In-base fabrication should draw on lockers and storage
donotwant
Victoria BC Join Date: 2017-08-15 Member: 232432Members
Victoria BC Join Date: 2017-08-15 Member: 232432Members
Am I the only one who wishes that the game would allow us to use the fabricator without making a bunch of trips between your lockers because "Oh shoot I forgot a piece of copper, even though I have 20+ in storage"?
It doesn't seem like it would be terribly difficult to implement, I just want my fabricators to see and access all of my resources I have in storage so I don't have to keep making trips within my base... Maybe have a unique form of storage you can dump materials into and you can access all of them within a certain radius?
It doesn't seem like it would be terribly difficult to implement, I just want my fabricators to see and access all of my resources I have in storage so I don't have to keep making trips within my base... Maybe have a unique form of storage you can dump materials into and you can access all of them within a certain radius?
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The game already lets you label wall lockers, and you can put up signs as well. I typically try to have one locker each for different items so I know where to look to find stuff. Of course, I still lose stuff. But that's the nature of the beast... In addition to managing your hunger, thirst and oxygen, you have to manage your inventory.
Is it still a game... ? ... or is it your Mother?
What I'd suggest is a middle ground.
I think there could be one storage container with a substantial amount of space inside, (let's say the size of 3 lockers or so) which you then have to connect to the fabricator (or it could be part of the fabricator itself) for it to draw resources from, instead of drawing things directly from your inventory. That would mitigate the problem a little as you could keep a certain amount of commonly used resources in that container permanently. You'd just have to keep it topped up and never have to worry about grabbing titanium, for example, from a locker every single freaking time because you keep a certain amount of basic stuff in there already.
It would also be more realistic/immersive as it makes sense that you would have to "load" the fabricator with materials, instead of them just teleporting from your magic wetsuit pockets.
This is the solution Empyrion Galactic Survival takes. The Constructor in that game can hold an insane amount of items. So, you just dump all your resources in the constructor. It works quite well.
Then what's the point of storage lockers?
Having the fabricator search for items would cause a significant amount of lag as the game would have to search every spot in every the locker till it found the item needed for every item.
I agree with garath on this one, The Constructor in Empyrion is my favorite crafting station yet. Its is one of the many ways that game streamlines the crafting process and allowing me to enjoy the gameplay more. I don't know enough about programming to speak to its feasibility though.
Did you even read the posts before replying?
I agree 100% with @Timelord_Fred that "search[ing] for items" in all the various lockers "...would cause significant lag". Well said.
In Empyrion Galactic Survival, even though the constructor can hold quite a lot, you have a TON of stuff and still need storage for the rest of your stuff. Plus, in that game, you have refrigerators for keeping food cold, ammo storage for turret, etc, etc.
I'm just a little slow... I played 200+ hours before noticing small lockers had free signs. In fact, I didn't even find out about that until I happened upon a bug report that mentioned it one day a while back. LOL.
It's simple. We're both just really, really smart.
Of course, you're right. We could just be drawing conclusions that aren't true. But I think we can apply simple logic to this. For example, what's easier? Looking at all the items in exactly one location and one location of a very specific type--the player's inventory, or looking at multiple locations and locations of different types:
1. Player inventory
2. Wall lockers
3. Lockers
Is there anything in the game that makes you think there is some common access to all those different lockers? Or, are they all treated individually? Is there anything that makes you think the game even keeps track of all the lockers in one common data structure?
If there isn't something in the game that makes you think all lockers are accessible from just one location, then that either needs to be created and maintained, or the game will have to do the following to query the content of all base lockers when you fabricate something:
1. Look at all base elements one by one.
2. If the base element is a locker, look inside and remember everything inside
3. Once you've finished looking at all the locker contents, let the player fabricate something.
For larger bases, that could take quite a long time. Of course, if you want to optimize the game for fabricating rather than simply placing items in lockers, then you would be far better off putting the logic in place for every single locker so that when you take or remove an item from a locker, this happens:
1. Update the list of inventory for the entire base each time and item is inserted or removed from a locker.
But that takes coding time as well...
Anything is possible. But it is probabl not easy. And anything that is not trivially easy opens the game up to more bugs.
The devs have already said they aren't adding any new features before 1.0. In fact, they said they are trying to reduce rather than add features between now and 1.0. Anyways... there you go.
The problem of large bases was already pointed out in the OP, mentioning a radius, or specific fabricator-linked-storage. As for your "required steps" for a crafting query... that's the kind of processing that computers are really good at, and it's an extremely simple example of it, too. This is CS101 stuff here, not even touching on optimizing. Structuring, balancing, and coding it would take time, sure; any new features would. But the item searching effect on game-performance? Measured in miliseconds, and handled before the animation of deploying the fabber finishes.
Minecraft modding, off the top of my head. Crafting from (massively) extended storage is something that has multiple implementations.
There are other examples, but that one springs to mind.
Having said that, I don't know if it's right for Subnautica. Fallout 4 would be crazy without it because materials are all built into junk objects, like screws in a toy car or crystal in a microscope, so it would be really tedious to pick out the items you need for building something. But in Subnautica I think those fiddly things like inventory management is part of the experience. There's a certain satisfaction to be had in building a well-organized storage room for your base which makes it easy to grab what you need when you need it. That experience is lost if you can just dump everything into any locker and still have instant access.
It's pretty obvious that having a list (bolded in quote) is the way to go. It wouldn't really be that hard. A very suboptimal implementation just off the top of my head: you could have an array of string-int pairs for each item type, encoding the item name and number of that item. The base could then search through that array to locate the item and see if there is enough; if it can't find the item then there are 0. That would already cut down much of the search time, and since Subnautica doesn't really have that many items, the array wouldn't be too large: maybe 20-50 at most (?).
That could be much more optimized in a number of ways. Sorting and implementing a tree, for one.
Edit: also, "takes coding time" is a pretty poor excuse for not doing something which ought to be infinitely easier than all the other stuff the devs have made. Modeling and texturing the Sea Treader poop probably took about as much time.
Everywhere in the game we have some sort of mechanism for conveying information to the player that is frequently graphical and occasionally only numerical. If the game is responsible for tracking the base inventory instead of the player, then wouldn't the game need some place in the game to show us how many of each type of item we have available in the entire base? Wouldn't that then take some work figuring out how to display that information to the player? If you follow the same graphical conventions throughout the game, you may need to create, model and texture the "Base Inventory Display". Thus, when you consider the math to track items plus the work on the display, yeah, you have far more time...
And we still haven't even decided if this is even worth it in the first place. Yeah, this makes it easier for the player, and yeah, we can say we sometimes want this because when we have a huge mega super base with many dozens upon dozens of storage lockers, this would save us some time. But, at the end of the day, do we really want the game playing itself or should we be playing the game? As mentioned before, we can already name lockers, create signs and manage inventory ourselves. Managing inventory is a key component of any survival game.
The whole point of trying to impart the idea that it "takes coding time" was mainly to convey the idea that this isn't something that is as easy as a two nanosecond clicking one checkbox to make the player's life infinitely easier. This feature would require real work--and work that many of us aren't really sure is worth it in the first place. I wasn't sure from the examples above if the game developers for any game have already done this or if only fans have added mods themselves after the fact. Certainly, in the case of MineCraft, it was definitely done only by fans and not by the developers. I'm less familiar with Fallout 4 and didn't understand if this was added by the company or by fans.
But I'm fine with having to find what I need to craft something with.
I'm used to keeping chests organized from playing 7 Days to Die so I always know where things are.
What I would love though is items that stack.
I mean even have the ores/salt be able to combine into a large chunk that you'd have to use the fab to break down again.
Large chunk takes up 4 square but remelt gives back 20~.
And yes I'm a hoarder in my games lol.
But I think this would be best implemented as a specialized room. Have a "manufactory" with built-in lockers and fabricator. I mean real lockers, not the pointless tissue boxes from the Cyclops. Then the fabricator could have access to everything in those lockers but you could still have inventory elsewhere.
A related idea I'd like to see is a simple indicator to let me know if I do have something in inventory. As annoying as it is to walk across the room to a locker it's an order of magnitude worse to think you don't have something and spend an hour hunting it only to find out it was in a forgotten locker. It'd be nice if the fabricator used yellow text to show that something was available, just not in your pockets.