Game Development: Steelmaking, and stuff.

[theTrav]

Don't break out the wine and honey until you've got the steel in your hand.
There's still plenty of time for things to go wrong

[Trafalgar]

If you haven't built your crucible deep underground, protected by armed guards (and preferably a large forcefield, a maze, and war foxes), the goblin thieves may just steal your precious wrought iron out of it... Wouldn't want that to happen!

[niltrias]

I think the Steel making is great, actually. This game is shaping up to be a very different style of MMO...economy fully defined by players and gameworld, among other things. You can live like a savage easily enough, wandering here and there...but if you want to be a knight in heavy armor, you almost require an entire society to make it possible. Sounds sweet to me!

The house thing I had posted on before as wishing it was a more time and labor intensive task, so Im please with that change as well. The fact that there arent enough trees to support the new system would bug me if this were a complete game or even a late beta, but as an alpha, no problem...seems like pretty standard fare for an alpha really. Although I do hope tree growing comes out soon. Especially as I can only imagine how long we will have to wait between planting that first precious batch and actually being able to harvest them. If you thought leather and iron theft was rampant, wait until your trees become ready to harvest...I bet we will see log poaching on a scale undreamt of.

Speaking of which, one minor idea for the tree growth system...could we have multi-growth trees? Like if you cut one down after x time, you get 1 log. if you wait y time, you get 2 logs. z time, three logs.
The graphics change of walking through pristine, old growth forests in search of bears in Mordor, instead of wandering about weedy little wood orchards in more civilized areas ALONE would be worth it. But I think it might have an important effect on game play as well...if the longer you wait, the bigger the payoff, people who play for the long run instead of instant gratification will be rewarded...which seems to be recurring theme anyway in this game.

I know Im getting slightly off topic here, but one more thing--can we maybe get some metal knives, that, like metal saws, increase the amount of meat or what not we gain from butchering? Im not so worried about the effect, but carrying around a stone axe is getting kind of old, and using a stone axe to bucher a boar to make sausages in a mechanical sausage grinder while people in chain and plate armor are walking by is a bit...odd.

[jorb]

I know Im getting slightly off topic here, but one more thing--can we maybe get some metal knives, that, like metal saws, increase the amount of meat or what not we gain from butchering? Im not so worried about the effect, but carrying around a stone axe is getting kind of old, and using a stone axe to bucher a boar to make sausages in a mechanical sausage grinder while people in chain and plate armor are walking by is a bit...odd.

You're nuts.

[niltrias]

[quote="jorb"][quote="niltrias"]I know Im getting slightly off topic here, but one more thing--can we maybe get some metal knives, that, like metal saws, increase the amount of meat or what not we gain from butchering? Im not so worried about the effect, but carrying around a stone axe is getting kind of old, and using a stone axe to bucher a boar to make sausages in a mechanical sausage grinder while people in chain and plate armor are walking by is a bit...odd.[/quote]

You're nuts. ;)[/quote]

Awww.....no knives then? At least you could make the axes take up two spaces, the knives 1. You have to admit that arrows that are twice the size of axes are a bit odd?
Or should i just stop using that word?

[jorb]

There will, of course, be knives. They're already drawn and everything.

[Öx]

The problem I have with steelmaking (not having actually tried it) is this:

Steelmaking, as it stands, people have to log in every 10 or 11 hours, not every 12 hours. This is because of (a) the time to refuel the crucibles and (b) IRL randomness in when they are able to log in. This results in the maintenance time drifting, like clock skew. What was an 8AM/8PM task becomes 7AM/7PM, then 6, then 5.

I would suggest bumping the timeout to 13 hours reflect this.

(I have the same complaint about on-demand movie rental. They give you 24 hours to view the movie. Well, what if I only have time to watch half the movie one evening. I want to finish the movie the same time next evening. But it just timed out. If they gave 36 or even 30 hours I would rent a lot more movies.)

[Vattic]

I agree with the above post, I must admit though that since the changes I haven't tried it but during the week I get on at fairly irregular times and would find steel making almost impossible alone, I'd miss it by an hour sometimes.

[Dennislp3]

Thats why you need friends. Friends like me who dont sleep to cover you while your busy :P Actually the bay12 community shouldnt have an issue with this since everyone is fairly cooperative and as far as i know there is never a 12 hour span where not one bay12 member wasnt on

[sami1337]

So far steel making at my place goes pretty nicely. Still waiting for the first steel tho, but only a server restart made us relight it. With the 8 of we pretty much keep it up and running all day long.