Ok guys don’t laugh at me… I really like minecraft. I am a big fan of the technical mods where you can build new things. There are some mods that have entire wikis. I think its fun to see what I can do with these.
I don’t know if these ideas would require a major engine re-write, but I figure I’d throw them out there.
Flowing water: water is static. How about when it rans, rivers can overflow. You can dig pits and have water flow into them to block off mobs. Possibly use flowing water for power. Things can be added later. WHen it doesn’t ran, water recedes. Water freezes in the winter. one interesting thing is that if you are near a river, you can make pipes and flow the water near your shelter.
Electrical Grid: Can we build generates outside and then have it flow like in an electrical grid? You can make electrified fences. Instead of having to build a shelter around a car to get power you can make a generator outside and flow the water inside. You can have powered gates and doors. Interesting for traps. You can create machines and/or find machine parts and put together and power them. I think if you have the framework for it, people can add mods. So adding these things can be optional.
We had a lot of water suggestions already, and they are all awesome, but i think that, in the way that water works, we should, at least, wait for z levels.
Ah! Fair enough.
I’d like to see big flooding issues in the future, however late that is. Basement full of loot? Hope it has an airlock system of metal doors.
A better model for water flow as it relates to CATA might be dwarf fortress. But that game is practically a madness-fueled physics mockery simulator at times, and I wonder how much environment-processing/building might just lag down gameplay. Not sure how current CATA could handle such an addition.
Unless minecraft mods change water’s ‘rules’, I recall the generation of infinite water being both a bit wonky and unrealistic, though hugely useful and something that can be mastered. As such, it’s ‘unreal’ nature is very much an integral part of the game.
For comparison, Terraria’s limitation to two dimensions allowed them to run fluid dispersion and collection more realistically, in that bodies of water actually drain when waterfalling into new locations.
How would we want/expect water to be used or interacted with in cata? More realistic, or more designed to fill a functional role? Would you want preservation of the water’s mass in CATA? Or more like minecraft’s better-for-landscaping, worse-for-realism method?
I do agree that some level of interactivity with water would be quite interesting. I am considering how surviving the local weather could include said flooding of basements, or zombo barricades being washed away. Likewise, you could use moats as a part of your base’s defense, bring in water for farming, or dare to dump precious water down your entranceway, flooding/washing out mobs trying to get in. We really need better Z-levels for this.
These ideas would make the game further about environment survival/manipulation, and less about zombies, though - an ongoing process we’ve been seeing since this game started getting community-dev’d.
In DF Water is a main lag source, with the only things that can possibly beat it are pathfinding and the large amounts of temperature recalculations required for flowing lava.
Flowing water simulation is a recipe for disaster performance wise, it’s something that happens very fast and continuously, and also has potential to fan out to very large areas. Another major problem is what to do at the edges of the simulated area, for example a player is watching a pond fill, and the edge of it extends off the map area. It either has to load all contiguous map areas into memory to process them, or deal with the weird edge cases when they happen. Also it’s something people feel they have an intuitive grasp of, so if it’s ‘wrong’ by even a tiny bit it’s perceived to not work at all.
All that having been said, the best place to stick dynamic water in our game engine would be to make it a field. It already has a lot of the same propagation and update issues To get an idea of the performance impact, go into a town, light everything on fire, and walk around. That’s the kind of load you’d see any time you walked near any water.
Power distribution is less problematic overall, just a pain to implement. The linkage between power generating, storing and consuming items would have to be maintained on the overmap, and overmap/map interactions just kind of suck.
Well, it is already possible to build a vehicle around a building for indoor electronics, but having a vehicle skip tiles in order to simulate small wires would be nice, and powered doors and electric fences would be great things that would be useful on mobile vehicles too. I suspect that running an electric fence is very expensive, and a corpse stuck on one part could disable a large section of it…
Yeah, processing that live seemed problematic. I can’t actually play minecraft without still-standing water lagging me down. Haha. Oh god. Minecraft doesn’t even have real fluid dynamics.
Of course, it probably wouldn’t be that intensive to have backup versions of waterways that are substituted in when it rains or during a rainy-season. Sounds like a pain to code though…
IndustrialCraft would be the iconic example of such a mod, though there are so many “power grid” style setups (both magical or tech) that the concept could be applied to either.
In vanilla, you could also consider redstone to be a form of power grid.
In terms of liquid simulation, Minecraft has a fairly simplistic model that still impacts people’s performance. DF has one that I happen to like, though the performance hit while I drive a column into lava to bring it up into more of my fortress can be rather high.
Any source* you can pull water from is to be assumed ∞ because it’s a river, or a swamp. I have seen neither drain from the water useage of a single person. So they’d be assumed ∞ sources since you couldn’t actually drain them completely. This frees up the problem of simulating vast quantities of water at once. The next thing would be simulating the water flowing through canals, which I think is simulated in where if you throw enough items into a pit they spread into other pits around them.
If we make water a ‘field’ then it will take an assload of work to make all the fields for every single type of water and other liquid.
*Its not arbitrarily ∞, it’s just assumed that it is because it can’t be drained by a single man.