NodeCore is supposed to be a "player vs self" mental
challenge, neither tourism/spectacle, nor a "player vs
environment" conquest. Players are supposed to find
their own goals, as well as applying the effort to
achieve them, and the nature of the goals is
purposefully as open-ended as possible, ideally with
no bias toward any kind of "completionism."
The name "Hints" implied some kind of assistance, and
thus was inappropriate. The name "Challenges"
similarly implies an extrinsic source of motivation,
which the system is only marginally designed to
provide; especially, it helps new player gain some
momentum, but players are supposed to find their own
motivation eventually instead of chasing after
hint completion as a goal, especially since they will
miss the most compelling aspects of the game.
Somewhat experimentally, rename these once again
to "discovery"/"discoveries" and remove language that
suggests progress toward completion. Add stronger
language suggesting that there is much more to
discover outside of this, hinting at emergent systems
as an example
Under heavy lag conditions, physical entities may
land on the ground at any point during a time
step, but if they have a lot of horizontal velocity
then they may "slide" along the ground, and if we
only check for settling based on their pos at step
times, they may have already slid some distance
dependent on luck and the actual amount of
server lag. This means that under heavy lag
conditions, items may spread out inconsistently
from their landing positions and make a messy
pile.
Using the MT 5.3+ moveresult parameter of
entity steps, we can easily find out when the
initial ground contact occured, and use that as
the settling position, which should be more
consistent under lag conditions.
This has the effect of making entities more
consistently "sticky" so they always tend to
stick at the point of initial contact and rarely
slide or glance along the ground, unless they
hit an edge/corner.
Witness checks include data about the node in
place at the time that the witness even occurred,
so players are not awarded credit if the node they
see there was changed again afterwards. A lot of
old witness code inserted the witness right
before the node was changed, since the node
change was done as a tail call, but this does not
work with delayed witnessing because the
delayed witness data would be tied to the old
node, not the replacement one.
Moving witness to after node setting should fix
a number of broken hints that should have been
delayed-witnessable, e.g. brick bonding.
Instead of registering 12 separate recipes for
each anvil recipe, just register 2: one for each
temper, and do a second lookup for anvil types
in pre/post check. This should avoid having
to re-evaluate all the rest of the stuff for each
anvil/temper combination type.
We were using action log level for a lot of
things because by default MT does not seem
to capture info logs to stderr. On "production"
servers though this makes too much noise and
makes it hard to find actual player actions.
Servers that want info logging will just have
to configure/compile it in.
This is a design compromise to knock out the
worst offender in ABM cost, by requiring a node
that must be created by player action instead
of ubiquitous naturally-occuring nodes that all
need to be checked.
Leaching is really meant to be more of a minor
gameplay element anyway, for either skyblock
purposes, or for people who are bored enough
that they want to take on a challenge like a
neutral eco footprint; most normal players just
gather the materials from mapgen and hardly
bother with leaching recipes anyway.
- Hide the Challenges tab for players who don't have interact
privs and thus can't use them.
- If there are fewer tabs than the horizontal limit, expand all
remaining tabs to fill the horizontal space instead of leaving
a gap at the right side, which looks bad when there's a
scrollbar in the content below.
It's possible multiple soaking ABMs are registered
against a single node, and if this happens, make sure
that the qty and time fields in the cache are kept
separate the same way they are in the node meta.
- Removes repeating patterns, creates a richer and
fuller sound experience
- Larger areas fill sound volume out better instead of
just repeating more loudly
- Spread network traffic across multiple ticks better
to reduce packet spikes
Each node position has a set delay, between 0 and 1
second, that's fixed for that pos but varies more or
less randomly between positions. This ensures that
sounds loop with the same frequency and alignment
for a given single node, but desync across nodes.
Instead of statically-positioned wind sounds, many
of which are often outside of hearing range,
attach sounds to moving entities which often tend
to move across the player's position.
