This is why terrain deformation needs to stay
MrRoarke
Join Date: 2016-05-16 Member: 216830Members
Join Date: 2016-05-16 Member: 216830Members
So I might have made this shape scooping up this ground with the terraformer, but I don't remember making this shape. I stumbled across this and thought "WHOA, that looks like a Leviathan claw mark!"
Comments
It's a cool feature yes, but with the limited resources that UnkWorlds has (And it's always a case of Time/Resources sadly enough) cutting the feature for optimization purposes was the route they had to take.
Personally (and I think a lot of people will agree) I really think a massive improvement in performance is worth a stuck Cyclops.
If so, getting stuck isn't an issue.
Only places I can really think of the cyclops easily getting stuck is in shallow biomes like the Safe Shallows (Not that you should try driving into such areas mind you) and the Floater Island's shores. And the Blood Kelp Trench at times.
The risk of getting your cyclops stuck is worth the performance increases, in my opinion. If it REALLY becomes that much of an issue, and not a few isolated cases of misfortune and/or poor driving decisions, then they might try and find an alternative to assist in getting the big sub unstuck. Maybe some fancy tech that would push it away a bit from the surface its on - like the exosuit's thrusters or... Something else entirely.
Depends. The command deforms the terrain, and they're removing the deformation mechanics entirely. So, it's likely the command would either be removed or become obsolete and do absolutely nothing when typed in.
I mean I've gotten a Cyclops stuck once EVER and that was when I spawned one in the Safe Shallows like an idiot. I may have had to dig it out, but it was my own dumb move that got it stuck there in the first place.
It'd require 1 single bit of extra data to differentiate the save files. They already have both types of ground coded in. the game would not get much bigger in size at all, since the 'new' ground code, only removes a bunch of code to make it uneditable.
All they'd have to do is program some switches for the types of terrain (allows some items, some actions etc.)
I am a programmer by profession, it shouldn't be too complicated if they already have both types of terrain, but say what you will, ofcourse.
I agree with you, this solution makes a lot of sense and would let people choose.
I do understand that most of the time its the player's fault for getting the Cyclops stuck. But what needs to be understood here is not from a veteran player's point of view its from a completely new player's point of view
A veteran player knows how big the cyclops is and wont/should'nt spawn it in the Shallows but a new player who never saw a cyclops before cannot know exactly how big it is and might very well make the mistake of spawning it right on a sand dune. I remember the first time i made one thats exactly what happened, i didnt knew how big it was and it got stuck on a dune lol
Granted, a new player will make this error once then realize its not a terribly great idea to make one in the Shallow but the point is to how can we avoid this error to be made in the first place since digging sand to free a beached cyclops will soon be out of the question?
Maybe the game can evaluate the space there is below where the Cyclops will be made and send a warning on screen that there is not sufficent space to safely build it? i dunnno ....
I'd be totally down for this, especially since I got my base kinda wrapped around a location that would require the terrain to make room for it.
Or they could have an option for terraforming/voxel destruction. like space engineers!
Keeping teraforming in a separate game version/as an option may very well be just a matter of changing one line in the code, but let's not forget that the development of SN is not finished yet. With terraforming removed from the main game - and improved performance as the result - I bet there will be previously impossible to implement possibilities/ideas/mechanics that the devs will want to bring in or replace the current ones with. Considering that, keeping terraforming as an option would essentially mean developing two, suddenly very different, games at the same time. I'd rather they focused on getting us all the planned awesomeness for 1.0 instead.
I think we need to finally learn that players can't have (and shouldn't have) absolutely everything they want in the game, eat the cookie and keep the cookie. In this case, I trust in the devs that they know what's best for their game.
If you're a programmer you'd know that arbitrarily adding a toggle to a system that is used throughout much of the game world, most of the way through the development cycle, will likely break several things and require several hours to fix.
This does not strike me as an efficient use of limited resources.
I'm not sure that'd change the fact that the underlying mechanics of deformation would still be there - Creative, Survival, Freedom... It doesn't matter what game mode you pick, the terrain coding and mechanics wouldn't be affected. Keeping deformation in period would affect all game modes, whether it's limited to one or not.
Originally I felt that keeping the Terraformer a Creative only feature would work just fine, but its the deformation mechanics themselves that are contributing to the pop-in issues. Even if you never touched the Terraformer your whole game, the coding that handles deformation will still be there slowing things down.
That's why they're cutting the whole thing. I'm sure if they had the resources and time, they'd find a way to keep it all in, but with the limited resources they do have sometimes sacrifices have to be made.
It's cool - don't get me wrong - but it is absolutely not essential to the game.