Developer interview
Tumblin' Down by David Meece
Hi all. Not a whole lot to report for this month. I finally had a video interview for the developer position within my company -- apparently it's been delayed because of general reorganization troubles. I haven't heard anything since, but I think the interview went fairly well.
This month in ASCRS, I continued working on the menu for pending attacks. I made a fair amount of progress, but it's not quite at the point of actually working yet. The tricky aspect (well, one) of doing something that relies on network communications is keeping everyone involved synchronized. I want to let a player modify a pending attack since ASCRS is a tool to assist role-playing moreso than a strict game, but I have to keep all the other players informed of the changes and prevent them from creating conflicting changes. Toward that end, when a particular user wants to make edits, I have to have them first send a request for such to the host, so that it can say "Go ahead" or "You can look, but don't touch, somebody else is editing it right now". Furthermore, any changes made aren't finalized until the editing user says to save the changes, but I have to send chat messages about the tentative changes to everyone else so they can keep up with what's going on and not have to be info-dumped with the entire thing at once when the changes are saved.
On Zelda RPG, Tommy finally caught up with Esava out in Hyrule Field, at the same time that Esava caught up with Link and company. Link then popped the news that he was planning to go BACK TO TERMINA, to seek out an artifact that can help him defeat Ganondorf (probably referring to the Fierce Diety's Mask). As you can probably imagine, Tommy wasn't pleased to learn that he and Esava had half-killed themselves to get to Hyrule when they could've just waited in Termina for Link to come to them. >.<;
Meanwhile, Ganondorf grew impatient with his minions' lack of success in locating the Triforce of Wisdom. Oh hey, I forgot to mention that detail before, didn't I? With Zelda in his clutches, Ganondorf tried to extract the Triforce of Wisdom from her, and he succeeded...but it immediately fled. Ganondorf then turned Zelda over to the wind sorcerer Vaati (who is being played in this continuity as ambiguously villainous but definitely infatuated with Zelda) and started looking high and low for the escaped Triforce. It wound up, in large part due to an OOC dice roll, in the possession of the demon lord Ghirahim, who has some allegiance with Ganondorf but doesn't realise he's the reincarnation of his original master, Demise. Ghirahim is off in Termina having fun with the Triforce of Wisdom, with no clue that Ganondorf was looking for it. X)
Anyway! Ganondorf decided that if he BURNED ALL OF HYRULE TO A CRISP, the current holder of the Triforce of Wisdom would be dead and it would probably show up again. So he pulled a Sephiroth and cast Meteor, summoning big ol' boulders from the sky to rain down on the land. There were a few separate scenes about the reactions to this event in different geographic locations; I shook the dust of John in the Kakariko one and had him helping to evacuate folks to the caverns of Death Mountain. But before the danger could get too out of hand, THE THREE GODDESSES THEMSELVES, Din, Farore, and Nayru, made an appearance. OoO They snuffed out the majority of Ganondorf's meteor magic, then caused a humongous earth movement and flood, ushering our story into a Wind Waker-like environment (which, we have been assured, is a temporary change of setting just for the fun of it ;) ). Anyplace that needed to be saved from the flood, like random homesteads about Hyrule Field, Gerudo Fortress, and Kokiri Fortress, got pushed up as new mountains which then became islands amidst the ocean. Hyrule Castle and Kakariko were submerged, but the former was already uninhabited because of Ganondorf's malice goo and the latter was evacuated. For the Crimson Wolfos Inn, I came up with a little story that allowed it to survive AND become a movable house-boat. ;) A botched order for 10 barrels of ale resulted in 100 EMPTY barrels, which were packed into the cellar shortly before the catastrophes, and the support beams holding the building to its foundation were mysteriously mostly-chewed through by beavers which came and left through the escape tunnel. This resulted in an inn floating on barrels trapped in its cellar walls after the flood waters snapped it loose from the ground. X) Not a terribly realistic scenario, but close enough for Zelda purposes.
In the cat + fox scene (which is time-bubbled to before all that disaster stuff happens of course), the furry heroes decided they'd learned enough and headed back the way they came...only to run across the boy's tortured dream sequence again. o.o; Getting out of a nightmare isn't as easy as getting in after all. Kito and Tipper pondered aloud whether they could do something from within the dream to help the boy...and that attracted the attention of the Fear. +.+ Sheikah told the others to try and wake the kid up somehow, then darted at the Fear to distract it. So far luck has been with me on the dice rolls and Sheikah has evaded damage, despite the Fear being even stronger in the dream world than the waking one.
Starbound: Frackin Universe + Bounty Hunter update:
This one's a little unusual. I've already given a review of Starbound and spent way too much time playing it over and over again with different characters (in addition to making them different races, which is really just a cosmetic change, I had fun restricting some of them to certain weapon types). Well, more recently I played through it again, but this time with the Frackin' Universe mod. That and they released an update to Starbound that adds bounty hunting missions, so I figure I'll cover that too.
Frackin' Universe might be more accurately described as a huge collection of compatible mods. It includes new planet types/biomes, new resources, new monsters, TONS of new stuff to craft, new missions...y'know, just lots and lots of expansion. The missions are the main draw for me, and they're pretty involved, averaging about three times the size of the vanilla game's missions I would say. Of course, to stand a decent chance of beating them, you have to craft sufficient equipment...and that takes hours of material-gathering.
The trouble with Frackin' Universe is that there are so many new types of resource, and some of them are difficult to locate. In vanilla Starbound, there are different tiers of planets, and the higher tiers have resources that the lower-tier ones don't, plus the same resources the lower-tier planets have (mostly) in greater abundance. In Frackin' Universe, some resources only show up on certain types of planets. For example, relatively early on I struggled to proceed because a vital resource called protocite was needed to craft certain machines/armor/etc. Turns out protocite can only be found in proto-world biomes, and that only in pretty small and rare pockets...unless you know the secret. In proto-biomes, a special type of tree can be found. Normally trees are pretty much just background once you've gathered a comfortable amount of wood, so most players ignore them for the most part. Well, these trees actually drop a chunk of protocite when felled. So the best way to gather protocite, rather than digging for it like most resources, is to acquire a bunch of saplings for these trees (and unlike most trees they always generate exactly one sapling when felled), then plant and refell them over and over. Fortunately tree growth is unrealistically fast in this game, you can plant a sapling on your farm and come back a few minutes later to find a tree standing tall. Still, it takes a while to get past the stage of not having enough protocite to work with, and who knows where I'd be in the game if I hadn't discovered this trick. Frackin' Universe is chock-full of resource walls like this, creating an extremely high learning curve.
Adding to that frustration is that it takes a lot more equipment to explore effectively. In vanilla Starbound, each successive tier of planet requires an upgrade to your environmental protection pack (EPP) or you'll lose health to the environmental extremes -- radiation, cold, or heat. Frackin' Universe follows this same basic concept, but instead of upgrading a single EPP to handle all situations, you have to craft different EPPs for different hazards AND they still need to be upgraded to handle LEVELS of those hazards. :P There are also more types of hazards, like acidic or sulphuric environments, poisonous gas, electrical storms, and insanity-inducing atmospheres. Some planets combine two or even more of these hazards, through weather conditions or terrain or the effects of monster attacks. So in addition to the EPPs, it also pays to craft armor that resists these effects, or grow plants that provide temporary immunity, or slot augments into your EPPs to give them an extra effect. All that takes more resources, some of which may be pretty tough to find because they're on planets with hazards you haven't acquired defenses against yet. X)
Bottom line? Frackin' Universe is basically Starbound dialed up to 11. It's enjoyable if you really like gradually becoming more and more able to explore hazardous environments and take on challenging missions, but understand that it is an IMMENSE time-sink, even for those experienced with vanilla Starbound. If at all possible, I recommend playing it with somebody who's already familiar with its nuances so they can guide you to a reasonably efficient path for collecting and farming the resources needed to succeed.
Now, how about that Bounty Hunter update? This is a feature of vanilla Starbound as well, but it came out while I was in the midst of my Frackin' Universe run. The basic idea is that you are given missions to track down criminals or dangerous beasts, and you have to travel to different planets to accomplish them. The game actually already had a similar feature; NPCs you meet will occasionally have tasks for you to complete at certain locations and will reward you for doing them. The big difference is that the NPCs will give you a task on the same planet you're already on, at a location that already exists. Bounty hunter missions require you to travel to different planets, and...they often generate a special location like a criminal hideout.
The tricky part of this is that if the bounty hunter mission takes you to a planet you've already explored, the game doesn't have as much room to plunk down a hideout. They don't want you to have the cognitive dissonance of having a new structure appear where there wasn't one before, so they generate it in a spot that's unexplored. That's fine if the planet you're taken to hasn't been explored before; the game will generate the mission target somewhere close to your landing point and give you a compass pointing to it. If it doesn't have that option, though, it'll just say "Explore the planet for your target", and wait for you to get near a convenient ungenerated spot. This could even be someplace deep underground. That happened to me a lot early on because the first set of bounty hunter missions were set in the same vicinity (in terms of space-travel) as the game's starting point, and I'd explored a lot of the planets around there pretty thoroughly.
All in all, the Bounty Hunter update really isn't all that exciting, just a little variation on the existing mission system. It does at least give you something to do with the last big update (space combat) because some of the missions lead you to space stations. Just make sure to get in as much bounty hunting in a particular area as you can before wandering all over the planets involved, or it will take you much longer to get it done.
Click to viewHi all. Not a whole lot to report for this month. I finally had a video interview for the developer position within my company -- apparently it's been delayed because of general reorganization troubles. I haven't heard anything since, but I think the interview went fairly well.
This month in ASCRS, I continued working on the menu for pending attacks. I made a fair amount of progress, but it's not quite at the point of actually working yet. The tricky aspect (well, one) of doing something that relies on network communications is keeping everyone involved synchronized. I want to let a player modify a pending attack since ASCRS is a tool to assist role-playing moreso than a strict game, but I have to keep all the other players informed of the changes and prevent them from creating conflicting changes. Toward that end, when a particular user wants to make edits, I have to have them first send a request for such to the host, so that it can say "Go ahead" or "You can look, but don't touch, somebody else is editing it right now". Furthermore, any changes made aren't finalized until the editing user says to save the changes, but I have to send chat messages about the tentative changes to everyone else so they can keep up with what's going on and not have to be info-dumped with the entire thing at once when the changes are saved.
On Zelda RPG, Tommy finally caught up with Esava out in Hyrule Field, at the same time that Esava caught up with Link and company. Link then popped the news that he was planning to go BACK TO TERMINA, to seek out an artifact that can help him defeat Ganondorf (probably referring to the Fierce Diety's Mask). As you can probably imagine, Tommy wasn't pleased to learn that he and Esava had half-killed themselves to get to Hyrule when they could've just waited in Termina for Link to come to them. >.<;
Meanwhile, Ganondorf grew impatient with his minions' lack of success in locating the Triforce of Wisdom. Oh hey, I forgot to mention that detail before, didn't I? With Zelda in his clutches, Ganondorf tried to extract the Triforce of Wisdom from her, and he succeeded...but it immediately fled. Ganondorf then turned Zelda over to the wind sorcerer Vaati (who is being played in this continuity as ambiguously villainous but definitely infatuated with Zelda) and started looking high and low for the escaped Triforce. It wound up, in large part due to an OOC dice roll, in the possession of the demon lord Ghirahim, who has some allegiance with Ganondorf but doesn't realise he's the reincarnation of his original master, Demise. Ghirahim is off in Termina having fun with the Triforce of Wisdom, with no clue that Ganondorf was looking for it. X)
Anyway! Ganondorf decided that if he BURNED ALL OF HYRULE TO A CRISP, the current holder of the Triforce of Wisdom would be dead and it would probably show up again. So he pulled a Sephiroth and cast Meteor, summoning big ol' boulders from the sky to rain down on the land. There were a few separate scenes about the reactions to this event in different geographic locations; I shook the dust of John in the Kakariko one and had him helping to evacuate folks to the caverns of Death Mountain. But before the danger could get too out of hand, THE THREE GODDESSES THEMSELVES, Din, Farore, and Nayru, made an appearance. OoO They snuffed out the majority of Ganondorf's meteor magic, then caused a humongous earth movement and flood, ushering our story into a Wind Waker-like environment (which, we have been assured, is a temporary change of setting just for the fun of it ;) ). Anyplace that needed to be saved from the flood, like random homesteads about Hyrule Field, Gerudo Fortress, and Kokiri Fortress, got pushed up as new mountains which then became islands amidst the ocean. Hyrule Castle and Kakariko were submerged, but the former was already uninhabited because of Ganondorf's malice goo and the latter was evacuated. For the Crimson Wolfos Inn, I came up with a little story that allowed it to survive AND become a movable house-boat. ;) A botched order for 10 barrels of ale resulted in 100 EMPTY barrels, which were packed into the cellar shortly before the catastrophes, and the support beams holding the building to its foundation were mysteriously mostly-chewed through by beavers which came and left through the escape tunnel. This resulted in an inn floating on barrels trapped in its cellar walls after the flood waters snapped it loose from the ground. X) Not a terribly realistic scenario, but close enough for Zelda purposes.
In the cat + fox scene (which is time-bubbled to before all that disaster stuff happens of course), the furry heroes decided they'd learned enough and headed back the way they came...only to run across the boy's tortured dream sequence again. o.o; Getting out of a nightmare isn't as easy as getting in after all. Kito and Tipper pondered aloud whether they could do something from within the dream to help the boy...and that attracted the attention of the Fear. +.+ Sheikah told the others to try and wake the kid up somehow, then darted at the Fear to distract it. So far luck has been with me on the dice rolls and Sheikah has evaded damage, despite the Fear being even stronger in the dream world than the waking one.
Starbound: Frackin Universe + Bounty Hunter update:
This one's a little unusual. I've already given a review of Starbound and spent way too much time playing it over and over again with different characters (in addition to making them different races, which is really just a cosmetic change, I had fun restricting some of them to certain weapon types). Well, more recently I played through it again, but this time with the Frackin' Universe mod. That and they released an update to Starbound that adds bounty hunting missions, so I figure I'll cover that too.
Frackin' Universe might be more accurately described as a huge collection of compatible mods. It includes new planet types/biomes, new resources, new monsters, TONS of new stuff to craft, new missions...y'know, just lots and lots of expansion. The missions are the main draw for me, and they're pretty involved, averaging about three times the size of the vanilla game's missions I would say. Of course, to stand a decent chance of beating them, you have to craft sufficient equipment...and that takes hours of material-gathering.
The trouble with Frackin' Universe is that there are so many new types of resource, and some of them are difficult to locate. In vanilla Starbound, there are different tiers of planets, and the higher tiers have resources that the lower-tier ones don't, plus the same resources the lower-tier planets have (mostly) in greater abundance. In Frackin' Universe, some resources only show up on certain types of planets. For example, relatively early on I struggled to proceed because a vital resource called protocite was needed to craft certain machines/armor/etc. Turns out protocite can only be found in proto-world biomes, and that only in pretty small and rare pockets...unless you know the secret. In proto-biomes, a special type of tree can be found. Normally trees are pretty much just background once you've gathered a comfortable amount of wood, so most players ignore them for the most part. Well, these trees actually drop a chunk of protocite when felled. So the best way to gather protocite, rather than digging for it like most resources, is to acquire a bunch of saplings for these trees (and unlike most trees they always generate exactly one sapling when felled), then plant and refell them over and over. Fortunately tree growth is unrealistically fast in this game, you can plant a sapling on your farm and come back a few minutes later to find a tree standing tall. Still, it takes a while to get past the stage of not having enough protocite to work with, and who knows where I'd be in the game if I hadn't discovered this trick. Frackin' Universe is chock-full of resource walls like this, creating an extremely high learning curve.
Adding to that frustration is that it takes a lot more equipment to explore effectively. In vanilla Starbound, each successive tier of planet requires an upgrade to your environmental protection pack (EPP) or you'll lose health to the environmental extremes -- radiation, cold, or heat. Frackin' Universe follows this same basic concept, but instead of upgrading a single EPP to handle all situations, you have to craft different EPPs for different hazards AND they still need to be upgraded to handle LEVELS of those hazards. :P There are also more types of hazards, like acidic or sulphuric environments, poisonous gas, electrical storms, and insanity-inducing atmospheres. Some planets combine two or even more of these hazards, through weather conditions or terrain or the effects of monster attacks. So in addition to the EPPs, it also pays to craft armor that resists these effects, or grow plants that provide temporary immunity, or slot augments into your EPPs to give them an extra effect. All that takes more resources, some of which may be pretty tough to find because they're on planets with hazards you haven't acquired defenses against yet. X)
Bottom line? Frackin' Universe is basically Starbound dialed up to 11. It's enjoyable if you really like gradually becoming more and more able to explore hazardous environments and take on challenging missions, but understand that it is an IMMENSE time-sink, even for those experienced with vanilla Starbound. If at all possible, I recommend playing it with somebody who's already familiar with its nuances so they can guide you to a reasonably efficient path for collecting and farming the resources needed to succeed.
Now, how about that Bounty Hunter update? This is a feature of vanilla Starbound as well, but it came out while I was in the midst of my Frackin' Universe run. The basic idea is that you are given missions to track down criminals or dangerous beasts, and you have to travel to different planets to accomplish them. The game actually already had a similar feature; NPCs you meet will occasionally have tasks for you to complete at certain locations and will reward you for doing them. The big difference is that the NPCs will give you a task on the same planet you're already on, at a location that already exists. Bounty hunter missions require you to travel to different planets, and...they often generate a special location like a criminal hideout.
The tricky part of this is that if the bounty hunter mission takes you to a planet you've already explored, the game doesn't have as much room to plunk down a hideout. They don't want you to have the cognitive dissonance of having a new structure appear where there wasn't one before, so they generate it in a spot that's unexplored. That's fine if the planet you're taken to hasn't been explored before; the game will generate the mission target somewhere close to your landing point and give you a compass pointing to it. If it doesn't have that option, though, it'll just say "Explore the planet for your target", and wait for you to get near a convenient ungenerated spot. This could even be someplace deep underground. That happened to me a lot early on because the first set of bounty hunter missions were set in the same vicinity (in terms of space-travel) as the game's starting point, and I'd explored a lot of the planets around there pretty thoroughly.
All in all, the Bounty Hunter update really isn't all that exciting, just a little variation on the existing mission system. It does at least give you something to do with the last big update (space combat) because some of the missions lead you to space stations. Just make sure to get in as much bounty hunting in a particular area as you can before wandering all over the planets involved, or it will take you much longer to get it done.