead to the victorious player making the choice to inflict death.

Players who aren't amenable to changes in the incentives informing their choices will also not be stopped by anything less than an absolute removal of permadeath as a potential consequence (and that, as discussed, would create a VERY different game).

It's not that I want bandit victims to have it easier, per se (though I accept that this will be a consequence and I'm totally fine with that). It's that I want the choice to kill someone to mean something other than 'I'm an antisocial jerk and I figured out how to put leeches in your equipment slots while you're KO'd.'
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Re: Game Development: Frolick in the Camomile

Postby Granger » Thu Apr 20, 2017 3:35 pm

Sorry, typo fixed: met* not meant
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Re: Game Development: Frolick in the Camomile

Postby Sollar » Thu Apr 20, 2017 3:41 pm

You may now, at the price of a 15s combat cooldown, switch combat decks while in combat.
I
I love this. I engaged a lot of times with the wrong deck ... Or a wrong item in hand ...

How about trolls? Are they still permakill you or they just knock you down?
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Re: Game Development: Frolick in the Camomile

Postby jordancoles » Thu Apr 20, 2017 3:46 pm

Granger wrote:
Potjeh wrote:
Potjeh wrote:9FPS when moving in centre of my hermitage with no other hearthlings around. AMD FX-6300 CPU, AMD Radeon R7 370 (4Gb) GPU, 8GB RAM.

What window size do you run it?

I noticed that when running Haven with maximised window on a 2560x1440 display it's slower FPS wise than running in a window covering only 1/2 or 1/4 of the screen. Specs are: i5-3570@3.4GHz, NVidia GT 730 (4GB) passive cooled GPU, 32GB RAM.

In all of the years that I've played haven I have never once played in anything but fullscreen
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Re: Game Development: Frolick in the Camomile

Postby Granger » Thu Apr 20, 2017 3:50 pm

jordancoles wrote:In all of the years that I've played haven I have never once played in anything but fullscreen

Fine with me. I just asked since it's a slight difference for a GPU to draw a frame for an 1024x768 display compared to a 4k one, fill rate and such.
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