Hangout of the Avatar ~ Crafting Discussion

Discussion in 'Crafting & Gathering' started by FireLotus, Aug 15, 2013.

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  1. FireLotus

    FireLotus Royal Bard & Master Dabbler Dev Emeritus

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    In today's Hangout of the Avatar. Richard Garriott and Scott Jones delved a bit further into the crafting system in Shroud of the Avatar. If you missed the broadcast, you can catch up here:



    We had some awesome questions and answered a few of them, but we know there were a lot more where those came from! So here is your chance to give us some feedback on what you saw and ask any questions we didn't get to. :)
     
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  2. Myth2

    Myth2 Avatar

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    I'm not sure what I'd do without FireLotus to keep me in the loop!
     
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  3. LoneStranger

    LoneStranger Avatar

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    Here are my questions:
    • Will we be able to restring, aka rename crafted items? For example, if I make a chicken pot pie, can I name it "LoneStranger's Amazing Chicken Pie Surprise?" Or will naming items be a part of the maker's mark as a custom name in addition to the actual object type?
    • What will the value be of completed cooking items? What effect will they have on the characters when eaten? Essentially, what makes it worth spending time and money on supplies and experimenting on recipes, other than role play?
    • Do you thing magic or a discipline/subset of magic will use a crafting system at any point? In early games you had to mix your reagents before casting them, however there was story added to the reagent descriptions in the lore books that said things about crushing black pearl, washing and grinding garlic into paste, boiling (and reboiling) ginseng into a syrup, etc. It was just backstory then, could it be reality now?
     
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  4. Myth2

    Myth2 Avatar

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    This question hasn't been answered in depth yet. A few useful threads on the matter:
    https://shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/stats-hunger-sleep-weather.2880/
    by redfish - This thread discusses the potential for statloss as a hunger/thirst penalty. An excellent idea in my opinion.
    https://shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/wounds-injuries-impediments.2935/
    by redfish - This thread discusses potential impediments for wounds and injuries. I presume cooking will have some overlap with alchemy and (maybe) healing.
    https://shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/diseases-poisons-and-infections.2934/
    by Bowen Bloodgood - This thread discusses audio, visual, and mechanical penalties for diseases and poisons. Even if its only through a bowl of chicken noodle (or wonton?) soup aiding a minor cold, cooking should have some overlap here.

    Personally, I would love to have 'hardcore' (to quote fallout NV's system) effects like the ones mentioned in these three threads. My only concern is that they might deter some casual or otherwise uninterested players. A slider that makes necessary eating and drinking optional would appear to cater to everybody's needs, but from a balance perspective, most people would probably opt out for convenience, leaving cooking no more meaningful than it was in UO.


    A few extra threads on the topic of cooking:

    https://shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/crafting-food-dev-replied.1682/#post-20801
    by Bob_Star
    https://shroudoftheavatar.com/forum...fting-cooking-recipe-realism.1710/#post-21274
    by Davenrock
    https://shroudoftheavatar.com/forum/index.php?threads/cooking.2901/#post-42551
    by myself
     
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  5. Mishri

    Mishri Avatar

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    The idea of hundreds of different possible ingredients sounds a bit daunting in a game where we need to mix ingredients to experiment to find something that works. I hope that means there will be plenty of "close enough" recipes and not, you need exactly this many of these things. Maybe the proper amount of each thing would yield the best possible result but something somewhat close also yields a passable result.
     
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  6. LoneStranger

    LoneStranger Avatar

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    While I appreciate the links, and I will take a look at them, they don't really replace an official answer. :)

    It gives me a headache thinking about it. I think it will be interesting and not as daunting as it might seem so far, but I wonder about other game systems. Will they all get this kind of detailed treatment? I'd hate to have this be awesomely defined and then have something else end up with a shallow implementation. Mainly my concern is the contrast.
     
  7. Scottie

    Scottie Master Artisan SOTA Developer

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    Just for fun, here's the potentially final image of the Butcher's Crafting Table, in all its gutty, bloody, stain-filled glory....

    Enjoy!

    Scottie ^_^

    [​IMG]
     
  8. LoneStranger

    LoneStranger Avatar

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    Awesome, Scottie! I love the blood drainer. Is the blood and other fun details going to be baked into the model? I guess what I'm asking is whether or not we can keep our work area clean, at least while we're not crafting.
     
  9. Bowen Bloodgood

    Bowen Bloodgood Avatar

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    They could do a dirty and clean texture.. if it's been used in the past x amount of time it's dirty if it hasn't been used in awhile it's clean. I suspect though that it will always have that recently used look.
     
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  10. Montesquieu Paine

    Montesquieu Paine Avatar

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    If you've got alchemy and cooking, oh, wait, and lumber and metal shaping -- you're going to need cleaning supplies, brooms, mops, and somebody to do all that @#%^# clean-up work!

    Wait. It's a game. We can have the equivalent of situational Brownies who do the work overnight. Got milk?

    Great image, Scottie!
     
  11. LoneStranger

    LoneStranger Avatar

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    All you have to do is wait for The Wolf, who should be coming directly.
     
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  12. Umbrae

    Umbrae Avatar

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    Really excited about the crafting. Just listening to LB list off ingredients caused me to swoon a little. :)
     
  13. Grogan

    Grogan Avatar

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    Can players gather resources and create items without significant help from other players? If yes, how do you plan to encourage meaningful trade amongst players? Doesn’t a player based crafting system require meaningful limitations on players so they have incentive to socialize for better standing in the player economy?
    For example: Wouldn’t a major goal of the crafting system be to get a player that can make swords need to find other players that can forge Iron. And have players that can work with Iron find other players that have access to raw Iron. Instead of just having a single player run around the world doing it all herself.
     
  14. vjek

    vjek Avatar

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    The single player modes require either the player be able to do it all themselves, or NPCs to fill in the blanks (and thus, NPCs that can do it all for them).
    ---
    Transcription of this Hangout of the Avatar. My apologies if I missed some words, or got some wrong, people mumble and stumble when they're extemporaneous! :D

    GD: Greetings community, thank you for being patient with us as we work through a few technical difficulties. But we are glad to finally be here for Hangout of the Avatar. Today we're going to talk about Crafting and to start us off, Lord British.

    RG: Hey everybody! Again, also sorry for the delays and thanks - I'll blame Scott, whichever side of me he's on here on your screens. But there were little technical delays down there in Austin Texas. But again as always I want to start with a thank you, thank you, thank you to you our wondrous community who has been following us along and supporting us and giving us great feedback. This is obviously a work in progress, as the usual caveat, especially this one. The crafting stuff is just now coming online. If those of you who watched the RTX demo where we showed a little bit of a first taste, as we got some of the first two crafting tables online and it's Scott Jones who did a lot of that work on the crafting tables, he'll be doing a lot of the work along with Jay, who as you can sort of see a little bit behind him. But let me introduce Scott Jones, just say Hi and I'll kind of take us a little bit into today's topic. Scott? ... and Gina you need to unmute him or he needs to know how to unmute himself ...

    GD: I think I did unmute him

    SJ: ... am I unmuted now? Can you hear me?

    RG: You are! Go ahead Scott, now we can hear you.

    GD: Yes you are.

    SJ: Yaaay. That's bizarre, I wonder how I got auto muted? My name is Scott Jones, I'm one of the artists here at Portalarium. You may have seen me before when we were talking a while back about user interface. So here we are into the next step of that which is the real world objects representing some of the user interface for the purposes of crafting.

    RG: Excellent, thanks Scott. For those of you who watched the RTX demo that we put together, the first two tables that were dropped into the game were the sawmill as well as the carpentry table. And with those you might have seen .. and Scott may be able to pull those two up if you happen to have them handy .. what you saw with those two tables is our general theorem of crafting. Which is that you're first going to go out into the field, you're going to harvest raw materials that could be.. in the case of the arc we tried to show in RTX, that would be: You'd chop down some trees, and find some .. get from those trees, logs. In fact those logs that you bring back, right now there's only one tree you can chop down, or one type of tree. But eventually you'll be able to chop down a variety of types of wood to use as a basis, that you could then bring to your saw table which I see that Scott now has up on his screen..

    SJ: That's right

    RG: ..on that sawmill. You would be able to chop logs into boards and dowels and other small parts that you might need for making furniture. And then you could go over to his.. the.. And by the way, that step for us is Processing the raw materials. So for most crafting loops, or many of the crafting loops, you start with things you can harvest out in the wild; could be meat or leather from animals, it could be herbs or berries for cooking or reagents. Could be timber like for the logs that we're creating, then once you've processed the raw material into the usable parts of a finished product, you would then move over to a second phase of crafting, which is the assembly of the final product. And that's what Scott has now on the little thumbnail you can probably see from his window, which is the ability to view the carpentry table. A classic carpentry table which you could then use to put things together. Scott, if you want to tell anybody about the details of those two tables, why don't you do that again, but I'll let you take control of both audio and visual so your screen becomes maximized so you can take people through the saw table (!) and the carpenters table.

    SJ: Certainly. No problem. And hopefully you can all see these now. The first thing that I'm showing you is the saw table that Richard was talking about, and you can see a lot of different little elements here. Originally we had these tables cluttered up with tools and things like that, but we realized of course that eventually these tools would be something that would be part of the recipe which would allow you to create stuff with these tables. So the tools would be something you'd be pulling from own backpack, placing on top of the tables. We're still working on how we want the user interface to look for this, but you can see elements of it actually right here, because this little area right here, this little placard, which is empty, and this little smaller placard up here, will eventually be a place where the craft button and the close button would be, so that a little X would appear in the right hand corner and let you close the table. But the table itself would appear in the 3D world, like this; you can see the little rollers on the side that allow you to, you know.. the crude medieval means by which to roll the logs across the table. The little shield right here which actually you can set to allow for the width of board, things of that kind. Just little details. And of course because we didn't really want to give away the idea that there's actually a mechanism, because we're dealing with medieval stuff here, at the same point in time, it did need to sort of feel automated enough to where it can all happen on one table, which is why you have this little closed in unit down here that might ostensibly contain that kind of mechanical gearworks. Now the next table, which is this one right here, is the table that Richard was talking about that you would then go to next, it's the woodcrafting table or woodworking table. And this bench, you'll notice, looks a little bit different than the other one. The reason why is because of the fact that, since time immemorial when woodcrafters have been creating tables for their craft, they had certain elements to them that were often in common. Like these little .. what was the right word for this, Richard?

    RG: A vise, there's a vise ...

    SJ: yeah, little vises.. Go ahead

    RG: Vises set at ninety degrees to each other, and the little peg holes also as well as that recessed tray in the back, so for woodworkers, this is a well recognized piece of equipment because it allows you to do things like clamp chair legs and chair backs when the pieces are at ninety degrees to each other. So it's a very specific table for doing Joinery with woodcrafting. So for those people out there that do woodworking, you'll probably be familiar with this type of table.

    SJ: and so of course, what you're seeing here right now is the surface that you would be working on, and you'd have the tools, placed on it. Ostensibly you'd have a pitchpot of glue, and you'd have a hammer and an actual bag of nails, as opposed to just a few little nails scattered around. The pegs of course you see, some are sticking in the holes some are just laying on their side above and below and there's a drawer there that's assumed there might be tools inside. But in general, the very basic table, as is, is what you'd work with and then you'd place all your elements on top including the rough wood you've just recently cut the lumber in the saw area and hammers and saws, and other things like that you might be doing small work with.

    RG: and if I may jump in here, Scott, one of the nice things about this too, is that these tables allow us a great deal of flexibility. Recipes can now be very diverse, you can cut down oak or ash or whatever types of wood we decide to put in as the entrance into the recipe all the way through to all different kinds of furniture we eventually let you build, will make a very large pantheon, so to speak of furniture or items that could be crafted there with that table. And that same theory holds on all the other kinds of crafting that we do, for example, just today I was filling out the Cooking.. resources through final product, .. getting started on it, by the way, it'll be months before the full list is done. But when you think about Cooking, I don't think cooking is one of the ones you've done, I think you're working the Butchery table I believe which is part of the process.

    SJ: Yes, the predecessor to Cooking

    RG: Good, predecessor to cooking, but if you think about Cooking, you're going to have things that go, first of all, you'll need Tools, not for the Butchery side that you're looking at now, but on the Cooking side, you might need pots or skillets or a mezzaluna, or I learned a new word, Ulu, today. Cleavers, flay knives, paring knives, peelers, cooking tongs, soup ladles, graters, mashers, spatulas, strainers, steamers, rolling pins and zesters, might all be part of the process you would need to do, to use the Cooking station. But then the ingredients, one of the ingredients, is meats! So what you see here is the table that Scott is working on for the preparation of meats, so that after you catch a fish or hunt some game, you'll bring it down here, back here to this game table to do the field prep. And you'll start with the carcass of some animal that you brought back from the field, but in here is where you'll end up with.. whether it's beef fillets, rabbit fillets, snake meat picked off the bone, trout or salmon, or whatever else it might be, this is the station where you'll do that Resource Processing. So again you would gather the Resources in the field, fish or game, you would Process it into the steaks or fillets that you might need to cook it at this table, separately by the way. There's a whole other path for collecting your culinary herbs, I was just putting an herbs list together today of things like mint, thyme, rosemary, dill, coriander, lavender, basil, and parsley; and I can probably get anything else in there you'd like. Vegetables of course, fruits of course, grains that you'll be able to harvest, and then all those things will then be taken over as the raw ingredients into the Cooking station. So we should be able to have a marvelously diverse set of creations, just with this standard pattern of give you as many possible things to hunt or gather in the field, Process the raw materials whenever appropriate at one of these types of stations, then move it over to your finishing station, be it Cooking for food, or a similar arc for.. and Scott, I know you're reticent to show some of our crazy little sketches.. but even if you held them up in front of your camera, of things like.. another one we've been .. is next in his queue are things like ... if you kill a or if you harvest a sheep you would get the wool, the wool you can then spin into yarn on a spinning wheel, that yarn you can take to a loom and weave it, and then you would take that cloth to a sewing station. What do we call that station? The sewing table, I guess it was... I'm now looking through my ...

    SJ: Yeah, that's the Tailoring.. I think that's the Tailoring table.

    RG: Tailor table .. to do that finish work. In any case, I think we have some very nice technology, very nice arcs, a standard methodology by which these things can flow that will give us very diverse recipes to finished goods. There we go, yes, exactly! Oh, that's the Butchers table

    SJ: That's the Butchery table which oddly enough is showing backwards, that's really weird.

    RG: Oh it shows backwards to you but forwards to us, it shows you a mirror of yourself, that's a google hangout feature.

    SJ: Ooh, I see, I see.

    RG: We see it the right way around, but you see a mirror of yourself.

    SJ: Yeah, so that's the cheesy really quick thumbnail sketch that helped decide how the Butchery table would be made.

    RG: Excellent

    SJ: Below that you can see ..

    RG: Oh ya! So there's the beginning of the spinning wheel, and in fact, the thing I like about that.. Gina can you force it to show his camera predominantly, if you haven't already?

    GD: Yep, I have it locked on his image right now.

    RG: Perfect. The thing that I like about Scott's... is that we took a classic spinning wheel, but we tried to make sure we created a surface in front of it, in order to be able to put down all the ingredients you need. Three spools of yellow thread, and two bolts of yellow cloth, if you were going to make some yellow armor, for example. Things of that nature. Do you have a sketch of your dyeing vats?

    SJ: Let me see..

    RG: I think you had it with your Tanning.. Oh Tanning vat, your Tanning and Dyeing and Leathermaking, I think it was one..

    GD: As someone who does work with yarns and fabrics, that's really exciting to see the different types of tables that go into ... a lot of times crafting stations are simplified down to this is a generic tailor station, or this is a generic cook station, but these are very specialized.

    RG: Yep, exactly. Thank you Scott, I think there'll be a total of a dozen or two by the time we're all wrapped up. But Gina, why don't we switch over to some of the questions if people have some queued up.

    GD: Sure. First question comes from Fireangel, she posted in the #LBSota_Hangout, and remember you can always submit your questions early via the hangout, and that way I have them archived. She would like to know "What is being done to keep crafting from being so simplistic that it's boring but also not so complicated that it's annoying, we don't want it to be rocket science, but we don't want to be bored to tears, either"

    RG: Absolutely, and that's one of the things that, as proud as a lot of us are on this team who were also part of the Ultima Online experience, in developing it .. we both feel passionate about the complexity of the crafting loops that we put in to those environments, yet we also forced people into a lot of repetitive, boring, mind-numbing activities in order to level up. One of the things we're trying to accomplish in this case is to grab the benefit of that diversity but not force people into this mind-numbing repetition. So that's one of the things we're trying to do with making sure that all of our crafting tables have a standard type of functionality. You just lay out the tools and ingredients on the table and say go and if that is a valid recipe that you have the valid skills to perform and all the valid equipment is on the table it will consume the ingredients, it will leave the tools behind, of course, and it will replace the ingredients with the finished products. And we haven't decided if there's a delay or lag time or what kind of animation if any could happen on the table, but we'll make it as nice as we can, obviously. But then you'll have the resulting object. So fundamentally, that's pretty easy to get your head around, and now what we're trying to do is make sure that even if we're talking about foodstuffs there's enough diversity both in ingredients and recipes to make it just fun and interesting to explore that system on it's own. And when you're talking about creating weapons and armor are things that are useful to players, we're going to try and make sure that the base set of things that the game spawns to be usable as a tool, like a sword or a resource, like a gem to put into a sword.. Those are all at a fairly common level of value, and it is the crafters in the world who will then take those things and create a large diversity of very unique and more interesting, more powerful, more diverse tools and gear and weapons for players to use. So we're working very hard to drive all of the adventurers into having a close relationship with whoever their armorer is, for example. And we're trying to make it actually cool and interesting and important to go back into town and debate whether I really do want to get that big juicy steak or if I'm off to get a chicken pot pie or something or an apple turnover somewhere based on somebodies recipe they've either discovered or created or otherwise unearthed out of the game.

    GD: Another place you can submit questions is actually on our main site. We always post the hangout a day ahead of time, sometimes a few days ahead if I know, and we'll take questions there. This question, or actually two questions come from twofold silence. Twofold silence would like to know: "What types of natural crafting materials will there be? And will we be able to take finished items apart after crafting them, and return them to raw materials?"

    RG: Yeah, great question, and by the way, let me also just point out, if Scott's screen if you want to pull that one up too, is the Alchemy table, both a pictographic source. Oh, it was up there on your screen, Scott..

    SJ: I'll make it happen, hold on.

    RG: It was kind of cool, if Gina wants to put that back up, it was showing both a real photographic source of an alchemy table from an actual historical example over to the dissected sketch that we're working on now. And I think Jay that's behind Scott right now is building, assembling this exact one, if memory serves.

    SJ: Yes, in fact, I can show you that.

    RG: But to .. oh yeah, great, there it is in progress. Fantastic, Scott, I'm glad you've got that. But from a "where will the resources come from?" Yes, we're trying to make sure that everything in the world is potentially a resource. It's a lot of fun to .. even today as I was putting together just the resources for cooking.. on the one hand I was lamenting how big a list I'm going to make for the artist staff to draw, so I was actually making sure I didn't blow the budget from an art standpoint, yet on the other hand I was also considering how fun is it going to be to literally go forage for mint and rice and all these other items that you might need to put a little mojito together or something to share with your friends. Not that there's rice in a mojito, I don't know where that came from..

    SJ: <laughs>

    RG: ..I'm getting my saki drinks mixed up with my vodka drinks or my rum drinks. But yes, the natural world will be rich in resources both from just foraging in the woods up through parts and pieces you get out of hunting or defeating beasts in the field will also all be raw materials you can take into crafting. What was the second part of that question, Gina?

    GD: "If items will be able to be taken apart and turned back into raw materials?"

    RG: Yes, our intention is .. the short answer to that question is yes but we haven't yet decided on how "lossy" it will be, as to how it will break down. But in general, yes you should be able to recycle equipment in some way, because what we don't want to do is have you end up with dead inventory, you've either acquired or created that now you basically have to go just dump. And so we'd rather you get value out of that by disassemblage. But we haven't done that disassembly part of it yet, but the intention is yes.

    GD: Tying with the diversity of ingredients and such, Phredicon posted a question in the third place you can participate which is live in our chat room. "Roughly how many craftable items do you envision at launch, for each profession?"

    RG: Well let's see, at launch, it'll still be a fairly high number per and when I say per profession, let me say per finished goods table. So in other words, for the sewing table there would be at least dozens and potentially a couple hundred I would imagine and for foodstuffs, at least again, dozens, and if we're lucky, get into the hundreds. For Alchemy, again, at least dozens. So I think dozens is probably true across the board as a minimum, but we'll be trending into the hundreds fairly quickly I would imagine. As it turns out, once we've set these standards and get the tables built, adding recipes is actually one of the easiest things we have to do because of how data driven it is. So I'm anticipating that the recipes will come online fairly quickly, and in fact, once the systems are up and working, we don't have a path right now for players to put recipes directly in themselves into the game, and in fact that might kind of blow the balance, if we did allow that. But we definitely would be open to suggestions. One of the people I'm really looking forward to talking with as soon as we have some of this cooking stuff in, for example, the Hearth of Britannia folks. Just because I know he's been assembling this recipe of all of our games of the past, it'd be great to make sure we include not only all of those but things that any of you could imagine could be built out of the standard ingredients that either have existed.. exist in the real world, have existed in our previous fantasy worlds, or that you see us creating with this new game, even the list I put together starting today about cooking again, includes ingredients I've never had in any of our previous games. So I think it's going to be much richer than previous. And Scott, you want to tell us anything about what you're showing there? Why don't you take us through the Butchery table, what are it's parts and pieces?

    SJ: Oh, certainly. Well here, let me go ahead ... I was just building a fish head as you all were talking. So I'm taking one of the fish heads that was made by Jay, and Jay luckily had already started creating some really wonderful pieces for our marketplace and that includes meat and fish and things of that kind. What hadn't been done yet, of course, was the slaughtered pig, which was something that we had both talked about when we were first going through the things we wanted for the Butcher table. Of course, this is the level of detail that I really enjoy, so at some point in time, even though we can't lay tools on the table, I do want to go back and add a significant level of detail to the other tables too. Things like wood chips, and wood shavings from the saw blade, and things like that, likewise on the cooking table, we're going to have powdered flour, herbs laying out here and there that aren't actual bunches of herbs. But what we see here is, we see a wonderful slaughtered pig and that's taken from a real good photo source that you found, Richard, that shows it in just that position.

    RG: mmm pig

    SJ: You can see the slop bucket ... yeah, tasty and delicious, in fact if you look really closely, you can see part of the jaw teeth from some other animal that's under that mass of slop.

    GD: I'm a little scared about that smile, Richard

    RG: <laughter> Oh yeah, I'm on camera!

    SJ: We have the thing that you requested specifically, and it was the part of the table is a stone surface, a marble surface that's been carved and set at an angle so that when things are cut apart on that, blood runs down and into that little hole and down into the bucket which you see below. So you have a blood bucket full of delicious blood, which, oddly enough, is used to make blood pudding. So that's the reason why they often kept it. Then you see the fish that are hanging up of different varieties as well as some of the stuff that you get when you're done at the table. The idea being that you have some of these finished cut pieces of steak that you would end up seeing these things in the market. So the idea being that of course, well, you don't need the market necessarily, you can do it yourself if you have those crafting skills. The few other things I'll be adding to this soon is some few more details, I'm going to add some stains to the surface and maybe a couple of fish heads, one in the bucket and one on the table, and maybe a little bit of that that slough over on the table, just to indicate that it's been used and is in use. Maybe something to tie the pigs feet up to the tripod there, and that's pretty much it. It, for the most part, is done. From here I'll be moving on to the cooking table. The cooking table you actually saw in some of those little pieces I was holding up, it had the big round oven on the back, that's the next step in this process.

    RG: Hey, even though I know it's Jay's work, since you have it in that file, can you scroll over to the Alchemy table and describe it's physical function?

    SJ: Yes, the Alchemy table is pretty cool, and you're right, Jay's done a fantastic job on that so far. What we're looking at here is a series of... Well first of all, probably some kind of marble or stone table, and on top of the table it's been cut .. a few areas where bowls that are meant for heating are placed, these little metal bowls will eventually have the kind of stuff that you saw in the image earlier. The wonderful glass

    RG: (overtalk)

    SJ: Yeah, let me see if I can pull that up real quick.

    RG: Yeah, I've got it too, if need be.

    SJ: Let's see.. yeah, here we go. See, so if you look at this, what you'll see is an area that shows where the bellows allowing for air flow down in, inside that little hash door, where you'd be putting the wood. And those little recesses are for beakers and decanters and things of that kind where we'll have something like that setup already to kind of show you what's there, but there'll be enough space to allow for all your tools and of course the little stovepipe up off the top. So, it will appear as a functional table and the cool thing about it is that it really is based very closely on a real, sort of a chemist.

    RG: Yeah and if you take a good look at this one, in these pictures, now flip back again to your other screen, there Scott, if you would, you can see how a model really is not arbitrary. It's not make believe so to speak, it really is what an Alchemist has used in the past to keep things.. little petri dishes heated up and little concoctions burbling away, as they try to transmute lead into gold or something of that nature.

    SJ: That's right, and of course along with this would come a host of tools and rare items and minerals that you would mine and other things that you would bring to bear at a table like this. So it's going to be actually pretty cool, to see those recipes come to life on these tables. Who knows, maybe eventually we'll get some animating elements in these suckers? But for now, they're stand and in place, but they'll have a lot of elements that are at least visually exciting, as you watch your character go through the animations of crafting.

    RG: Excellent! Ok, Gina, well, we got started .. I see some people talking about the time .. we got started about quarter after, was that correct? Or was it a little after?

    GD: Yep! We got started about quarter after.

    RG: Ok, we've probably got time for a couple more questions, so Gina do you have any more queued up for us?

    GD: I do. The next question comes from coolphoenix. "Will recipes be dropped or can we buy them from a vendor, or can they be automatically learned, or trial and error learned?"

    RG: The short answer is, all of the above is the broad intention. There'll be both recipes that you can learn and pass down from one person to another, most recipes you should be able to copy, so to speak, to somebody else's cookbook. You will have the metaphoric cookbook jut so you can remember what things to put out on the table, but at the moment, our intention is that you don't actually have to have the cookbook. As long as you remember or know, or somebody has literally told you through the Internet that the way you make a chicken pot pie is you dice some potatoes, you dice some chicken, you add in a handful of herbs and other vegetables and put some dough in a pan and you've got the pan and you've got the .. brush some butter around the top and you put all the right tools and ingredients out on the table and your skill level is correct and you say put it all together. Then it should work. That means sort of by definition you can discover recipes but the fact that recipes are discoverable is also why we're trying to make sure that the amount of potential ingredients is Big. Because that way the odds of stumbling into a valid recipe by just random association we're hoping is low enough to where you should feel some sense of obligation to either go learn it from someone else or if you're actually a Cook, we're going to try and fulfill that dream. In the sense of, if you're going like "Oh, ok, let's see if they made a chicken pot pie. If I was going to make a chicken pot pie, here's the ingredients I'd put together". We're not just going to have just one recipe for chicken pot pie, we'll likely think of dozens that we might include ourselves, and maybe take some submissions and people will go "Look, I have a great recipe for chicken pot pie and mine uses twice the pepper that yours did", so you really gotta accept one that uses twice the pepper, then we can add that too. I think it'll make the whole recipe orientation, or the alchemy orientation of creation, I think it'll make it fun both contribute to, for all of us, including yourselves and to discover as well as a player.

    GD: That kind of leads us to the next question, Montesque_Paine would like to know: "Will there be multiple ways people can collaborate or cooperate to make recipes or to make items using different crafting professions or different ingredients?"

    RG: So we've tried to make sure that each of the crafting.. threads, at a minimum, had a first step of gather resources, a second step of refine those resources. So if it was wheat you might grind it into flour, if it was wool, you might spin it into yarn. It may or may not have an intermediate step after that like if it's yarn and you weave it into cloth, before it goes to it's final process which is taking that cloth and sewing it into a garment, which might also use a resource from a whole other path which would be hunt another beast, tan it's leather, and take that leather to the same final table to be able to take it .. to create a garment that is out of both leather and cloth. So, there's no question that it will take multiple specialties, so you might need a trapper to catch you your pelts to get the leather, in fact you might even just go to the Tanner, to get the leather. Separately, you might know someone else who has sheep in their back yard, and you can get some wool from them, and make a .. since they already have wool, they might have a spinning wheel in their back yard, and they might sell you the yarn, or they might even sell you the cloth and you might just be the person who does the final step. The game should .. the whole point of this is to have a great deal of interconnectivity between those different kinds of specialties. Similarly, on the armor side, we have a whole part of the world that we haven't talked to you guys really much about, but there's a whole northeastern section of the world, a particular area in the northeast which is going to be particularly good hunting grounds for valuable gems and gemstones. So if you bring back gems or gemstones from that northeastern section I have in my mind that would be good, in theory, both for the people making weapons and armor, to make them jewelry, jewel encrusted, but also could be used in people making clothing, who want to make jewel encrusted crowns or something that might require sewing them into your shirts, versus hand forging them into your swords.

    GD: We've had a couple of people ask in the chat channel "How will failures be handled and will there be failures?" I know from moving here (Note: Gina lives in Alaska) I had to relearn how to make bread, and trust me, there were lots of failures, before I got that right at this temperature and altitude. So will crafting have failures, and if so how will that be handled?

    RG: One of the mantras that we chat a lot about here, is that outright "missing" and outright "failure" is not commonly fun. Yet you also want to make sure that there is a challenge to doing it right. So one of the things that we're currently shying away from is, if you took a basic dagger and made it into a better dagger, took a better dagger and made it into a great dagger, then to a fantastic dagger, and now it's an ultimate dagger, what we don't want to do is have you then lose the ultimate dagger down to nothing. Because we think to take something you've invested that much time and actual energy and actual resources in, and destroy it because you failed on that take ten regular swords and make one great sword and now it's all wasted and gone. We think that's too big of a price to pay. But we don't think that every time you do something it has to work perfectly in the sense of .. when I go to combine two daggers or the resources of the equivalent of two daggers to make one better dagger, if that were to not work, and therefore you still .. you only lose some fraction of those ingredients or you have to repeat the process or whatever it might be, we don't think there's a problem with not being successful and having to repeat or in the case of combat, having a glancing blow, especially if that glancing blow which did no damage, still might have interrupted their thought process or their defenses in some way. We're trying to make sure that failure is fun..

    SJ: <laughter>

    RG: ..in the same potential way that full success is fun. You're having fun tying up this pig, here, aren't you?

    SJ: Yes. It's gotta look right, man, it's gotta look right!

    RG: Exactly. Ok, why don't we take, we're at 4:47 now, so we're probably at just about thirty minutes, but let's take one more question if we can, Gina.

    GD: Ok, last question comes from King Krispy and he wants to know: "Are you planning on making crafting and vendoring economically self sufficient to make it a standalone style of play for some people?"

    RG: Absolutely! In fact, very good point, thank you for asking that King Krispy. Yes, we hope very sincerely .. we'll balance it until that statement is true. I think it's one of the things that I was so happy about with Ultima Online and one of the things that I know Starr Long's efforts here on this team will help ensure is to make sure there are lifestyles beyond adventuring which are complete and interconnected. They're interconnected with Adventurers, they're interconnected with the other activities of a village, that will make Shroud of the Avatar a living and breathing world, a fully realized world with all of your help. In any case, thank you so much, thank you Gina, thank you Scott, and thank you our wonderful community. As we get these recipes up online, and we get more of it out to you, once we give you the basics, of what ingredients are around, I look forward to hearing more feedback from you not only about the base system but how we could enhance it to better serve your desires and your needs, so thank you and goodbye from me, I'll pass it over to Scott and Gina you can get the last word.

    SJ: Oh no, I'm gone.

    RG: You're still there Scott, you just have to unshare your screen.

    SJ: Ok, let me see if I can do that, though. Hold on.

    GD: I dunno, the pigs foot's kinda fun.

    RG: Oh, no, Scott is gone. I guess you can give the final word, Gina.

    GD: I'm going to go ahead and start a thread on the forums and hopefully we can either address some of your questions that we didn't have a chance to get to, or I could put those questions together for maybe another Crafting Hangout because we certainly had a lot of questions this time. Really good ones, too. So I don't want to miss any of those answers for you. Look for that, later on today. And thanks again for joining us, we'll see you next week.

    RG: Bye bye.
     
  15. ArcanumVeritas

    ArcanumVeritas Avatar

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    I have two questions:
    1- The depth and breath of skills seems wonderful, and having been a master craftsman in a number of disciplines in other games (sometimes using multiple characters to do so) - given SotA looks to only have the one Avatar, will there be a skill limit (level limit for a given skill level) or max number of skills (again absolute or for a given level)
    2- Given what was stated in the video, will there be at least some profit in each phase, could you make (minimal) money buying raw materials from market and crafting? or only via players/field?
     
  16. Kambrius

    Kambrius Avatar

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    Questions for crafting and resources:

    Will crafting and resource gathering follow the standard MMO pattern of ‘progressive obsolescence’, i.e. beginners starting with inferior type of raw materials/ reagents and creating vendor junk until meeting the next quality level OR would resources be a source for conferring item properties to crafted materials which any level of gatherer or crafter can have access, eg., a bowyer using a particular type of heavy wood can craft a bow that adds encumbrance and damage but if the bowyer uses a particular type of lighter wood, he/she can craft a bow that weighs less and has greater range? Would this also apply to cross-professional materials used to enhance/ modify an item depending upon the source of animal, mineral, or plant?

    How does leveling a craft skill work in SotA? Is it based upon the number of items attempted (considering failures) over time or based upon the ratio of success to failure?

    Does master status confer greater item durability or the number of modifications which can be applied to the item or both?
     
  17. TemplarAssassin

    TemplarAssassin Avatar

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    [​IMG]
     
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  18. Straynger

    Straynger Avatar

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    I'm just watching the video now (or trying to anyway). Something's been expressed multiple times about having to put your tools on the table. What about having the tables be able to store/be outfitted with tools by the player, so that a given crafting table is more or less "ready to go", then only requiring that the player present the materials?

    Perhaps make different "levels" of crafting tables, that allow for more tools to be added or stored on/in the table?
     
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  19. Mugly Wumple

    Mugly Wumple Avatar

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    I hope they'll have a recipe for Mugly.
    [​IMG]

    An unusual and sweet 19th century rice pudding dessert.
    Ingredients
    135gm or 4 1/2oz of sticky rice
    1 1/4 pints or 600ml water
    4 tablespoons of sugar (15ml tablespoons)
    1 cinnamon stick
    roasted unsalted peanuts
    Makes 2 – 3 serves

    http://www.sarahsvintagekitchen.com/mugly/
     
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  20. Scottie

    Scottie Master Artisan SOTA Developer

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    Heh,...that's a great question! I suppose it is possible to do "cleanliness states" of crafting tables, just as you can do "destroyed" states of other objects... This may have to be something added as "bells and whistles" later, assuming all the basic functionality comes online with relative ease...
     
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