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Piles of Treasure Decorations!

Discussion in 'Developer Work and Blog posts' started by Scottie, Feb 22, 2019.

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  1. redfish

    redfish Avatar

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    We still need to be able to place gems in the first place :> And orbs too :>

    (Btw nice job Scottie)
     
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  2. Bowen Bloodgood

    Bowen Bloodgood Avatar

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    Loving it!

    Now.. if only we could get stacks of ingots... ;) (or even just single ingots). Would love to add some gold and silver bars...
     
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  3. Alley Oop

    Alley Oop Bug Hunter Bug Moderator

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    shouldn't be hard, micsere already has ingots as world objects (we can't take)
     
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  4. redfish

    redfish Avatar

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    It would be nice to be able to place all types of crafting components, honestly. Not just decoration for decoration's sake, but because say if you want to "dress up" a shop to advertise what you're selling, its useful. Like say I want to set up an ore miner's shop, how can I do that with the decos currently in the game? Not very well, at least.
     
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  5. ErikRulez

    ErikRulez Avatar

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    I wonder if it would be possible to make these into containers of some sort that we could put in our dungeons that would give treasure like a chest. I'm not sure if you would make them so they would disappear or if they'd just be "empty". It would nice to defeat a boss and then be able to pick up all of his hoard.
     
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  6. Bowen Bloodgood

    Bowen Bloodgood Avatar

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    Would also love for these to be containers.. as well as containers that looks like stacks of other items.. would be great for better organizing your storage.. ie all your gold ingots go in the stack of gold ingots..
     
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  7. Scottie

    Scottie Master Artisan SOTA Developer

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    Ha ha! You'll notice, though, that if you look really close, the donkey's nameplate is just strange gibberish... He only exists in my game's editor, and not actually on the server itself, and something on my editor makes all the nameplates look like total gibberish, for some reason... Luckily, whatever is causing that doesn't affect the server when I play it.. ^_^

    But, you're right! That's FAR too much treasure for that poor little donkey to carry... Heh!
     
  8. Bowen Bloodgood

    Bowen Bloodgood Avatar

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    hmm I don't know.. a donkey who moves a treasure horde begins by carrying small piles? :)
     
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  9. Scottie

    Scottie Master Artisan SOTA Developer

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    It's my absolute pleasure! ^_^

    I originally created these gold piles and the versions of the treasure objects scattered among them for the sake of Artifice, but my intention was always to find a way to make them available in some way fro them to exist in the rest of the world... Chris Wolf was able to use them as visual piles of treasure for one of the other adventures, but you couldn't actually access them... What I really wanted was for them to become some kind of "diminishing pile" container that would let you take gold from them... The idea would be that, if you took enough gold out of it (below some designated amount) then it would visually "revert" to a smaller pile, and if you kept taking it out to zero, the pile would simply go away... At least, that was the idea for Artifice...

    We never quite had the chance to achieve all of that, but at least for now they can be used as simple decoration for all of the cool player areas you fine folks have built! ^_^

    Scottie ^_^
     
    Last edited: Feb 23, 2019
  10. Scottie

    Scottie Master Artisan SOTA Developer

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    That could be something we might be able to do for later... I don't really know what that would mean from a "non-art" standpoint.... Let's see what Richard, Chris, and Starr say about that!

    Scottie ^_^
     
  11. Bowen Bloodgood

    Bowen Bloodgood Avatar

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    Perhaps someday? Would love to see that. Reminds me of some of the Ultimas with stacks of coins.. A coin is just a coin.. but add a couple and it's a small pile.. add a few more and it's a single stack.. add more and it's multiple stacks.. always loved that. :)
     
  12. Scottie

    Scottie Master Artisan SOTA Developer

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    Hah haaaaaa!!! Yes! The funny thing about you mentioning Scrooge McDuck is that our programmer Bobby said I should figure our a way of hiding some kind of tiny duck statue hiding in there somewhere, with just the butt sticking out as if he'd just dove in! ^_^
     
  13. Scottie

    Scottie Master Artisan SOTA Developer

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    On top of the largest treasure pile, I actually placed a golden plate with small stacks of coins... It's all static decorations, of course, but hopefully it captures the imagination! ^_^
     
  14. Scottie

    Scottie Master Artisan SOTA Developer

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    Heh! Sure! I'm glad you folks seem to like hem!

    Great question about the crafting recipe! I'm not sure how Brandon will be setting that up...

    Scottie ^_^
     
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  15. Scottie

    Scottie Master Artisan SOTA Developer

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    Sure! I can't wait to see the first time someone puts together an amazing Dragon's Lair in one of their dungeons!
     
  16. DavidDC

    DavidDC Programmer Moderator SOTA Developer

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    In dungeon and dragon online there was pile of gold near dragon like that which you could click and "harvest" to get some gold (same amount as a monster). Would be nice to have something equivalent with those! The pile would remain there just not harvestable anymore after first hit.
     
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  17. Scottie

    Scottie Master Artisan SOTA Developer

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    Great questions! I'm betting you won't like the answer, though... Now, mind you, my understanding comes mostly from an artist's perspective, but from what I know, we don't have a set of player tools that let you "assemble" things the way I've assembled these in the Unity Editor... The tools I use let me get away with things that can easily "break" the game if I didn't know what I was doing... And even with the technical knowledge I have, there are times when things I do actually DO create "in-game" errors... When that kind of stuff happens, it usually takes a few other technical people looking over my shoulder to help me figure out what broke and why, and then a bit of time to actually painstakingly fix those things, tweak them, and experiment with them in the Editor environment only until I get them exactly right...

    Certain things, like correctly-created collision shapes (and knowing how to make tem and adjust them until they actually function properly while allowing item placement) is one of the most demanding tasks when dealing with decorations like these... Then, deco items have to be set up with all the right "tags" so that there placement limitations work, they are the right "weight", have the all the other correct game settings, and other such things... Unfortunately we'll most likely never have the time to make a "player-safe" version of all the necessary elements to allow combined objects of the kind you are imagining... Heck, they barely have a "developer-safe" version of all that... SOOO many things can go wrong (and often do) anytime we try to create these kinds of things... I was there working so late the night I published these treasure piles, simply because I couldn't get them working right the first two times I though I "had it"... I had to remain there working for several extra hours just to test, experiment, re-test, try it in the Editor, watch it fail inexplicably, test-yet-again, watch it fail, get some advice from a fellow artist, figure out what was wrong, fix that, try it again, and then proliferate all those changes to all the rest of them before calling it actually "successful"...

    Imagine, just for these piles of treasure, each base gold pile had to have a special collision shape that I could only create using 3D Studio Max (then exported into an FBX file which Unity can import and use), each and every object that wasn't the gold pile had to be placed by hand in the Unity Editor, each one then had to be "sunk" down into each pile in a way that requires significant manipulation tools that simply aren't available outside the Editor (it's not possible to "collide" meshes like that in-game, since they already have collision shapes made for different purposes), each one then had to have each of their separate collision shapes either turned off entirely or manipulated with special tools (again only available in the Editor), and then the whole conglomeration had to be saved of as a set called a "prefab" so that it could be turned into an asset that can be made available as a deco... Each such prefab has to be carefully named, both for Unity's purposes and for ours, as well as being given a separate "in-game" name that players get to see... And then set with all the placement "tags" I mentioned earlier... Each such item also requires a separate icon that I have to create by hand and "attach" to t final asset file, and the particular prefab mesh file ALSO has to attached to the asset file...

    Once all that is done, all those objects are non-separable, unless we go back by hand and literally tear the file apart at the prefab level and save it off again... We simply don't have a system that would let the player do this kind of thing dynamically... To create such a system would be a monumental task, something that I'm betting Chris and Starr would never want to schedule, simply because of the enormous resources it would take to make possible...

    As far as simply placing down tiny objects like gems, even small gem fragments, and tiny coins.... Though it's certainly possible, the visual value of it would be fairly insignificant... You'll notice we did break down and let folks decorate with the "much larger that realistic" CotO coins, but by doing so we quickly realized that doing that for all the tiniest harvested items would be foolish, in the long run, merely because these would quickly become memory/data hogs in general, as well as take up slots out of a player's maximum number of deco objects for things that would be so small as to have unsatisfactory visual impact on a scene... As such, they (like many other tiny things, and especially crafting ingredients) became things that were decided, very early on, to only ever appear as inventory icons, and never as "real world" 3-D assets or decorations... The nodes that crafting ingredients come from, or the items they eventually produce,...yes.... But the harvested materials themselves, rarely if ever...

    Hopefully that helps explain things... Sorry if that's not the answer you were hoping for...

    Scottie ^_^
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2019
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  18. Scottie

    Scottie Master Artisan SOTA Developer

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    Like I had mentioned earlier to majoria70, what you folks are describing is something that I was truly hoping we could eventually do... What I really wanted was for them to become some kind of "diminishing pile" container that would let you take gold from them as you described, but actually become smaller as you took stuff... The idea would be that, if you took enough gold out of the large one (below some designated amount) then it would visually "revert" to the medium pile (maybe fade between or something), and if you kept taking it out, it would eventually become the small pile... And if brought to zero, the small pile would simply go away... At least, that was the idea... If that gets to happen, it will have to be something for the future... Chris would need to be willing to set the programmers a task to create such a system... As you say, it would be cool to find and loot these on adventures!

    Here's to hoping they'll be able to do that eventually! ^_^
     
    Last edited: Feb 24, 2019
  19. Bowen Bloodgood

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    In theory, this shouldn't be terribly complicated. There would need to be a simple check on 'closing' the container to see if anything new was added or taken away, first to check if a change needs to be made, then to make the change which would essentially be just swapping models. I think the troublesome part is dealing with placement. A smaller version of a gold pile would fit where a larger one would not.. so what happens if you place a small one and then add a bunch of stuff. The simple answer would be that all versions share the same collision/take up the same space regardless of the visible mesh.
     
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  20. Scottie

    Scottie Master Artisan SOTA Developer

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    Possibly. I honestly don't know exactly how they will be made available... I'm making as assumption about the store... I simply know they will be made available in some way... ^_^
     
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