2020-01-22 Site Overlap, Rare Resources, Friend Code, Mine Production

[Vectorus]

The intersection of buildings is only considered on the XY axis, though, which is obviously 2-dimensional. Two buildings project XY axes out from their origins and these axes are considered as being on the same Z-level for the purposes of obstruction, as I understand it. Regardless of the fact that the planet surface is curved and non-smooth, the overlap checks cannot be called 3-dimensional; that is all I'm noting.

In any case, I'm feeling happier since the suggestion of an attempt at a more realistic full-intersection check in future; but I would to like to ask that, if that actually proves impossible once you have tried it, we turn and continue to look at the problem from other angles. Obviously, that is not a question for today.

[Deantwo]

Site Overlap
Site overlap test should be applied to all buildings.

All buildings are now tested for site overlap. Buildings cannot be placed if their site overlaps the site of another building.

This mainly applies to regular buildings. There are exceptions, such as street lights.

This fixes some issues and makes city building more sense. So I am all for it.
Overlapping buildings just feels messy.

Mine and Well Production
...
Increased the output of most mine and well processes by 2x.

I am still not convinced that this was necessary, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing either.
It definitely does speed up the fresh start up a bit, which was missing after we became unable to manually do 4 jobs at a mine.

I still say that we just need more advanced tools or something to increase production later. Such as Magmium and Vulcium mining tools. Or even a Adamantine drill. Just add the normal 20% output increase or something.

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Once you start looking at sci-fi cities, the issue becomes worse since futuristic shapes provide more scope for overhangs

Just design your buildings as city blocks? Have the over hang be part of the same building.

[Vectorus]

I wonder if now would be the right time to propose again that there be some way to automatically align buildings to one another, some sort of snapping mechanism. 

With no overlapping, it would be nice to be able to avoid gaps without it becoming a minigame in itself! That would have been useful even with the old-style building system.

[Deantwo]

Avatars cannot offer teleport to their location.
Avatars cannot accept teleport invitations.

If some new players want to play together to test, how do they proceed ?

Maybe Haxus could make it so that new players can teleport to/from other new players.

Been trying to wrap my head around this too. But I really can't think of a solution that would work.

But that aside, trial players can still berth-a-port I guess.
Until the day that is changed so assigning berth becomes only available to avaters in the same system as the ship, which doesn't sound too unreasonable really.

[Neils Iyssada]

Avatars cannot offer teleport to their location.
Avatars cannot accept teleport invitations.

If some new players want to play together to test, how do they proceed ?

Maybe Haxus could make it so that new players can teleport to/from other new players.

Been trying to wrap my head around this too. But I really can't think of a solution that would work.

But that aside, trial players can still berth-a-port I guess.
Until the day that is changed so assigning berth becomes only available to avaters in the same system as the ship, which doesn't sound too unreasonable really.

Well it has to be a thing, as this game was always known for its nice multiplayer empires. How can a group fully play and like the game if they prefer to play together ? I can see a lot of people not even trying to buy the game just because they can't TP to their friends.


What if we make a way to start together, like a password you share with your friends and when they spawn they are on the same village ? Or some kind of private lobby you can join via a single word / password / list ; then you can begin together and at the same moment.

[Kastuk]

Isn't it for preventing prolongation of trial account progress by joining with fresh one account into trial empire near the end?
Or all things and buildings of that account will be removed anyway? At least blurprints will stay?

[Deantwo]

Isn't it to prevent prolongation of account progress by joining with fresh one trial account into troal empire near the end?
Or all things and buildings of that account will be removed anyway? At least blurprints will stay?

Cities and buildings would decay ~3 days after the trial account runs out of time.
And yes preventing teleporting likely was an attempt at limiting that. But without teleporting it makes the trial impossible for a group to try out together, which is something we really wouldn't want to discourage.

The possibility of recycling trial accounts is the reason a trial system has always been tricky and not really been positively suggested.
I guess some limitations could be implemented to prevent prolonged empires with only trial avatars active. Maybe limit the number of lands a trial avatar has to 1 or 2 (plus home system).

Public blueprints current have no limits at all.

[SunnyDrake]

how do you intend to fix the original problem of not being able to place buildings next to each other?

I don't view this as a problem. I made a strong attempt to accommodate that architectural style but alas it opens the door to cheating.

Some day I may develop a fast way to find geometric intersections while placing a building in a city. It would have to be fast so that it doesn't bring the computer to its knees while dragging a cursor around. Then I could relax the placement rules a bit.

The result would be less restrictive on building placement. That is easy to implement later, without players crying foul.

i imho against it, all critters would stuck there will be unpassable terrains etc.... i had same problems in WebGL with slow trianlge point intersect detection, turned out it was way faster to create at mapgen stage to create walk-maps arrays(9dirs pointer assoc array per square(2trinagle combined 1 unit cell) than to intersect point on huge mesh map for every unit.

other than that  Fast way to implement that is to have multi proxy squares list that checked against same proxy squares .. this will allow to fast intersection tests on placement but makes building models little more complex(tho can be automated by script)   
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