Last night I finished the tree felling system. That system is going to stay in a development freeze until Genesis Part A is rewritten (I will go into that in a moment).
Last night I added decrements on the characters fatigue, hunger and thirst levels when chopping trees. The amount decremented is fixed, but the higher your felling skill level, the less hits you need to cut a tree down. Your first tree will likely take much longer than the second.
I expect the overall reactions to the cutting system to go along the lines of: “It takes way too long” or “my axe keeps getting blunted”.
The most unrealistic thing in Annor will be the tree growth rate. Trees don’t pop up every couple of days. But in MMO’s, full trees respawn in the same place. They don’t spread, and they can’t be permanently wiped out. After the tree growth rate, realism kicks in. Players will have to get used to that. You can’t realistically go chopping every tree down in the forest. And while you may be thinking “but its fun”, think again.
It won’t be any fun when there are no trees left. So powergamers who think they can become the ultimate lumberjack in 4 hours will find their fame short lived when they have wasted their skill levels on training a now redundant skill. Trees don’t come back after a server reset!
GENESIS Part A – Rewrite
The Genesis system has been working great for now but during testing of he felling script I came across several issues. The system won’t need a total rewrite (I hope) and most of it will be re-useable. The system will still work fine for plants. I will go into full technical details later when I have a plan but I will first not the issues here:-
Landscape
Although there are alot of trees in our forest, it still doesn’t look like a forest. There are a few possible solutions to this problem. The idea of a rewrite will be to increase the performance of the scripts. I am also thinking of adding much larger trees into the game, trees that take up alot of space. They will be limited to the forest areas. Trees will take a very long time to get to that size.
I need to organise some of the foliage. Trees are only a 2/5 of the objects in the forest so it currently looks worse than it will be.
Growth Rate
With the completion of the felling script, it has become more obvious that I need to adjust the growth rate of trees. The seeding system needs a complete revision because it currently directly related to Felling:-
Felling Locations
The forest is a large area and it started out with 14 seed trees. But even with that it was difficult to find a certain type of tree that could be cut down. There were also problems with passing the active tree along after spawning new trees. This would only be an issue with multiple trees going down in one area. The pass-on script itself works great. But trees need to stay choppable after seeding new trees and this is where largest amount of change will be.
Growth Locations
At one stage trees spread beyond the walkable map area and began to spawn under hills etc. I may need to work my spawning boundries system into the game. Second of all is the problem where trees grow too close to another tree, sometimes in almost the same location. The growth script will be altered to ensure a set gap between trees, sometime making several attempts at finding a viable seeding location.
FRIDAY, 18 JUNE 2010 BY 