Castles, Fireballs, Sewers, and Secret Facilities (Leth's Twitch streams November 22-23) [PICS]

I agree with the first two sentences above, but not the last one. It's perfectly reasonable to spend a lot of time on your homeworld - building, farming, crafting, etc. - but this will be content that you created yourself, as opposed to explored. You don't need a planet to be 8000 tiles deep to make a great homeworld.

The game's crafting/building is much more similar between Starbound and Terraria (at least based on known info). It's the exploration which is quite different - more spelunking for Terraria, and planet travelling for SB.

Setting aside the point that developers can't do everything at once, it's also a matter of amount and diversity of content. Terraria has built dozens/hundreds of hours of content's worth into one planet - 1.1 had jungle, dungeon, underworld, tons of smaller biomes, and hardmode variations on all of those which totally change them; 1.2 doubled that amount to the point where I can't even enumerate it without resorting to a wiki - there's just so much of it.

SB will likely eventually have as much total amount of content in all of the game (if not more), but it would have to be spread over dozens of planets instead of a single now. If you just take a planet's worth of content in SB, and multiply it 10 times in order for the planet to be as big as the world in Terraria, the content will be too repetitive and boring.

 

Most of this was explained sometime during the night.

1) That's not a glitch. Mining the background wall in a pool of water will make the water drain into the background. At certain depths, this won't work anymore.
2) That's a glitch, it's not supposed to happen. Tiy explained that in the devbuild version that was being played there's something enabled that prioritized putting a player right next to a dungeon so they can get to it quickly for testing, and it sometimes puts you inside walls.
3) Bartwe said that optimization wasn't even a priority at all during development, so virtually none has been done. That, and the guy was playing on a pretty bad laptop.

 

Of course, but now that Beta is getting closer, it should become a priority. Optimization takes time to do - you can't leave it to the last day.

 

That's what the beta itself is for. Optimization for PCs is extensive because you don't know the specs and hardware configuration of the people that will be playing your game. It's not really something that can be done by a small dev team of like 10 people, in the span of a couple months, especially without the large amounts of money AAA devs have at their disposal to throw around.

The game doesn't have to be optimized for the beta, because the beta is the optimization process for the game.

 

It's a matter of degrees. If the game slows down to 30 FPS instead of 60, sure, that's beta territory. But if it slows down to like 5 FPS (which I saw during one fight) then it becomes unplayable.

Of course it could be just be a case of a crappy laptop. But I'd imagine there's at least some profiling going on prior to beta, to get an overall feeling of "is this good enough to be usable by most people". Hopefully the answer is yes and there is no work left to do, but we'll find out, I guess.

 

Well yeah, they did, after all, have to make the game playable for themselves. So there was SOME work going into optimization, probably more into multiplayer optimization so they could work out things together, but past getting it to work perfectly for Bart's rig, or Tiy's macbook or whatever else, there was probably none.

Even if there was, there's always work to do because the game might be 2 FPS for people using an i5 with a AMD Radeon HD 6xxx series graphics card, and they won't know until those people get a hold of the game. You don't just flip a switch and optimize the game for everybody, they have to be played on those machines to work out what the problems are.

 

Why not? With the developers being able to design the dungeons room-by-room, it should definitely be possible. Those two rooms with the electrical traps that ended up killing Leth were really awesome, for example. Maybe have a few rooms that benefit players who have a morph ball, add some moving platform objects... After that, pretty much the only things missing are block-pushing puzzles and color-coded keys and doors, which aren't hard to add.

Dungeons are made by snapping together a bunch of pre-designed rooms, but the caves are randomly cut out of the planet by the terrain generator and don't have a reliable shape at all. There is a mine shaft dungeon on some planets that looks a lot like a natural cave with some wooden structures built inside, but it isn't the same as a natural cave.

I guess my real concern is with how versatile the dungeon generator is. Like, if I decide to mod it, exactly how drastically can I change it? Could I make a dungeon than has mainly vertical shaft shaped rooms above a certain height, then has a bunch of horizontal corridors at the bottom below a certain height, for example? Since one of the dungeons being discussed is an Avian Airship, I assume that these things will be flexible, but I'm very interested in the specifics because it's the number one thing that I'm interested in modding.

 

Judging from the most recent stream which is up on youtube, there appear to be caves a la terraria with monsters in them and what not. I think that's the right way to go because it keeps dungeons special.

 

Alright, well I meant the full experience of a 3D zelda dungeon. I suppose right now they more remind me of a metroid set-up, especially with the morphball addition.

 

Aren't the dungeon shapes determined by .png files? You draw a layout (or several,) and then the generator can populate specified areas (based on color?) randomly from a pool of rooms. I suspect you could have fixed rooms, too, with the proper coding proficiency.

 

Many thanks for the Info OP, for those of us that couldn't catch the Stream.

 

The bird in the fireball reminds me of Shadow's Fire Bird ability from Illusion of Gaia. Perhaps it is a coincidence or perhaps it is a deliberate reference. Either way, I have happy!

 

And here I was, thinking you were talking about the way dungeons felt in Zelda II: Adventure of Link.

Metroid sticks you into a huge map you can really get lost in, bringing out that exploring feel. The dungeons I've seen in Starbound so far are too small for that. If I were to compare the size of the largest dungeon I've seen in Starbound to even one region of Super Metroid's map (Like Brinstar or Norfair), I'm pretty sure the Metroid map region would be bigger. I suppose we can always mine, too, but at the very least I'd like to see some huge dungeons, either in the form of derelict space stations or high tier super dungeons. Maybe even have a dungeon that replaces an entire layer of the planet and wraps all the way around underground.

Exploring dungeons is my number one most anticipated feature in Starbound, can you tell?

The individual room shapes are determined by .png files. The generator uses a procedure to randomly snap the rooms together, presumably with some limitations depending on the specific dungeon type so that you don't have Avian Airships underground, for example. I'm hoping that these dungeon layouts are easy to alter, like how all the items are designed to be very easy to mod. Like configuration files or whatever works best. Something easy so I don't really need to learn how to code, basically.

 

Oh, yeah, that's right. Never mind, then.

 

Oh yeah, there's no doubt that a lot metroid areas are pretty enormous. Maybe I just meant like small sections that included morphball puzzles/ grappling challenges. Space stations in the form of dungeons would be fantastic, just a nice change up and going more into the spacey feel of the game. Reminds me of Dead Space 1, aboard the Ishimura. Naturally I do love dungeons too, very much- I'm just concerned with how much variety one could have from the other, I mean there's gotta be a point when you just don't get excited by them anymore since there's bound to be an uncountable amount of them in the Starbound universe. Size and shape could differ greatly, but the actual content within them would start to resemble more and more to the previous dungeons you conquered.

 

Thank you for sharing all these great images. You show that the community also has people who don't like to argue with people over something that won't matter upon game release all day like me, but actually do something constructive with their time.

 

+1. Good idea. In fact, great idea.

If they DON'T do this, couldn't you theoretically completely annihilate a planet? Sure, it would take forever to do, but, you know, put a couple thousand people on task and it might not take that long (assuming that so many people could play on the same server, which I'm told will be possible, if unlikely)

 

Mmmmh, the Bow need some buffs and improvements for the range.

I think it would be nice to see this weapon works like in Terraria - or similar - with the Range and " Bullet " Drop. The arrows fall too soon, they need more traveling distance !

 

I agree. Damage and rapid fire bug aside, the way the arrow flies isn't very good. The only reason its ok now is because of the bug. Imagine the same trajectory on a bow that fires slow and does less damage... lame.

 

That's why I really hope it is easy for players to mod dungeon layouts as well as the individual room layouts. When one developer or even a small team works on all of the dungeons in a game, you start to notice patterns in the designs that are indicative of a certain style. With players making them, you'll have a wider variety of very unique styles at the cost of lower average quality. If you've played other games that have level editors and a large fan base, there is often no shortage to the creative things they'll come up with.