Farmbound

Well 60 fps will appear quite fluid for most applications, 300 will appear a lot more fluid and assuming it's a quality display will provide a lot more detail to our eyes during fast motion. Eyes don't have a refresh rate so trying to pin down a single number is a pretty moot point anyways.

 

This thread isn't about farming since Blazererererer philosoph'd:

 

And proud of it! Though I do not as much approve of you mocking my name

I would prefer plants to grow continuously though, so that even when I leave the planet my plants will remain growing. It would be a pain to have to stay on your greenhouse planet at all times if you want something to grow/evolve/develop.

 

I would like all sorts of plants. It seems to be quite limited a lot of times, like Terraria just had trees and tiny flowers. We need shrubs, maybe even vines like pumpkins, and I believe root vegetables like carrots were mentioned? It'll be great having a nice wide selection of plants to grow.

 

I remember one of the staff members talking about plants growing only off screen, as it seems that they weren't sure how to make them grow on screen. (If my mind serves me right, that is. Please correct me if I'm wrong)

I'd rather just have it work like Minecraft. Whenever it's time to grow, just swap sprites. Perhaps a few growth stages could be added, just to make it seem more natural. I don't like being forced to go off-screen for my stuff to grow.

 

Lol sorry, it wasn't my intention to mock your name, it was to make myself look silly... since I had accidentally typed an er too much without intending to, anyway. I thought I would share my accident to distribute humor.

Hmm... Plants already grow off-screen, so I must assume they have some sort of timer on them. The need for plants to be on loaded chunks to grow would be just as bad as forcing us to watch a pot boil.

 

What if they take over the world?
I had a suggestion somewhere about invasive species and I think that farming on alien planets should either be easy or really really hard (like on the moon).
I'll bet plants grow the same way they did in Terraria though.

 

By all means, it made me giggle. I originally wanted to call my first fire-mage Blaze, but that was taken and Blazer sounded like a sweater, so I simply added -er. You only continued the thought

I guess you could have it as a sort of virus? Just as plants could get sick, weeds grow as well. It could simply be a kind of weed only found on extreme hard planets (where you could only farm the extreme best plants) that will take over and make sentient any crop it can reach. It then will try it's best to bite your face off.

 

Here's a pic from the iOS game junk jack:

Seriously, huge range of farming, mind blowing amount of foods.
Junk jack wiki, have a look: http://wiki.pixbits.com/index.php/Main_Page

 

will npc's have to eat?????

 

That would be a cool addition, that you'd have to either manually resupply certain 'drop points' or build a system that automatically manages supplies. Water, food etc.

 

I play that game i still need some of the plants though... i have a lot
I recently got sugarcane. PIEPIEPIEPIEPIEPIEPIEcupcakePIEPIEPIE!!!

 

Interesting. Will Junkjack be released as playable on general PCs?

 

I'm excited for farming and am in total support of a hunger system. I DO think there should be other uses for farming than sustenance though. As for growing... I'm glad they've managed to get it to work off-screen so far, but I'm concerned about how they managed to do that if they can't also get it to work on-screen. What sort of system would they be using that would be 'more' conducive to off-screen growth? I hope they find a solution. I don't anticipate spending a ton of time watching plants grow, but if i'm waiting for a specific crop to ripen, I might intentionally work nearby while I wait. Actually SEEING crops get to their harvesting stage was one of my fondest memories of farming in minecraft or terraria, that "Yessssssssssss, finally!" moment.

I would really like to see some of the thigns talked about in this thread though. A 'sentience' disease would be hilarious and would be the sort of obstacle I like being forced to deal with in these kinds of games. Probably beyond the scope of the game's "science lab", but I think it would be awesome to be able to bio-engineer our own crops, mixing qualities to produce unique plants useful for unique purposes.

 

To everyone saying the Off-Screen bit.

I fI recall it was one of the coders having an issue with "trees" growing onscreen and Tiy just said to make them grow offscreen. And I believe it was for trees because well let's face it, trees are huge. And even like Minecraft there's no good solid way to make them slowly grow. Since they'd take forever, and then you'd have different sizes of trunks, that would yield different amounts of wood, at which point you chop them down, not to mention some wood changes color slightly as it grows etc etc. So my thinking is, that it's just with trees since they'd otherwise go from tiny to fully grown. Plants tend to be much smaller and more managable to give growth sprites etc.

As for farming. I'm all for it. I prefer to have a million options available, even if I only do two things the option to do others is still there. I do hope it's not hard required to farm. Except maybe for food. (I'm the fellow who has a giant wheat farm and that's it in MC or carrots/Melons. ) So we'll see how Chucklefish implements it, though I have faith in them.

 

I'm hoping for this too, though I fear it might become very cpu intensive on large servers.

 

Something like this could be simulated without constantly rendering or even calculating though. Presumably, there is some mechanic in the game that tracks the passage of time as a variable. Could set up a system to do this retroactively as soon as a planet is revisited, based on time markers and calculating the difference. It would increase generation time of the planet every time you come back, but would keep the system from having to constantly track the state of every crop while you're offworld.

 

Good thinking! Now we know why I'm not a programmer.

On a side note, I'm really hoping they'll include parasitic plants.

 

I'd imagine the problem with this, of course this is a giant if so bare with me. Is if it did this for every planet you've visited, then re-visit. If you happen upon a planet you poked in on when you first started, and stumble on it again hundreds of hours of gameplay later, by all rights and dues. Any NPCs there will probably have expanded and made huge buildings etc, at least that is if NPCs even care to expand their world. But that's also a false hope I'm sure.

 

Me too. I'm really hoping that there's going to be lots of really 'alien' (har har) plant/fungal life. Parasites are a must.

Haha. Yes, that would be unfortunate. It could potentially also be pretty fun...

But if there is some kind of 'NPC establishment growth' system set up, it would still happen over large periods of time. The suggestion would really just make it easier for the system to handle.

EDIT: I just thought of this, but I think it would be awesome; If crops (maybe all, or maybe just a few specific ones) are left unattended for a lengthy period of time (either as is, or in certain environment types), they should be able to mutate and become 'feral' (for lack of a better term), growing out of control, breaching the boundaries of their plots and taking over. It would be really funny to come back to a farming planet you haven't visited in awhile to find out that one of your crops had mutated into this hyper-aggressive weed that was overtaking the ecosystem. Bonus points if you could also somehow turn that around and find a way to take advantage of the new strain.