Game Development: Twinkle-Twinkle

[ydex]

Using the default client more lately, the following things seem the most lacking compared to custom clients, mostly things everyone already brings up:

-Mousewheel zoom speed: it's so damn slow! Amber had a menu option bar to increase speed of this.
-Bounding boxes: Same argument as for gridlines, it's not meant to be aesthetically pleasing but allows us to place stuff to be aesthetically pleasing. A tool.
-Waterskin/Waterflask meter: Combat, mining, and of course digging soil all consume tons of water and everyone is hauling around 10-20 waterskins. Being able to tell which ones are full at a glance is pretty useful. If appearance is important, maybe a custom image cross section of the container with the liquid at different levels? Then the icon itself would convey the information.
-Fast Equip Hands slot: I switch between tools and travellers sacks a lot, and right now this requires me to open up the whole equipment tab every time to do it.
-Button to drink from any hotkey'd container.
-Hotkey to display current damage of stuff on the screen. Or even just a tickbox in options. I usually have this on all the time except for when I disable the GUI for pictures.
...

I just returned to the game today, using the default client, and this list is almost exactly what I was missing in the default client.
I would add:
-Align the ortho camerna to the actual cardinal compasss directions and let me use some hotkey (ctrl+arrowkey) to quickly align my camera to these (so I quickly can turn the camera back to the north for minimap navigation purposes).
-put some kind of indicator of what day it is in the current season somewhere, because it is annoying to come back and not have a clue if it is propper time to plant ones seeds or not.

Nice to see that custom client QoL features are slowly beeing added to default client tho, keep up the gods work

[shubla]

-Bounding boxes: Same argument as for gridlines, it's not meant to be aesthetically pleasing but allows us to place stuff to be aesthetically pleasing. A tool.

yeah and if you are going to add this, add it as a toggle thing just like the grid.
So no nonsense like this:
Bounding boxes, but they are only visible when placing objects or something, because then people will have to use custom clients anyway to have them visible actually on demand and not only on some situations!

[Apocoreo]

I'll add to the ortho cam discussion with an anecdote. I planted a pair of pretty little plan trees in front of my home's door. On the ortho cam, there's no camera angle where I can easily click and enter my door. It's mostly blocked by the leaves and I have to use badcam (which I prefer, luckily) or ruin the aesthetics of my plot. Hiding trees would also solve this issue.

I think winter is still an issue. I would highly recommend Jorb and Loftar watch that new player's stream. There's some interface advice you can get from it, if you ignore the usual new player fumbling and self-education. The important part is he spawned in winter and had so much trouble getting string. I'd just make taproot spawn on snow, maybe nettles. I think seasons need to be fleshed out after interface stuff, then object controlled objects or another combat rework/rebalancing.

When it comes to a wipe I'd like a new world but I'd rather wait for a new exciting world, with some new feature. Maybe a new geographical thingy like how we all spawned in a central continent. Maybe we could all spawn around the edges?

But anyway, I am rambling.

[vatas]

I think winter is still an issue. I would highly recommend Jorb and Loftar watch that new player's stream. There's some interface advice you can get from it, if you ignore the usual new player fumbling and self-education. The important part is he spawned in winter and had so much trouble getting string. I'd just make taproot spawn on snow, maybe nettles. I think seasons need to be fleshed out after interface stuff, then object controlled objects or another combat rework/rebalancing.

http://ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/Bark_Cordage

I have NO idea why nobody in chat told him about this. (As far as I know.)

Don't take this message as "winter is fine, don't change it at all."

EDIT: I would go as far as jamming "acquire tough bark" and "craft a bark cordage" into tutorial quest chain.

[shubla]

I wonder if the update is on sunday or moved to mondays!

[jorb]

Hey, while you're working on the small feature, why don't you take the texture files you have for the various metal bars/nuggets and color-code the metal/nugget stockpiles? That's a quick tweak, unless you did something weird with the code.

I think that it is a good idea, but I also recall that devs have earlier stated something about why they are not implementing this.

We held off on that on account of the potential performance implications of doing so. Might be possible to revisit soonish.

[jorb]

I wonder if the update is on sunday or moved to mondays!

May vary.

[yagogoii]

I wonder if the update is on sunday or moved to mondays!

no, he just finished livestock manager and uploading it to server now

[shubla]

I wonder if the update is on sunday or moved to mondays!

May vary.

But of course he could not tell what the case is on this week! Typical jorb!

[WowGain]

Hey, while you're working on the small feature, why don't you take the texture files you have for the various metal bars/nuggets and color-code the metal/nugget stockpiles? That's a quick tweak, unless you did something weird with the code.

I think that it is a good idea, but I also recall that devs have earlier stated something about why they are not implementing this.

We held off on that on account of the potential performance implications of doing so. Might be possible to revisit soonish.

The benefits of variable stockpiles (ore, stone, metal, logs, boards, etc) I think far surpasses its possible impacts on client performance. If it ends up being that big of a dent to lower end PCs just make it a toggle-able feature even.