Game Development: Surveyor's Delight

[pagsiu]

Nice update, glad to see you guys alive. New parallel world when?

[SpacePig]

1. Level the selected area by default to minimum remaining land.
2. Or manually set the leveling amount as a number.
That's all that's needed. Nobody will ever select irregular areas for leveling because it's completely dysfunctional — it provides no advantages in construction or defense and only causes extra problems.

Since eg. slope/hill construction is rather common, this is an abjectly false statement.

Only beginners will build a village on a slope because they don't know all the potential inconvenience and problems with expanding their base. For example, you can't build a house or chicken coop on a slope.

99% of villages will be located on completely flat ground, including all large villages and kingdoms.

Given this ratio, it makes sense to first satisfy the needs of the 99% of players by making construction as easy as possible for them, and then consider beginners who might choose to build near slopes or rivers, likely encountering leveling issues even at the palisade-building stage if they ever reach that point.

[Audiosmurf]

Where is the ERP server

[vatas]

99% of villages will be located on completely flat ground, including all large villages and kingdoms.

If a question of "do you want a village site that is completely flat, or a massive slope?" was asked in a vacuum, obviously you would choose the former.

However in practice (at least depending on how large of a village you want) this is hardly feasible and you may end up having to choose handful of different elevations for different areas. While currently there is little practical penalty for having the connecting slopes have the maximum angle possible, people may still prefer the aesthetics of having more proper "ramps."

Even if we disregard aesthetics, one construction method would be to build an expansion wall to the proper elevation first before "filling up" the space between it and the old wall. The new survey would presumably be an improvement when filling up such a "rampart."

Having tested the new survey a bit, I can see there should be stuff to help with "I just want to flatten this area." Something like quick options for...
1. have flat plane snap to lowest elevation point within the survey
2. have flat plane snap to largest flat area within the survey
3. have flat plane snap to highest elevation point within the survey
I'm not sure exactly how these should be implemented. Bluntest way would be to add a button for each directly into the survey window, alongside the four that it currently has. I doubt having subcategories or "sub-windows" is the ideal solution either. The old slider for elevation control would be neat, if nothing else for the fact that lot of people have accustomed to it.

[Selles]

Is there a plan to add the ability to terraform with someone on the same flag area?
Also, is there a plan to create a bigger area that can be allocated for terraforming?

My bases are usually 50-70 tiles, so it would be nice to be able to select the entire area at once.

Anyway, a good update, thank you! Terraforming for houses and palisade was always the longest part for me at the beginning of the game

[MaltGrain]

I'm glad we can now make slopes with ease and divide sub-areas within a larger survey area.

Could we have a grid size readout during sub-area designation, please?
I've tried to picture what I mean - the left picture is regular survey with 16x16 readout. The right pic shows only a fine blue line while sub-dividing a survey, which is difficult to see without glasses.

Survey.jpg

• You can pull a corner point of a survey to raise the slope of the surveyed area relative to that point.
• You can pull any other point to move the survey area generally.
• You can hold shift to select/create a sub-area of multiple survey points, which can be similarily modified as the survey generally.

It might be worth copy-pasting use instructions to the survey tooltip ingame

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Rip, I had been guessing we were going to get news on the new world any day now.

What do you suppose this is hinting at?

• Significant server side optimization work has been performed on hittesting, object delta transfers, protocol object lists, &c, which should imply significant performance gains not least in terms of peak user capacity.

[Robben_DuMarsch]

Rip, I had been guessing we were going to get news on the new world any day now.

What do you suppose this is hinting at?

• Significant server side optimization work has been performed on hittesting, object delta transfers, protocol object lists, &c, which should imply significant performance gains not least in terms of peak user capacity.

My best guess is that it was a necessary server side upgrade which helped it more efficiently keep track of user interactions, which was potentially a necessary or helpful upgrade that would allow the implementation of the feature they just added, but had the additional benefit of allowing more peak concurrent users in a location which may see better performance in situations like gigantic siege battles, fights over meteors, or other big events.

Did you have some other theory that it was related in some way, directly or indirectly, to the parallel world?

The only two things I could think of is that they plan on making the parallel world run on the same server so they wanted to make some performance improvements (I'm not sure these performance improvements will necessarily effect that?) or they wanted to experiment with a central NPC City like Boston where they envisioned a ton of players on screen and therefore needed to improve performance in those situations... And they wanted to add some slopes to it manually, so we got some benefits of that too.

That's super fucking speculative and not what I'm actually predicting, btw, lol

[mvgulik]

Is there a plan to add the ability to terraform with someone on the same flag area?

Take it from me dev's have no such plan.

Because ... you currently already can set multiple heartling's to work on the same survey.

The issue/(game puzzle part) that your running into is that it's the survey GUI part that is limited to one heartling at a time. (this is kinda a protection against others directly messing around with your survey, as long as you keep its GUI part open.)

Ergo:
1) Set heartling-A to work. [Dig]
2) Close survey GUI part for A. [x]
3) Open survey with heartling-B
4) Set heartling-B to work. [Dig]
5) Optional: (preemptive close survey GUI part for B. [x])

This will work until those two workers bump into each other. Stopping one, or both, workers from digging.

(if easily done. using multiple surveys, one for each worker, might be the better option. ... Until Dev's add some anti heartling bumping feature to Surveys. ... Take (it) from me, not going to happen.)

[mvgulik]

It might be worth copy-pasting use instructions to the survey tooltip ingame

Erm. Those instructions are only valid for a freshly created survey AREA. As a new survey comes with an automatically added survey REGION for the whole survey AREA.
Remove that REGION and thing change a bit.

[BigCountry]

+1

Glad you are alive and kicking!!!