Game Development: Surveyor's Delight

[mvgulik]

Funny to see it dumping soil or digging it away on points that are displayed as green. But I guess that's the puzzle part of it.

... Hmm, starting to feel like some other issue I encountered. (my puzzle to you I guess.)

[Nightdawg]

and it should allow custom client makers to create their own tools to aid in surveying

Are you guys moving towards putting more faith into custom clients and stuff?
Will we see more stuff aimed at custom client support?

[loftar]

Are you guys moving towards putting more faith into custom clients and stuff?
Will we see more stuff aimed at custom client support?

I'm not sure what you mean to ask by that -- if we didn't have some faith in custom clients, surely we wouldn't have maintained the old resources for four years, added the Workshop Launcher on Steam, or made the client open source to begin with.

[mvgulik]

Probably more economical delegating related.

[Nightdawg]

Are you guys moving towards putting more faith into custom clients and stuff?
Will we see more stuff aimed at custom client support?

I'm not sure what you mean to ask by that -- if we didn't have any faith in custom clients, surely we wouldn't have maintained the old resources for four years, added the Workshop Launcher on Steam, or made the client open source to begin with.

Currently I see custom clients as a necessary evil, and I thought you guys are still aiming for the vanilla client to eventually cover custom client features.
Just wanted to know if you're aiming to make more features that expect custom clients to expand on, that's all. I'd be excited for that xD

[loftar]

Currently I see custom clients as a necessary evil, and I thought you guys are still aiming for the vanilla client to eventually cover custom client features.

I don't see it that way at all. Modding is nice in general, and while, obviously, I don't agree with every feature or customization made by custom clients, arguably, being able to do stuff that the OG developer doesn't agree with is part of the nice thing about modding and customization, as long as it doesn't verge into straight out cheating or such. I do think the vanilla client should try to adopt custom client features to the extent that we agree with them and I find that they can be implemented in a maintainable way, but even if the vanilla client were to effectively just absorb literally all the custom client features there are, I wouldn't think that would constitute reason for just making the client closed source again and outright ban all future custom clients, surely? Just generally speaking, I emphatically support game modding, though it's obviously harder and has some more controversial aspects in the specific context of MMOs. You don't agree?

Just wanted to know if you're aiming to make more features that expect custom clients to expand on, that's all.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that we'll specifically aim development towards things that can be expanded on by custom clients, but on the other hand I'll say that one thing I have been trying to work towards for the past number of months is a more modular system for client modifications, where users might be able to choose and load modifications in a modular way rather than having to choose one, single custom client. It hasn't been entirely easy to formulate in a good way, though. I think I mentioned this in the reset stream too, IIRC.

[Nightdawg]

Fair enough

[losexd]

cool update!
btw, is there any news about the the new short world? alot of ppl are waiting for it

[mvgulik]

I will admit it never even crossed my mind that this would be too course. Are you using a somewhat bad mouse or something that causes this to be a problem for you?

Seems I also must have a bad mouse (or a normal mouse compared to Loftar's mouse ... No man likes to buy condoms that are labeled SMALL. So they don't exist (period).).
Having to try 3, 4, etc times to very carefully moving the mouse to get the survey area back to its original level is highly annoying (in case that also slipped your mind).

Just adding a UP & DOWN button in the survey GUI could have bypassed that problem. But as it seems there is no code supporting some selected point focus. Those buttons would ofc not know what to move up or down. Ergo: By by slider.

[Arbys]

The current setting is that 10 pixels of vertical mouse movement causes a change of one Z unit to the point(s) being dragged. I will admit it never even crossed my mind that this would be too course.

Yes, this happens on occasion but overall is only a minor annoyance. I had always wanted (+0.1)/-0.1) buttons on either end of the slider previously as an alternative for fine control in those circumstances.


More importantly for the new system, I notice when trying to raise/lower an incline plane that it doesn't uniformly move up/down:


Now selecting a middle point to raise/lower the entire plane:

If I continue moving it, the rest of the plane moves too, but it's not something I'd want to constantly check.

I assume for other types of movement such as pulling corners, there's a bit of rounded multi-decimal place math involved to determine when each point moves up/down proportionally based on the cursor movement on the screen, but for moving the entire plane it really should always be overridden to +0.1/-0.1 for the entire plane.

Something that would be useful and I'm surprised isn't included is the ability to raise/lower the edge of the currently selected box. Having to do both corners is icky since it doubles the effort of counting/measuring and therefore doubles the possibility of screwing up.

Should be interesting to see what type of neat landscaping folks do with this!

Edit: Trying to place a stockpile in a survey has become a bit annoying as well, it's very easy to accidentally click a gridpoint. Perhaps trying to place a stockpile should override clicking on the survey gridpoints.