First impressions

[Brosephine]

I've spent near enough two good solid days in this game, and first of all let me say what a fantastic job you've done: Everything looks incredibly promising thus far - there's a definite feel of Ultima Online meets Harvest Moon meets Dwarf Fortress.


Now then, onto the downers I've noticed so far, even though I'm aware that probably more than half of everything I mention is likely going to be something that's already planned or even in development.

No way to domesticate animals
At the moment, theres no way to maintain a flock of nearby animals, which makes anything animal related somewhat difficult - expecially leatherworking.

Food requirements
It seems my character needs an absolute mountain of food in a day, and apples in particular seem to provide a bizarrely low amount, requiring 50+ just to fill you up for barely half a day.

Cart movement
Carts seem to have rather large collision boxes, getting stuck on all kinds of things. Getting one through a two-tile wide gate is often a complete pain. Reduce the size of the collision box.

Mining and smithing unrewarding
This is one of the big ones.
There is little to attract a player to things like mining and smithing. The LP outputs are noticably lower than those from the farming related skills, and ontop of that, failure rates are incredibly high - mining out 25 tiles to get usually 2-3 cast iron is a little depressing, and this is made even worse when you get to trying to produce wrought iron, where you have a 50% chance of trashing your iron, and then even if you make bloom, you still have a 50% chance of failing to make wrought iron and ending up with cast iron again - which puts you back at your 50% chance of becoming slag.

And to this the fact that you need charcoal, and you find that the industrial side has it a rather rough. I suggest Increasing the percentage chance of getting cast iron from the smelter - the failure rates on refining it to more valuable materials wouldn't be so soul-crushing if it were easier acquire simple iron, which isn't used for the construction of all that many things anyway.

Mines quickly become enormous
This is somewhat tied to the above, due to the huge amounts of ore required for even a single bar. A way to slow down the physical expansion of a mine is to give 2 ore per tile, and double the time taken to mine a single tile. This would mean that mining ore wouldn't be any quicker, but you wouldn't end up with huge empty caverns within mere days.

Combat is clunky
This is sort of double-sided.
The current combat system is somewhat awkward. In a way, I suppose this may actually be a good thing as it makes attacking other players less appealing, and I get the feeling that in this game, war and murder are supposed to be ugly things that are unpleasant but sometimes necessary rather that a definite focus.

MOVEMENT
There has GOT to be a better way to move than having to left click the ground every 2 seconds. Either via keys or via click-and-hold to move towards mouse cursor, UO / Diablo style. The game is click-heavy enough as it is.

Resolution
I'd really love to fullscreen this thing. It'd be nice to see further (although I imagine this could affect bandwidth and performance), but even just fullscreen 800x600 would be good - everything is damn tiny at 1600x1200.

[Bio]

[quote=]No way to domesticate animals
At the moment, theres no way to maintain a flock of nearby animals, which makes anything animal related somewhat difficult - expecially leatherworking.[/quote]

I think that this might be planned, but server updates eradicate any stock of cattle or other animal. They move every IRL day because of server updates. Maybe a domestication skill can 'tag' them as being unmoveable when the server restarts? =/

Food requirements
It seems my character needs an absolute mountain of food in a day, and apples in particular seem to provide a bizarrely low amount, requiring 50+ just to fill you up for barely half a day.

I complained about this in another topic, I'll link to it later.

Cart movement
Carts seem to have rather large collision boxes, getting stuck on all kinds of things. Getting one through a two-tile wide gate is often a complete pain. Reduce the size of the collision box.

Make wider fences. I think that optimizations are soon to be made though, correct me if I'm wrong.

Mining and smithing unrewarding
This is one of the big ones.
There is little to attract a player to things like mining and smithing. The LP outputs are noticably lower than those from the farming related skills, and ontop of that, failure rates are incredibly high - mining out 25 tiles to get usually 2-3 cast iron is a little depressing, and this is made even worse when you get to trying to produce wrought iron, where you have a 50% chance of trashing your iron, and then even if you make bloom, you still have a 50% chance of failing to make wrought iron and ending up with cast iron again - which puts you back at your 50% chance of becoming slag.

And to this the fact that you need charcoal, and you find that the industrial side has it a rather rough. I suggest Increasing the percentage chance of getting cast iron from the smelter - the failure rates on refining it to more valuable materials wouldn't be so soul-crushing if it were easier acquire simple iron, which isn't used for the construction of all that many things anyway.

So gaddamn true, and I've not heard about this being altered. Maybe jorb or loftar will say something about it though.

Mines quickly become enormous
This is somewhat tied to the above, due to the huge amounts of ore required for even a single bar. A way to slow down the physical expansion of a mine is to give 2 ore per tile, and double the time taken to mine a single tile. This would mean that mining ore wouldn't be any quicker, but you wouldn't end up with huge empty caverns within mere days.

Sunds like it would be a problem, but I've not eperienced this yet. Ask me again later.

Combat is clunky
This is sort of double-sided.
The current combat system is somewhat awkward. In a way, I suppose this may actually be a good thing as it makes attacking other players less appealing, and I get the feeling that in this game, war and murder are supposed to be ugly things that are unpleasant but sometimes necessary rather that a definite focus.

Meh. Most memorpuhgers have pretty bad combat. I hear plans abut it being a bit leveled out though. I'm not sure if this is what you mean, but hey.

MOVEMENT
There has GOT to be a better way to move than having to left click the ground every 2 seconds. Either via keys or via click-and-hold to move towards mouse cursor, UO / Diablo style. The game is click-heavy enough as it is.

And how.

See below: ':cam fixed'

Resolution
I'd really love to fullscreen this thing. It'd be nice to see further (although I imagine this could affect bandwidth and performance), but even just fullscreen 800x600 would be good - everything is damn tiny at 1600x1200.

If you don't know about commands, click somewhere other then chat boxes, then type ':fs 1' you need to hold shift and press the semicolon key to activate the command line entering. Then press enter afterwards.

Also, '

[eql]

:fs 1

doesnt work with most people ;/

[jorb]

@ Brosephine: Wait a minute... you actually played the game *before* posting critique? And, as a consequence, your critique is now both well founded, and presented in a nice suit of grammar and disposition to boot?

Kids, Brosephine is on to something big here. If your forum alias is formated as [name][number], your post count is above 30, and your join date was less than a week ago, I suggest you study the OP in this thread. You'll be doing me a favor.

On to the points:

Animal domestication: Planned but unimplemented feature. We've been talking more and more about it lately, so hopefully it's not too far off.

Food: Will be balanced to more reasonable numbers. My own alt chews through about a chest's worth of sausage in a playing session -- about the equivalent of a small herd of cows. Pace of levelups will most likely remain largely the same.

Cart: I quietly ignored all the people nagging me about this for a good month or so, and then, tonight -- when I used a cart myself, and the subfunctionalities of them became apparent to me -- I took the five seconds required to fix the issue. Lazy code gnome still needs to redo the resource files, but the source files are updated to rhyme and reason. No need to thank me. (Really sorry ppl, I didn't realize how bad it was)

Mining: Good points there, especially the part about digging out too large areas.

Clunky combat: Not sure what you mean by clunky. Clunky interface wise? The aim is to develop a fighting system in which actual player skill -- as opposed to character statistics -- is often the determining factor in combat. A goal has been to devise a system which forces you to constantly respond to what your opponent is doing, rather than just standing around minding only your own punches ala most combat systems. We haven't hit those marks yet -- by far -- but I believe in the basic concepts we've established. The interface can certainly get better.

Movement: Hopefully we'll put some basic pathfinding on the dude at some point not too far off. That should help a lot. Our UI isn't great, and we're well aware. When we designed it we weren't really sure what we would need it to do in the future, so it's been a suit to grow in. As our conceptions of the basic modes of interaction improve, so will the user interface. One stumbling block is that we both hate doing UI. We released the client as open source a while ago, so if you're into programming, you might be able to improve somewhat on it. The game client is essentially just a terminal, however, so most things (almost everything except rendering) are handled server side. We're uhm.... working on it.

Resoultion: As has been stated above, the console command for full screen is available. I think we're also considering increasing the default resolution somewhat (Not the game viewport, mind you).

Welcome to the forums, and thank you for the kind words.

[Yolan]

Some nice points B. =D

Regarding mining, I think that is a good idea. I would also like to see mining turned into something of a more exploratory adventure. So, make squares of ore give up even more than two, say, five or six, but then make it appear in veins. So, the default would just give you a block of stone.

[sabinati]

Cart: I quietly ignored all the people nagging me about this for a good month or so, and then, tonight -- when I used a cart myself, and the subfunctionalities of them became apparent to me -- I took the five seconds required to fix the issue. Lazy code gnome still needs to redo the resource files, but the source files are updated to rhyme and reason. No need to thank me. (Really sorry ppl, I didn't realize how bad it was)

so carts can go through gates now?

[kobnach]

All good points, and I'm overjoyed that Jorb has fixed the cart bounding box issue - it's been faster to keep one cart inside the gates, one outside, and transfer the contents - but while mining is a PITA, one does get double the metal from one's ore if full industry, making the pace of production not be too unreasonable. (The issue with relatively lower LP remains.) Also, after unpleasant experiences with a huge wide open mine, we've found a solution to some of the problems there -- we left enough structure not dug out that one can at least avoid getting lost. (There's nothing much one can do about the long walk from working areas to pithead and smelter though.)

p.s. Welcome to Haven & Hearth.

[DarkSage]

Once you start making items out of steel you get 2k+ per item.

[Brosephine]

Clunky combat: Not sure what you mean by clunky. Clunky interface wise? The aim is to develop a fighting system in which actual player skill -- as opposed to character statistics -- is often the determining factor in combat. A goal has been to devise a system which forces you to constantly respond to what your opponent is doing, rather than just standing around minding only your own punches ala most combat systems. We haven't hit those marks yet -- by far -- but I believe in the basic concepts we've established. The interface can certainly get better.

It's mainly an interface thing, I think, as the more combat I've been doing the less cumbersome it's felt, so I retract the 'clunky combat' statement and replace it with 'clunky interface'.

Clearer representations of your target's stats would be better, as would a better way of displaying your combat odds before you make a move. So far there are a few parts of the combat UI I haven't really figured out yet:

[ZestyLemons]

Mining is harsh. Out of a full load of smelted goods I usually get 1 cast iron, two if I'm lucky. Should be around 70% for the cast iron at least