Nodes vs University

I was curious as to what the community thought about the nodes system in place. Would you prefer nodes over university or vice versa? Example; Finding areas of stone or mountains, mining those areas in search of metal, versus finding labeled nodes and mining accordingly. Same with trees. Specific trees or all trees.

 

Question: Why are we using resource nodes and not Ultima Online style resource gathering?

• Ultima Online resource gathering relied on two things: 1) Tile based system where each tile was at most two different textures and 2) no visual representation of the resource gathered “going away”. While many people remember that method fondly it prevented the ability to do certain things. Our current thinking is that it will be a hybrid approach where most resources will be linked to a specific item in the scene like a tree so that we can show the actual act of gathering (i.e. chopping down the tree or pulling up a plant). In some cases the “node” will appear to be fully integrated into the scene (like veins of ore on a rock).

Most of us ( if not all) would rather the UO style of gathering. It made gathering more involved and not some Easter egg hunt. But it just seems the Dev's took the easy road.

 

I gather you meant to say "universality" ?

I agree, it would be nice to be able to chop down any tree in the forest that I please, rather than looking for those special orange ones.

Would probably entail a significant amount of development effort to do so though, in a non-tiled 3D environment.

Not sure whether it would be worth pulling resources off other projects to make that happen.

 

I would like to be able to mine anywhere there is rock or cut down any tree or so on. However at the same time I like how you can visually see the results of your gathering/mining/chopping down trees. It makes it feel more real. So when I think about the options we have I personally prefer the one they went with.

 

I dislike labeled or graphically distinct nodes.

If I am mining a mountain range for a day, I don't want some random adventurer harvesting a rare ore/gem while en route to a dungeon, just because it was there. They weren't focused on mining like I was, yet they still get the prize.

Create nodes that blend into the surroundings and have a larger harvesting radius. This would help simulate the tiled resource collection in UO. Gatherers would then get a feel for resource respawn rates and be able to indirectly "claim" areas while gathering.

Just because you can make a "gold node" shiny and sparkly doesn't mean you should.

 

I do think they could make the nodes a little less obvious so they blend in a bit more.

 

Hmm... I would expect the intent to make them easy to find.

That way a user isn't trying every tree in the game to locate the one that is a node. Such would be a little frustrating I suspect.

 

Well they should still look different from the other things. Just not as obvious where you can spot the harvestable tree from across the instance. I agree though it would be way to frustrating for instance if all the trees just looked the same. I also would not really mind if they just kept what they have now and didn't really make many changes to how nodes look. It would be nice but it is pretty low on my wants list.

 

aside from mountain sides; trees and grasses from what i can tell are items, how hard would it be to make every tree/bush harvest-able? Then make every mountain /rock node bigger and blend into the environment better so it doesn't standout like a sore thumb.

 

In unity, building the terrain in the playable space doesn't involve objects, what you are seeing is textures placed on a terrain object. So grasses, dirt, rock paths, trees don't live as an object in the real world. Since they aren't objects, there isn't an easy way to interact with them. This makes it hard for you to walk up to something and chop it. The same can happen with cliffs and mining, under the hood cliffs are a raised area with a texture on it. While trees aren't technically textures, they aren't objects either (if I recall correctly). So you to allow chopping or mining you have a problem, how do you decide if gathering is possible where the person is standing. You could map each point into the world to a database that would specify if gathering is possible and what kind of gathering can be done there. This is probably what they did in UO. Or you could create an intractable, 3d object, such as a tree or a mining node. I can envision that it easier to create tech where an object, node, is being interacted with than a underlying tile system.

 

~All gathering is node based. UO was node based on.

 

NRaas, look at the tree's trunk and it's quite obvious from then on which tree's are harvestable, the trunks are straight w/no branches down low, and you can't walk through them (like all the other trees), you can see them a mile away (once you know).

I know, everyone hates that, they prefer the UO Lottery system (the good old days, key word "Old") where everything is random and you need to farm every single tile 16 times before it depleted and you moved to the next tile. It wasn't always that way, the nodes were stationery at one point, so you could mark a rune book and get back to that spot, but they went "random" and that was the last straw for me. Sorry for the rant.

I went to WoW and had a blast, sure it was easy in the low levels, and the ore spawned in the same spots, but in the higher levels they did something very interesting. They had maybe 150 spots, but only 75 would spawn at any given time, so the spots were the same and moved around too.

I'm all in favor of different trees/ores, but even in nature, you can tell by looking at it, which is which. I should be able to tell a maple tree from a pine tree or a quarts vein from a copper vein. If you need a skill, so they really stand out, I will learn it.

Yay, to node system.

Just my thoughts, UO is dead, nail the lid on and bury it...

 

Oh, personally I know how to locate them. My reply needs to be taken in context with the post I quoted.

 

how it works today chopping wood.

http://servuo.com/archive/ultimalive-lumber-harvesting.138/

 

Are you sure this is an official UO shard? It said something about "shard owners" could set the graphics as they wished, and that tells me it's a un-official free shard someone is running.

The UO I played never had anything cool like that...

 

It is not the official Shard.
But I do not know which Shard Ultima Live has.
Unfortunately I have also never seen it live.
Praxiiz is Scripter.
ServUO has more of such things.
servuo is just an emulator of many.

 

Trees and bushes in Unity are not real objects, the terrain system has some restrictions in order to improve performance, it seems this is the reason behind nodes system .
and sadly this affected all gathering systems.

Of course they could place trees manually but this would be a lot of work, it wont happen..

 

I would like the resource nodes labeled if you have the Names feature turned on. By hitting the 'N' key, I believe. I haven't been able to find any harvestable nodes yet.

I imagine if I ventured forth into the multiplayer game I could find plenty of bare stumps along with all the smashed chests and dead animals. I don't want to see all the desolation caused by my fellow players. It is kind of depressing. LOL. I guess that's why I've been playing single player.

 

The fact is, there's a very different level of productivity between some guy with an axe and a commercial lumber operation. I realize some people want to play more or less in single player mode, and I don't want to take that away, but this seems like a good opportunity for guilds to be important in terms of larger scale resource gathering. Keeping the mill of mine running benefits the nearby town, provides a focus for PvP, etc. This is simply a natural place for multiplayer strategy.

 

you guys can always try Landmark by SOE... there you can dig holes in the ground as you mine for ores.... chop down all the trees you like... pull all the plants you see (except for a few)... hehehe