Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

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Iv121
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by Iv121 » Sat Feb 01, 2014 4:35 am

This discussion is all good Frost but you went past the point, I asked if the grouping idea I built is feasible, if it is it solves a lot of problems and in the same time allows us to expand in the future making it the best choice for NPC handling , as for it being distracting nobody forces you to do it now, plus considering the fact it is only a matter of writing text you can give it to anyone who knows how to write while freeing us to work on the code of other things, it doesn't collide with anything.
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by Prototype » Sat Feb 01, 2014 8:33 am

It is likely that this is a secondary feature. We can do without It so I see where Fr0st is coming from, but if we can make it happen it's a good feature.
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by Keon » Sat Feb 01, 2014 10:54 am

Look, I sure as hell am not coding an RPG system for some stupid testificates. I get the feeling neither is fr0st. If somebody else wants to waste their time developing a way that you can talk to people and have deep and meaningful relations with your crew, go ahead. It would be a standalone mod the scale of a large, popular mod, and it would take a long time to do right.

My system: Crew is robots. For all intents and purposes, they just stand at consoles looking pretty while I blow up ships. I really don't care about villagers in Vanilla, and I've never seen a mod that made me care about them. I don't think we can do that.
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by cats » Sat Feb 01, 2014 12:23 pm

Even if we add only robots and no NPCs, you'll still have to code an AI beyond "walk to door." Of course the NPC personality is secondary, but if it's done halfway decently it'll add so much to the overall feel of FC. As Iv said, the majority of the time-consuming work is writing the spectrum of responses and voicing them if we're going that far. Only very few members are actually working towards finishing the mod at the moment beyond discussing ideas and drawing designs for those that can.

Also, Keon, you have a tendency to ridicule ideas that don't match your vision. That's not very constructive. Try to act like a member of the dev team should, with at least a little diplomacy and tact.
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by Keon » Sat Feb 01, 2014 5:39 pm

catsonmeth wrote:Even if we add only robots and no NPCs, you'll still have to code an AI beyond "walk to door." Of course the NPC personality is secondary, but if it's done halfway decently it'll add so much to the overall feel of FC. As Iv said, the majority of the time-consuming work is writing the spectrum of responses and voicing them if we're going that far. Only very few members are actually working towards finishing the mod at the moment beyond discussing ideas and drawing designs for those that can.

Also, Keon, you have a tendency to ridicule ideas that don't match your vision. That's not very constructive. Try to act like a member of the dev team should, with at least a little diplomacy and tact.
Sorry. *ahem*

I am afraid that your opinions are a bit unfeasible, and while I agree they would be fantastic given the talent and time, I fear that I do not posses said time or talent and would recommend simplifying them to a degree in which they could be implemented rather easily and therefor leave more time for the other aspects of the construction of this mod. While I, of course, would love to sit at the helm of a fully crewed starship, I feel that having an empty starship that still fires lasers and can duel with other players is the priority for the development of this mod currently. While I acknowledge that we need to have many focuses, I feel that the benefit gained from having a crewed fleet is of less importance than other areas of study, such as the gameplay mechanics that I feel we should be working on; that being ships, weapons, terrain, and such. It is my opinion that Minecraft has never been a living world in the way others seem to want. I was against adding villagers, and I still to this day feel that they don't add much to the vanilla game. (Adventure maps, of course, are the exception. I've seen some very well done things with villagers on paths leading players through castles and such, and that is of course one way that minecraft has been shining lately; adventure map support.) I feel that currently, villagers don't feel like creatures, as evidenced by the way they are used by most players. If a villager is lucky, he may simply be locked in a cage and forced to spawn iron golems or produce rip-off trades for all eternity. If he is unlucky and a less studious player comes around, said villager is likely to be killed on sight. I very much doubt that we have the talent to make that very same player who commits genocide on Testificates regularly behave any better to his spawned in "crewmates", and if we require them to function, s/he will only be frusterated in what is likely to be a not very engaging part of the game. If we look at other respectable examples of openworld games, such as EVE Online, we see that NPCs do not attempt to act like players. They are relegated to the role of questgiver, and political battles are between people. Sure, you may not get the chance to fight alongside your crewmates, but that has never been what EVE is about. You control a spaceship, and for all purposes, that spaceship is an extension of you in the same way a jaegermech is an extension of that guy in Pacific Rim. If we look at minecraft, it makes no attempt to make NPCs sympathetic characters. Any mod that has has pretty much failed to do so in the same way that, say Final Fantasy or Skyrim has. That is because minecraft is a randomly generated world and these are not. Is minecraft multiplayer still a very living world? Yes, with no doubt. But I don't feel that villagers are the reason that servers feel living, and I don't think that they will be the reason that Futurecraft feels living either.

Please notify me if you feel that this is a better way for me to express my ideas. I am more than happy to continue talking in a manner befitting a member of the developer team of which I am so eagerly waiting to be part of.
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by Prototype » Sun Feb 02, 2014 2:36 am

This is in a similar boat to the multiple species idea, nice, but difficult to the point where it's not worth it.
Of course once we have our first full release we can think about it for version 1.1
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by Iv121 » Sun Feb 02, 2014 3:02 am

Well first of all you need to get out of the head that testificates are valid NPCs in our world or any other MC vanilla NPC. Second it is a good idea to reduce our development time in as many ways as possible, we can just get rid of the mod and remove the development time entirely ! You need some actual content to get a 1.0 release you know, and yes crew is as important as a laser in FC, you can relate to it as another subsystem of your ship that needs to be done, like the engines or the life support.
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by  ҉  » Sun Feb 02, 2014 11:44 am

Iv, the development team is telling you that this isn't happening. That should be the end of the discussion.
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by cats » Sun Feb 02, 2014 12:29 pm

Mistake Not... wrote:Iv, the development team is telling you that this isn't happening. That should be the end of the discussion.
Honestly, after three years of virtually naught, what the dev "team" says doesn't really have much weight. Fr0st and Proto are the only ones that have shown any progress whatsoever, even that's been a trickle or modeling for a different mod (both are appreciated). This is something that part of the community can and wants to get involved in because we can't do anything else and we're bored of doing nothing while the devs do the same.
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by Iv121 » Sun Feb 02, 2014 12:32 pm

Plus Frost didn’t say anything against the system itself, the existence of the system is inevitable anyway. Do you really enjoy that much teaming up on me LJS ? You can deny it but let's face it if you didn't want to make this suggestion fail yourself you wouldn't intervene, will it be better if someone else will write down my suggestions from now on ? Just to ease it up for you ?
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by Prototype » Sun Feb 02, 2014 12:56 pm

Keon is right in that we shouldn't be adding this into the first release, we just won't get it done otherwise.

However, I can see merit in the idea, and who says we can't release updates?

The system would be good if done properly, and I'd rather wait until after first release and do it properly than rush it to get the mod out, however we can still discuss it, it'll be easier to know what we are doing should we ever come to implement it.

We can give crew a basic system for first release, then flesh it out afterwards, how exactly we flesh it out is up for discussion.
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by Iv121 » Sun Feb 02, 2014 2:18 pm

By giving basic crew system you mean we are going to double our work and make two systems ? If you don't want to do so you will be forced want it or not to implement that system at least partially, in our case to implement single NPC handling, but to be honest that is basically 75% of all the work ! From there it is only a small step to introduce the system as whole which means it is mostly pointless to divide this job in two, and you can't do without NPCs running your ship anyway (Sure you can implement just the AI and make the guns shoot automatically or something but that is 70% of the work, 5% is calling it an "NPC" and 25% more to take care of group handling). Really the AI is the true problem here and AI is mandatory if you want your guns shooting OFC anyway.
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by cats » Sun Feb 02, 2014 3:14 pm

We don't need to segment everything, if we start on time-consuming secondary objectives right now, like the NPC system, we can still add it in a later update. I agree, the devs should be focusing on more important features, like Copernicus and the render engine, but the average member is unable to assist in that aspect of development. The majority of the forum is an untapped resource. There'll be almost an equal amount of work for the devs regarding the AI whether we implement the NPC system or not, members can take care of writing and voicing (if necessary).
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cannonfodder wrote:it's funny because sonic's face looks like a * and faces aren't supposed to look like a *

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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by Iv121 » Sun Feb 02, 2014 3:28 pm

Im not even about the writing, that is the least the worries me, I talk purely about the grouping of NPCs as a way to control them and optimise them. That is true about the writing though, programming wise it only means adding one number to each NPC in the database - personality ID, that would be exactly 4 bytes per NPC, 0 effort on the programmer's side.
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Re: Cities, NPCs, and vehicles.

Post by  ҉  » Sun Feb 02, 2014 4:23 pm

Iv121 wrote:programming wise it only means adding one number to each NPC in the database - personality ID, that would be exactly 4 bytes per NPC, 0 effort on the programmer's side.
...except that he also has to program what that number means, yes? Which is the problem.
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