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zennyrpg

Member

Registered: 2018-06-03

Posts: 98

Construction and its place in the vision vs reality of the game

Creating buildings (walls, floors, doors) is currently an underutilized part of the game.  In is this post, I will: show the importance of building structures as relevant to the game's vision; discuss the motivations for building in game; review the current implementation; and suggest fixes for the current state of the game.

First, is building structures even relevant to the core vision of the game?  Let's look at Jason's description of the game.  One part includes, "I was this kid born in this situation, but I eventually grew up. I built a bakery near the wheat fields. Over time, I watched my grandparents and parents grow old and die." Notice the part about the bakery.  Reading this paragraph with no knowledge of the game, I imagine most people would invision a "bakery" as a building.  A place with four walls, a door, and floors that contains the essential tools and ingredients for baking.  In the trailer, Jason speaks about the players’ contributions saying, "hopefully, you'll get a chance to leave your own small mark on the world before you die."  The "bakery" the player built in the description is the contribution they made to society.  In the trailer, Jason also uses the imagery of building styles to show the progression of society from primitive to futuristic.  At first, the people have no buildings, then pine panels, then adobe, then futuristic walls.  Its a visual language for advancement up the tech tree.  Why does Jason include buildings?  He also includes tools and clothing to show advancement.  It's possible he showed buildings because they are so essential to our real life society and thus relatable; or because, without the buildings the settlements would have looked too similar and interchangeable.  I think it was for the same reason he used the bakery example: to invoke interest in potential players by showing them a concrete example of how they can contribute to a society.

If building structures is an essential selling point of the game, why do people want to create buildings in game?  The first reason we've already covered, "leaving your mark."  But what kind of mark is something that is not useful?  Art certainly has it place in the game, but I do not think of buildings primarily as works of art.  There are two purposes for buildings besides aesthetics: organization and shelter.  Think of why a bakery exists in real life.  We could build an oven in the middle of a field but we'd have a hard time baking without counters and racks and drawers of tools and a sink.  A bakery is where we have all the things we need.  This is true in game too.  I've lived exactly one life where I had a bakery (actually it was also a forge but the forge was mostly unused) and it was great!  People knew to drop off pie ingredients because the place was obviously a bakery.  No one picked up tools and ran off with them for the same reason.  The walls made all the difference.  Inside was bakery stuff, outside was everything else.  Besides organization, there's another reason we don't bake outdoors in real life: its because the wind and rain would ruin our stuff.  Buildings provide shelter.  At night my house is warmer than the outside and during the day its cooler and that's pretty much always true without air conditioning or heating.  It's why as soon as real humans settle in any location they start building structures.  Currently the temperature system does not give any bonuses for being indoors so buildings provide no shelter related benefits.  Versed in both real life and other survival games, I found the lack of these benefits disappointing.

What is the current state of the game in regards to our building options?  I just mentioned that buildings do not affect temperature, but that is not entirely true.  Floors do affect temperature, but in a way that is so complicated I cannot accurately describe it.  I do know that putting a floor under a fire somehow makes the neighboring tiles get less heat so that a floored building is actually cooler in most places than one without with a floor.  Now for what we can build: 2 types of doors, 3 types of walls and 2 types of floors.  Looking just at walls: all are extremely resource intensive.  Imagine I want to build a 4x4 tile bakery.  That's 19 wall tiles leaving a space for a door.  I can either: grow 380 milkweed for pine panels, dig 19 non respawning boulders and carry them at snail speed back for stone walls, or gather 38 non-renewable clay for adobe.  Adobe is clearly the best, I would only have to farm 38 wheat and empty 7.6 clay pits.  Still, that's a lot of farming and use of non-renewable resources for one building.  I assume my bakery isn't the only building in town and if it's not, we are going to have to upgrade from adobe to stone/pine real fast.  Even using adobe and wood floors, I'm not certain I could build a bakery in one life, but that might just be my skill level?  But I’ve likely played over 50 hours and spent a good amount of time on the forums and onetech.  If I doubt I can make the simplest building in a fairly optimal life, how does that bode for newer players who see the trailer and are hyped about contributing?

It's clear there's a disconnect between the vision of the game and the reality of playing it.  I see very few buildings.  Most I see are for locking away weapons and food.  Buildings are almost never used as workshops.  I have a suspicion that a very small percent of the player base is doing most of the building.  Towns do not look anything like the trailer.  Here are some suggestions:
* Make buildings buffer temperature in some way.  This will give motivation to build.  A building’s’ utility will overtake its aesthetics as the primary reason to construct it. Even if the buff is small, it will add up over the generations that use the building.  I personally do not build because I cannot justify all the calories I am wasting for something that has marginal value.
* Add primitive buildings.  Grass walls, igloo (ice) walls, dirt floors (that look different from the biome ground).  This will make building more accessible to more players.  Simple materials could have weaker temp buffs than nicer materials.
* Fix pine panels to use less resources.  5 ropes per panel is ridiculous.  No one uses them but they are so pretty!
* Lengthen the time in which adobe walls are in the “cracking” state.  This gives people more time to fix the walls.  It also leads to an interesting choice: if I notice a cracking wall, it might not fall apart during my life.  I could leave it to my children… who in turn, might think the same thing.

Neo

Member

Registered: 2018-06-19

Posts: 336

Re: Construction and its place in the vision vs reality of the game

Not only that but space is an issue too, cluttering is bad enough outside let alone when your surrounded by walls. They also get easily griefed by people literally locking them up and throwing away the key for fun or to selfishly hoard it so they can have it next life.
Should be a way to smash down doors or stone walls, a multi person effort like the abobe walls.

Last edited by Neo (2018-06-24 01:34:04)

Realcooldude

Member

Registered: 2018-05-20

Posts: 133

Re: Construction and its place in the vision vs reality of the game

Bears, on the flip side walls keep us from expanding. Although we could just build walls around the bears!

Rebel

Member

Registered: 2018-03-28

Posts: 120

Re: Construction and its place in the vision vs reality of the game

Bears, on the flip side walls keep us from expanding. Although we could just build walls around the bears!

What do you mean walls keep us from expanding?

Last edited by Rebel (2018-06-24 03:01:09)

zennyrpg

Member

Registered: 2018-06-03

Posts: 98

Re: Construction and its place in the vision vs reality of the game

Should be a way to smash down doors or stone walls, a multi person effort like the abobe walls.

I wouldn't mind a way to tear down most walls (maybe not ancient stone).  As long as it was a multi click process that deterred griefers.  If buildings were useful, I could totally see your descendants tearing down one wall to expand or moving where the door is.

YAHG

Member

Registered: 2018-04-06

Posts: 1,347

Re: Construction and its place in the vision vs reality of the game

Should be a way to smash down doors or stone walls, a multi person effort like the abobe walls.

I wouldn't mind a way to tear down most walls (maybe not ancient stone).  As long as it was a multi click process that deterred griefers.  If buildings were useful, I could totally see your descendants tearing down one wall to expand or moving where the door is.

EVEN ancient stone.. Old adobe was a 2-3 man job to have even a HOPE of removing it.

---

"be prepared and one person cant kill all city, if he can, then you deserve it"  -pein
https://kazetsukai.github.io/onetech/#
https://onehouronelife.com/forums/viewtopic.php?id=1438

Potjeh

Member

Registered: 2018-03-08

Posts: 469

Re: Construction and its place in the vision vs reality of the game

Floors should be required for placing advanced stuff like shelves or stoves.

Neo

Member

Registered: 2018-06-19

Posts: 336

Re: Construction and its place in the vision vs reality of the game

Floors should be required for placing advanced stuff like shelves or stoves.

I think if buildings weren't so griefable then it might work. I could picture advanced industrial civs building factories and warehouses.

zennyrpg

Member

Registered: 2018-06-03

Posts: 98

Re: Construction and its place in the vision vs reality of the game

Floors should be required for placing advanced stuff like shelves or stoves.

Agree.  However this will not stop people from working in fields.  They'll just place one floor tile under the thing they need.  We need some motivation to enclose floors in walls.

Kinrany

Member

Registered: 2018-01-22

Posts: 712

Re: Construction and its place in the vision vs reality of the game

AFAIK one of the problems with buildings is that they are inherently multi-tile, and the game's engine doesn't like that.  And without multi-tile interaction there's no way to tell if you're inside a building or outside one.

One crazy option is to have single-tile buildings that are bigger on the inside.  The interior would be located in a separate world.

I wonder if it's possible to only allow building floors on tiles that are adjacent to two other floor or wall tiles.  This way it would be impossible to build floors with no walls at all.  Even then, an NxN square building would need N wall tiles, not 4N.

Last edited by Kinrany (2018-06-24 21:31:13)

zennyrpg

Member

Registered: 2018-06-03

Posts: 98

Re: Construction and its place in the vision vs reality of the game

AFAIK one of the problems with buildings is that they are inherently multi-tile, and the game's engine doesn't like that.  And without multi-tile interaction there's no way to tell if you're inside a building or outside one.

One crazy option is to have single-tile buildings that are bigger on the inside. The interior would be located in a separate world.

The game does do temperature calculations across tiles.  If a floor buffered the biome temp (made it more to the temp center) and walls blocked temp transfer (do they already?) then buildings could work within the existing system.  You'd put walls so less of the outside hot/ cold got in and floors to buffer the interior temp.  I think that is all possible but its hard to be sure.