[Therian]

I'm really looking forward to seeing the first successfully built player city to reach the top tech level. Player cities just sound so incredibly cool to me.

[Sergo]

Originally Posted by Elrar

there goes the Horizons idea!

Making dragons in the character generator is cool enough to justify downloading the free trial. They look really good.

[Skarlath]

Originally Posted by Elrar

so I guess there goes the Horizons idea!

Aww!

I guess Ill take it for a spin all the same, and hopefully my horizon adventure wont end the same way.

[Sergo]

Originally Posted by Skarlath

I guess Ill take it for a spin all the same, and hopefully my horizon adventure wont end the same way.

I'll be interested to see what your impressions are.

[Skarlath]

Not wanting to change the course of the thread too much, I thought I would comment on how I feel about construction projects in terms of duration.

I think building a structure (let alone a town) should take a fair amount of time. Setting up tiny wood huts or Teepees (sp?) might take a short time, but constructing a european style house should take 3-7 days. A mansion should be a two week project, minimum.

A fair amount of time should be involved in resource gathering - housing should eat up a lot of resources. Another bunch of time in component crafting. However there should be a rather large element of 'labour' going into the final construction of the structure. The actual 'building', as it were.

It would be nice if there was some player skill in it - some mini-game-esque type idea. In theory something very similar to the rest of the crafting system. If you perform well then your building would have better stats - sturdier, needs less maintenance. That sort of thing. Additionally, if you perform well then the overall final construction time might be cut down a little. The player(s) should be expected to perform lots of sensible jobs around the building site, all in order. Friends helping out would speed things up a lot.

I just feel that housing should be a little more meaningful. People loved their houses in AC1 when they had to really try if they wanted to nab one. If players put effort into their houses, as well as taking part in their design and construction, then surely they will be far more attached to them. That sort of thing it good for player retention and all that.

The argument 'not everyone wants to have to craft for several hours on their building site to complete their house' doesn't really stand up. There is always someone who will help you out of you pass a few shinies their way. Or what about buying prebuilt housing? Im sure people would be happy to design and construct houses and then sell them on to rich adventurers.

[Sergo]

Originally Posted by Skarlath

There is always someone who will help you out of you pass a few shinies their way.

That's a key part of the value of housing from a community perspective. In HZ, it was prohibitively time consuming to build your own house due to all the skillups needed. It's much faster to keep working YOUR trade for pay and then in turn pay other specialists to do the part of your house you can't do. I did all my own masonry and contracted out the carpentry and metalwork. I met quite a few people this way, and they in turn hired me or recommended me for other masonry jobs. Our guild pooled all our skills to constuct the first guild hall on the server, and that was a great feeling.

[Skarlath]

Vanguard is already taking measures to be a community game, it would be silly not to borrow ideas from Horizons.

Originally Posted by Silius

My current plan is that our carpenter will be the person who assembles the final ship, but look for every crafter trade to have a part in makings ships depending on size.

Sil

Here's a bit of sauce that might relate a little to housing, but just in regards to ships its interesting (but somewhat negative if I am interpreting it correctly).

Speaking entirely in terms of ships, this comment suggests that a ship will be created as a final 'crafted combine' of all the components. I was sort of hoping that ships (even small ones) would be constructed in a dry docks in a similar way to how I described house construction - somewhat labour intensive with players performing 'crafting' on a number of different jobs. Slowly, bit by bit building up the hull and such in front of them.

If ship building is just crafting the components into the final product, all in one go, then I fear that house building may be the same. Its a big leap to assume though, so I won't get myself too worried.

[Skarlath]

I downloaded the horizons 0.98mb client installer thing. I double clicky it and a box pops up:

Halt! We cannot allow thee to continueunt without warning - the publisher cannot be verified! Dust thou wish to continue?

Choice of 'Run' or 'Cancel'.

Cancel closes the box.

Run makes the mouse appear with an hourglass for 3 seconds, and makes the computer make "I'm doing it, I'm doing it!! Please don't kick me again!" noises. Then all is quiet and the installer does not launch.

Its a mini adventure.

Tried a restart. Tried running it without my firewall. Any ideas?

[Elrar (of Silky Venom)]

are you using IE or Firefox?

And make sure you've clicked install on the ActiveX controller prompts that will appear at the top of your IE browser window.

[Skarlath]

This isn't relating to the brower at all - I have already downloaded the installer. I just can't run it.

I had the bright idea (duh!) of checking whether it was even registering as a process. When I click 'run' it does start a process called HORIZONS_10 (The name of the file) but after a little while this just disappears. Grr.

[Elrar (of Silky Venom)]

No Horizons for J00 either

It wtf pwned both of us, not the best way to get new subscribers /laugh

[Skarlath]

Originally Posted by Elrar

No Horizons for J00 either

It wtf pwned both of us, not the best way to get new subscribers /laugh

Oo, I dunno. Im pretty hooked... maybe the full subscription will get us a service that works!!

[Sergo]

Originally Posted by Skarlath

If ship building is just crafting the components into the final product, all in one go, then I fear that house building may be the same. Its a big leap to assume though, so I won't get myself too worried.

Yeah, there's lots of ways around that. You could leave a contstruction site up for days or weeks, and require a certain type of crafter to "wave the magic wand" as it were, once the site was full with all needed materials.

[Skarlath]

When a house was under construction in Horizons, what exactly did the crafter have to do? They gather the components, then what?

[Sergo]

Okay, prepare yourself for a shock: EQ2 did it better.

While Horizons (or maybe SWG, never played it) broke ground in making crafting a fully developed sphere of the game, rather than an afterthought, Horizons didn't make the actual combine process very interesting.

To directly answer your question, when I worked on my house, I first gathered the raw stone by clicking on a number of visible nodes sticking out of the ground. The nodes had spawn points just like monsters, so you knew where to look for them. I filled up on raw stone and trucked it all to a crafting shed. The higher level the stone, the farther it was, naturally, from any shed. There it was a matter of a few clicks, selecting recipes and executing them. Raw stone to bricks, bricks into blocks, then blocks had to be carried to the job site. Once there, click "apply" and those blocks are counted toward completion of the project. No skill or thought invovled anywhere, except for streamlining your transportation method to get the most per trip.

Although EQ2 crafting is denigrated as "whack-a-mole", it was more involved than that. Your "whacks" would buff the durability of your product, or move it more quickly toward completion. And you didn't have to wait for a mole to pop up, either, you could use the abilities at any time.

Once again, though, Tale wins hands down. Many kinds of crafting were a different sort of minigame. Making charcoal was very much like EQ2 turned out to be. You had a couple buttons you could push to control this or that, and you had a couple values you needed to keep your eye on. Gemcutting, my favorite, was totally different. You have an unrealistically huge (so you can see it) hunk of gem with numerous flaws. You had to turn it over, and study it, then start grinding at it, one layer at a time. If you planned wrong, or failed to see how the imperfections lay deep inside the stone, you could ruin the entire piece, or have to settle for a lesser cut. And you might go through scores of stones before finding one suitable for a very rare cut.

[Skarlath]

I didn't enjoy the EQ2 system. ATitD system (especially your gemcrafting example) seems cool. Especially as it relates to the actual task rather than being an abstract minigame.

So you know, SWG was a 'gather the components and click combine' system. The reason why many were reasonably happy was because it all laid in the preparation. There were different types of each resources (different woods for example, each with a number of different traits). Different traits were best for different items and so the skill came from minimising cost and maximising the stats.

When making components in SWG, the component would have different stats once made. When crafting these into a final product, the final product would assume a variety of traits according to the traits of the components, according to the traits of the resources. So using all the right materials and such was actually quite good!

[Loampounder]

I loved SWG crafting for having the components actually matter, and I hated EQ2 crafting for making components too bland.

In SWG, components were generalized in type (like conductive metal or insulative polymer). Within each type (and there were many types) was a specific material with quality traits (1-99, higher being better). So you could find type A with qualities X or qualities Y, and most importantly these qualities had purpose (better qualities make strong, better, or more of it). When we looked for resources, we actually cared what we found, in terms of qualities. The market changed by who found what where. One week I found some high quality avian bones, so I would hunt birds in that area. Next week I may scout around and find some high quality oil on another planet, so I mined that. I loved having a reason to explore and it felt good to interact with what crafters needed.

In EQ2, a carrot was always a carrot, and only a specific recipe called for carrots. A carrot was one of five things from a scrub, so you could not tailor your hunt. Worse, crafting yielded one of four goods, divided by quality. These different things did not stack. So I had bags full of partial stacks of resources and goods just to craft. Gathering resources and cooking became more of inventory management than experimentation.

I would love to see a system with the complexity of SWG resources and the cooperation of ATitD crafting.

[Skarlath]

Well the Vanguard devs talked about a 'grade' system for resources, didnt they? 'Grade A wood', 'Grade E Iron Ore'. Not quite as intricate, but it still allows for many of the possibilities in SWG.

If SWG had made the actual harvesting process a bit more interesting (as opposed to the scouting, which was often enjoyable), and had involved some player skill or at least involvement in the crafting (even in a minigame system like EQ2) then it would have been an absolutely top-notch system.

That ... and I would have liked to have seen a husbandry system running along side the bioengineer tree.

[Loampounder]

I always read the "grade" levels as probably something like the tiers in EQ2. The tiers really simplified the game to a ridiculous level. Grades A-E? I hope not.

And the SWG resources changed on a weekly basis. I loved that.

[Skarlath]

Originally Posted by Loampounder

I always read the "grade" levels as probably something like the tiers in EQ2. The tiers really simplified the game to a ridiculous level. Grades A-E? I hope not.

And the SWG resources changed on a weekly basis. I loved that.

I actually agree with you. It would be disappointing if there wasnt a large variation in traits of resources.

Hopefully grades might apply to various traits. Perhaps a 'Flexability' trait for various woods could be rated A-E, and so on?