Game Development: UI Scaling

[Jalpha]

boomer b0omer Boomer 800mer b00mer bOOmer

Boop.

[Zentetsuken]

The leap in logic you have made here is bizarre, jorb.
Haven is not an fps and choosing to not see a bunch of flavour objects and shadows so that you can actually play the game with more than 20fps is not a game breaking hack by any stretch of the unboomerized imagination.

Bizaaaarre! Boooomer! Do I know you? Pipe the F down.

See, performance could perhaps be a somewhat legitimate reason to disable certain features, and turning off shadows or flavor objects *might* even be something I could consider for the default client. Turning down the straw density for fields is another one of those features that I at least sympathize with. You seem to think that my stance is entirely without nuance, but it is not. My stance is not that no custom client feature should ever be ported, and that the default client is in perfect shape, and leaves nothing further to be desired. This entire thread is about us working to improve it.

Yes, and I am simply making an argument for why all custom client features are worth considering.

If your stance is not entirely without nuance I am very happy to hear this, but you have to understand that your stance on this has been both historically and recently pretty opaque when we consider quips such as

HIDE TREE = AIMBOT HACKER!!!!!
BADCAM = YOU ARE PLAYING MY GAME WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!

We are all looking forward to the additional improvements to come, I just hope that you come at it with a more liberal approach

[jorb]

Also, lest there be any confusion: I love that people have developed custom clients, and am very grateful to our loyal GEMEINSCHAFT that has stuck, and sticks with us through the thick and the thin. It is inspiring to see people take a ball we've given them and running with it, and we get good ideas from it, so I don't think of this as some sort of conflict here. Even the creative genius of some of the more outrageous things I've seen is humbling, and I agree that the default client can and should improve.

... but I also have strong opinions on the vision we should be providing, and it ain't botting/scripting/movement vectors. If you want particular features badly, the tools are at your disposal, but they may not be things we agree with or prioritize, as is entirely our prerogative. Our core focus is, as it should be, more on the server side than on the client side.

Lots of drama, but we just keep on keeping on. No breaks on the train.

[jorb]

a more liberal approach

You talkin' about your desire to see zoophilia legalized again, now...? My boomer mind is CONFUSED!

[Ardennesss]

Personally, I just think they need to decide which direction they're going. If the intent is to keep vanilla client "pure and wholesome" then I don't think it's worth spending development hours on. Even if loftar invested 2 months adding custom client features - you still wouldn't convert any meaningful amount of the player population.

If the intent is to continue to utilize the free labor of nerds with nothing better to do, it would be a nice surprise if custom clients were a little more officially supported and understood. I've lost track of how many patches we've seen that break all clients and loftar posting the inevitable "Woops I had no idea that would happen."

[jorb]

Personally, I just think they need to decide which direction they're going. If the intent is to keep vanilla client "pure and wholesome" then I don't think it's worth spending development hours on. Even if loftar invested 2 months adding custom client features - you still wouldn't convert any meaningful amount of the player population.

Humble reminder that we are a joyous and merry band here, and that we do not entertain defeatist attitudes. Of course client improvements matter, not least to the extent that they allow custom client makers to drop particular support for features baptized into the general deposit of the faith and canonized. This is not some dialectic where we only get to pick one option. One person brought to the true faith of the default client is a cause for great celebration.

If the intent is to continue to utilize the free labor of nerds with nothing better to do, it would be a nice surprise if custom clients were a little more officially supported and understood. I've lost track of how many patches we've seen that break all clients and loftar posting the inevitable "Woops I had no idea that would happen."

In this particular case it was well known that they would break, and hence support for these features was added two weeks beforehand with advance warning, even to old customs running with deprecated resources. There are limits to what kind of non-compliance with the canonical client we can help support.

But I agree that we can do more. We can always, and should always, strive to do more.

[Ardennesss]

Since you're paying attention to this thread however and we're talking about clients, here's something you can do to make default and custom clients better. Change how resources load. It's completely pants on head retarded to crash the client because you couldn't load a fully updated res file for a goddamn tree. Try again for fucks sake. Yes, I understand there's a load priority hierarchy that it runs down before giving up - but given that you can iterate that hierarchy nearly instantly, why not try more than once before you kick someone out of the game? Furthermore, what even is it the intent of having so many required res files stored server side and loaded on demand? We live in a universe of very very cheap storage, and I'll gladly give up a few more megs on my hard disk to avoid situations like that where failure to load version 38 of oak trees just boots your ass out of the game.

But I agree that we can do more. We can always, and should always, strive to do more.

That wasn't a stab at this particular situation, or others in the past where plenty of notice was given. This is more targeted toward the situations like w11 launch where a change was made to the server kept Trees res package and nobody knew about it until the world went live. The client code itself is open source, but not the resource files that contain code themselves. Client devs are not aware when tweaks are made behind the scenes to versions of these files that might be utilized locally in decompiled form in order to inject more features.

Most notably, Amber (and all branches thereof) use multiple local copies of many resources such as Barter stands in order to support language localization for that window and the specific widget buttons on it. Branches of my client also contain local copies of all things that cause smoke to generate, in the interest of gaining the ability to turn smoke off for performance. This means that critical changes to these resource files are likely to break clients if those new changes are utilized and referenced elsewhere, with us having no notice that's about to happen.

I think in general it's not out of line to state that simply being more transparent with what's coming down the pipeline would go a long way. Nobody is necessarily asking for you or loftar to spend extra time documenting every single thing you do, but just having a more open dialogue for targeted feedback on client features and performance would go a long way.

[jorb]

Since you're paying attention to this thread however and we're talking about clients, here's something you can do to make default and custom clients better. Change how resources load. It's completely pants on head retarded to crash the client because you couldn't load a fully updated res file for a goddamn tree.

I agree completely, and I have pointed this out to loftar more than once. Absolute cancer in development as well. I wash my hands. ^^

Good input! I take it with me. Agree that world resets especially should avoid breaking customs!

[abt79]

my initial response was a little bit more than facetious, and in all seriousness it's clear that the unique vision of the developers and their commitment to it is a large part of what makes the game so fantastic

That said, is it really constructive to respond to "maybe consider the possibility that you're wrong" with "but I'm right!" in this context?

Fundamentally: I don't think there's any legitimate reason to turn off graphics, draw bounding boxes, or movement vectors. I understand perfectly why you would, but it's wrong, and not how the game should be played.

It's only "wrong" to those who see it as wrong for their own semi-arbitrary philosophical reasons. I've never been a botter or in favor of botting since it essentially means not playing the game at all, however I personally don't consider it perfectly analogous to visible bounding boxes since you are merely obtaining an advantage which makes your play-time easier but that's technically irrelevant since everyone's going to draw that line somewhat differently.

This is why I don't really see much value in "wow entitled gamers need to shut up and let the devs do their thing," especially given you two are willing to listen to reason but generally uncompromising in your vision. No matter how much people bitch and moan on this forum, you two still hold all the power to develop the game as you see fit and we can't do anything about it save from report on unintended consequences of your "add now, fix maybe in 5 years" approach. If you truly only value your idea of what the game should be, consider that there are massive swaths of content (killing trolls/mammoths/dungeons, truly deep mining, meteorites, etc) which ONLY players who play the game "wrong" are willing/able to meaningfully engage with. How interesting of a social experiment can Hafen be if most players only scratch the surface then quit after planting their first trees? Or worse, if no one plays it at all?

Haven and Hearth is a massive enough time sink that none of us realistically expect you to spend 1000s of hours engaging meaningfully with every piece of content or the overall gameplay loop in the way we do while still developing and living the rest of your life. That's why it's nice that at least a few hundred people show up every world to invest massive amounts of time (and occasionally money) not just trying the game but figuring out every system and its quirks and problems. If we the players really are just guinea pigs, can that feedback really be dismissed offhand because it doesn't fit into some criteria of what you think the game should be, despite what it actually is? More to the point, if players consider custom client features to be QoL while you see them as cheating, will you always be right by default regarding a gameplay experience they categorically and quite extremely know more about?

Saying "lol just make your own custom client for free and update it every week or so when we break it dummy" isn't quite the same as "just make your own game haha" but it's not that far off either. Right now the big-name custom client makers all seem to be on the out, and the weekly new birds or even this year's new world didn't seem to spark much new interest. Not saying you should pander to the dedicated retards on every matter but maybe when the overwhelming majority of the playerbase states that certain custom client features are worth quitting over if unavailable that's worth a bit of self-skepticism.

Anyways it seems you're at least somewhat open to some custom client features being brought into the default so that's nice. Here's to epically ruining your vision, and owning the libs with right-leaning tabloid articles!

[jorb]

and owning the libs with right-leaning tabloid articles!

Those are explicitly liberal/soc-dem n00spapers. There is no other kind here behind the IKEA curtain.