Small concern regarding towns

I know we haven't seen those yet in any form, yet I'm still a bit concerned if they will be fun to navigate. If Starbound is just like it is now, being a 100% 2d game, well.. Picture having a few buildings. To go through the town, you'd have to enter every single building you came across. Having to open the doors, and so forth. I think it'd become a bit of a nuisance. Yet I can't see any ways to 'remedy' it, apart from adding a separate layer for a town, much like in older sidescrolling platformers in the likes of Simon's Quest, or Legend of Zelda 2. Meaning the buildings would be in the "background", with the ability to enter them using a door. But that doesn't seem like it'd fit nor work with the current block-based system.

I still hope the devs thought this through and got a satisfactory solution, though! And I believe they did

 

There are easily a few options open to them. They could easily have large "lobbies" for each building that you can basically run through as the dungeon preview image shows. In a marshland setting they could have buildings be on stilts with laddders or stairs to take players up to the buildings with the main throughfare being the ground below. They could also take inspiration from ancient cities on earth. In some areas the buildings were all built touching each other with no space between, there would be an opening on the roof to enter through and the general populous would walk around on the roofs of the buildings, taking stairs, ladders, and ramps when the heights changed. Or pull from fiction and have the homes built into hillsides ala the Shire where players can just jump over the entrances and walk above. Dwarven style underground cities built into a mountainside that the player would have to climb over or go through anyway. Anything underwater would have players swimming around above it, and any flying buildings would have players and NPCs flying above and below.

 

I don't really see this being an issue at all.

One of this big ways that Starbound outshines Terraria is the huge focus on exploration. It was said somewhere that the majority of planets will be small little things, throw-away areas that you don't have to worry about wrecking or mining or making ugly with dynamite. With that being the case, any towns you come across, you're going to want to go in and explore! That's why you're there! Okay, now that's done, explore the rest of the planet... and then leave. You've had to open the doors once, and then walk back through on your way out with them already open.

On the other hand, maybe the town is on a planet you want to set as a home world? Alright, deal with it! Building's what the game's about! If there's terrain in your way that you don't like, you build over it or build through it. Towns are just terrain in fun-sizes.

 

It's not a 'deal with it' scenario. I played Terraria on a server where we had player towns and it was actually pretty annoying. People were always passing through one town to get to some other area but, to do this, they had to trespass into homes that weren't protected with plugins and they always left the doors open. People could put pressure plates on both sides of the doors but that took up floor space. So people were always going in and out of homes and the home owners didn't like it. Or you have people flying over houses with rocket packs or jumping over them like crazy people. It was exhausting to have to leap over 20 homes just to get to a forest biome on the other side. What about if servers use a protection plugin for homes?

The one we used on Terraria had it so nobody but the home owner could enter a house, so you were forced to jump over it. I'm certain people will have these type of plugins to prevent grief and add a bit of RPG to their servers. There needs to be a more natural way of walking past homes. Maybe have it so houses can be set as houses and you can trigger your character to walk up the stairs into them or just walk past them and not collide with them. I don't know, that's just an example. Something does need to be done, I don't want to have to fling myself over every single building in my way, it kills the perception of depth in the world, even though it's 2d it still can give you the immersion that it's a complex world.

 

You could just blow up every house you come across then build bridges across the craters . But on multiplayer servers I guess you can build your house floating in the air so people can just pass under (assuming that blocks will float still after you break its support underneath).

 

Didn't they said they were going to put up-sliding doors? Maybe these open when you get near them.

 

When I saw the new picture that Tiy put up (regarding the Avian Town), my first question was this:

What would happen if you started disassembling the houses and property within the town? It would be understandable if the NPCs attacked you when you attack them. But, what if you were taking apart their town, block by block? Will there be some sort of protection for the NPCs against that? Will they react unfavorably towards that action, or just be impartial to the fact that you are destroying their homes?

I can just see a plant race sitting inside their home, which is the trunk of their ancestral ancient descendants. Then, there you are going about and disassembling the entire house because you liked the color hue of the blocks >_<. The next player will come along and the NPC will still be sitting in the chair. "Welcome to the ancestral home...of...of...OH THAT PIECE OF STICK!"

 

that's a good point, if this happens i would hope that the npc whose home you are taking down-would stop you by talking to you telling you to stop before things "get physical" ;p
this way, if a player accidentally mines out a block of someones house/whatever, that person won't be punished for a small mistake

 

In both my single player worlds and the servers I used to play on, people would avoud this issue by making an underground highway, usually about 'level' on a depth meter, that would cut straight across the whole map with openings above and below for people to reach areas of interest. The level of decoration for the tunnels would often vary, some just a horizontal path through everything, others with brick walls and floors with signs marking each branch and where it went. I always found this to remove any difficulties in traveling through a populated world.

 

As I understood it, OP was talking about mob generated homes. As far as player towns, well.. Yes, yes it is a 'deal with it' scenario.
Aside from the fact that players will probably be living on seperate homeworlds often anyway.. You can't expect them to balance and tweak against irritating things that players do to themselves. If you built a 50 foot tall wall on either side of the spawn, you couldn't say, 'Hey, I can't get out of here, this game has an issue.', and aside from the magic of our imagination telling us that a giant wall is different from a town, that's all that a town is.

It's up to players to decide if they're going to build their houses on stilts, or have hollow bottom floor lobbies (which look much better than they would have in Terraria, from what I've seen), or leave doors off their bottom floor. Change the word 'door' to 'mild annoyance'. If someone else on your server says, 'Hey, I want to put this mild annoyance in everyone's way, hey admin, can you protect it so people can't get through?', and the admin says 'Yes I don't see this as an issue', then you need to play on a different server if going over or under bothers you. The admin setting up these theoretical plugins is not an issue with the game.

 

I *think* it'll be something like holding a button to access things in the background, like stairs.

 

Jump on the roofs.

 

from the picture though, it looks like you still have to go through the house, which still doesn't solve the problem

 

good idea, but If it's possible to go around the buildings, mobs could also change direction, such as slimes jumping past my house, rather than just jumping in front of my door...

 

Solves the problem, just doesn't make it an RPG.

 

the other thing is the plugins were 3rd party terraria didnt ship with said plugins was just op's choice in servers

 

This
Or you can just fly above the houses and jump like a daredevil.

 

I have been silently wondering the same thing. One just assumes that your just going to be running through peoples houses. One thing they could do is give each building a little 3/4 block foundation of background blocks. That way you can just run under/in front of the buildings. That dosen't seem to be what they are doing though.

 

Press the Staples Button.

That was easy wasnt it? Also, people dont really care when Link breaks into their house and starts throwing their pots everywhere. So why would NPCS care about people disassembling the rest of the house?