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The slowly dying sandbox

Discussion in 'Starbound Discussion' started by LilyV3, Jul 28, 2016.

  1. LilyV3

    LilyV3 Master Astronaut

    as Inf_Wolf said, there were more than 200, they just removed them so they spent time makign soemthign which they removed which wasn't necessary, aka waste of time, watse of assets. and if you make assets like 30x40 blocks wiht the same "ends" acting as section interfaces but change their interior, how much effort is that to place just a few chests and furniture different? and soem platforms? thats best somethign like 20minutes each. It will then not mess up any anchor points but ends to be a visual variety.

    that has nothing to do with the scale, a single starbound planet si much like a single terraria wold. and even if you rmeove anything from both games except lush planets and make terraria be all the starting zone biome and give both theur undeaground biomes to this location, you will have more variety in terraria, because assets in terraria are not reused 100% identical 1:1 as Starbound does. The simple fact that the same structur ein starbound exists over and over withn a short area already is whats repetitive and that does not belong to any density issue of the universe. Why can the upper shown house not have furnitre placed randomly and the loot containers? doesn't requires making 100 different ones per hand. This would make the usage of the asset not repeat 1:1.
    please tlel me where these two differ


    [​IMG]


    [​IMG]


    so tell me where do thes etwo hosues differ? and why do I have to find more than 20x the EXACT same one in a single planet? WHY?
    Now go and fire up tzerraria and generate 10 large worlds and find me two exactly identical of the broken houses underground. Where even the breakable objects in the hosue are the same.

    you ar eht eonyl one who is ignorant if you think repetition of using the exact same asset findable by the player mulriple times within juts a few minutes is NOT repetitive. With 1000 variants you will extremely rarely see any repetition. And workload doesn't increase "greatly" not if you now how you propelry utilize modularity. CF had NOT made a decent number, if they would have made a decent amount of differnet ones, you would not see the same one used like 15x+ on the same planet and make thes eeven appaear at every 3rd planet. if there were like 1000 ones it would be a much lower chance finding 3x the same even, and before they all repeat for the 10th time you would have to go through mostlikely 20planets housing them.

    thats math and probabilities, while you think that 200x with repetition is more repetitve than 20x with restriction of 1x-3x, thats not the case on the outcome of possible combinations.
     
    Last edited: Jan 20, 2017
    Zanary likes this.
  2. Inf_Wolf14

    Inf_Wolf14 Parsec Taste Tester

    No, I didn't.



    In my examples
    And:
    Pre-Giraffe and post-Giraffe have, essentially, identical part counts.
    However, post-Giraffe dungeons have more parts which are actual house and building variants rather than minor filler parts like lampposts.



    This argument is heading nowhere fast. I am willing to discuss this matter in an intelligent, structured method; However, you have demonstrated ignorance that disallows such a discussion.

    I will be leaving now. I wish you the best of future luck. But I will not entertain this any longer, especially if you are going to simply skim my posts and misquote me in the manner you have already demonstrated.
     
    Last edited: Jan 20, 2017
  3. Firebird Zoom

    Firebird Zoom Oxygen Tank

    You're giving me OCD, Lily!
     
  4. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    A lot of effort actually. You are completely ignorant on the subject-matter.



    Few issues.

    - Terraria uses generated structures. Starbound uses premade structures. Obviously there will be repeated designs. You can't get generated structures to remotely be like premade ones without a shit ton of work because they are designed all in code where as premade structures are not.
    - Why cant a structure have randomly places furniture? Well they can, but you would need a new structure for every possible outcome. OR, you would have to ensure that every possible object was the same size, so you would end up with similar looking structures just with different themes which is actually counter to what you are arguing about.


    Because that specific sub biome doesnt have 100+ vairant. The work on making those variants had to be spread out through ALL micro dungeons, so if you look at them individually, yeah, they seem sparse. Again, Terraria has most all of its content in one world, so yes, it looks like it is more dense with more variant content, but if you compress Starbound to the same scale, it would be overflowing with way too much.



    Never once said it wasn't repedative.

    Ignorance as to what it takes to develop a game. It is a lot more work than you think. You want more variation, I get it, I am all for it, but you have to keep perspective. Chucklefish is like what, 12 people, and not all of them are the ones tasked with dungeon creation, and they have to make themed sets for all the different biomes and sub biomes, and in your eyes, they should have made 100+ variants off the bat. That is a LOT of work.



    Never said 200 variants would be more repetitive than 20. But it would still be noticeably repetitive.
     
  5. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    So basically your argument is "Apples and Oranges are both fruit, you can compare them quite well!" I.....already commented on that, and you've yet to address it.

    And give the CF devs time. Yes, there are a lot of blocks... but you know, it DOES take time to create more mini- and micro- dungeons. They need to be up to quality standards, they need to be coded properly blah blah blah.

    This takes time.

    Did you play Terraria during 1.1?

    There was no Crimson, there was no Underground Snow, no Underground Desert, all dungeon bricks looked exactly the same, only with a random color, yadda yadda. Don't compare Starbound 1.1 to Terraria 1.3. That's silly.
     
  6. pop-yotheweird

    pop-yotheweird Ketchup Robot

    I can confirm this. it was pretty barebones and easy to get through. not a bad experience though, it's why I like Starbound lol.
     
  7. DraikNova

    DraikNova Spaceman Spiff

    Terraria also first released 1.0 back in 2011. Starbound released 1.0 last year. Terraria has had five years more than Starbound to build up content. Not to put all too fine a point on it, but Terraria's 1.2 happened in 2013, more than 2 years after it was first released. Let's see how much content Starbound has by fall 2018. Although Starbound will probably have hit 2.0 by then, if they keep updating as quickly as they have (about 74 days per update).
     
    Last edited: Jan 21, 2017
  8. Blaine

    Blaine Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    The last time I played Starbound was in late 2013, maybe early 2014. My last post in this forum is dated December 2013, and that's how I know.

    The game has changed quite a lot in the three years since then. I've been playing post-release Starbound for 20-30 hours now, and frankly I think that the planet, biome, mini-biome, and monster implementation and variety in 1.2.2 is far superior to what we had back then. At one time practically every planet and monster was almost totally random and procedural, but that quickly got old, because everything ended up seeming pretty much the same, just slightly different and with different colors.

    In my opinion, this new orderliness of planet biome sets and static monsters combined with procedural generation creates a lot more variety and interest than the early builds. Then again, I wasn't here for the in-between builds. When I was last playing, there was no weather, you could still fuel your ship with wood, and you couldn't upgrade your ship without a mod.

    The combat balance in 2013 was way off, too. Enemies would start shooting you from three screens away (or one screen away if you were zoomed out to the max). I'm glad that's been fixed. The cadence of combat hasn't changed much at all, though. I still feel Starbound falls short of Terraria in terms of the combat cadence/"feel" and the mechanical variety of the weapons.

    One particular thing that mystifies me about post-release Starbound is the hoverbike. Most if not all planet types have huge mountains at regular intervals, and trying to hover up and down them is comically annoying, to say the least. Terraria managed to have tons of running, swimming, and flying mounts that all worked exceptionally well. I'm not sure what went wrong here.
     
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  9. DraikNova

    DraikNova Spaceman Spiff

    Luckily, they seem to be improving our vehicular options in the next update.
     
    Firebird Zoom likes this.
  10. Sneve

    Sneve Void-Bound Voyager

    I'm afraid I can't agree, I believe the lack of content allows Chucklefish to fix the game even more, if you remember the old combat system versus today's combat system, it's been improved. I played back in 2014, about 3 months after EA release, and I absolutely loved the game back then and now. I again, believe that they took things out of the game to further them in making them more polished and overall more fun for the users.
     
    Xylia likes this.
  11. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    I, too, joined Starbound right after EA release.

    People talk about lack of content.... I'm wondering how many of them are either wearing Rose-Colored Glasses, or they just plain weren't around during those days, because the game had no content back then. It was a Sandbox, and absolutely nothing else. Literally just a box with a bunch of sand. No moulds, no water to make sandcastles out of, nothing. Just a box with sand.

    There were no missions.
    There were no story quests, at all.
    There were no varied biomes whatsoever, except for whole planet-wide ones.
    Half of the progression system wasn't even complete or implemented.
    You unlocked new tiers by making cards that didn't even have descriptions.
    Half of random weapons had stuff like (todo: insert description here) in the tooltips.
    Damage numbers were way higher than they needed to be (T9 weapon: 2,500 damage. T10 weapon: 5,000+ damage).
    Wanna fuel your ship? Dump WOOD in it!
    Matter Manipulator was useless and nobody used it. Instead we used Stone Axes to cut down vines, and Pickaxes that had to be repaired every 10 minutes with the very ore you were trying to make armor and weapons out of.

    The game has come a long way since Koala, and it is far, far better.

    I will say that randomgen monsters with random varied attacks was better than seeing Gleaps, Poptops and Bolbops on 99.9% of all of the non-frozen/hot planets you visit, but meh. Nobody's perfect.
     
  12. Blaine

    Blaine Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    Yeah, the game has come a long way since then.

    Unfortunately, I think Chucklefish realized the issues with total procedural generation (mainly that stuff starts to look the same after an hour or three) too late to implement a really elegant solution. Now there are pre-designed monsters, perhaps about as many as were in Terraria 1.0, but most are shared between various biomes and tiers and they help to ensure that all planets seem like a variation on the same theme rather than actually being different places. Most biomes and mini-biomes feature one or two unique enemies and a unique critter or two, whereas in Terraria there's a host of unique creatures for every biome. Procedurally generated monsters remain, and there's a lot of variation there, but you can always tell immediately that they're a mishmash of random parts, and most of them still just have a charge attack like the Road Runner from Looney Tunes (presumably because implementing diverse animations for random parts is prohibitively difficult).

    On top of that the game has no nuanced enemy loot; it's pretty much meat, pixels, and a handful of mostly elemental-themed crafting materials dropped by everything in the game, depending on their type. In Terraria, monsters drop thousands of different things depending on what they are and where they are. The ability to create farms, traps, and defenses against enemies just for fun (and loot) remains a huge part of Terraria's draw. I spent 2,000 hours playing Terraria, having started playing the day it was released, and I invented a few things with timers and such that had never been done before in the earlier years. The drive to do this really doesn't exist in Starbound at all. You can do a lot of stuff with wiring and mechanics, but it pretty much amounts to fancy doors, light displays, and elevators because you can't meaningfully interact with enemies or bosses with it. In fact, they're immune to traps from what I've seen.

    The strict progression has also created issues. Why do certain planets only exist near certain types of stars? Why do jungle planets only exist near radioactive stars? How does the Avian village built there survive without EPPs? Why would Novakids build a frontier town on a volcanic planet if it catches on fire and burns down once per day? What is the point of the Xenon pack when you can't build it until you're exploring planets that require an EPP (i.e. almost all of them)? A lot of these issues could have been solved by using a method other than the EPP to gate progression. In my opinion, it should have been needed only for moons and underwater, and any type of planet should have been able to appear around any star. It just feels so artificial.

    That being said, I think the building, "tenant," and pet-collecting aspect of Starbound is broader and more sophisticated than Terraria's ever was. There's a greater range of furniture, decorations and types of decorations, more to do with the wiring logic gates and rails, more freedom with your NPCs (of seven+unplayable races with a lot of appearance and clothing combinations), and more leeway in where and how you build. That's saying a lot, because Terraria has added seemingly a billion decorations and blocks since it began.

    Certainly farming and cooking are overall more sophisticated in Starbound too, although of course it falls short of dedicated farming sims like Stardew Valley.
     
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  13. littlestabber

    littlestabber Void-Bound Voyager

    this is all true... But, well the game doesn't turned into trash, not at all, it still fun but those features are missing of course. But! I fell like there's better things coming we just need to wait, give our ideias and... Wait for updates!
     
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  14. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    "Why do certain planets only exist near certain types of stars?"

    Because tier progression. People would complain about high tier planets in the starting system before they got FTL.
     
  15. Xylia

    Xylia Tiy's Beard

    But yet, FU manages to get around this and does it rather well.

    In FU, starter systems are still guaranteed to see Lush and Desert Planets, but yet you will also see Moderate-threat planets in them rather often as well.

    Sometimes you'll even go to an Eccentric Star and see something that's Risky or above. But yet, there's also normal vanilla planets there too.

    As for the monsters, well... again, FU somehow managed to add a lot more monster variety, and I remember back in Koala when we had "mish-mashed" monsters and they had a lot more than charge. In fact, a lot of monsters even had various ranged attacks. They had punch attacks. They had bite attacks. They had lunge attacks. They didn't just spam Charge over and over again. That's a Giraffe thing, there. We didn't have that back in Koala.

    Don't really know why they got rid of the varying attacks on random-gen monsters and replaced it with Charge 90% of the time.

    And I am really tired of everything doing nothing but Charge. It is very boring gameplay. And somehow, it ends up being more annoying/frustrating/boring than Terraria, and 90% of Terraria's mobs do the exact same thing -- they navigate to try and ram their body into yours. But yet they're done in a way that doesn't seem entirely ridiculous like Starbound. At least in Terraria, you can outrun the stupid thing.

    Not in Starbound, nooo.

    If there's no terrain to lose it with, that stupid Charging mob will spam Charge until it catches up with you (which it will, because its charge is faster than your sprint).

    I miss the days when mobs did their punches, bites, and short-ranged attacks, like zaps, blood spews, etc. At least then, combat had a lot more variety to it. Now, it's "jump mob as it tries to charge you to death".

    Or, just find a mountain so that it keeps charging into the wall, lol.

    And Bulbops.... can we just remove the stupid Bulbops already? There is nothing, NOTHING more annoying in SB or Terraria combined than Bulbops. They spawn 6-12 at a time and they relentlessly hop at you and can hop 30+ feet and will not leave you alone whatsoever. So annoying.

    Wish someone would come up with a mod that just outright removes Bulbops.

    EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I like Starbound, I just feel that is the one thing, the one glaring flaw in their development decisions since Koala, was removing varied mobs and varied attacks and replacing it with Contact Damage Charging Mobs. I still have not heard or seen any developer explaining WHY this change was necessary, and how it actually does the game any good to remove more than half of all the variety in mob attacks, and replace it with a standard "it touches its body to yours to cause damage" that every other side-scroller has done to death in the past.
     
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  16. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    There is a lot to like about FU, no question there, but we must understand that FU is a mod. Mod makers have no deadlines and can afford to put more time on specific things. Chucklefish had to make EVERYTHING, including the engine of the game itself. Not that is not to say that Chucklefish couldn't do content on par with FU, but it would take a bit longer. Modders have more freedom than developers do.

    I do hope chucklefish does keep on adding depth to the game, in all aspects. I am a bit sad they removed "alloy" type materials after the fuss people had over "iron and copper make steel", and now basically everything is crafted with raw materials, not really any processed materials. (Metal bars excluded, they are just "X or = 1 bar", which is meh).
     
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  17. Blaine

    Blaine Scruffy Nerf-Herder

    There's no need for a volcanic planet to always have tier 6 enemies. They could just as easily have tier 1-5 enemies and still require a cooling unit that's not tied solely to tier progression.
     
  18. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    Yeah, there is a lot they could have done, I'm not arguing that, I simply answered the question.
     
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  19. Sneve

    Sneve Void-Bound Voyager

    What would make people want to go further through the tier progression besides items if you could access all the planets at once?
    I personally would stop exploring if I was able to get all the planets in the very beginning, the tier progression makes me appreciate the fact I have to work to visit different biomes with different enemies.
     
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  20. lazarus78

    lazarus78 The Waste of Time

    Well, ores are bound to planet tiers, so that? A tier 2 volcanic planet would only have iron and tungsten just any forest and desert world? But then that sounds lame.
     

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