Indomitus

I've played through the "Veteran" difficulty level a couple times, and thought it could be interesting to put out a few challenges to the community. (I haven't tried any of these myself yet, but I definitely will do some.) The ultimate objective for all of these is to eliminate ALL mutated creatures from every yland. That includes the alphas that spawn at night. At that point, you win the challenge. Base rules for all of them: No help from the Editor (including to fix a glitch) and no exploits. Here are a few ideas I've had: 1. NO BED. In the hardest mode, no beds allowed. Sleeping pads only. You'll respawn on the starting island, and deal with it. 2. PERMA-DEATH. If you die, it's over. That one's obvious. 3. MELEE ONLY. No bows, crossbows, or guns. Melee weapons only. 4. RANGED ONLY. Nothing but bows, crossbows, or guns. 5. NO YLANDIUM USE. That means no propeller pack. Face your enemies. 6. NIGHT OWL. Sleep through the day and only explore at night. 7. SPEED RUN. How fast can you get all of them? Thoughts?

Certain foods will tame them faster, too. I usually use corn. It only takes 4 or 5 of them.

I think that would set them to half of their hearts, and the HP would regenerate over time, back up to 100. I don't have access to my game right now, but isn't there a SET MAX tile for hit points?

I know I've brought this up before, but I think it bears repeating. We need a mode in the Editor where we can mimic anything a player can do, and have results that are persistent in the Editor. I mean things like digging, planting, building,or even running scripts to place and manipulate entities. I was reminded of it yesterday, as I was creatively using dynamite to dig tunnels and caverns and remarked to myself that I'd love to be able to do that for a map in the editor. I could make some really amazing cave systems that way. Character mode was intended to allow us to easily see builds from a player's perspective. Let's be honest, though: That has very limited usefulness, because at the same time we'd also want to try interacting with parts of our build, and the full testing mode is so much better for that purpose. It just takes a few extra seconds to compile and load. I would essentially like to see a mode where any changes, including script output (with the exception of memory variables) would be persistent when we returned to the normal Editor mode.

There will always be ways around any filter, no matter how it's set up. It should cover the basics only. Variants with spaces or dashes, or whatever, should be optional at most, because there will always be alternate ways to spell them or type them to bypass the filter. Ultimately, the best way to deal with this is to give US better means to monitor and manage our own servers. Until then, BI is going to waste a lot of energy micro-managing.

i got an idea for a game, and I want to open it up for anyone else's ideas or possible collaboration. (Or even someone else taking the idea and developing it, because let's be honest: I already have a bunch of incomplete games in my scenarios folder.) The game (the way I imagine it) would be pirate themed, and would be called "Mutiny." The players would be separated on two teams: Crew and Mutineers. But here's the twist: When the game starts, you only know YOUR team, and don't know which team anybody else is on. They would start evenly split, but a mystery to everyone. There would not be any color-coding to reveal it. The two teams would have some kind of objectives, such as stealing treasure or defending something. I'm not really sure about that part. You would have the ability to capture players on the other team. Actually, you would be able to attack or capture anybody, and if you do that to someone on your team, they could (randomly) be offered the option to switch teams without anyone else knowing. The game ends when one team (or whatever is left of it) is entirely captured. My preference is for the PVP aspect to be "soft" meaning you're not killing the other players. The weapons would be nerfed, and there would be a custom hit counter that would "knock out" a player when they're hit a certain number of times. Since it's themed around pirates, the play area would be modeled after a ship, with a deck (and rails you can jump over into the water) and probably a couple levels below the deck. This would be bigger than a Ylands ship, by the way. There would be a jail for each side, and the ability to release prisoners (by anybody except the prisoners themselves). There could be a treasure room and an armory. If a player jumps into the water, maybe they're knocked out for a short time then they spawn back on the deck of the ship? Or they have a few seconds to get to a ladder? My thoughts on it so far are pretty random, but it sounds to me like it could make a fun game.

I know I only need to ask, . I'll try to stop by when I can (I'm at work right now).

It hasn't really moved since that post. I keep meaning to join in on a P1 party or something to see if a quick test could be organized, but I've missed nearly all of them over the past month. And in the meantime I've gotten distracted by other ideas. Really need to get this tested, and see if anyone wants to contribute to the design work.

I haven't tried capturing new blueprints, but my older custom blueprints are not showing any preview when I'm placing them. The downloaded blueprints do show it. Once they're placed, the normal blue "hologram" shows up, but I'm basically having to place them blindly. I'll try making a newer blueprint tonight, see if that helps my issue, and if I encounter the same issue as above.

I'm inclined to agree. It's fun to find a rare variant in some random encounter, but some of those encounters are a little too random for the level of items you find there. Many times, I'll find a RE only to find out that anything they have there would be a downgrade for me at that point. (Case in point: Yesterday, I had iron armor already before finding the camps that had Raider Armor. In a brand new map.) Personally, I prefer the rare finds to be a bit more special, equal to the achievement of the find. Say, for example, a special sword that's been buffed and is stronger than anything I can craft. Meanwhile, regular arms and armor are better suited to either more common RE, or just unlockable recipes.

I'll happily second this one. The terrain tools need loads of improving. Personally I'd also like to see the ability (somehow) to mimic a player using normal digging tools, in the Editor.

The new planting system doesn't work for bamboo. And seriously, PLEASE, fix the horse AI. They keep getting between me and predators during a fight. Not acceptable.

I think that's where the collected dirt and sand comes into play. We could place it down to create a gardening area for different plant types. That's what I expect, at least. We'll have to give it a try. I am a little concerned about restricting some to "grass" unless the dirt we place counts as grass.

It will be unusual for me, not being able to stack when planting, but we've needed improvements to the farming mechanics for quite a long time. And the restrictions for terrain types for different kinds of plants makes a lot of sense, as well as giving us a use for all the soil and sand we end up collecting. Does it restrict us from placing plants on bare building materials? Might have to re-think my stone gardens. ? Looking forward to trying that out. Does it "preview" where the plant will go or will we still have to guess that? I'm hoping for some type of indicator, as a small arrow or hologram preview, so we know exactly where we're placing it before we plant it. And is it able to "lock on" to the small planter boxes, so we can plant in them and make it look good? Of course, you would introduce and interesting new biome as I'm knee-deep in digging an ambitiously huge underground base in my current save (spanning almost the entire size of the barrier). This is one reason why I never finish things. (heavy sigh)

In a game mode I'm working on, I have an animated trigger zone that follows the player. It is configured to trigger when it encounters anything with a ZoneInteractable label. It then hands off the trigger entity to the player's storage to decide what action to apply based on other labels that object has. The zone is capsule shaped around the player. The idea is that other players will have the label, as well as certain blocks and items that make up the play area. One type of block, for example, is "lava" and should kill the player on contact. This should be true no matter what type or size of block I use, as long as it has the LavaDeath label in addition to the ZoneInteractable label. The play area is supposed to be dynamic, able to change between rounds for various fast and simple mini-games, so it's critical that the zone is able to trigger on any entity that has that label, no matter what. The problem is that blocks will not trigger the zone at all unless the player contacts a CORNER of the block. If I run up the side of a labeled 4x1x4 block, or jump on it from above, nothing happens. The zone is not triggered. But it is if I hit a corner. I can use 1x1x1 blocks, but that could hurt performance, and if I weld them the trigger zone doesn't react to them no matter what. I'm attaching some video, logs, and the scenario... (The video is not exciting at all, but shows what the problem is.) output_log.txt output_log_clean.txt MULTI-MODE PARTY.zip

We would need more accurate planting mechanics before that goes away.

I will try changing it to a block. Spawning a zone for every piece would be too demanding on resources, and also complicate the algorithm I plan to build to generate the play area, which already has to take into account different kinds of labels for different behaviours. A capsule shape would be better for player collision. Maybe I can give the player 2 zones: a block for play area items, and a capsule for player interaction.

Yes there are multiple ways to do it with script, but I think OP might be referring to Explore mode.

The pieces he used for the animated map? I would imagine those are large steel rods.

I've found that, any time I want to explore an island without having to deal with predators or enemies, I simply get a horse. They won't react to your presense at all, until you dismount. ...and can we PLEASE fix the horse AI so they're not crowding around the player as if it's a celebrity autograph session? That's so irritating I've started killing them.

Could we at least push for a special widget to allow us to display entity icons? (I'm pretty sure this was already requested elsewhere, though I can't remember where.) Those images are already in the game, and it would be nice to be able to add them to a custom HUD or window. Add a tile to set the image through script (using the Entity Type enumerator) and we could do a lot with that.

First I want to say I'm really enjoying the new HUD so far. I've started reworking a couple of my work-in-progress game modes with it to make the UI look so much better. The selection of sprites seems a little light, though. There are a few repeats in the list (hearts appear twice) and while designing my UI, I noticed a couple of general concepts not represented. I'm sure there are plans to add more; I just wanted to start this thread for any specific requests I or other creators might have. 1. "Clock/timer" - something to indicate a timer or clock image 2. "Feather/Wings/Bird" - something to indicate flight or the ability to fly 3. something to indicate speed or a speed boost/buff 4. images that could represent each of the basic character actions, such as digging, jumping, or crafting

That would be nice. Being able to use ranged weapons like bows or rifles while on horseback, maybe melee weapons. Of course those would all need new animations and combat mechanics. Fair to say, I think this one might take a couple updates to get balanced just right.

I tried this. (I had not noticed that tile because I don't use much animation. I really need to explore more in the Editor.) I think that it should work fine. I would worry about performance only IF they were animated manually. The FOLLOW TO command works in a different way, and should not have that problem. As long as Speed and Acceleration are high enough, and Distance Start and Distance End are both 0, it should follow the player perfectly.

Could we request something else in its place? We could create our own collision detection with Trigger Zones, but making them follow a player close enough to work would require animation techniques that could have bad side effects. (Putting timers or loops at 0.03 seconds gives a smooth animation but can cause performance drops.) Would it be possible to have a tool or command to make an entity or logic automatically lock onto and follow a player, maybe with an optional position and rotation offset? (Of course, I might have missed something that's already there. I haven't done much with the animation scripting yet.)