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dat594

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About dat594

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  1. Terrafirma minimap

    I am in favor for a TFC map because reis may not always be compatible and I have a horrible memory, I forget where I put my keys and I live in a 8*12 dorm plus I have about 4 hours to play a week, not consecutive writing a map is a possibility but I would have to spend countless hours training my self to finally draw in proportions- which by that time someone would have probably created a map mod specifically for TFC side not- ruthless boot stomping is fine for a post on easy prospecting and floating gravel. not for constructive ideas that may not fit your view of TFC...we don't all have the grasp of Biox's plan for this mod as you who have been here since the beginning
  2. Kingdoms Brainstorming

    all already said I am making a compilation of the posts about block protections and economy posts that tie into block protection
  3. 131 from deathbytac0 Holy wall of text batman! That would keep an illiterate out for days, bro. I skimmed through that but I can help out. Jail blocks can be created by vanilla iron bars, you can still get them, I think, craftable with iron ingots dropped by zombies. Also the area of a hearthstone will leave evidence of greifers such as footprints, and maybe something like thread from clothes that will tell you the color of part of their skin, if that's possible. Anyway, I want to see iron bars made by wrought iron and maybe other metals if you are completely rich and just want to show off instead of make your yard look nice (red steel bars baybee!), I would like a nice hedge garden to place guard dogs in. 132 from cevkiv I forgot to add, and I'll say it here so it doesn't get lost in the Great Wall of China Text, that the Pigeon Mail System was made in mind with the thought of limiting the range at which players can read another player's text message. I think that there should be two chat modes, which can be switched between by players. The first mode would be OOC (Out of Character Mode). This would be the default mode for chatting, and would function exactly as chat does now: Everything anyone says (in OOC or RP Mode) can be seen by everyone else, and you are able to receive /tells. The second mode would be RP (Roleplaying) Mode. In this mode, you cannot see anything entered in the OOC chat channel, and other people in the RP chat mode can only see what you say if you are in physical proximity to them. Furthermore, in RP Mode, you can only receive tells from, and send tells to, a player in very close physical proximity to you (to simulate whispering). If this isn't added, the only purpose of the Pigeon Mail System is allowing players to send messages to others who are offline. If these changes are made to chat, then they won't affect people who choose to opt out of it (people who continue to use normal chat functionality), but will be invaluable for people who choose to roleplay, as it would be the only way for communicating between settlements. page 13 133 from cevkiv I really hope you and Bioxx do consider adding some sort of Pigeon Mail System in with the Kingdoms segment of development. It would really go a long way to making a period-appropriate method of communication between settlements. Except I think they actually used ravens. I can't remember. Anyway, it would be invaluable to have this system if you do end up adding OOC and RP modes of chat, which I would also really like to see implemented, and I don't think those would actually be that hard. 134 from bsb23 Mileaos: NPC's won't be playing that big of a role in cities at most they will become guards it would seem. Also we don't want all buildings to built off plans, we want them to be built the way the people want it and by the people. cevkiv: Pigeons sound like a good idea to me but what if any animal could be used for a messenger just pigeons would be faster and more dependent than say a pig. 135 from cevkiv View Postbsb23, on 12 August 2012 - 11:08 PM, said: Mileaos: NPC's won't be playing that big of a role in cities at most they will become guards it would seem. Also we don't want all buildings to built off plans, we want them to be built the way the people want it and by the people. cevkiv: Pigeons sound like a good idea to me but what if any animal could be used for a messenger just pigeons would be faster and more dependent than say a pig. Because, historically, pigs weren't used as messengers. Pigeons were. Pigeons were used thousands of years ago, and even in World War 1. Also, using pigeons that don't actually have a model, and are just used as an abstraction, removes the need to make a model, to animate it, and to program the pathing for an AI. Also, what do you do if the pigeon has to travel over unloaded chunks? 136 from dunk cevkiv, on 12 August 2012 - 11:14 PM, said: Also, using pigeons that don't actually have a model, and are just used as an abstraction, removes the need to make a model, to animate it, and to program the pathing for an AI. Also, what do you do if the pigeon has to travel over unloaded chunks? I would probably add pigeons in as a mob that you would have to capture, but I agree, once the pigeon flies off with your message, it would disappear and then arrive at it's destination at the correct time. page 14 137 from pyrocantaes Wow this thread is getting big .. 14 pages and growing .. not a great way to consolidate ideas as no-one (me included) is going to read through 14 pages just to see if what they want to say has been said already.. So (not having read 14 pages).. There are already (at least) 3 minecraft mods that have attempted to simulate economies, 2 of which allow the player to start and manage a town (ala the home stone system). Millenaire is probably the most advance economic model allowing the player to trade with towns, the result of which causes the towns to grow and expand. If I remember correctly (a while since I've played this mod) the player can eventually form new towns/villages as well. I'm not sure how advance the npc town->town trading is. Mine Colony - another mod in the same vein as Millenaire but based on an old PC game (Anno1602). Never really got beyond the basics stage and had a few issues with building placement. Single town controlled by the player who also decided building placement. Sim-U-Craft - by far the bast player controlled town mod. Again I've not played this in a while. This mod imposes actions on the player forcing them to manage the town (ala sim-city on which its based). Residents arrive and require housing. They then require feeding and jobs. Houses can be designed by the player and then replicated by builders. Building placement is totally player controlled. This mod is SSP only and the author has no desire atm to make it SMP compatible but it is Forge based. I would love to see this mod integrated with Terrafirma craft as its the one that I thnk aspire to the same sort of ideals as TFC does. But from a long term perspective in terms of economics, Anno1602 serves as a good model and sort of fits with the resources already present in TFC. The problem is then creating the towns and resource drivers in the first place. 138 from scooterdanny Eh, i'm not in favor of Npc's or at least conventional ones, they just are out of place in this mod. 139 from inertburger After a debate with some of my friends on the ideas of a sandbox game we eventually came to an agreement on the nature of anti-grief (I know the topic is a dead horse. However, it is important to find the best possible solution for such a serious issue). Wall-of-text ensues: One of the biggest issues discussed with my friends is that people can make mistakes. That and the fact that they are "god" incarnated as an admins. Normally I would be okay an admin removing trolls and griefers from an objective based game. You are already playing against carefully calculated game mechanics (hopefully), a griefer interfere's with these mechanics. Example: team killing in an FPS is inexcusable if it loses you the match, that world is over and you cannot recover it. You lost and you can only hope to do better in your next world. However in a sandbox game like minecraft being griefed is a set back, not an end of your world as you know it, the world persists and so does your character, even in death. Because of this we noted that an Admin is more of a god than an enforcer of "justice". We realise they hold the right to ban at will, but we hope that the anti-grief mechanic will make that use of power a rarity. I took the biggest stance against "ban griefer" as it violates the transparency I want in a sandbox. By violation of transparency I mean an overt use of out-of-game force (I consider it "out-of-game", as not all players have access to this ability; see "immersion breaking"). I went as far to say remove admins ban mechanic entirely, but that assumes a "perfect" solution to the issue of griefing. I am harshly against human moderation, if you look at most justice systems they even admit that the system is not perfect and innocent people are punished from time to time. A good game should never punish someone that did nothing wrong. Our discussion finally arrived at the point of game-oriented anti-grief. Simply put, the game is a barrier to stealing, killing, blowing up, griefing, etc. other people. Someone suggested spawn protection for cities, but we didn't see perfect protection of possessions being a solution to this. This does not address the issue precisely, more of going after a rabbit with a cannon. This doesn't differentiate between gameplay and griefing. We've used chemotherapy to try to cure a cold. People will still be able to grief you when they join the city. Their punishment? Get kicked out. Another person suggested that stolen possessions are returned. What if they've already used them? Or sold them? Or threw them into lava? Griefing could provide and avenue for an insurance service or hiring people to defend your cities. Unfortunately this can also be a huge problem. Server Capacity. Some of the best servers I've seen can host 250 people on vanilla. With TFC? I'd conservatively say 100, if not much less as processing power goes up with this mod dramatically, take multiple concurrent chunks loaded and several chunks being updated at a time, and you're probably stressing the hardware to its limits. So lets say 100 people can ever be on a server at one time. Now we either have to choose timezones we're allowing in as to maintain a consistent online population or there will be times that less than 10 people are online at one time. Chances that all of these people will be defending each settlement? Very low unless there are only a few settlements, say five or so. This means any one of these ten people can go steal from one of these settlements. This is because there is no enforceability, like there is in the real world, and the only reason why we don't live in total anarchy. There is a watchdog, and people have to take risks. We ended up at risk vs reward gameplay. No griefer, or marauder, or thief, should be able to ruin three hours of work with thirty seconds of planning. Theres needs to be a time investment and then an investment of this work and time on ruining someone elses work and time. This risk vs reward provides elation when things go well. When you fail, it may dissuade you from stealing, killing, etc. again. Either way, the aggressor needs to be at the very least evenly matched with a settlement, if not flat outmatched if its just one man versus a settlement (this is an expansion of my earlier post towards the bottom of page seven). To overcome the lone perpetrator when your entire village is logged off will require some sort of standing force, such as guards. These may require a special building, a certain amount of bread, and a weekly to monthly payment. We think of this assertion of paying for protection as normal. Why should a thief not have to pay something (time, materials) to get your hard earned work? He may need tough armor, a good weapon, or even buddies to back him up, or else get swarmed by guards and just die. In fact it shouldn't be unreasonable to say that you need a minimum number of people to steal from or attack a village. Make the guards constantly respawn when they are bested(untill A.I. is improved). One man should not be an unstoppable army. This lets people group up and form mercenary bands if they want to pit their steel against the world. How far can you get with your wits and sword kind of gameplay? But death isn't an appropriate punishment as in a sandbox you get infinite "do-overs". Instead when attacking a town, there could be a chance of getting wounded, and fatal blows inflict sever wounds. These wounds could persist on the character for days, weeks, months, until healed. They would penalize certain stats like max runspeed, max damage, hunger consumption, the possibilites are enormous. They could be treated to heal faster, lessen severity, etc. Some could even make you bleed out if left untreated. This would be yet another risk to the attacker, as the villagers may gain a resistance to wounds when defending their settlement, call it "quick treatment" , "homefield advantage" , "triage" or the like. The name is unimportant, the implication is what is necessary. Make a griefer or a raider think twice. Now why am I discussing combat in a kingdom related post? Because current combat mechanics and penalty for dying are too binary for this solution (unfortunately); that is whomever is better geared is more likely to win, especially as the gear differential increases. My final point is on NPC's in general. As the available human player population goes down, the number of NPC's needed goes up. That is, a village (at least if the inhanitants are sane) should always have some way to defend itself. We need a proactive solution to griefing, not organizing a man hunt after the fact when that player could be anywhere in the game world. This retroactive solution doesn't punish someone for wasting your time, it provides validation for their action making you waste more looking for them. TL;DR: The defense against unsavory conduct should occur before/during the deed, not after. Time investment versus time stolen needs to be equal, I.E. four hours to get a set of bronze armor, Thief took three to five hours to steal it. 140 from legendary_cookey Block Protection seems like a good idea, but to me it feels a bit overpowered. If you can simply protect blocks and make them unbreakable, it really removes the ability to rob someone... which wouldn't be realistic. I know the goal of the mod is not realism, but it is still useful to have some. Number one, doors should have locks. Only the player with a key can get into a certain door. Also, maybe a lock pick to be able to pick those locks. Number two, if blocks are protected then they should not be simply unbreakable, they should just take much longer to break. Something like 2 or 3 minutes to break a protected block such as wood, and have a linear formula to multiply the block's original break time. Windows should still be easy to break, but you could maybe take damage when you break it with your fist? Glass shards hurt. Number three, in real life detecting who broke something is impossible without some neat CSI stuffs. Players who break blocks should leave something behind, maybe a fingerprint or a footprint that can be matched up to a player. It wouldn't be overly impossible to match it up, maybe being able to use a new type of dust to identify the print and right click the player with it to see if it is a match. Punishments should be enforced more than in real life though, as it is easier to commit crimes in Minecraft or TFC than it is to commit them in real life. You should lose all the items you have in your inventory, owe the town money, and move down a rank in society as well as being put in prison for a TFC month or two. Heh, you could also be banished from the town and not be allowed to have a home nearby. This would allow better law enforcement and would encourage players to not commit crimes. 141 from jed1314 Oh god, that escalated quickly I go away to a festival and that is the weekend that this thread gets started ? T.T I can't be expected to read through 14 pages of text before making suggestions, so I will give a quick summary of my ideas, and you guys who have seen the thread develop can tell me which have already been covered comprehensively enough: A town "marking" system, which will not just protect blocks and make a small town indestructible. Towns should be able to go to war and do some damage A coin based economy, preferably with a minting system which would allow users to differentiate between official currency and fake currency (fake currency should still be craftable). The ability to build a designated "prison" area where rule breaking players could be sent. Some kind of siege weapons to go along with war. A UI for political relations between towns, so that you can easily see the current political climate. 142 from jed1314 bsb23, on 14 August 2012 - 10:05 AM, said: Or a summary, but ya jed most of that has been covered except for the UI (did you mean GUI?) which would be great for quick summary but i don't know how it would be done a little more detail would be great. Everything else has been agreed on minus plot protections. They could be a major problem with warfare as both teams would need to agree to war. Not to mention greifers need to be able to do something, we don't them greifing but instead they will become petty criminals stuck to only theft and vandalism. They will be easier to stop and catch apparently. Edit: oh and we have pretty much agreed that currency will be based on the town as some people like barter only towns. An idea dunk had was that when somebody mints a coin it has there name on it to prevent counterfeiting. Thanks for bringing me up to speed I did indeed mean GUI :L .. Basically, the idea was that if there are 3 states "War" "Peace" and "Alliance", then this GUI would list the town you belong to's political relations with every other town on the server. That way, secret alliances could still form, but it would be easy to keep track of who you were fighting against etc. It would simply be a list of the towns names then either 1 bar beside which said the state of relations, or 3 bars with the relevant one lit up or something... Perhaps rather than agreeing to war (which is silly because then people would decline if they thought they might lose) there should be a server wide warning and a 24 hour "grace period" where the aggressor still can't attack ? I like the idea of allowing crime to continue, I think disabling block destruction when not at war, but allowing looting could be the answer. Maybe non allied users could only open wooden doors, so you can still protect your goods, but at a cost. 143 from kinjirum I support the idea of making a system whereby there can be authority and jails to be used by it. Jailing may suck, but it's better than a ban, and if it's a serious griefing incident, who really cares for their fate? That allows for a system where artificial container restrictions are not needed. Of course, we could also have locks and keys and such (I'd love to have skills like lockpicking, but I digress.) 144 from jed1314 Scooterdanny, on 14 August 2012 - 02:43 PM, said: Well, stone is unbreakable by hand so, ya know, just toss em in there, and they shouldnt be able to leave, oh wait, we cannot make metal/stone doors, hmm... Is it ? I thought with enough determination you could break most stone blocks (in game of course). You could make a horrible "pit" style prison where you wipe everyones inventory and then put them at the bottom of a pit in the middle of the town .. You could even make them fight to the death for their freedom .. And then not give them it when one wins 145 from too-damn-much View PostJed1314, on 14 August 2012 - 02:16 PM, said: -snip- i think the wars and war declarations idea is cool too, but at the same time i caution against making it too easy to declare war on other towns, that's precisely the reason eve online has a ingame currency cost attached to declaring war on another player run corporation so that the big ones can't just declare war on every non-npc group they notice exists as a means of griefing, maybe you should be required to craft and sacrifice a few weapons or maybe even a piece of armor and a weapon if it's desired to make wars really a thing to not declare lightly. hell maybe the quality/durability of the stuff you pay to declare a war could modify the length that the declaration is valid for. page 15 146 from scooterdanny Ehh... this isn't an mmo, wars should be able to be declared at the drop of a hat, but the other kingdoms might become wary, or even join the fight on the other side to get someone while they are occupied. 147 from barkingnoise InertBurger, on 13 August 2012 - 07:00 PM, said: -snip- I agree wholeheartedly on that it needs to be harder/more demanding to inflict damage on player-constructed things, but I don't agree on introducing a Guard NPC. I'm more inclined to the Guard Dog idea. That said, introducing a 'new' sort of NPC doesn't alleviate the problem of things being to easy to grief or destroy. I think settlements should take longer to destroy. In real life, if you want to destroy a house, you can set it on fire (assuming it isn't make of rock). You can't really break large chunks of it without some sort of explosive or siege equipment. You can have at it with something hard but it won't make much impact unless you stand there for a long time (try breaking a wooden house with just one axe). I want to emulate this difficulty (as well as the danger when it comes to fire and explosives). One simple way to emulate the difficulty of destroying things is by the system used in Civcraft which requires you to 'break' something multiple times until it actually breaks, although perhaps balancing it a bit and not making it directly "reinforcable" (although it currently seems to be the most practical option). Fires should spontaneously spawn further away from a bigger fire, so the safety distance is increased (and people standing too close are in danger of getting burnt) Breaking stone (ceilings, halls and walls) can be dangerous already because of cave-ins. The biggest problem right now is that things are too easy to break. Although it should be (for the owner) it still shouldn't be (for griefers). Dilemma. 148 from scooterdanny The civcraft idea was already suggested a few pages back, fire should not be made more dangerous, burning down a whole city would be too easy. cave in's don't happen with artificial stone, like smooth, or bricks. 149 from jed1314 Too-DAMN-Much, on 14 August 2012 - 03:11 PM, said: i think the wars and war declarations idea is cool too, but at the same time i caution against making it too easy to declare war on other towns, that's precisely the reason eve online has a ingame currency cost attached to declaring war on another player run corporation so that the big ones can't just declare war on every non-npc group they notice exists as a means of griefing, maybe you should be required to craft and sacrifice a few weapons or maybe even a piece of armor and a weapon if it's desired to make wars really a thing to not declare lightly. hell maybe the quality/durability of the stuff you pay to declare a war could modify the length that the declaration is valid for. Firstly, this: View PostScooterdanny, on 14 August 2012 - 03:16 PM, said: Ehh... this isn't an mmo, wars should be able to be declared at the drop of a hat, but the other kingdoms might become wary, or even join the fight on the other side to get someone while they are occupied. What danny said is true. Think of it this way. If there is one big town that has lets say a full 1/3 of the servers pop (this would be actively discouraged, at least on my server ) then that town goes to war with everyone. In retaliation the other 2/3 of players on the server band together in a temporary alliance. The aggresive town is facing enemies on all fronts, and perhaps the town that used to supply their iron/food/whatever isn't doing it anymore. The town will lose. The comparison to Eve is flawed because in Eve you can get whole fleets of ships, whereas in TFC you will only ever be one man, so no matter how big and powerful you are, numbers are still an advantage, which means tactful diplomacy 150 from barkingnoise Scooterdanny, on 14 August 2012 - 04:00 PM, said: The civcraft idea was already suggested a few pages back, fire should not be made more dangerous, burning down a whole city would be too easy. cave in's don't happen with artificial stone, like smooth, or bricks. I know it has already been mentioned, I was just applying it to the context. Why shouldn't fire be made more dangerous? It used to be very hazardous - now it might slice of a part of your house. Besides, it doesn't need to be made that hazardous again, just make it's dispersion larger (or add like fireballs flying from a large enough fire). Cave-ins happens to smooth stone though, doesn't it? Or do you mean the stones made with the chisel? I remember "smooth stone" not being exactly the same like in vanilla, but yeah, that can be made to cave in by removing the pillars/supports (if it's used as a building material). Anyway, most people might not use that kind of stone so cave-ins as an anti-griefer tool might not be relevant. 151 from scooterdanny Because it would be the almighty griefing tool, that's why. All you need to do, is sneak into a city, start a fire, boom 2 minutes later, entire city is gone. There is just too much potential for it. Also, by smoothstone, i mean SmoothedStone. So, yeah cave in's will not happen in artifical stone, unless they quarried around it, which is entirely too much work lol. 152 from cevkiv Any formal, hard-coded system for declaring/initiating war between two parties should not be implemented. War should be purely a social construct. There is no need to add a mechanic for something that can be accomplished simply by player consensus. 153 from too-damned-much Scooterdanny, on 14 August 2012 - 03:16 PM, said: Ehh... this isn't an mmo, wars should be able to be declared at the drop of a hat, but the other kingdoms might become wary, or even join the fight on the other side to get someone while they are occupied. then what's to stop people just joining every server they can find, declaring war on every single town, using NEI to give themselves full top tier armor and weapons and essentially having the enjoyment of every other player on the server under their thumb until they get bored with it? not really much of a good point you tried to make there, sure it's not an MMO and i'm not saying it is, but i'm sure people will still want to ruin other people's fun, even if on a much smaller scale than usual and giving them such an extremely easy and at the drop of a hat way to do so is just recipe for disaster, hell encouraging it arguably. 154 from scooterdanny What's to stop them, is needing to have an established town, Using NEI to spawn items requires OP. So really i don't understand what the problem is. 155 from cevkiv Scooterdanny, on 14 August 2012 - 09:49 PM, said: What's to stop them, is needing to have an established town, Using NEI to spawn items requires OP. So really i don't understand what the problem is. Please explain exactly what the point of this "War" mechanic would be, and why it is necessary? It seems to me that it's an unneeded addition. 156 from scooterdanny War could allow for block breakage if not already enabled on a server, and would allow the leaders of factions to officially state their relations. also to allow for unified attacks, rather than just rag tag groups of 4 guys fighting, instead 20-40 men all in one glorious battle. 157 from cevkiv Scooterdanny, on 14 August 2012 - 10:59 PM, said: War could allow for block breakage if not already enabled on a server If block breakage is disabled, it's disabled for a reason. Because the admin doesn't want people breaking the blocks to begin with. Therefore, there is no reason to add a function that will do absolutely nothing to begin with. View PostScooterdanny, on 14 August 2012 - 10:59 PM, said: , and would allow the leaders of factions to officially state their relations. I don't see how this is necessary. It adds needless complication onto something that doesn't need it. It's far easier and simpler to simply have the players themselves decide what the relations are. "Hey, Bob, are we trading with Larrytown?" "No, Steve, Larrytown is full of assholes." View PostScooterdanny, on 14 August 2012 - 10:59 PM, said: also to allow for unified attacks, rather than just rag tag groups of 4 guys fighting, instead 20-40 men all in one glorious battle. Once again, you don't need some complicated mechanic for this. Having this mechanic won't magically make people cooperate. They have to do that on their own. Therefore, the mechanic is still unnecessary. If people want to fight a "glorious battle" they will fight a "glorious battle". This "war" mechanic can't make them do that. page 16 158 from scooterdanny Scooterdanny, on 14 August 2012 - 10:59 PM, said: War could allow for block breakage if not already enabled on a server If block breakage is disabled, it's disabled for a reason. Because the admin doesn't want people breaking the blocks to begin with. Therefore, there is no reason to add a function that will do absolutely nothing to begin with. View PostScooterdanny, on 14 August 2012 - 10:59 PM, said: , and would allow the leaders of factions to officially state their relations. I don't see how this is necessary. It adds needless complication onto something that doesn't need it. It's far easier and simpler to simply have the players themselves decide what the relations are. "Hey, Bob, are we trading with Larrytown?" "No, Steve, Larrytown is full of assholes." View PostScooterdanny, on 14 August 2012 - 10:59 PM, said: also to allow for unified attacks, rather than just rag tag groups of 4 guys fighting, instead 20-40 men all in one glorious battle. Once again, you don't need some complicated mechanic for this. Having this mechanic won't magically make people cooperate. They have to do that on their own. Therefore, the mechanic is still unnecessary. If people want to fight a "glorious battle" they will fight a "glorious battle". This "war" mechanic can't make them do that. 159 from cevkiv Furthermore, in the second example, about faction relations, not having some hard-coded mechanic allows for more political intrigue. If two towns are in opposition to each other, you could have people from one town working behind the backs of their fellows as saboteurs, or engaging in clandestine trading with the enemy. The fewer restrictions you put on players, the more emergent behaviour you get. You don't want to needlessly restrict the player's options of interaction. The only thing absolutely needed is a form of block protection. A subset of block protection is protection of chests. I do not suggest making blocks completely invulnerable, nor making chests 100% secure forms of item storage. There needs to be a balance between security allowed and the freedom of other players to adopt other playstyles other than "I mine things and make things." You want players to have the options to be roving bandits. You want the option for players to raid others. This can be accomplished without needless mechanics and abstraction. Instead of forcing some model of government upon players via an in-game mechanic related to a town, you let the players decide on the form of government. It's an absolute dictatorship by default, because one person and one person only is in charge of dictating who can build in the protected area, but that does not preclude other forms of government. If the creator of the town wants it to be a democracy, it can be a democracy. If they want a communism they can enforce a communism. And so on, and so on. These things should not be hard-coded mechanics, but emergent behaviour that occurs when players band together for a common cause. Scooterdanny, on 14 August 2012 - 11:30 PM, said: Now that's just being stubborn lol, if they want a setting that allows no rogue block breaking, but allows seiges to break blocks, i like that. And nesissity is a funny thing, we don't NEED most any of these feautures, they are nice to have, and if you don't like them, don't use them. Have you never played a factions server before? and i realize it doesnt make them cooperate, but encourages it. Have you read anything I've written on the subject? It's entirely possible to create a mechanic that allows not only for block protection, but for bypassing of block protection by determined players without the need for some "war" mechanic. And if you can do it without the mechanic, you should do it without the mechanic. There is a principle in engineering called "KISS" -- Keep It Simple, Stupid. The more complicated and complex you make something the more points there are for failure of the system and behavior you don't intend. [edit] fixed spelling error 160 from scooterdanny I didn't suggest a hardcoded restriction? All i want is a little Gui, that shows relations, and allows for leaders to edit them, and others to see it. there need be no restriction of innovation, with what most of the suggestions here state. Sigh, also just suggestions here cevkiv, no need to get worked up, some people like warring servers, some don't. 161 from cevkiv Furthermore, if you were paying attention, I'm not saying that there should be no way for people to go to war with each other. I'm simply suggesting that there does not need to be a specific war mechanic, nor a GUI for determining the relationships between settlements. Both of those things (the disposition of two settlements between each other, and war between two groups) can be achieved without specific game-enforced mechanics. 162 from enzer cevkiv, on 14 August 2012 - 11:42 PM, said: Furthermore, if you were paying attention, I'm not saying that there should be no way for people to go to war with each other. I'm simply suggesting that there does not need to be a specific war mechanic, nor a GUI for determining the relationships between settlements. Both of those things (the disposition of two settlements between each other, and war between two groups) can be achieved without specific game-enforced mechanics. Sure, there is really no need for a GUI if it is just two communities going through day to day politics of trading and bartering land rights until someone pisses off the other and they go to war to settle a dispute (just as an example), but on larger servers, where you have many many different communities all with different levels of political standing (allied, neutral, trading partner, bad standing, war, etc) it would be nice to have all this information stored and visible at the cities homestone rather than on a massive wall of signs that would require (depending on the size of the server and instability of the leaders) a lot of rearrangement. That is sloppy, it is also, more importantly, slow. Having it as a viewable GUI of "Political Standings and Relations" would be a nice addition that doesn't force restrictions on the playerbase and will allow new users to figure out the information on their own as well as allow city leaders to easily keep up on news in the world and think accordingly on what they should do next. Doing this would also help take a step of having all the towns information stored within the homestone. Thinking over this I really can't find a con to just having the information stored in a clean format that everyone would know how to find and the less players rely on giant walls of signs to convey information the better (or at least until Jeb decides to redo how signs and lettering work so that each letter isn't an individually rendered entity and not just, you know, a texture). It isn't forcing players into a system, if they don't want to fill in their cities standings with others, it will just now show up. I would think of this as adding tools for servers to develop how they want their kingdoms to work, not strict systems they are forced to comply by. As for an actual "war" mechanic, I think this could be worked around. Again, make it a tool for people to use if they so wish, not a strict system. A "war" mechanic can be taken a bunch of different ways. -You could go with a "capture" system where two towns going to war with each other can claim land as they conquer areas of land, by this I mean not land that is given by the default townstone, but any land that is acquired through upgrades could have their own stone that extends your bubble of influence, a few conditional rules such as the land being conquered must have at least one side designated as neutral or owned by another nation can only be conquered (so as to prevent people storming deep into enemy territory and claiming land there, doesn't make sense, you'd have to eat at them from the outside borders, this also allows for land disputes). You conquer land by damaging the enemies territory stone to a certain point and then placing your stone on top of theirs, after a certain amount of time, the land becomes yours. This would provide servers that want a high stakes political game play aspect tools to do so, if you don't want to use this system, you could simply ignore it. -You could make it so that two towns that are flagged as warring with each other have different death penalties. By this I mean you have two warring nations, if Soldier from Nation A kills Soldier from Nation B, Soldier B has a timer before he can enter the fray again. This prevents people from just respawning instantly at their beds and doing combat, creating a never ending wall of bodies to battle. It would also means that the winning combatant just got rewarded with some new gear. This would only apply with players at war attacking each other, that way if civilian from Nation A falls off his roof and dies, he doesn't have to wait because his town is under siege. I mean, there is a lot you can do with this system and still present it as tools for players to use and not just strict modes of play you MUST comply by. 163 from dunk cevkiv, on 14 August 2012 - 11:42 PM, said: Furthermore, if you were paying attention, I'm not saying that there should be no way for people to go to war with each other. I'm simply suggesting that there does not need to be a specific war mechanic, nor a GUI for determining the relationships between settlements. Both of those things (the disposition of two settlements between each other, and war between two groups) can be achieved without specific game-enforced mechanics. Sure, there is really no need for a GUI if it is just two communities going through day to day politics of trading and bartering land rights until someone pisses off the other and they go to war to settle a dispute (just as an example), but on larger servers, where you have many many different communities all with different levels of political standing (allied, neutral, trading partner, bad standing, war, etc) it would be nice to have all this information stored and visible at the cities homestone rather than on a massive wall of signs that would require (depending on the size of the server and instability of the leaders) a lot of rearrangement. That is sloppy, it is also, more importantly, slow. Having it as a viewable GUI of "Political Standings and Relations" would be a nice addition that doesn't force restrictions on the playerbase and will allow new users to figure out the information on their own as well as allow city leaders to easily keep up on news in the world and think accordingly on what they should do next. Doing this would also help take a step of having all the towns information stored within the homestone. Thinking over this I really can't find a con to just having the information stored in a clean format that everyone would know how to find and the less players rely on giant walls of signs to convey information the better (or at least until Jeb decides to redo how signs and lettering work so that each letter isn't an individually rendered entity and not just, you know, a texture). It isn't forcing players into a system, if they don't want to fill in their cities standings with others, it will just now show up. I would think of this as adding tools for servers to develop how they want their kingdoms to work, not strict systems they are forced to comply by. As for an actual "war" mechanic, I think this could be worked around. Again, make it a tool for people to use if they so wish, not a strict system. A "war" mechanic can be taken a bunch of different ways. -You could go with a "capture" system where two towns going to war with each other can claim land as they conquer areas of land, by this I mean not land that is given by the default townstone, but any land that is acquired through upgrades could have their own stone that extends your bubble of influence, a few conditional rules such as the land being conquered must have at least one side designated as neutral or owned by another nation can only be conquered (so as to prevent people storming deep into enemy territory and claiming land there, doesn't make sense, you'd have to eat at them from the outside borders, this also allows for land disputes). You conquer land by damaging the enemies territory stone to a certain point and then placing your stone on top of theirs, after a certain amount of time, the land becomes yours. This would provide servers that want a high stakes political game play aspect tools to do so, if you don't want to use this system, you could simply ignore it. -You could make it so that two towns that are flagged as warring with each other have different death penalties. By this I mean you have two warring nations, if Soldier from Nation A kills Soldier from Nation B, Soldier B has a timer before he can enter the fray again. This prevents people from just respawning instantly at their beds and doing combat, creating a never ending wall of bodies to battle. It would also means that the winning combatant just got rewarded with some new gear. This would only apply with players at war attacking each other, that way if civilian from Nation A falls off his roof and dies, he doesn't have to wait because his town is under siege. I mean, there is a lot you can do with this system and still present it as tools for players to use and not just strict modes of play you MUST comply by. 164 from enzer Then I guess I am still misunderstanding what Bioxx means when he says he wants the Home Stone to be "a way for players to easily learn what they need to about a town such as laws or w/e else." For me, knowing a towns political standing with other towns is a very important thing to know, it would also allow players who haven't been on the server in a while figure out what has been going on recently if they get on and no one from their town is currently on. I, for one, would hate to log on and find out that my town might be at war with someone, but I don't know who because the enemy town isn't replying to me, what if I'm doing trades with that town? I walk over there hoping to drop off some charcoal or what have you and they gut me in the streets, or I do successfully trade with them and then my cities leader finds out and has me killed for being a traitor? 165 from dunk Enzer, on 15 August 2012 - 12:54 AM, said: Then I guess I am still misunderstanding what Bioxx means when he says he wants the Home Stone to be "a way for players to easily learn what they need to about a town such as laws or w/e else." For me, knowing a towns political standing with other towns is a very important thing to know, it would also allow players who haven't been on the server in a while figure out what has been going on recently if they get on and no one from their town is currently on. I, for one, would hate to log on and find out that my town might be at war with someone, but I don't know who because the enemy town isn't replying to me, what if I'm doing trades with that town? I walk over there hoping to drop off some charcoal or what have you and they gut me in the streets, or I do successfully trade with them and then my cities leader finds out and has me killed for being a traitor? please read my signature. I may say "we" but I mean "me" (or "I", as the case may be). This is my opinion, I didn't consult Bioxx. Besides, laws and rules are something that you WOULD find on a stone. The ancient Babylonians had a huge stone in the centre of their city which had all of their laws and the punishments written on it. Social structure and relationships like that fluxuated so much that it was never "written in stone". 167 from scooterdanny dunkleosteus, on 15 August 2012 - 12:56 AM, said: Snip I guess i can get on board with that methodology, Feel free to implement it as you wish, but i have a question could you make a system that could alert all players of a faction to an update? Ie "A new law has been handed down, report to the town square to be educated" 168 from enzer Sorry if I came off the wrong way with that post, that isn't what I meant. file:///C:Usersdat594AppDataLocalTempmsohtmlclip101clip_image002.gif What I meant is that my support for storing a towns vital information and why I feel that political standings of a town are vital for the survival of a town and its citizens are based on Bioxx clarifying that he feels that Home Stones should contain such information. I agree with him and I agree with the guy who says that political standings are vital. I am also just debating that I cannot find a bad reason not to have this information stored this way, having the information stored outside of one centralized point makes information scattered and thus harder for players to keep up which may eventually drive them away from even caring, I don't feel that making the information non centralized adds any game play benefit, it doesn't increase difficulty of the game outside of making it tedious, and to keep information centralized without using the Home Stone would require things such as giant billboards (which I have already given my opinion on how this is a poor way to handle it in game as well as impacts the server negatively). I've yet to hear a good reason to exclude that bit of information from the rest of the information stored within the home stone outside of personal preference or saying that it would be benefit to the "lazy and/or stupid", is all. 169 from deathbytac0 Enzer, on 15 August 2012 - 01:04 AM, said: Sorry if I came off the wrong way with that post, that isn't what I meant. What I meant is that my support for storing a towns vital information and why I feel that political standings of a town are vital for the survival of a town and its citizens are based on Bioxx clarifying that he feels that Home Stones should contain such information. I agree with him and I agree with the guy who says that political standings are vital. I am also just debating that I cannot find a bad reason not to have this information stored this way, having the information stored outside of one centralized point makes information scattered and thus harder for players to keep up which may eventually drive them away from even caring, I don't feel that making the information non centralized adds any game play benefit, it doesn't increase difficulty of the game outside of making it tedious, and to keep information centralized without using the Home Stone would require things such as giant billboards (which I have already given my opinion on how this is a poor way to handle it in game as well as impacts the server negatively). I've yet to hear a good reason to exclude that bit of information from the rest of the information stored within the home stone outside of personal preference or saying that it would be benefit to the "lazy and/or stupid", is all. Or just put it on the forum post and alt-tab to browser. Maybe home stones can be craftable so you can have your own copy. I haven't been reading since my last post here, it sounds angry though, so I don't know if that has been suggested. I have no desire in reading long, angry posts though, unless I'm in the middle of it. 170 from enzer Deathbytac0, on 15 August 2012 - 01:13 AM, said: Or just put it on the forum post and alt-tab to browser. Maybe home stones can be craftable so you can have your own copy. I haven't been reading since my last post here, it sounds angry though, so I don't know if that has been suggested. I have no desire in reading long, angry posts though, unless I'm in the middle of it. My first post talking about a political GUI? Wasn't angry at all, second half was talking about tools servers could use to facilitate wars. I also think that keeping that information out of game in a forums is also a bit of a bad solution, you're taking game play out of the game and sticking it someplace else, meaning people have to stop playing to look up information that should be readily available in game. 171 from scooterfanny I think they mean for it to be word of mouth sort of thing. not on a website. 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 145 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200
  4. page 12 125 from doodthedud cevkiv, on 12 August 2012 - 12:36 AM, said: You're failing to understand this: This is not what I consider fun. This is not what a lot of people consider fun. I dare say that the majority of people, if asked, would not say they consider their things being stolen to be fun. Of course not. They consider building adequate defenses to stop their stuff getting stolen as fun. Losing a game isn't fun, but playing is. 126 from cevkiv DoodTheDud, on 12 August 2012 - 06:06 PM, said: Of course not. They consider building adequate defenses to stop their stuff getting stolen as fun. Losing a game isn't fun, but playing is. It is impossible to build adequate defenses. Someone can simply build a dirt column and hop over your wall. Someone with a high enough tier pick can just go through your wall. The only way I could see this being remotely, remotely tolerable, is if when an item is taken from a protected chest by a user who is not on the protected listen, the item becomes flagged as stolen by the thief from the owner of the chest (that is, if JoeGriefer steals a diamond from cevkiv, the item's tooltip will now display, below "Diamond," "Stolen by JoeGriefer from cevkiv"). Furthermore, in addition to that, there would have to be some message that could be read by the person being stolen from identifying who did the thieving. A server-wide message would be the bare minimum, but that won't help much if no one else is on. Having the owned container be able to spit out the last X items that were removed from it and who removed them would be nice, except that a griefer could easily just fill the chest with dirt and remove the dirt until what items have been taken from it are out of the last X items taken. I like the idea of being able to claim an area for a person or group of people, and excluding others from being able to build inside that area. I like the idea of being able to "Reinforce" blocks within that area to make them more difficult for an individual to break. I like the idea of having tiers of lockboxes, either with keys, and locks that need to be picked (with various tiers of lockboxes and various tiers of picks, so that the highest tier of lockbox will always be the hardest to pick, while the lowest tier of lockboxes could be opened quickly with the highest tier of pick), or combination locks where a 3 to 5 or 7 digit combination must be entered, but there is a device (stethoscope or similar) that allows you to determine the first X digits of the combination). Lockboxes with keys and locks that must be picked require an expenditure of time in the form of gathering the resources necessary to pick the lock, and combination locks where parts of the combination can be guessed require an expenditure of time in the form of gathering the resources necessary to make the item that tells you what some of the digits of the combination are, and a further expenditure of time in the form of actually having to guess the rest of the combination. Griefing, if allowed, should not be something that can easily or quickly be accomplished against a settlement, no matter how small or crude. Also, to prevent people from just tunneling under walls, and to prevent the people of the town from having to reinforce every god damn block of dirt, if there is a placeable "Hearth Stone," or similar, then all dirt/gravel blocks below its level within its effective range should be automatically highly reinforced. Because if they're not someone can just go under the wall to get inside. And there needs to be a "no build zone" around the claimed area, or people need to leave a buffer between the end of the claimed area and their walls, to avoid people just pilling up dirt and getting over the wall. As far as trading goes, some sort of craftable block, similar to one in Industrialcraft2, whose name I can't remember, I think it's Trade-o-mat, would be nice. The way the block works is you place the block, and then you place a chest (lockable, or not) next to it. The GUI for the trade-o-mat would have two slots: One for the item you're willing to sell, and another for the item you will accept in exchange (if you want to enforce a currency, this slot could be restricted to using coins only). A player other than the player who placed the Trade-o-mat, when accessing it, would be presented with a GUI that would tell them what is being exchanged for what, and would have an input slot where they could deposit the item that the owner wants, and an output slot that would spit out the item that the buyer wants. The trade-o-mat could either have an internal storage capacity, or could place/retrieve items to be sold/items that have been bought into an adjacent chest. This would allow people to be able to buy and sell goods even when offline, and could be used to enforce a specific currency by accepting only coins as payment. 127 from bsb23 I'm questioning the need for a foundation stone what real purpose do they serve besides stopping the chance for towns to get the buildings they need. It is a lot easier and it is more believable. If i were to build a cathedral right now why would i need a special stone? Also I'm not sure why a city that religon doesn't exist in should need a cathedral. Schools would make a good spot for tutorials not further requirements. If someone wants to build something then build it. As long as you have the resources, know-how, and the time it takes to build it i don't see why you can't build it. Edit: this was suppose to send a while ago it was in response to mileaos' post directly after my last post. 128 from scooterdanny Urk... nobles, don't even get me started on them... And guys, i think we should move past all Griefing and Stealing, we've hit just about all the bases, and if you look back a few pages, it was already stated. so can we get on to more of suggestions for kingdoms? thanks Anyways, i think it would be neat for there to be recognized systems by the game, that would enhance ceratin government types or all. Ie, -Caesar Bsb23 mandates that all gathering of wood in his forest is hereby prohibited, (this is broadcast to all in the empire) Cevkiv, being a rebel (just playing here) decides to go chop down some wood, he gains a bounty in said empire. Or a system that allows for confidential voting ( i realize one could publish books in 1.3 but that would be cumbersome) so if you were in a council, you could see voting and vote on a decision, that the mayor would implement. So even a basic minecraft text and command system would make me happy 129 from too-damn-much ThinkTank, on 11 August 2012 - 10:34 PM, said: If we are going for little steps before large. Locks & Keys. A new tool, or the chisel used on a metal plate, possibly in the metalurgy table Opens a double Knapping GUI, save with a metal texture You 'cut' your key shape into one side, and its reverse into the other Done correctly this will produce a key and a lock item Each new pattern cut this way produces a difrent lock and key pair as long as it follows a few basic rules (eg: a key must start with a single horizontal or vertical line, a lock must have three soild sides and one opening) When held and clicked onto any door or chest, the door or chests texture changes to show a lock The chest or door will only open if clicked with its key Also, while it doesnt technicaly make sense, you could add in metal types to increase the number of lock and key pairs people can make. As in a iron key and lock with the same pattern as a steel lock and key, wouldnt open each other. you know all else aside, including kingdoms, this is a pretty damn cool idea, i think we should have to work and forge the accompanying lock too in a similar manner though maybe if we're lucky it could be integrated into some sort of storehouse too where 1 key put into the interface would open the inventory of one chest, the next would open another inventory, cool idea, no matter how you slice it. honestly though, i'd say first stage should require a single ingot + a blank key plans, then once that's done you can use knapping to make the teeth. Scooterdanny, on 12 August 2012 - 07:30 PM, said: Just as long as we don't call it knapping... because that is certainly not how keys are made lol fair enough lol. heck honestly the more i think about it though, the lock should be a separate crafting on it's own, maybe a second stage to crafting chests, that way if you lose a key or something, you don't have to store a duplicate lock to go along with it. [edit] i mean as an optional second stage just to be clear, not being able to craft chests until you had at least a few ingots would suck for sure [/edit] 130 from cevkiv great wall of text Sorry for double posting, but I want to clarify my ideas in a more readable format, modified by the ideas of others I have read in this thread Town System Hearth Stone (placeable craftable block) The Hearth Stone is a craftable block. It should require at least medium tier items, but not extremely rare items to craft. For example, wrought iron and average gems. When placed, the Hearth claims a 5x5 chunk area, centered on the chunk the Hearth Stone is in. The Hearth Stone remembers the person who placed it (hereinafter referred to as the owner), and when activated opens a GUI. For anyone not the owner, the displayed GUI shows the owner's name, the current area claimed, and people who have permission to build in the area. For the Owner, this GUI will list the owner's name, the current size of the area claimed by the hearth, contains a list of players allowed to build in the claimed area and the ability to add more people to the list (after a certain point, adding more people should require the expenditure of resources), and displays the resource cost to upgrade the Hearth Stone to the next level, which increase the size of the claimed area by 1 chunk in all directions. This should be at least as expensive in resources as the Hearth Stone itself, and go up substantially as more area is claimed, up to some limit, which could be defined in a server configuration file. Dirt, Sand, and Naturally occurring rock blocks below the level at which the Hearth Stone is placed are automatically reinforced to the maximum reinforcement amount, to prevent people from simply tunneling under walls. The GUI further contains two buttons for both the Owner and for people whose names are entered into the list by the Owner. One button creates a tool that allows blocks to be reinforced (via expending other blocks of the same type from inventory), which dramatically increases the number of times someone not on the list of approved players has to break a block in the protected area to actually get rid of the block (for example, reinforcing a rhyolite brick once would require an additional rhyolite brick block and would make force an unauthorized user to break the block twice to actually break it, reinforcing it a second time would require two rhyolite brick blocks and would make the reinforced block have to be broken four times to actually break it, etc, etc, up to a maximum reinforcement amount that could be changed via server configuration files) The other button creates a tool (a pair of hand cuffs, say), which may be used by any player on the authorized list of the Hearth Stone on any non-authorized player within the protected area. Doing so would teleport the unauthorized player to a jail area. The Jail Area would be defined by the placement of a special Jail Block, and the area itself would be a 5x5 cube with the Jail Block at its center. Blocks and doors within this 5x5 cube are not breakable under any circumstances by players within the Jail Area -- they must be released by an authorized person of the protected area within which the jail is situated. Jail Block (placable craftable block) I have no idea what the items used to craft this would be. Probably lots of metal bars. It should be roughly as expensive (resource wise) to create as a Hearth Stone block. The jail block would provide a way to take care of griefers who are caught in the act. It creates an area, which is linked to handcuff items produced by the Hearth Stone block whose protected area the Jail Block is situated in. This area is where people who have handcuffs used on them are teleported to. Blocks within the Jail Area are not breakable by persons within the Jail Area -- they must be released by someone from outside the area who is on the authorized list of persons in the Hearth Stone of the settlement where the jail is located. Reinforcement Tool (item dispensed by a Hearth Stone to people on its Authorized User List) Use of this tool on a block inside a Hearth Stone's protected area by someone on the Authorized User List would allow the Reinforcement of that block by using other blocks of the same type within the reinforcing player's inventory. Each level of reinforcement requires 2^X blocks of the same type as the block being reinforced, where X is the number of times the block has been reinforced (For those of you who can't into math, the first reinforcement requires 1 block, the second 2, the third 4, and so on). Each reinforcement of a block requires it to be broken an additional number of times before the block will actually be destroyed, where the number of times a block must be broken to be destroyed is equal to 2^X, where X is the number of times the block has been reinforced (again, if a block is not reinforced, it need only be broken once, if it is reinforced once it must be broken twice, if it is reinforced twice it must be broken four times, etc, etc). I suggest a maximum of 6 reinforcements per block. This would require a single grief to break a block 64 times before it will be destroyed, while a group of 8 griefers (who I guess would call themselves a "raiding party") working together would only each have to break the block 8 times. This would have the effect of deterring lone individuals, but would not stop a determined group of players working together in a coordinated fashion. Furthermore, using a Reinforcement Toll on a block with the left-click (as though trying to break it), would display its current reinforcement level, and how many times it must be broken to degrade to the next lowest level. For example, if a block has been reinforced 5 times, using the info aspect of the Reinforcement tool would give a message like: "Reinforcement Level 5. Time to be broken to downgrade reinforcement level: 16". So, if a griefer is trying to break through the town wall, is caught in the act and killed, a citizen could then check the area of the town wall around the griefer to find the damaged sections of the wall, and then could use the reinforcement tool to "repair" them. As in the above example, if a block had been reinforced 5 times, and had been broken 8 of those times, it could be repaired by to full be expending the number of blocks required to reinforce it to its current level from the previous level (in this example, 16 blocks to repair it fully). Handcuff Tool (item dispensed by a Hearth Stone to people on its Authorized User List) Lock (craftable item, ingredient) A lock would be a craftable item, made out of metal, and requiring plans to make. They could be made out of various metals, creating various tiers of lock (e.g., a copper lock is worse than a wrought iron lock, which is worse than a steel lock). A lock could be combined with a door to create a lockable door, or with a chest to create a lockable chest. Lockable Door(craftable, placeable block) A lockable door would have the normal door graphic, but with a lock on it. A lockable door, when first placed, remember the player who placed it (its owner). There are a few possible ways to go about dealing with the locks Option One: When first created, a Lockable Door is "unregistered". Using a key (craftable item) on the door registers that door, causing it to remember the key which was used on it. Keys should be renameable (via shift+right clicking while holding one and not pointing it at a door (to allow players to distinguish between keys more easily). From then on, the door can only be opened by right clicking on it with the appropriate key. Keys can be copied by placing one in the plans section of the anvil, and an ingot in the item-to-be-worked slot, and crafted just as a key is normally crafted. This will create a duplicate of the original key with a denotation that it is a duplicate (for example, if I have a key named "cevkiv's front door", a copy of the key will have an unchangeable name of ("copy of cevkiv's front door"). Duplicates can be given to other players and allow the player to open the door to which the key is linked to. Anyone can close a lockable door, however, without a key, they will not be able to exit. Option Two: When first created, a Lockable Door is "unregistered". Shift+Right clicking on the door will bring up a GUI that contains several dials (3 to 5, representing low to high tier locks), which form a combination lock. The first person to use the door enters a combination and then clicks the GUI button "Set". They are also remembered as the Owner of the door. The door now remembers the combination that unlocks it. To open the door later, one must shift+right click on the door, bringing up the GUI, and must enter the correct combination on the dials. Upon closing the dialog, assuming the correct combination was entered, the door will be able to be opened and closed. The combination entered will persist between opening and closing of the door, requiring someone to scramble the digits entered after closing the door to prevent unauthorized entry. Option Three: When first created, the person who initially places the Lockable Door is considered its Owner. The owner may Shift+Right Click on the door to bring up a GUI where they may enter the names of other people (with a limit on the number of names based on the quality of the lock used to make the door) who may freely use the door. Anyone else who attempts to use the door whose name is not on this list will not be able to open the door. Lockable doors themselves are reinforced by default to a number based upon their lock's quality, which can be set in the server configuration files. If a maximum of 6 reinforcements is set in the config files, I recommend a low tier lock cause the door to be reinforced twice (requiring it to be broken 4 times before actually being destroyed) while a highest tier lock would be reinforced to the maximum allowed amount by default. I suggest that the level of reinforcement provided a door be the same as the level of reinforcement provided to blocks. The door should not be, at its maximum, harder to break than the blocks around it. In all cases, when a lockable door is broken by anyone except the door's owner, it drops a regular door of the same material -- the lock is broken and not obtainable by the person breaking the door. I also suggest that doors must be made of the same material as their locks -- copper locks require copper doors, wrought iron locks require wrought iron doors, etc. Metal doors could be made following the normal pattern for a door, but with metal sheets instead of wood planks. Lockable Chest(craftable, placeable block) A lockable chest would have the normal graphic for a chest, but with a lock upon it. A lockable chest, when first placed, remembers the player who placed it (its owner). There are a few possible ways to go about dealing with the locks, just as there are with the locks on doors. See Lockable Door, above for the various methods I thought of. Lockable chests would be made by combining a chest and a lock and 7 extra wooden planks in the crafting cube, with the chest in the middle, the lock above the chest in the top middle, and the other squares forming a U shape of wooden planks. A lockable chest would be considered reinforced by default, to a level configurable in server configuration files. Furthermore, instead of creating a lockable chest with wood used to reinforce the chest, the wooden planks in the above example could be replaced with metal sheets. A metal Lockable Chest would have the same graphic as a lockable (wooden) chest, but color-shifted based on the material it is made of. Metal Lockable Chests should be reinforced to a higher degree than Wooden Ones, based upon the material they are made out of. I also suggest that lockable metal chests have a higher maximum level of reinforcement that other blocks, to make them worth while, and to make tools designed to pick locks on chests worth the investment. This will serve to further deter casual griefers, while an organized "raiding party" that spent the time and resources to come prepared would be rewarded for their extra effort. As an example, a lockable wooden chest would need to be broken 8 times, by default, to break it, while a copper one might need to be broken 32 times to actually break it, a wrought iron one 128 times to actually break it, and a steel one 512 times to actually break it. To those of you who say that that is far too many times, that's the point. Spending the considerable amount of time and resources required to be able to make a steel lockbox would assure that no one, short of a determined individual or group of individuals, who have devoted a considerable amount of time and effort, approaching or exceeding the amount of time and effort required to create the steel lockbox, would be able to open it in anything approaching a reasonable amount of time, via the use of special tools used to overcome lockboxes. Furthermore, just to clarify, a lockable chest, even when placed in an unprotected area should always be reinforced to whatever level it normally would be reinforced to, to give people who do not live in a town some protection against having their things stolen (and to those of you who say, "Just hide your things," I respond that a griefer is likely to use an X-Ray mod, and hiding your things does not help against an X-Ray mod.) Trading Post (craftable, placeable block) A trading post would be an item, created from a lockable chest, which functions as a lockable chest, but with an addition to its GUI. Upon placement of a Trading Post block, the block registers the placing player as its owner. The owner, upon opening the Trading Post, is presented with a GUI that contains the same amount of storage space as the lockable chest from which it was made (if higher tier chests contain more storage space), and two slots: One for the Item to be Traded Away, and one for the item the placing player was to receive in turn. The placing player then fills a certain number (but not all) of the storage slots within the Trading Post with the item he wants to sell. Any other player, upon opening the Trading Post, is presented with a GUI that displays the item and quantity of said item that they may buy at one time (for example, if the owner of the trading post put 8 charcoal in the Sellable Item slot, the Trading Post would inform the prospective buyer that they will receive 8 pieces of charcoal), and will also see what item is wanted by the seller (for example, if the owner placed 8 copper coins in the receiving slot, the prospective buyer would be informed that they need to pay 8 copper coins (or some other material. I suggest that if Bioxx wants to add coinage to the mod and have a use for it, Trading Posts be restricted to accepting coinage only as payment). There would be a slot into which the prospective buyer could place the payment, and, upon placing in the required payment, assuming there was still 8 coal (or whatever else was being sold) remaining in the Trading Post's inventory, the buyer would receive that item. I suggest Trading Posts be at least as reinforced as the kind of chest they are made from. For the Griefers No, I have not forgotten about you. Lockpicks (craftable item) Lockpicks would be a craftable item, requiring a metal ingot and plans. The final "durability" achieved in the crafting process determines the number of lockpicks received upon completion. Lockpicks would be in tiers, just as locks would be in tiers. Depending on the kind of lock scenario chosen from above, the lock picks would work in different fashions. Scenario One: If the kind of lock used is that that is attuned to a key, using a lockpick on that door or chest successfully with cause it to open. After it shuts, another attempt to pick it must be made to open it again. Scenario Two: If the kind of lock used is a combination lock, then, instead of a lockpick, some sort of stethoscope would be used. The quality of the stethoscope would determine how many digits of the combination would be revealed to the user, starting with the first digit of the combination. For example, a lowest tier stethoscope would reveal only the first digit of the combination lock, cutting the time required to guess the combination down to ten percent of what it would normally be. For the lowest tier of combination locks, this would mean having to try 100 combinations instead of 1000, and that would be a significant return on the investment in making the stethoscope. However, for the highest tier of combination locks, while you're still cutting the number of combinations to be guessed to 1/10th of normal, that would still leave you with 10000 combinations to guess -- this would reward the player who devoted the resources required to make such an excellent lock for his doors or chests. The highest tier of stethoscope should reveal X digits of the combination, where X is equal to the number of digits in the combination of the best combination lock - 2. For example, if the highest tier of combination lock has 5 digits in it, the highest tier of stethoscope should reveal 3 of those five digits. This would have the effect of a given tier of stethoscope used on the same tier of lock always having the same effect: giving 100 possible combinations to guess. So someone using the highest tier of Stethoscope on the highest tier of Locked Chest would (in this example) only have to guess 2 out of 5 digits of the lock. Furthermore, someone who has the highest tier of stethoscope would, in this example, be able to find the entire combination to the lowest tier of chest (as the highest tier stethoscope would reveal 3 digits of a combination, and the lowest tier of locked chest would only have 3 digits in its combination). This rewards people who spend the time and resources required to get the best possible tools for safe-cracking. Scenario Three: If the kind of lock used is one wherein the owner of the door or chest may specify users who are allowed to open the door or chest, use of lockpicks on the door or chest would cause the door to switch to its open state, or the locked chest to open. After closing the door or chest, another use of lockpicks would be required to reopen the door or access the chest again. In scenarios one and three, where actual lockpicks are used to pick a lock, I suggest two possible methods for lock picks functioning Lock Pick Functionality Scenario One: For a single ingot, up to 4 lock picks can be produced. The number of lock picks created is determined by the final durability achieved in producing the item on the anvil (half durability would only produce 2 lock picks, etc). Each use of a lock pick has a chance to consume that lockpick. A lock pick has a 50% chance of successfully opening a door or chest of the same tier (copper lockpick on copper lock, iron lockpick on iron lock, etc). A lockpick on a lock one tier lower would have a 75% chance of success (iron lockpick on copper lock), and a lockpick being used on a lock two tiers lower than it would have a 95% chance of success (since lock picking is a skill and is hard, 100% success rate should never be possible. Even experts fuck up sometimes.) Using a lockpick on a lock one tier above it has a 25% chance of success, while using a lockpick on a lock two tiers above it has only a 5% chance of success (or less. Personally, I think using the shittiest lockpick on the best lock should not have a chance of succeeding). If the lock is successfully picked, there is a chance, based on the tier of the lock pick, that the lockpick will not be expended (high tier lockpicks have a better chance of not being expended). The lowest tier of lockpick might be expended 50% of the time, while the highest tier might be expended only 10% of the time. On failure, the lock pick is always consumed (because you accidentally broke it when you screwed up). Lock Pick Functionality Scenario Two: For a single ingot, 1 lockpick is produced. Its final durability is determined by what you achieve in producing the item on the anvil. Higher tier lockpicks (more durable kinds of metal used) have a higher maximum durability. Each time the lockpick is used, it has a chance to fail or succeed, as determined above based on what tier of lockpick is used on what tier of lock. Upon a successful picking of the lock, a small amount of durability is expended. Upon failing to pick a lock, a large amount of durability is expended, with a greater loss the lower the tier of lockpick. For example, if a copper lockpick can be used successfully 10 times before breaking, you might need to fail only 3 or 4 times to break it, where as a steel lockpick which could be used 100 times before breaking might be able to withstand 30 to 50 failures before breaking). Scenario 1 would, I think, require more resource investment on the part of the griefer. Explosives I know gunpowder is currently in the game as a drop from creepers. Should this be removed as a drop, and gunpowder be craftable from saltpeter, sulfer, and charcoal (which are all in the game current, unless I am quite mistaken), then I think crafting this now much rarer and harder to obtain explosive should have a use in breaching walls and breaking open doors and safes. If gunpowder is removed from creeper drops and is craftable from items available in game, I recommend a (formless) recipe of 7 saltpeter, 1 sulfur, and 1 charcoal, as this as as close to the correct proportions as we can get with 9 crafting slots (although 6 salt peter, 1 sulfur, and 2 charcoal might be more "realistic" -- it's a matter of opinion, and I personally think that something as easy to obtain as charcoal shouldn't be a larger part of the formula than 1 part in 9). Gunpower could then be used to craft a crude explosive. This most crude explosive could have a "power" of 16 -- that is, when it is set off, every block within its blast radius that is protected would be considered to be broken sixteen times for the purposes of overcoming protection. This would allow someone to overcome thin, highly reinforced walls, or thick, low reinforced walls, very quickly, as a reward for expending the considerable amount of effort required to find these rare ingredients.The "power" should diminish for each block it has to go through. E.g., if the first block breaks from the 16 breaks the explosion causes, a block behind it should only receive 8 breaks, and if that one breaks, the one behind it should only receive 4, etc. Using an explosive against a door would have the same effect as on any other protected block, and, upon destroying the door, would leave no door behind -- you blew it to bits. Using an explosive against a locked chest would have the same effect as on any other protected block, except that there would be a chance for each object stored inside the chest to be destroyed due to the explosion when the chest breaks. This could be a flat chance for all objects (easiest to code), or each object could have a hardness value which makes it more resistant to explosions (a flint spear might only have a 5% chance of surviving, whereas a steel ingot might have a 90% chance of surviving, and a ruby or sapphire might have a 95% chance of surviving, and a diamond might have a 100% chance of survival, while paper or books would have a very low [1%] chance of survival.) Gunpowder should be made in a Mortar and Pestle (a 3x3 crafting grid used for the sole purpose of making gunpowder). Furthermore, this item would have additional functionality if, in the future, guns are added to the game, as it could be used, in combination with a bucket of water placed in the crafted grid along with raw gunpowder used to make explosives, to simulate the process of corning, which would render the "only good for bombs" quality gunpowder into something usable in a gun. Other suggestions Guard Dogs Guard Dogs would be created by applying a collar to a standard dog. Upon right clicking on a guard dog, they would follow you around. While in follow mode, right clicking on the guard dog again would cause it to enter guard mode. A guard dog only responds to clicks from its master. A guard dog will guard a 9x9 area, centered around itself. If in a protected area (where it can only be placed by a "citizen" of that protect area), the guard dog will attack anyone who enters its protected area who is not also a citizen of that town. A guard dog will have more HP, and deal significantly more damage, than a regular dog. An unarmed and unarmed person should have no hope of defeating a guard dog. A guard dog will also attack someone who attacks it from outside of its guard range (such as with a bow or a spear), provided they are within the 9x9 area it guards (assume they're on a leash and can't get out of that area). A pack of guard dogs should be able to take down even (lightly) armored opponents. If a guard dog is set to guard an area that is not inside a protected area, it will simply attack anyone who is not its owner while it is in guard mode. A guard dog who is attacking a player can be stopped by its owner right clicking on it (removing it from guard mode). A guard dog not in guard mode will not attack its attackers (to avoid cases of "Shit your dog is attacking me! "Here, let me right click on it!" "Shit, I hit it after you right clicked on it" "PLAYERGARY has been slain by a guard dog!") Guard Dogs would also make an audible noise (barking), when someone enters their guard area (who, if this is in a protected area, is not on the authorized user list). This should be able to be heard a good distance away (so if you're in town, and you hear a dog barking on the other side of town, you can go check it out). Since Guard Dogs would not require a Protected Area (town) to be usable and useful, I did not include them in that section. Guard Dogs would also need to be fed at regular intervals or they will starve. I suggest that the MINIMUM amount of beef dropped from a single adult cow be at least enough to sustain one guard dog for at least the amount of time it takes for an adult female cow to become pregnant, birth the calf, and then the calf grow into adulthood. At least if this were single player. Since there's a SMP focus, A guard dog should "need" to be fed once every 24 hours, and should "starve to death" after three (earth) days with no food, just so people who can't get on every day don't constantly lose their guard dogs. Mail via Passenger Pidgeon This idea would require crafted blocks and crafted items to work, and might work best if delayed until 1.3, which introduces writable books. Pigeon Stand (craftable, placeable block) A pigeon stand would be a craftable block (probably some sort of horizontal support on the bottom of the crafting cube with, I dunno, a chest on top and feathers on either side of the chest). When placed, right-clicking on the Pigeon Stand opens up a GUI. The GUI has an inventory of, say, 8 slots, where incoming pigeons are stored. It also has an Outgoing slot, capable of holding a single pidgeon. Placing a Pidgeon in the outgoing slot and then click "send" would cause the pidgeon to fly off to deliver its message. Upon arrival at the destination, it would be put into the "incoming pigeon" storage area. A pigeon can be used to retrieve the message it carries, which could then be read by a player. There are three options I can see for how to address letters: Option One: Each Pigeon Stand, when crafted, is given a Unique ID Number that is displayed in the Pigeon Stand's GUI. When sending a pigeon, the player inputs the Destination Pigeon Stand's number, and the pigeon will be sent to that stand. This is probably the simplest method. Option Two: Each Pigeon Stand is nameable when placed. When sending a pigeon, the player inputs the Destination Pigeon Stand's name ("Joe's Town", or "Gary's Summer Shack", etc), and the pigeon will be sent to that Stand. This would be slightly more difficult than Option One. Option Three: When a Pigeon Stand is placed, it registers its placer as it's owner. When sending a pigeon, the sending player inputs the name of the player to whom them are sending the pigeon, and it will arrive at their stand. Only the player who placed the stand can open it. For Options One and Two, I suggest that, if placed in a protected area, only citizens of that Protected Area be allowed to remove pigeons from the "incoming pigeons" area. In all cases, sending a pigeon takes time. The time is based on the distance between the two pigeons stands. I would say let it be two to three times as fast as a person can run, to represent the pigeon being much faster than the player. During this time, there would be a "cooldown" displayed on the sending pigeon stand, representing how long it will take for the pigeon to arrive, and disallowing further deliveries in that time. Furthermore, if the destination stand's receiving slots are full, any newly arriving pigeons, and their messages are lost. The sender will be unaware of this. A Pigeon Stand must have access to the sky, just as a forge. Passenger Pigeon (craftable, usable item) A Passenger Pigeon would be created from an egg (I know they're chicken eggs. I don't care at this point) in some kind of nest box. A passenger pigeon could be combined with a letter to create a "ready to send" Passenger Pigeon. This "ready to send" Passenger Pigeon would then be placed in the "Outgoing" slot of the Pigeon Stand and could be sent. Using a "Ready to Send" Passenger Pigeon would return the Passenger Pigeon to its default state, and recreate the letter that was originally attached to it, allowing it to be read. Letter (craftable, usable item) A letter would be craftable in a crafting cube using a piece of paper, an inc sac, and a feather. Upon picking up the letter from the output slot, a dialog would be created where one would be able to enter some amount of text (I suggest 128 characters, max). At the bottom of the dialog is a "finish" button, which finalizes the letter, after which it cannot be edited further. Prematurely exiting the dialog (via escape, or some other failure) wastes the letter (turns it back into a piece of paper). Using a Letter in the hotbar will display the contents of the letter. One option is that the final line of the letter could be "signed" by the player who wrote the letter. That is, their name is attached to the letter as a way of proving that it was written by them, to avoid people forging letters. I personally, would suggest the final line of all letters be the name of the player who wrote the letter. A letter would be combined with a Passenger Pigeon to create a "Ready to Send" Passenger Pigeon. Next Box (Craftable, placable block) I got nothing here, other than you'd need one to turn eggs into passenger pigeons. Currency (Craftable item) If I recall correctly, the graphics for coins are already in the resources for the mod. I suggest that a block be created to mint coins, probably requiring a die to be created on an anvil. One bar of copper, silver, electrum or gold would render 9 coins of the same material. Furthermore, 9 coins of the same material could be melted down to create 1 bar of said material. Coins should stack up to 64 (or 99, if that's possible). This would, in combination with the above suggestion of a Trading Post, if it were only able to accept coins in payment, would provide a more advanced form of economic exchange for larger, more advanced settlements, as they would be able to move away from a barter economy. Furthermore, it would allow the creation of banks -- A player could set up a building which contains Trading Posts which will exchange, say, 10 coins of a given kind for 1 coins of a better kind, or one coin of a given kind for 9 of the next lower value. Summation (tl;dr) In closing, the highlights are: The suggestions above provide a way for a player or group of players to "claim" an area of land to allow them to build defenses which provide security against griefers, without forcing any one particular model of government on the places, excepting for the fact that it would be a despotism. The suggestions also provide a way to keep your valuable safe from other players, while still making it possible, though difficult, for a griefer to steal them. The suggestions also provide a way for a determined individual, or a coordinated and resourceful group of individuals to bypass protections put in place. The Guard Dog suggestion gives a way to provide extra security for players when they are logged off, and for individuals who do not have the resources to establish a town of their own. The Mail via Pigeon system would be useful in allowing players to communicate with players who are not online without having to worry about the message getting passed through the grapevine, and, if letters are forcibly signed and "mailboxes" are only usable by the person who created them, allows for secure communications. The "Trading Post" provides a way of establishing shops, which allow players, or groups of players, to specialize in the production of certain goods which can then be sold to other players, and the option to make the only form of payment a form of coinage or other fiat (as decided by Bioxx) currency would form a standardized system of economic exchange for more advanced and "sophisticated" cities, which would simulate the move from a barter economy to a more advanced system. [edit] Fixed some spelling and grammatical errors. I'm sure I didn't get them all
  5. 96 from me I like the founding stone idea but I think there should be single person homestead type thing as well, with less protection. this for those who want to live by themselves or haven't found any ingame friends yet 97 from enenra How about approaching NPCs the other way around? What I mean is - no or few NPC cities / villages. Instead have NPCs move into player cities as soon as they reach a certain size (kind of like in Dwarf Fortress). The players could then build accomodations for NPCs and (maybe in a later iteration) also set up areas where NPC traders could sell wares to the players. This could then be expanded much further with a "real" economy where NPCs could be supplied with goods to have them produce certain items etc. there's quite a lot of possibilities but I'd like to concentrate on the basic idea first. 98 from lumireaver To those of you suggesting config options for various things...don't you think it'd be a bit tidier to create in-game ways to toggle these things? 99 from dunk To those of you suggesting config options for various things...don't you think it'd be a bit tidier to create in-game ways to toggle these things? 100 from bsb23 Yes! Thank you Lumi! I was going to say this soon but was too lazy. Eventually there will be server to server travel in fact ive heard one is avaliable now. But when this happens if we have servers that have a bunch of config options then traveling between them will be a pain in the butt. If the options are all there in-game though then all servers options will be the same but the way they use them will different. had no idea what I was getting myself into file:///C:Usersdat594AppDataLocalTempmsohtmlclip101clip_image002.gif 101 from dunk bsb23, on 11 August 2012 - 12:24 PM, said: Yes! Thank you Lumi! I was going to say this soon but was too lazy. Eventually there will be server to server travel in fact ive heard one is avaliable now. But when this happens if we have servers that have a bunch of config options then traveling between them will be a pain in the butt. If the options are all there in-game though then all servers options will be the same but the way they use them will different. I think there are some inherent problems with that. If you don't like the config options of a server don't go there. page 10 102 from lumireaver View Postdunkleosteus, on 11 August 2012 - 12:24 PM, said: But could tarnish gameplay, I think we'd rather let you alter your world externally so to speak than give you power of that sort in game, takes away from where we'd like to take the game. This thread has been getting posts like mad, but if you take a look at the post I wrote up earlier, splitting the Homestone idea up into a bunch of different Rulestones could potentially address this. Instead of half a dozen configurable settings you could just limit certain Rulestone crafting recipes to certain user groups, or something along those lines. edit: Not sure if that's what you're going for either, but I think it's a nice in-between that allows for Server Op limitations without choking everything through an intangible config file, even if they're fundamentally similar. 103 from dunk Lumireaver, on 11 August 2012 - 12:28 PM, said: This thread has been getting posts like mad, but if you take a look at the post I wrote up earlier, splitting the Homestone idea up into a bunch of different Rulestones could potentially address this. Instead of half a dozen configurable settings you could just limit certain Rulestone crafting recipes to certain user groups, or something along those lines. edit: Not sure if that's what you're going for either, but I think it's a nice in-between that allows for Server Op limitations without choking everything through an intangible config file, even if they're fundamentally similar. If the config file is the problem, I'm sure we can work something out. I just don't like the idea of blocks or items that exist on the programming side, I think everything in-game should be a part of the game, not the rules to how you play. 104 from scooterdanny Agreed, all instances of ingame configs for mods have been kinda cumbersome, i much prefer, situation = 0-1 system, or a different external method. 105 from chasedbybees I understand this isn't strictly related to kingdoms, but: please consider doing all you can to make this mod compatible with LogBlock, one of the most popular anti-griefing plugins around, which records who places and destroys everything, making it impossible for griefers to get away with griefing on servers which utilise it. Thanks for your consideration. 106 from bsb23 I'm not a fan of blocks that declare rules rather just a decision in-game by each individual faction/city. For instance the descision whether you need papers or not to enter a city could be made by each individual governing body. Private property, type of governing body, basic freedoms, taxes, currency they could all be developed at smaller level rather than a full server being forced to do it one specific way. I would like permission to make a thread on this matter to see what other options and methods we could come up with. 107 from biox The problem with players just forming a consensus and living that way is enforceability. All it takes is one asshat to ruin the entire system unless there is a way to enforce these rules. That is the purpose of an in game system designed to enforce things of this nature. And I'll say it again. If you don't want to take advantage of these systems on your server then you do not have to! But the fact remains that without some way to enforce these rules, unless you are a very small tight knit server, people will break the rules when it suits them. Also I'm not saying that rules will affect the entire server. Anyone who has that impression is wrong. The laws etc are done on a town by town basis. Want to be a monarchy? Thats fine. Live in another town and want a representative democracy? Thats fine too. The freedom to choose. Eventually I'd like to set up a large official server for TFC and it will take advantage of these systems. Instead of trying to debate about why these should or shouldn't be in TFC, try to come up with ideas that make this the best that it can be. View Postdunkleosteus, on 11 August 2012 - 12:26 PM, said: I think there are some inherent problems with that. If you don't like the config options of a server don't go there. Dunk and I don't agree on a lot of things regarding Kingdoms I am for these things being set in game and not via config. Configs are like writing something in stone. I don't want to do that. In fact, the more that I can keep you out of a config the better. There are ofc certain things like the cave-in parameters etc that need to exist out of game and be global. But things that are decided by the players on a world by world basis should be determined in game without the use of notepad. 108 from thinktanik The problem with players just forming a consensus and living that way is enforceability. All it takes is one asshat to ruin the entire system unless there is a way to enforce these rules. That is the purpose of an in game system designed to enforce things of this nature. And I'll say it again. If you don't want to take advantage of these systems on your server then you do not have to! But the fact remains that without some way to enforce these rules, unless you are a very small tight knit server, people will break the rules when it suits them. Also I'm not saying that rules will affect the entire server. Anyone who has that impression is wrong. The laws etc are done on a town by town basis. Want to be a monarchy? Thats fine. Live in another town and want a representative democracy? Thats fine too. The freedom to choose. Eventually I'd like to set up a large official server for TFC and it will take advantage of these systems. Instead of trying to debate about why these should or shouldn't be in TFC, try to come up with ideas that make this the best that it can be. View Postdunkleosteus, on 11 August 2012 - 12:26 PM, said: I think there are some inherent problems with that. If you don't like the config options of a server don't go there. Dunk and I don't agree on a lot of things regarding Kingdoms I am for these things being set in game and not via config. Configs are like writing something in stone. I don't want to do that. In fact, the more that I can keep you out of a config the better. There are ofc certain things like the cave-in parameters etc that need to exist out of game and be global. But things that are decided by the players on a world by world basis should be determined in game without the use of notepad. 109 from enzer Deathbytac0, on 11 August 2012 - 10:36 PM, said: Nope I like venerable places so if anybody is stupid enough to steal the whole server will be anarchy gone wrong or that person will get mauled. At the same time, there has to be incentives for towns or kingdoms to go to war at each other besides land and resource rights. Having it black or white on if your chests are lootable is a bad decision because you either open yourself to being completely unprotected or making it so that the average soldier looting an enemy town receives no spoils. A lockpick system would provide a middle ground, if done right, that would offer protection but also provide chances of rewards for invaders if they have the skill to pull it off. I would suggest that you would not be allowed to attempt to pick the lock of a fellow citizen, only those of other towns or people who have yet to affiliate themselves with anyone. This could lead to some interesting things like an actual thieves guild employed by the state that sneaks into others locals and steals funds to help their own nation grow.. with a payoff of course. Then if they get caught that provides chances for court investigations to be started and the offending nation the citizen comes from would have to prove innocence on their behalf or risk the nobles themselves being tried or even all out war. Thievery provides a lot of gameplay options, it just has to be balanced carefully. Actually, this makes me wonder. For a lot of scenarios, global chat would become an issue when a nation wants to handle something secretly. I suggest that each town has a Local channel that you only hear if you are a citizen of that town or within the town boarders. I would also suggest a private chat channel on top of that for war room meetings or the like. There of course would be global chat for normal day to day chatter, but an in game way of keeping important conversations secret outside of a /tell system of a private 3rd party chat system would be nice. This would also allow town guards to coordinate while tracking an invader in their town without said invader knowing what they are up to. 110 from enzer ancientpower, on 11 August 2012 - 11:32 PM, said: at this point it just sounds like you're forcing the way you think people should play the game on them vanilla smp didn't need kingdoms to be fun, so I don't see why TFC does honestly if you ABSOLUTELY believe these features need to be in the game, my opinion is that you should make them configurable From the OP: Will I be forced to play with these rules? Added 8/10 No. If you want to play with no rules, then that's fine. Towns will never be required. I plan to give the players as much control as I can over the systems involved. As many of you have rightly noted, the players will do a much better job creating gameplay than I ever could myself. --- Sorry for the double post, thought I hit edit. 111 from cevkiv View PostDoodTheDud, on 10 August 2012 - 02:13 PM, said: I don't know about you, but I'm not talking about "griefing". I'm talking about thievery and raiding, which I believe should be a fun and interesting mechanic for both the owner of items and the thief/raider. I personally want to avoid having NPCs, but NPC guards that patrol the streets and confront strangers is, in my opinion, a FAR better option than protecting land. Perhaps there could be citizenship cards, and those who don't have them should try to avoid guard confrontations, which could lead to their death or imprisonment. I don't think you understand. Some people do not find having their shit stolen to be fun and interesting. They view it as hours of their work being taken away from them. page 11 112 from enzer And that is why you make it difficult to open chests that are not yours and you do not allow fellow citizens of your city or kingdom steal from you. An out of towner will stick out and if stuff starts going missing when someone is visiting, then the guards will be on their ass. Someone who isn't marked as part of your town is sneaking about, trying to find a street no one is on, hes crouched in front of a door, trying desperately to get a door to open, then he is inside the house, snooping about. People are going to notice eventually and then he will have to deal with the guards. Want better protection? Pay for more guards or fire those who fail to do their jobs, invest in better locks for you house. Here is an idea, trained attack dogs. Make it so you can train a wolf into a dog and a dog into an attack dog, the dog will be "tethered" to your property and when you leave, set him to guard your place. Someone from outside of town decides to snoop about? Guess what, hes got a dog attacking him now, make that make noise, it will attract people to see what the hell is up. Thievery just doesn't have a place for personal profit though, I think it would be neat for nation leaders to send hired cat burglars after each other to steal important documents, maps, claims to land, etc. It could provide a whole other tier of game play. Ultimately, the way to completely solve this is to give sever admins the ability to just outright disable people from lock picking, but to out right have it disabled or not even an option I think would be a worse option and would stifle a lot of creativity and game play options. 113 from cevkiv View PostEnzer, on 12 August 2012 - 01:10 AM, said: Ultimately, the way to completely solve this is to give sever admins the ability to just outright disable people from lock picking, but to out right have it disabled or not even an option I think would be a worse option and would stifle a lot of creativity and game play options. Read: It will make assholes have a harder time being assholes, and I, being an asshole, don't find that fun. 114 from enzer View PostEnzer, on 12 August 2012 - 01:10 AM, said: Ultimately, the way to completely solve this is to give sever admins the ability to just outright disable people from lock picking, but to out right have it disabled or not even an option I think would be a worse option and would stifle a lot of creativity and game play options. Read: It will make assholes have a harder time being assholes, and I, being an asshole, don't find that fun. 115 from mileaos2 for the griefer problem: add milizia, when griefers start destroying blocks, stealing stuff, the milizia attacks them. when the village/town has walls (walls shouldnt be destroyable, at least not very easy) the greifers are dead. milizia could have special spawn points in special buildings like miliziahut for meeles and watchtower for archers... anyway, to the rest of my idea: the player, who found a village, is the mayor of an city, but not everything belongs to him. taxes from villagers get into the village cash register, where this money is used to build village owned buildings. (the mayor decides, where to build them with foundation stones) there are 3 types of buildings: required (from npc, they take over the building and pay everything, but the village get only taxes) village property (those buildings produce direktly for the village storage, but the workers get paid from the village too) player property (the player have to pay anything, but the produced goods are his own) towns should start as villages, they grow and grow until they become towns, citys and with each new step, they get more space and more available buildings. the village start as a main building, where npc are moving in, than you can start placing foundation stones for buildings, this stones are the middle point of the building and the same time below the floor, so be carefully, where you place them. villagers will come with recources out of the main building (later the storehouse) to build the building. those buildings are upgradeable, to become more efficient and to produce other/ more stuff. for example: grinding hut is the first building to produce flour. you can upgrade this building up to an watermill (near rivers) or windmills ofc npc´s need food/water to survive, the villages can produce them on there own and can sell the overflow to towns. when a village become a town, you have a new problem. the town is very big and no good place for animals/ farms, so sorround the town, a few hamlets starting to spawn. those hamlets will take over the food production. (meat, wheat, fruit) and some of the building material (like wood, stone) mines will still exist and producing buildings like windmill, sawmill ect with towns you get new special foundation stones like the fortress foundation stone. the fortress is a player owned building, which get build far away from the towns, to control a area. (pvp take place there mostly) a forstress acts like a town, it has special buildings (military and civil) and hamlets starts to appear too. you can buy food, building materials and weapon materials from those hamlets or from towns. a fortress has a huge influential area, where no player can attack any towns with an npc army. (they can pillage hamlets ofc) 116 from enenra Ok, so I'm going to expand on my point earlier a bit. I think there are several problems that need to be solved in order for a system like this to work and for players to be encouraged to actually use it: Problem: Benefits of a city Why would you want to live in a city? Proposals: Safety from mobs Safety from griefing (by players) Trading possibilities Cooperation with other players Economic benefits Solutions: Safety from mobs: Mobs don't spawn within a certain radius around the town Safety from griefing (by players): There would have to be a way to prevent griefing, at the same time this could be seen as attacks and thus should not be prevented entirely Trading possibilities: This is automatically the case with multiple players at one location but I think the possibilities have to be improved - one way would be player-owned shops where they don't have to be present to buy and sell. Cooperation with other players: The way to facilitate or even reliably encourage this, a group-system would be needed. Economic benefits: Economic benefits are created in a way with the cooperation of players already. However, I think it would be good (maybe in a later iteration) to include an influence from NPCs in a way. Workings: Safety from mobs: Mobs don't spawn within a certain area around claimed plots. They are, however, not automatically removed. Thus, to prevent them from wandering into towns the town would have to have walls and the like to be safe. Safety from griefing: I suggest adapting the system that was introduced by CivCraft for TFC: Certain blocks can be reinforced. Reinforced blocks gain additional "breaks", thus even if you break it, it won't disappear until it has been broken a certain amount of time. The effect would be that it would be far harder to grief and generally bust through battlements and walls. A second mechanic (which I'm not entirely sure about yet) would be the suggested "war / raid events" where usually, it would not be possible for players that are no members of a city to place or destroy blocks but during these events it is possible. The way this is set up could be inspired by EVE online SOV Timers: In order for these events to happen, both parties would have to agree on a certain timeframe so that a proper attack / defense could actually happen. Trading possibilities: Player-owned shops would be important for this. Additionally a player-to-player trading GUI would be great but this is optional, really. To go back on the NPC idea I posted before: NPCs that settle in player cities and then can also be assigned to run shops would be great. Either for players or independently - but please with a proper trading GUI where the player can select what he wants to buy and not get some random item. Cooperation with other players: A group system would allow for three types of groups: Alliances, Guilds/Factions/Nations and temporary groups. Alliances would be the alliances of multiple guilds/factions/nations and every guild etc. member could also be temporarily part of smaller groups (from which he is removed upon log out). Only guilds etc. would be able to claim land and thus build cities. Every member that is part of a guild would also have a colored prefix in front of their name. If two players are in the same group (no matter what level a group is), pvp is disabled for them. Lastly, this is a long shot but it would be great to have the health bars of the members of your temporary group on screen in a GUI and maybe allow for setting waypoints or the like to encourage forming groups to do tasks together. Economic benefits: NPCs that have settled in player cities could at a point (and with the facilities) take over the more menial tasks for players like woodcutting, farming and mining the trivial stuff like sand / gravel / stone. Maybe they could also be set to take over certain artisan jobs when supplied with the necessary resources, like crafting wood into planks, support beams, chests, workbenches, etc. or tending to charcoal pits and then selling that charcoal. There are several more problems I'd like to address but I'm going to do that later. I've got the itch to play again. 117 from mileaos2 when you buy a foundation stone of a cathedral in the next city and buy the whole materials you need too and transport them to your village, you can start your building, no problem =) well, you need a bit system in it. i suggested a palace, to become a king, because you have to build up your city quite a while until you can start a monarchy, unless you want a monarch in every small village on mp server... (well, you could chrush them with force ^^) and why citys have more buildings available than towns and towns more than villages? i throw some numbers in here, i know you cant have citys with 10000npc in it and keep the server stable well, you need ALOT ppl for building more complex and big buildings, when you have a village with 50npc, you cannot build a cathedral, i would consume more material, than the whole village needet twice... and you need someone who calculate the whole thing, you cant just start to build something big like a cathedral, it would collapse... i thougt about something like that: higher upgrades for buildings need more complex materials and tools to build. big citys with around 20000ppl attrackt more npc, because they ged work there, they can trade materials and tools from the whole country and ingeneurs want to work for the lord in charge (or the king). lets say, a town can build a scool, where you get new founding stones for alot money. (bigger towns produce more money, so you can build more stuff and keep a bigger milizia) with a scool, you can build special things like sewerage (bigger population), ship builder (river trade or at a sea) ect. why only a town get a scool? because you dont get someone to teach there, when you have a small, dirty village (its expensive) a city could affort a univerity, there you can buy foundation stones for a cathedral and your workshops can create hoist, to increase the building speed and they would make bigger buildings possible 118 from deathbytac0 cevkiv, on 12 August 2012 - 12:36 AM, said: You're failing to understand this: This is not what I consider fun. This is not what a lot of people consider fun. I dare say that the majority of people, if asked, would not say they consider their things being stolen to be fun. So... Maybe not to some people, my idea of fun in this situation is sneaking around, finding them, and slaughtering them multiple times. That can be hard, frustrating, and you may lose your stuff forever, but if they are ever let back in you can spawn camp them. Hopefully that wont get you banned. Make your house an underground entrance, one they cannot simply mine to, 3 blocks higher that the start, with a maze with pitfalls. Also build your house on a mountain, not at the top, but close. Mine the inside out and expand along the sides, and have a stairwell all the way through the mountain to the entrance. Nobody will bother to infiltrate your labyrinth. 119 from dunk Guys, from what I can understand, some people don't want raiding. Some people (myself included :/) find no pleasure in the experience, and the only way it becomes remotely tolerable is if the perpetrator is caught and the items are returned immediately. I don't want any man hunts or wanted criminals. I just want my shit to stay where I left it. 120 from mileaos you have that problem on all servers... okay, solution: pve server: griefing offline, you can protect everything vio commands pvp server: griefing online, you can protect your stuff with npc´s 121 dunk you have that problem on all servers... okay, solution: pve server: griefing offline, you can protect everything vio commands pvp server: griefing online, you can protect your stuff with npc´s 122 from mileaos2 well, then you make everything more complicatet... in that way you CANT be 100% safe, you have to lock your valuable stuff avay or hide it (behind walls, the ground ect) buildings shouldnt be easy destroyable, when they are build, you need some heavy force to destroy them. (siege weapons?) to prevent a fire: the village/city ect get "fireprotection points" for diffirent buildings. like wells, water pipes, firestation... when those points are high enough, the possibility is very low, someone is able to start a fire at your house. (cityguards, who catch someone, who tries to set a fire insite a town, gets arrestet/attacked) the same goes for picking the logs of doors, where the difficulty of lockpicking increases with more guards and the illumination of the village. (not to mention the difficulty of the lock itself) but when you WANT the game mechanik of griefing, you should stop arguing about the existence of it ^^ 123 form ak_snowfiend I don't think NPCs are a good idea. They often are very unbalanced, and in worse cases, laggy and broken. Not to mention, that would be a HUGE project to write that code... I'm going back to my original idea that a bounty system be considered. Something akin to Skyrim? You do something bad, and now there's a bounty out on your head. It won't stop people from comitting crimes, but it will give players incentive to seek justice! I know I'd love to RP a bounty hunter type character that wanders the land, hunting down brigands and collecting fame and fortune... Some people might choose to start a band of highwaymen, and pillage the countryside, as well. Others might join forces and dedicate their lives to scattering them and reclaiming their ill-gotten wealth. 124 from enzer dunkleosteus, on 12 August 2012 - 12:22 PM, said: Then why are we having these arguments? I was under the impression we weren't doing that. and i still don't know if npcs will protect your junk. I don't know why the argument is even happening. I don't think NPCs are the solution to this issue, being able to secure your shit via locks is a viable solution that wouldn't be to hard to implement (see the bukkit mod LCW), but having an in game way of locking stuff would be one the best options. To settle both sides what you do is give the admins the right to set if or if not locks can be bypassed, end of story. Some servers will prefer complete security, others will find ways of using this to facilitate game play. Check my previous posts in this thread, I've gone into detail on how this could easily be handled, just a few users are flipping out about even have the potential for such a system to be included in the mod, even if there is a way to disable it. :/
  6. 90 from bsb23 I love millenaire and minecolony and a couple other of the NPC adding mods however we are aiming at believability. And the problem with these mods are that they aren't believable sentients. With a simple wooden sword an entire millenaire village can be destroyed. Our spamming is no match for their AI. Minecolony is extremely annoyingly glitchy. The AI's are complicated but nowhere near ours. They just aren't believable humans. I see one way to use NPCs and that is testificates. They aren't human but they are sentient, barely. A couple more functions and they could make decent guards but guard dogs and golems would probably make more sense. 91 from dunk The server should have manual settings. I agree with what has been said earlier, you can never make a system that works for everyone. I personally don't like thievery, but I'm well aware that there are those of you out there who do. I'm sure neither of us are alone, so I think it is important that these things are configurable in the server set up, so that I can join a server advertised as "No thievery" and you can join one advertised "Thievery and raiding". bsb23, on 10 August 2012 - 08:28 PM, said: I love millenaire and minecolony and a couple other of the NPC adding mods however we are aiming at believability. And the problem with these mods are that they aren't believable sentients. With a simple wooden sword an entire millenaire village can be destroyed. Our spamming is no match for their AI. Minecolony is extremely annoyingly glitchy. The AI's are complicated but nowhere near ours. They just aren't believable humans. I see one way to use NPCs and that is testificates. They aren't human but they are sentient, barely. A couple more functions and they could make decent guards but guard dogs and golems would probably make more sense. Oh ho, I have some plans for those, given my experience with the animals and their AI, I'm confident I could (given some time, however) come up with some suitable code. They won't like you messing with their stuff, although they can grow to like you. page 9 92 from olaf_one_brow The political system should be based entirely on the type of rule the owner of the town chooses to enforce. When the player sets the home stone he/she can choose what system of government the town can be ( republic, dictatorship, etc). If a dictatorship is chosen then only the player that set the home stone has absolute rule but can be overthrone if most citizens of the town choose to. In a republic each person says what they think and the ruler decides the final verdict, this verdict can be overturned if most citizens dont like it. Pretty much like in real life when it comes to government. Concerning the economy each town should have its own currency and each town ( depending on its size and its power ) has a set amount of money. The money can be enterchanged between towns. When the money is transfered between towns it is converted to the others currency, in this system certain towns can get more money so the economy is much more realistic. This is my take on things though its just my opinion. Hope it helps . 93 from trepnick It's very hard to strike a balance between forced gameplay and emergent gameplay in the case of kingdoms, politics, and such, in my experience. I've run towns on servers, and it takes some work on the part of players to keep them going, keep them fair, etc. I think the first thing that should be considered is how to make government of towns easier for players to do, but still allow people to do it in their own way. For example, in TFC, one of the great possibilities is for roleplay in towns. One person is the blacksmith, some will mine, some will farm, etc. The thing that throws a wrench into it is that anyone can actually do anything if they want. TFC already balances this out some by making it much much harder for anyone to do everything. It's very hard to search for ores, keep your food stocked, and still have time for smithing all the ores you bring up from the depths of the earth already. I think with time, this will become even more true as more things are introduced that will be necessary for continued survival, and vanilla mechanics are rewritten to be TFC appropriate (i.e. 10 times as hard). So I suppose I don't really have much of a proposal per se, simply the suggestion that new mechanics be added to TFC with the idea of encouraging cooperation and making it so that each mechanic requires somewhat of a skill. For example one person spends the time to make a steel anvil and learns to smith perfect armor every time (meaning the patterns required for a particular seed) and thus they become the community blacksmith. I think encouraging this type of gameplay is important, although not something that should necessarily be implemented as its own separate mechanic, simply incorporated into other mechanics wherever possible. Make construction require not just a single chisel, but 2 or 3, and more knowledge of how to use them. Make farming require lots of knowledge of animal grazing patterns and crop growth patterns. Making the "barrier to entry" of a specific skill set higher will make that skill more valuable to others on a server, and thus they'll be willing to pay or trade for items, and an in-game economy will form, encouraging more gameplay options. Politics will originate from money, war and other social constructs will originate from politics through emergent gameplay. You'll know it's done right when people have banks and other constructs that don't rely at all on blocks or items or the way things are programmed, simply on social interaction with other players. It's late, and I've rambled enough for tonight. 94 from hidinginthelight How Villages/Towns/Cities should work, my take on it. First off I'm going to rename the Home Stone to Founding Stone. A founding stone would require (x) {(x) will represent a configurable option that can be set by the admin, I'll most likely use that again as I go} amount of people to provide some item (perhaps a petition or ballot) that would get used in building the founding stone along with other TFC materials. The person who builds it would be the mayor/leader, etc of the village. { Requiring ballots, or petitions from other players would limit 1 person towns, 5-10 would make a good default I think} Founding Stones would only allow for a very small village (x)chunks by (x)chunks. {I'm thinking 5 chunks by 5 chunks as a default} with the Stone being in the center chunk. Founding Stones could be upgraded, upgrades should be easy at first, 128 charcoal as an example for the first upgrade. Starting upgrades might increase the village size by 2 chunks in all direction, later upgrades that are more expensive could increase the town by 5 chunks in all directions. Max city size would be a configurable option, the distance between Founding stones would also be a configurable option. Some servers could allow overlap of cities at there maximum size, causing tensions between the cities, or allowing them to build the 2 cities together. {Not sure how the overlap area would work with the rest of my ideas coding wise, but that's no so much my problem} The Founding Stone, would have an interface, that the mayor could open up and drop the required upgrade items in, and a button to commit the changes. A text field to name the city. Anyone could click on the stone, and it would show them the name, and how much area the city occupies currently, what the next upgrade will cost, and how much of that has been supplied already, who the mayor is, I'm sure more info could go in it as well. Zoning. Once a town has been founded, the mayor would need to zone out the available chunks within the town's boundaries. This doesn't need to be over complicated, perhaps 2 zones, City and Private. Chunks zoned as private would be sold/given/rented {Mayors choice} to people that want to live in the city. City zoned chunks would be for roads, common ares, markets, etc. I'm thinking of modified signs as the zoning markers, can be placed on the ground or hung on a wall. City Zones. Again something that could be configurable. Either anyone could build in City Zones, or perhaps the mayor could set builders for that city in the Founding stones interface. Private Zones. Private Zone Markers would have an interface allowing the current owner to give ownership to someone else. It's be nice if they could be picked up and moved around within the chunk with out causing problems with the ownership, if that's able to be coded.. More to come. This got long and I'm getting tired 95 from thinktank Usual apologies if this has already been covered. While Bioxx has mentioned his views on NPCs, for security which falls somewhere between total block protection and full player controled I'd recommend using NPCs as enforcers. (although I am of the mind that all other professions should be handled by players.) NPCs dont need to go offline. So I'd suggest the following method to police both the town itself, and private property within the town: Spoiler Watchmen & Guardmen NPCs Blocks: Watchman Spawner Guardsman Spawner Watch Post Guard Post Prison Bed Items: Guard Captains Badge Watch Captains Badge Travel Papers Ownership Papers Use: First of all, the use and sale of areas from a mayor GUI of some sort is still in place, however instead of full block protection, the areas encompassed by 1) the entire town, and 2) the sectioned areas within it, are linked into the AI of the Guardsman and Watchman NPCs. Watchmen Spawners need to be supplyed with both money (or whatever is used for a trade medium) and NPC villagers (whom you can recruit in the rightclick GUI manner that has been mentioned). If NPCs are killed they vanish from the number recorded in the block and new villiagers must be recruited, the same happens if the money level is exhausted. It will spawn in watchmen where it is placed. ONLY A PLAYER WITH THE WATCH CAPTAINS BADGE CAN INTERACT WITH THIS BLOCK. Watch Posts are similar to 3 fenceposts stacked verticaly (or 3 supports) and have a torch or lamp set atop them (crafting with posts, redstone lamps, ect.). When clicked with the watch captains badge, they can be set in numbered sequence. Watchmen NPCs will move from the Watchman spawner, to follow the path from Watch Post 1 to the last number set, then return to the spawner and reset. (This can later be complicated by adding day and night shifts and so on) When a player attempts to destroy a block within a protection zone without the right Ownership Papers in their inventory, any Watchman NPC who can see this happening will become hostile to the player, after which so will any Watchman within an area around the event, much like the zombie pigman AI. If killed by damage from a Watchman, the players previous spawn is replaced with the nearest free Prison Bed block. Insuring that said bed is placed in an area it will be impossible for a player to escape from is the players responsibility of course. Guardsmen and their blocks work in a near identical fashion save for the following. They do much more damage than Watchmen, and can use Bows, they have a diffrent style of Guard Post (lamp colour possibly), and they react to players entering the towns area of influence without Travel Papers in their inventory. The AI for the Travel Players is similar to the delayed aggression of wolves except with a far larger radius. If killed by damage from a Guardsman, players previous spawn will revert to the world spawn point. Both NPC types react to hostile mobs by attacking. Both NPCs react like an Iron Golem AI to players attacking villagers, guardsmen or watchmen. Some Thoughts: As an added complexity you could make Travel Papers spesific to each Home stone for the town. You could also add bribery, in that throwing money at an aggressive NPC might reset the aggression and cause them to ignore you for a period. While the aggression system might get your head caved in for accidentaly punching somone elses wall, or wandering to close to an angry guard, a little kneejerkery is probably worth it in the end if your looking to discourage the usual petty theft that SMP is rife with. This system would benefit from tieing in with a lock system, where locks can be created and added to doors and chests (new texture when applyed) and only opened with the corrisponding key (hey if you really wanted to you could use the knapping GUI to cut out the keys shape). That way trying to bash in the locked door or chest would likly be the first thing that sets of the long arm of the law. In this manner people who want to thieve can still get away with it if they are clever, blocks can still get blown up or destroyed, and even with only 10-20 players, playing maybe only a few hours a day, you can ensure that players are under the beady eye of the law in your town. As mentioned before, a lot of this stuff has been covered by millenaire, so there might be no point in reinventing the wheel here if the systems can work side by side. (side note: no this system will not eliminate griefing and theft, if you have one or a number of players joining your server that are 100% focused on ruining everyone elses stuff there is no way short of banning and whitelisting that is going to stop them.)
  7. 89 from sirdave medium wall Wow, a very interesting discussion. I reckon I could write a seriously "too long" post here. Ill try to keep this short. Im surprised no ones mentioned millenaire. For me millenaire (or a copy - im being flagrant here) is the building block for kingdoms. Already millenaire has pre existing settlements populated by human villagers that do a large number of the things that fit in with the ideas being described in this discussion. There are multiple cultures, differences (basic in current form) in food, basic building blocks and "earnable goodies". The villages can trade with each other if they have markets and if relations are good enough and they can war/raid each other if relations are bad. they expand and build buildings and their "radius" (such as it is in a square world - not getting into diagonal lines of blocks and actual distances) are configurable as are the distances at which the chunk+village is still loaded and "active". This last part about distances and the state of a settlement being "active" are critical, in terms of game/client performance and also in terms of how the game will/would play. Ill say more about this later. Millenaires settlements are "found" during exploration/chunk generation. Reputatuion can be earned with them mainly by trading construction materials to them for their currency (they already have what i consider to be a workable currency built in, more on this later). There are a few small quests implemented in millenaire with a small amount of reputation gain. (I would increase the amount of quests so that reputation gain does not come 99 percent from trading stuff youve gathered to them). Millenaire already has a basic diplomacy system built in. You can go between villagers praising or slandering other villages to encourage them to trade with each other or fight/raid each other, I would involve reputation gain with this. Reputation would fall with the slandered culture/settlement. Millenaire has a built in protection system. All chests in the village are locked. To unlock all the villages chests you have to kill all the adult villagers (possibly all vilagers in "kingdoms", armed child resistance!!) to be able to access the resources within. If you break the chest in millenaire nothing drops. I dont like this but without any further discussion there is a mechanism existing to provide protection. In millenaire you can become the leader of the villager after lots of trading (very little non trading mechanisms exist to enhance reputation, this I would change) and you eventually gain access to the chest of the village. After reputation has reached a certain level you can "place/seed" an offshoot settlement of the parent culture that can then be traded with as per the original settlement and influenced to like/dislike other settlements with aformentioned results. At a later reputation threshhold you gain the ability/trade option for necessary item, to create a new player controlled village where you choose the buildings the villagers will build. I think in this player controlled village you will have full access to the chests from the very beginning. To me Milleanire is ticking so many boxes in terms of something already being there that a copy would be easier than a rewrite but I am not suggesting merely copying millenaire. The author seems like a very decent fellow. Hes been working on Milleanire for a long time from what I can see. He seems very active in coding the mod and talking to people. He seems to have gone to great lengths to make millenaire customisable by players, there is a mechanism for adding player designed structures and also cultures. I have no affiliation to millenaire, nor do I have a relationship with the coder so I am not speaking for him but I would be very surprised if he wouldnt be very interrested in the idea of millenaire forming the basis of a "political building block" and or working with, at the very least conversing with Bioxx on something similar if either party did not want to directly use/implement/modify Millenaire For the purposes of a beginning I think there could be no better template than millenaire. To do a lot of stuff that is being talked about here would take serious modification to the millenaire mod but I cannot imagine that one could write something as rich as millenaire currently is within 6 months of hard work. And to get more than it currently offers would take even longer. And I beleive that it would take only small modifications here and there to acheive some of what is talked about here with very little work, compared to a ground up creation/wtriting.coding of something similar. Protection has been discussed at length. I personally think with the right features no protection would be necessary. I would consider the following features necesary at a core level for no other protection to be necessary (ie ditching the milleanire style protection) 1) NPC guards - hireable but also loyal followers or family members, including patrol routes, line of sight for "disallowed actions such as breaking the blocks of your designated house(s) (also your designated roads fields and well... blocks 2) Locks - possible lockpicks and keys and copies of keys made by the locks creator, 3) Changing mining time for all blocks, increasing significantly but looking for the balance of - .not too easy to tunnel into somones house/not allow breaking through walls to be so quick guards have 0 chance of "discovering" an intruder/thief/hostile/vandal .mining for stone/mud/whatever needed not boring, tedious 4) Damagable chests with varying base material modification for "breaking open" and possibly a chance to destroy items contained inside (this might make theft less attractive to non griefers and more fun all round), 5)Hardcore mode - you die you die. no "spawning" for a theif whos been caught and killed. More on this later. 6) Ability to move a player defeated in combat, if you beat somone (not necessarily kill them) you blatantly would/could/should have the ability to drag their unconscious form whever you wish, chain up a severly beaten opponent or whatever. the idea here is imprisonment/restraint. In line with the mining time for blocks idea above I think a stone cell should not be breakable by hand within the confines of the game. If you get caught theiving and beaten and imprisoned, well its better than being dead. you might be able to talk your way out with your gaoler if you promise to behave etc etc.... but effectively inline with the hardcore, "youre dead youre dead" idea if youre imprisoned and unrepentant, effectively you might as well be dead. Unless you have friends prepared to try to break you out. While youre a hostage if friends attack the threat of slaying you might hold them off. ill say more about this later. Now this post is already getting fat and ive rejigged it a few times. Ill try and talk briefly about those things ive said ill say more about later. (ill work from the top down). Firstly I said id say more about the village radius and the distance from the villager a player (any player in SMP) has to be to keep a village active and the implications for game performance and flow. In Millenaire the village has a radius which is effectively the "owned land", you can build on it but they treat it as theirs, they will build over the top of whatever a player who is not on control of their village builds, destroying what is present. It also has a distance the player must be within to keep the village "active" ie collecting resources and building. The scale of millenaire is small, the settlements have of the order of 40 villagers at their fullest growth and typically they are found with 8 villagers. Despite this the performace impact on the game is heavy. Having a land populated wall to wall (sort of) would not be feasible with a player count of 100 or so (im guesstimating here) due to the number of villages "active", if all players had a different village in their radius. To me this fact given the maturity of millenaire mod and the quality I associate with it, translate to the mod not providing the "kingdoms", which I would envisgae as multiple millenaire settlements as viable. As a non coder The only solution to a problem like this is to simulate the gathering/building rather than having actual entities going from a to b performing tasks that can be "seen". This is the part where millenaire would need to be very different or be adapted. I would like to imagine that one could create some kind of simulator effectively generating and consuming/resources, trading and attacking/deffedning without actually running entities ais which directly affect the outcomes of the village. Sort of like a sim city, simulating many villagers and generating macroscopic outcomes without simulating every aspect of the individuals lives. Millenaire doesnt really do this (as far as I know) but again, anything written from the ground up is surely going to take far longer than will ever be actually realised. next I mentioned currency. Millenaire already has essentially a gold silver copper based currency. I like the idea of minting coins with a name.That works on many levels and could be easily integrated within millenaires existing currency. I think that gold silver and copper coins should be crafted from ingots of the said material. The value/ingot craft rate/cost of goods should be tied directly to the scarcity of the resouce (like i think it works in real life, or has, or should). Obviously the spawn rate of the currency metals would need to be set relative to each other, and also the prices/values of traded items is measured by the scarcity of the resource/crafted item balanced against the players or npcs needs. This brings me to something I havent mentioned but fits here. Villagers should require food/water (possible needs here can be inserted, balancing for performance/viability/cost balancing, including shelter,warmth,clothes,tools with whatever they have the least of generating the most need/desire). As it stands in MC you need a constant supply of tools so tools are continually used up/broken and new ones needed so a village will consume tools by collecting resources. I dont think I need to say too much about a villager/indivifual npcs needing food. Food would be the baseline for need and consumption and food generation methods and the time needed for a given output would need to be balanced with the economy and the scarcity of rare metals/commodity price. All of this creates an economy for which the currency should be balanced as the tool for facilitating trade. Between the villages also(necessitating some modification of the millenaire tarding system which i know nothing about). It has been previously mentioned that in TFC the "needed resources" are more scattered than in vanilla, this naturally and gracefully creates an inducement for villages seperated by some distance to trade amongst themselves for those resources they need/find desireable/useful. Weapons and armour and MANPOWER would be expensive and consumed in warfare/raids which would be another source of generating need and consumption to regulate the economy of the greater world. Ive also said more about the hardcore death is death. There is another mod that I like very much called minecraft comes alive. In this mod the testificate villagers are overwritten with "human villagers" that you can interact with (millenaire villages do not overwrite testificates and both villages spawn in a world with both mods installed). Eventually you can marry an MCA testificate replacement and have children. When playing in hardcore mode if you have a child and you die you have the option to continue as your child (currently you dont change name and essentially play on as the same character but the child does disappear upon your death). I like this as a mechanism from the point of view of griefing - players who are cuaght and killed can eventually be forced "out of children" into permadeath and the "cost" of being killed for antisocial actions becomers much higher (your children/household should require food, clothes, tools if they are to do any work and shelter to keep wild animals attacking them, so they would incur a cost and therefore not be an unlimited resource that a grifer can exploit (just having many many children) to grief other players. Also If a player were to be beaten in combat rather than kiled (beaten or injured into submission) the player can be imprisoned and cannot "respawn" into a child upon death (no death occurs). So for me this is working from multiple angles. If I could I would integrate the "marry a villager" functionality from MCA into millenaire outside this mod, but in the context of this discussion I would say that the two make natural bedfellows along with many of the suggestions Ive added. I would make the guards/family members/villagers ai integrated and have settings which are either displayed (if not controlled or under stong influence - like the subject of a village youve become the leader of) or are controllable. I woudl keep them simple but flexible. Military stance - run away, deffend/fightback with setttings for until inury threshold or death/flee uncontrollably, attack range - melee or ranger weaponry and optimal range for missile fire, basic job, resource consumption rate - translating to rationing,tool quality and usage,clothing consumption, movement settings - setting home locations, range of movement/freedom, flee/flight distances/ranges/boltholes. The idea here is that the guards can be "setup" along with other "protection countermeasures" to offer a nice protection to the owner, a chance of success for a potential thief and a very general platform for lots of other exciting scenarios. Villagers/family members can be setup to produce some resources mitigating their cost, or potentially with multiple villages trading a profit might be generated by producing smart, selling in the right places etc etc. This would require lots of work but offers a powerbase that enables things a solo thief cannot sustain. At this stage Ill mention skills. Skills would be awesome. There shoudl be skills for everything. Like dwarf fortress a peice of armour or a weapon made by a master smith should be orders of magnitude better than that made by an apprecntice. Farming should be faster, hitting stuff should be more damaging etc etc. I always think about an infinitely increasable skill with each extra increment in skill taking longer to earn and have a corresponding lesser effect than the previous skill point on an exponential scale. So there would be a "bang for buck" point that is worth more than the ever increasing skills of somone who does 1 thing for their entire lives, in terms of the time it takes to earn the skill, as well as the value of the output produced. However despite the fact that I would love to see skills in minecraft for the scope of this discussion I think its a bridge too far. I think a great deal of what has/is envisaged can be acheived without it and the work involved with adding skills (should have been there from the start like many other things which are almost a joke) I think might be too entrenching. Given that TFC has/is talking about seasons, if the hardcore idea would be utilised then the player character can have a lifetime which he can either play until death and then/or continue as a follower/child to "contiinue the game". This would lead to "bloodlines/families/houses, that would benefit from the legacy of those that came before them, the facilities, accumulated resources/wealth/manpower and knowledge. Another mod I think would fit within this concept is one called researchcraft which im currently playing. In it every recipe must be "learned" by performing an action upon resources which may be consumed and may result in a new recipe being learned. The recipes are stored with a recipe book known by the player which can/could be written into a book and/or possibly shared with other players or npcs.
  8. 84 from jasnatdic A thought about npcs, if they get added. I think building a job board to hire npc with would add a believable way to obtain said npcs. Then you would have to maintain there wage to keep them, maybe even with downsides if you fail to pay them for a period. Like they run off with your treasury instead of guarding it. Also, you should have to equip your npcs. Including building their adiquate place of business and home. A guard for instance would die easily if not armed and armored, and require a baracks. A baker would require input of bakeing materials, as well as a bakery, as well as a home. Also all job npcs would only do so much work in a day. 85 from hindmost View PostBioxx, on 10 August 2012 - 02:29 PM, said: This comes back to the protection provided by cities and towns. I will not force something upon players that I dislike myself, therefore at the very least, thieving will be configurable somewhere and most likely off by default. What about delayed protection - say, it becomes on after 10-15 min from dislogin? If player is on the server, he will meet with the intruder (or not, based on intruder luck and skill), and if he is off, intruder have small amount of time to try to unlock some chests/doors - jamming in 25% cases - lets say, by 1-2 minute of heavy work for the mind per standart lock? After that time, the house becomes invulnerable (and NPC-guards, if any - [almost] immortal). And, of course, guards - they are defence mechanism with some AI - because they able to alarm other guards and report about failed or successed fights with intruders to the holder. That mechanism gives us the ability to configure itself by two degrees of freedom - delay of lock and jam probability. What do you think about it? 86 from doodthedud hindmost, on 10 August 2012 - 04:25 PM, said: What about delayed protection - say, it becomes on after 10-15 min from dislogin? This is a good idea. The delay keeps them logging off when they sense defeat, but stops them losing everything while they're offline. 87 from dunk View PostDoodTheDud, on 10 August 2012 - 04:50 PM, said: This is a good idea. The delay keeps them logging off when they sense defeat, but stops them losing everything while they're offline. In that case, you might as well make it 5-10 minutes. 15 is i think too long, long enough for a thief to just happen along on the house, as opposed to one who's already there. 88 from noctem9 Here's a couple ideas I've come up with on the fly. By no means are they refined or well thought out.. just some brainstorming. Regarding property: I would like to see a system in place where one or two people can found a location to be their "Camp". Camps can be almost anywhere in the wilderness and they can be upgraded to full fledged villages through a sort of deed system. The deed system could work as follows: Once a camp is esablished in a prime location fit for building into a village, the founder writes up a Village Deed in a sort of writing desk GUI block. This deed, centered on where is was "written" establishes an invisible border. It would be up to the denizens to mark, protect, and maintain their borders. Plots of land for cottages (homes) could be subdivided and centered around a hearth/fireplace block inside the cottage. Doesn't break immersion, and what's a home without a warm fireplace? In order to "upgrade" the newly founded village into a Town (with much larger border and space for cottages), there must be some conditions met inside village limits: a) There must be a farm and maybe a grain mill file:///C:Usersdat594AppDataLocalTempmsohtmlclip101clip_image002.gifThere must be x number of cottages (ties in with c, below) c) A currency or resource* requirement *Elaborating on resource: Perhaps when a village is established it is given an arbitrary base "productivity" value. Every time a new building is added inside the village limits "productivity" value increases. e.g.: Base village productivity = 20, cottages add +10 productivity, a bloomery adds +5 (once), et cetera. The productivity value must be met in order to upgrade. (idea pilfered from many turn-based strategy games) Regarding theft and chest protection: How about something simple but effective; Different types of inventory systems. a) Resource Piles - Large inventory, can hold a lot of stones/logs/food but is unprotected from light fingers. file:///C:Usersdat594AppDataLocalTempmsohtmlclip101clip_image002.gifWooden Chests - Small inventory, locked by default but can be destroyed with metal weapons thereby dropping the contents. c) Strong Boxes - Tiny inventory, unbreakable and expensive to make requiring stronger metals like iron or steel; guarenteed protection for the owner. Also, I feel like denizens of the same town shouldn't be allowed to break eachothers wooden chests. Only members of rival villages should have that ability. Again, villagers should be responsible for the defence of their village (building fences, bridges, gates) That's all I can think of for now.
  9. 78 from inertburger small wall Lots of really good Ideas here. I think a bit of Q&A may help the ideas flow, currently Kingdoms is a very broad topic. I got a couple of questions so we can see what Bioxx reasonably thinks might be in place for kingdoms and help polarize the direction of these ideas cause alot of us are thinking X assuming Y. Bioxx may loathe the idea of Y (Bioxx may also love it, but that's peripheral we're here to talk about kingdoms!). Bottom line, good brainstorming has a set of defined parameters. Now lets see if we can get some! About how big is the server you imagine this being used on? 10 players? 50? The bigger the population the more it will feel like a "kingdom" this also leads to more griefers but, hey, take the good with the bad. Additionally npc's may be suited to a guard role for lower pop servers (such as the iron golem, etc.) acting as a watchdog. Would lessen binary gameplay of hold down left mouse button to break through wall and get items. Now you have to dodge guards. Will material distribution remain as it is, or will it change allowing for specialized kingdoms? Imagine an ore-rich kingdom at the base of a mountain, or one in rich plains near a river which grows food X% faster. This leads to trade, as bigger kingdoms need more resources and smaller ones may be able to cash in on this. How complicated will this get? Simple feudal/city-states? Kingdoms with fiefdoms and a noble ruling court? This one really is just how much work Bioxx is willing to put in (keep up the good work!). Finally, how transparent is control over these kingdoms going to be? Such as: GUI for everything, action and reaction, automation, tier control, etc. Also things such as type of government being set or fluid, each one may have a bonus, etc. Bottom line how much hair does the mayor need to lose before his duties are over for the day. I too want to give input for the protection system unfortunately I'm going to make assumptions (bad Burger, bad!). More focused towards non-kingdom-members versus kingdom-members. Basically its the guard system from WURM ONLINE. If you have a low reputation (too many negative actions) town guards aggro on sight (mayor could also blacklist people, or set a negative rating for them for the town only.) Town guards should obviously be appropriately powerful and in sufficient number to thwart one or two people if they get caught doing unsavory deeds (also think "STOP, you've violated the law" kind of chain aggro), however larger groups might be able to overwhelm them. I also think some sort of armor should be a must, Steve shouldn't be able to take a sword to the side and get out with a bunch of health. This way the attacker needs to put effort into attacking. Personally I think it would be more fun if a group of raiders was rewarded over a single griefer. I see a group of 5 raiding one settlement for materials and goods, that settlement then raids back and takes more, etc. Eventually they get sick and tired of it and enlist help or offer a truce etc. Not on at a certain time, upgrade your guards or hire another settlement to defend your holdings should that be available. In short, we normalize resource risk versus reward. To clarify: 5 people attack a settlement of 20, that is a 1:4 ratio I feel a lot less "screwed" than 1 person attacking a settlement of 20 and getting away with it at a 1:20 ratio. 5 people worth of resources versus 20 etc. Finally for this to work I imagine some sort of wound system, health can still be regained but there's debuffs placed on a character after taking damage, to varying severity. A heavily bruised arm may suffer a 25% damage malus on a sword swing. A concussion may result in less XP gained from an action. The defending party is a risk of this too, but they have the home-field advantage. TL;DR: Questions and No Rambo-ing entire settlements. P.S. Jail is the wrong kind of punishment, we're playing a game to play and have "fun", not sit around. "But, yes, Mr. Burger that's the point make it un-fun to grief." True, but its a cop-out. There is no "fun" anti-grief mechanic to jail, just doing "nothing". To my knowledge "nothing" cannot be fun. Remember "Losing is Fun" (see Dwarf Fortress). 79 from darkdurza EternalUndeath, on 09 August 2012 - 04:13 PM, said: If you right click on a locked chest with a lockpick, the lock's durability is removed from the durability of the pick. If the pick is still intact, it then makes a check with a 10% chance of opening the lock and making it pop off as an item, returning the chest to normal. This is improved by 3% for ever tier of metal above copper. I don't like the idea of a chance to open a lock. I like the idea of having a GUI similar to the anvil so that lockpicking becomes a skill, and not just spamming rightclick. 80 from dunk DarkDurza, on 10 August 2012 - 11:48 AM, said: I don't like the idea of a chance to open a lock. I like the idea of having a GUI similar to the anvil so that lockpicking becomes a skill, and not just spamming rightclick. I'd agree with you, but this isn't a game like skyrim. The chests aren't put in for your amusement, they hold the fruits of the hardwork of your fellow players. I'd rather not have you stealing at all, but if I do, I'd rather it be tough as hell. 81 from doodthedud Enzer, on 09 August 2012 - 04:17 PM, said: Honestly I think we should stop focusing on griefers all together for now. No option is perfect and nothing will deter people who want to be assholes. This thread is beginning to lose its purpose because of the direction the conversation has gone. Discussing how land ownership and protection is great, but not when it is completely about griefing.. I don't know about you, but I'm not talking about "griefing". I'm talking about thievery and raiding, which I believe should be a fun and interesting mechanic for both the owner of items and the thief/raider. I personally want to avoid having NPCs, but NPC guards that patrol the streets and confront strangers is, in my opinion, a FAR better option than protecting land. Perhaps there could be citizenship cards, and those who don't have them should try to avoid guard confrontations, which could lead to their death or imprisonment. page 8 I find it interesting that so far its averaged ten per page 82 from doodthedud dunkleosteus, on 10 August 2012 - 12:06 PM, said: I'd agree with you, but this isn't a game like skyrim. The chests aren't put in for your amusement, they hold the fruits of the hardwork of your fellow players. I'd rather not have you stealing at all, but if I do, I'd rather it be tough as hell. Stealing should exist, but ideally, you'd have to work even harder to successfully steal something without your identity being known than you would have to work to gain your items legitimately. Disallowing theft and vandalism greatly removes many fun possibilities from the game. The only thing that can make a real challenge for a human is another human. We're the only ones unpredictable enough. 83 from bioxx I won't address all of the points so far but the theme of theft is ongoing so I'll comment on it. Yes, thievery can bring a lot of interesting mechanics to the game. However it needs to be VERY carefully balanced. There is no fun whatsoever in logging in and realizing that everything you have has been stolen while you were offline. This comes back to the protection provided by cities and towns. I will not force something upon players that I dislike myself, therefore at the very least, thieving will be configurable somewhere and most likely off by default. edit: Also I updated the OP
  10. Why Suggestions Suck

    a way to fix all the re posting, at least the ones caused by those who care at all to do even a little reading before posting( yes I know this won't solve the problem but I do not seek to solve the problem only to decrease the magnitude of the problem), is to make a thread that lists the ideas that have been sugested and rejected, at least the ones that might be suggested again, and why the link to the relevant threads. and a post that lists the current plans for improving the already implemented features and the relevant threads and a post of suggestions or proposed features that are being worked on for implementation and the relevant thread(if the rest of this is ignored please at least do this one so that we can actually know what is going to be implemented without having to read all the posts) yes its a lot of work but so is sifting through all the posts ever made on this forum before posting. if you want someone else to work you have to too plus getting designated people to improve the forums and not simply lock or sticky threads would be a really good idea
  11. please add a download for earlier versions

    dunk and anyone else who is a staff please x1000000000 post how to get older versions in a stickied thread. if not people will continue to post questions of how to get older versions plus it would simply be kind to those of us who don't troll the download page everyday in case we want to join a server or our server updates please and thank you no rudeness intended and I know you have a lot to do, I and others would just really like to have this information in an easy accessible place
  12. Camp/base/home defense

    how many -pats on head-do you think you give a week? just wondering
  13. Kingdoms Brainstorming

    civcraft will not work with all servers we are trying to find a way that works for all servers
  14. so that someone does not have to rad a 40 page thread dealing with multiple topics in order to read about block protectionsthis would encourage people to actually read before posting and would keep you and the others from having to always tell them its been suggested before. in essence its for simplicity and efficiency for the average poster and for bioxx to see what we think
  15. part 2 51 from infinus5 has anyone planned out how people could get there hands on good land ? what if we added claim posts ? in irl, miners, prospectors and land speculators use land claim posts to mark out what plot of land you wish to control there would be some limits though 1) a person could only "own" 4 "1" by "1" km area 2) the property must be noted at a government office (or with an server admin) 3) groups of people and corporations can control land to a limit (set by the admin) 4) a land claim must have at least a 1000 of what ever currency is used on the server to remain controlled by the owner any other ideas? just spouting ideas 52 from too-damn-much i have to say just one thing so far really i regards to buying plots of land or claims if you will for mining out, basically how do we ensure it doesn't just facilitate another type of griefing whereby the griefer simply buys up all the land plots around each newly constructed town block and does nothing with them thereby rendering making towns pointless. maybe if the town center or structure had a communal inventory that everyone with a plot of owned land nearby could contribute to and then when the materials stored by the town center got past a certain threshold it'd provide a nicer environment in and around the town, or heck maybe it could give a bonus that reduces the time to produce charcoal or something like that, of course something really small like 5% or 10% but something that'd incentivize being a cohesive part of a town instead of just staying on your own. 53 from infinus5 Too-DAMN-Much, on 09 August 2012 - 01:00 PM, said: i have to say just one thing so far really i regards to buying plots of land or claims if you will for mining out, basically how do we ensure it doesn't just facilitate another type of griefing whereby the griefer simply buys up all the land plots around each newly constructed town block and does nothing with them thereby rendering making towns pointless. maybe if the town center or structure had a communal inventory that everyone with a plot of owned land nearby could contribute to and then when the materials stored by the town center got past a certain threshold it'd provide a nicer environment in and around the town, or heck maybe it could give a bonus that reduces the time to produce charcoal or something like that, of course something really small like 5% or 10% but something that'd incentivize being a cohesive part of a town instead of just staying on your own. as far as theft and crime goes.... /me points to eve online, have fun with your research yeah i know, not much useful to say on it, it's early. simple way to stop a greifer form buying everything could be to simply double the taxes on the person after the alotted 4 claims in one area are used up. claims also could have a limited life span of a year, before needing to be renewed you could though have problems with land speculators buying large areas of land, but if you simply claim the land they don t want, than there land depreciates in value. pg 5 54 from dat594 heres my idea about locks/protection/towns/factions/war/pvp/griefing make levels have them scale from killing players/mobs, have them scale by an achievment system(like finding ore/making ingots) have combat levels where you have to be within a certain range to fight other players have an achivement level requirement for making a town/home protected area have a town level where you can't expand/use certain town perks untill you reach a certain level. have combat levels for tows allow pvp to be turned on or off for those of us who take a long time to start up/ have a laggy computer and would be unable to even see the other person in real time 55 from i think that plots in towns, whatever they look like, should be fairly big to accommodate the small chest inventory sizes or for inventory management to somehow take up less space (this is an edited version of my post since I was way to tired to post logically) 56 from hindmost small wall So, the griefing, thieft and assasination should be - because it adds spice to teh gameplay, and it should be limited - because nobody want to wake up in complete ruins every damn day. I like idea of reinforcement - not for crazy 1 hour of wall-penetration, but lets say, 5-10 min for a man with a black/higher pickaxe and not-ever-try for others. I also like an idea of hired guards patrooling the walls and trying to deal hardly with a suspicious person, attacking that walls. Are you tough enouth to withstand 10+ guards in steel making you a hedgedog with their long bows? I also vote for idea of locks. They were the real way to stop intruders (by jamming, lol). The limitation should be based on time. If a master of some house is inside - he should repel marauders by himself, which is fair enouth. If he went out, the house starts a 20-30 minute timer. After it counts to zero - game does locking of all the unbroken content (doors, chests, blocks) in the house. The mercenaries is the good solution, I think - a pack of heavy armored guys defending key points of the house - as living (and regenerating!) traps with simple AI. They could get orders and nust be paid well. The word about sniffing the explosives: they could be carried in in form of precursors and built to bomb just inside the building. And that the hell "explosive sniffing system" could be in <1600 years? The explosives could, npo doubt, but no sniffing. Attackers could use bombs/explosives to break obstackles - break wall underneath, as instance, and it will break being turned to cobble. The wise attacker could divert attention of guards (if they aren't trained well - twere hired on the street) by throwing a piece of rock or, if he knows that master of house is a greedy bastard, throw a small gem and pull the guards by one. All that operation must be done for a 20-30 munites - or house locks and guards become (almost?) immortal. 57 from me i like the lock pick stress thing plus the lock combo thing I think their should be levels of lock based on material+how wil its crafted picks should have to be a higher level to not get buffed, if they are same or lower they have an exponetial buff against durability the locks should be either number combo or a pusle type thing that the maker creates, for every level above basic add one more number slot, for every level above the base one to start their should be a clue or auto gues one of the numbers and their should be a random alarm for stress on lock picks and if one should snap their should be a alarm on a larger scale and the lock should jame till it is opened and if it jamed a in game mesage should be sent to the player while he is online/when he logs on 58 from ttk2 wall i like the lock pick stress thing plus the lock combo thing I think their should be levels of lock based on material+how wil its crafted picks should have to be a higher level to not get buffed, if they are same or lower they have an exponetial buff against durability the locks should be either number combo or a pusle type thing that the maker creates, for every level above basic add one more number slot, for every level above the base one to start their should be a clue or auto gues one of the numbers and their should be a random alarm for stress on lock picks and if one should snap their should be a alarm on a larger scale and the lock should jame till it is opened and if it jamed a in game mesage should be sent to the player while he is online/when he logs on 59 from barkingnoise View Posttsnm, on 09 August 2012 - 02:14 PM, said: Each city has it own laws. These laws include or not the taxes. I suppose that the cities grow depending of population. A city <50 npc is smaller than another >100 npc. The city ratio increase depending of population but, all in this life has a limit I think that npc city could attack to other city if relationship down very much. The npcs occupy the player place. In single player is only one player, then npc occupy the player places, but in a server you could choose if your city will or will not npcs. How are these laws enforced? Automatically or are they just set up so they are easily readable? I don't want players be physically limited by ridiculous laws, and I don't want these laws to be set in stone, only to be used as basis for a judicial system. Of course NPC's (if implemented at all) will follow whatever laws made up automatically - which by the way would open up for potential abuse of the soulless masses 60 from hidinginthelight View Postttk2, on 09 August 2012 - 02:50 PM, said: I am ttk2, I created and administrate http://reddit.com/r/Civcraft, as far as I know we are the only server dedicated to being a political melting pot. Our player base is over a thousand strong, in many ways TFcraft and Civcraft are each other reversed, you started with an expanded tech tree and environment and now move to politics, we started with politics and are working on moving to an expanded tech tree. Don't get me wrong, I think it's possible on a certain server(s), under the right conditions, indeed you may have done it on your server. But TFC isn't being designed for, or atleast my ideas aren't for, a single server with 1000's of players like you have. A system in TFC needs to be designed for multiple servers of varying sizes. A server with 50 members won't be able to mount as strong of a defense vs the griefers. 61 from ttk2 HidingInTheLight, on 09 August 2012 - 03:07 PM, said: Don't get me wrong, I think it's possible on a certain server(s), under the right conditions, indeed you may have done it on your server. But TFC isn't being designed for, or atleast my ideas aren't for, a single server with 1000's of players like you have. A system in TFC needs to be designed for multiple servers of varying sizes. A server with 50 members won't be able to mount as strong of a defense vs the griefers. Its much easier to create order with these systems than most people think. Mainly because it relies on strength in numbers griefers are usually isolated and tend to not work together or be a cohesive group. We have had situations where small groups working together have defeated waves of disorganized griefers without much effort. And the organized griefers have to stay around long enough to build up equipment to be on even footing with the regular players. In the end you are correct, the players can fail and the server fall to chaos, but that's what makes it fun, that's what makes it worth doing. It makes every battle so much more significant an exciting with so much riding on it. If players are not interested in this risk than they simply do what they do now, ban griefers and/or add a white-list then those players can practice the flexibility offered by this approach in safety. page 6 62 from barkingnoise HidingInTheLight, on 09 August 2012 - 03:07 PM, said: Don't get me wrong, I think it's possible on a certain server(s), under the right conditions, indeed you may have done it on your server. But TFC isn't being designed for, or atleast my ideas aren't for, a single server with 1000's of players like you have. A system in TFC needs to be designed for multiple servers of varying sizes. A server with 50 members won't be able to mount as strong of a defense vs the griefers. To add; there haven't been 1000 players online at the same time, the cap is (or at least used to be) at around 100 in peak hours. There are around 1000 subscribers to the subreddit, and that's where the number comes from mainly. quick-edit: which means that griefer-defence has been successfully done at numbers lower than 100. 63 from buzhwaz building towns is a great way to include more macro-crafting...or enviro-crafting...or whatever. after you craft a home stone, you use it as a brick in building a great hall. the hall would be a place to buy land, pay debts, hold coffers, etc. however, you shouldn't be able to call yourself a 'town' with only a hall. in order to become a town, you should also have to build a couple of other things... a granary and an armory, for instance. then you're officially established as a town. perhaps the granary and the armory could be built and owned by different players, who will each wield control of their resource, thus making a little room for some politics to flare. one possible function of an armory might be to craft friendly mob spawners, which a town could place at its gate and near its coffers to defend against any thieves or marauders. the wealthier a town, the more mob spawners it can get, thereby offering more protection for its citizens. 64 from eternal Okay, so I see that locks are pretty popular as an idea... how about this then. There's a craftable item called a 'padlock', wrought iron or better. It will have a plan pattern. When you craft this in the anvil, it will come out with X amount of damage depending on how well you make it, same as a tool. The damage values could be, say, 1-50 or whatever. The lock never actually takes damage. Lockpicks are also craftable, with a lockpick head (copper or better, made on the anvil with a plan) and a stick (or handle, if we add those from the other thread). They can have a durability of 1-30 or something, with an additional 5 points for every tier of metal above copper. These, like locks and tools, can be forged well or poorly. Right-clicking on a chest with a padlock removes the lock from your hand and turns the chest into a locked chest, which is a separate block. A locked chest cannot be opened, even by the chest owner. If you right click on a locked chest with a lockpick, the lock's durability is removed from the durability of the pick. If the pick is still intact, it then makes a check with a 10% chance of opening the lock and making it pop off as an item, returning the chest to normal. This is improved by 3% for ever tier of metal above copper. Keys are also craftable with a plan and an anvil. They are blank when crafted. crafting a blank key with a padlock yields a regular key with hidden metadata that links it to that particular padlock, and places the lock back in your inventory. This key will remove that lock and only that lock from a chest with 100% chance, losing no durability. A keyring would also be craftable. A keyring would have in its code a list of all the values assigned to the keys on it, starting with a null set {} when freshly crafted. Crafting a key with a keyring will remove the key from your inventory and add its value to the keyring's list. So if you add 3 keys whose values are :3490 :1520 and :0012, then your keyring would have the set {3490, 1520, 0012}, and would function exactly the same as all those keys. Now you could just say 'well what's stopping someone from breaking the chest?' Absolutely nothing. Just like there's absolutely nothing stopping someone from breaking into your house, smashing open your cabinet, and taking all of your shit IRL. This is a very real possibility, and was even more likely back in the time period TFC supposedly takes place in. The solution is to live with other people who have a schedule such that someone is usually home at all times, and to have a very efficient legal system. You think that an IRL thief has a problem opening a hole in your wall or basement and knicking your shit? You're dead wrong, friend. The only thing deterring them is the thought of the effort involved, and the risk of getting caught. 65 from enzer Honestly I think we should stop focusing on griefers all together for now. No option is perfect and nothing will deter people who want to be assholes. This thread is beginning to lose its purpose because of the direction the conversation has gone. Discussing how land ownership and protection is great, but not when it is completely about griefing.. 66 from me the problem about griefers difers greatly than with real life theaves 1. security systems, we have no cops, we do not sleep in these houses and cant so no cops to catch the bad guy and no angry sleepwalker with a shotgun to make them think twice 2. most people have neighbors in game you may not have someone on at all times, really a town usually has people on at almost the same time, its what makes smp fun, playing with friends not tag teaming with them. 3. dogs... 4. those who don't have neighbors live in the midle of nowhere and thieves arn't going to take the time to search all of western kansas,I live in kansas so I can say this, for some unprotected house. 5. most peopl have morals and think thieving and simply causing mayhem is wrong in minecraft their are tons of people who get their kicks from ruining someones day just cause( even if it takes hours to break a block they have no life and so will watch tv while holding the mouse button) you can't seriously talk about towns, houses, everyday server life without talking about griefers and comming up with a plan to make the game chalanging yet not depresing when you log back in from and emergancy break right after crearing you first mine and find all your stuf gone and your swimming in lava, hyperbobly most likely they just fill in your house with dirt to sufocate you 67 from hidinginthelight barkingnoise, on 09 August 2012 - 03:48 PM, said: To add; there haven't been 1000 players online at the same time, the cap is (or at least used to be) at around 100 in peak hours. There are around 1000 subscribers to the subreddit, and that's where the number comes from mainly. quick-edit: which means that griefer-defence has been successfully done at numbers lower than 100. Obviously there aren't 1000 on at a time, but you have a player base of that many. With that large of a player base, it's likely that at least 10-20 are on at any given time. Enough to notice a griefer, and stop it. If a server only has a total of 50 players total, it's likely there will be times that only 1 or 2 people are on, there maybe even be times when a griefer would have the server to themselves. 68 from eternal dat594, on 09 August 2012 - 04:47 PM, said: the problem about griefers difers greatly than with real life theaves 1. security systems, we have no cops, we do not sleep in these houses and cant so no cops to catch the bad guy and no angry sleepwalker with a shotgun to make them think twice 2. most people have neighbors in game you may not have someone on at all times, really a town usually has people on at almost the same time, its what makes smp fun, playing with friends not tag teaming with them. 3. dogs... 4. those who don't have neighbors live in the midle of nowhere and thieves arn't going to take the time to search all of western kansas,I live in kansas so I can say this, for some unprotected house. 5. most peopl have morals and think thieving and simply causing mayhem is wrong in minecraft their are tons of people who get their kicks from ruining someones day just cause( even if it takes hours to break a block they have no life and so will watch tv while holding the mouse button) you can't seriously talk about towns, houses, everyday server life without talking about griefers and comming up with a plan to make the game chalanging yet not depresing when you log back in from and emergancy break right after crearing you first mine and find all your stuf gone and your swimming in lava, hyperbobly most likely they just fill in your house with dirt to sufocate you 1) Who's to say that guards can't be appointed in cities/castles, who get paid TFC currency to walk around town looking for greifers in shifts? 2) As Hiding said above me, there will usually be people on if enough are on the server. And in a castle/town, you WILL have neighbors chilling around. 3) Domesticated wolves can be recoded to become hostile to PCs not on the 'guest list' for your house that enter your property bounds 4) Isn't that a good thing? 5) In RL there's tons of people who get their kicks doing the same shit. If there weren't, crime rates would be less than a tenth of what they are now because all crimes would likely be done out of desperation - stealing food cuz you're starving, hot blooded murder, etc... MC players have morals too, you know. I've never griefed a single person except for my friend Fearick, whom I was in a prank war with. And to be fair, blocking his nether portal with obsidian was payback for him filling an entire floor of my wizard's tower with water 69 from lumireaver Pardon me, I skipped over a lot to chime in on something after I read about Homestones. (I'll read more in a bit, but alas, the days efforts have made me grow weary. :U) Instead of any sort of protection, couldn't it be made so that tool durability was multiplied, and effectiveness was cut to an eighth, or something, except by players whose names are engraved on the stone? So raiding is still viable and stuff. Homestones could also be destroyed and would have to be safeguarded and/or hidden somehow. Also View Postsdbaynham, on 09 August 2012 - 12:42 AM, said: For what? The first thing someone who actually wants protection is going to do is, mod their server to have it. It's a protection system for people who don't want protection systems. It's a TFC!Vanilla protection system that could potentially be circumvented with skill but should serve to deter theft. Plugging my alphanumeric pin and tumbler lock/key suggestion. ...Which is...somewhere. I'll find it tomorrow. :U edit: ...There...now sleep. edit2: Ohoho, plugging a plug. :U 70 from redundandusage A simple fix would seem to be to provide configurable menus or files for towns and claims. If options are provided that allow the servers to choose when or if protection comes into play, then the people who want protection will be happier, and the people who want realistic consequences will be happier. A wider range of TFC server types will derive from this, thus fulfilling Bioxx's goal of providing a gameplay experience that is unique per playthrough. Potential Configurable Options: Invulnerability to all blocks in a town or claim to all but those who live there. Only chests of a town or claim are protected. When all players of a town or claim log off, protection is either enacted then, or after an interval of time. This is an easily expanded list, and with the coming of LAN games with 1.31, it would mean a variety of different game styles on smaller scales as well. 71 from antimattergizmo I'm partial to the idea of influence in terms of people in a settlement, the advancement (how far in a technical line) of the settlement, et cetera growing your borders. Growth would be based on need for specific items (as configurable within the Homestone) such and extra growth on hilly areas if you are very low on metals/ores or extra growth within plains if you are low on food stuffs. This leads to passive debuffs/buffs depending on how complex the terrain is (large growth in y coord/ large amount of water in a non ocean/lake/river) so that you don't gain a plains hill as quick as a flat plains when still in need of food, but quicker than a flat forest when not in need of logs. The base generated ownership is that of wilderness, that has a base influencing value that rises on a small settlement over time, or a rise in population in too quick a time (something like overcrowding leading to lowered population health). When the Wild takes over outer parts of towns, the buildings (player placed blocks) are open to destruction, looting, and degrading. Once the Homestone is taken over (such as in a ghost town) the degrading of the town is sped up dramatically to the point that in a week or so MC time the town is all but ruins of a lost tribe/civilization of which minor loot can be found by the wondering adventurer. This creates a system of only needing a few people that work hard to keep a small village running, while mass expansion and sprawling cities will be there for towns that stand the test of time. In the last of my dronings on I think that growth could potentially be factored with the amount of time people are on (in a vague way like a solar panel) the time and effort directly relates to large percentages of town growth (as opposed to the single digit percentile buffs of the land as stated above). This can prevent (but also aide) cities that need a second village by not letting a small group of visionaries go out of town aways with complex technology and machines with the expectation that they will get an instant -suburbs if you will- to clod the land with very small factions that pretty much mooched off the trials of working you settlement through the ranks. There will, however, be a certain advantage to doing this with the permission of governor-monarch-dictator-pope-mayor-presidents as a specified joint of the parent city (such as increased city to suburb trading) 72 from remedi I'm normally more of a lurker, but I had a couple ideas I hadn't seen in the thread already, and ways to combine a couple that have... Going from the idea of the homestones, we have the "mayor", or whatever you want to call him, who places the stone and founds the town. His job in the town is then to organize the citizens toward a goal. To enable this, all who wish to live in the town must pay a tax, the timer for payments would be tracked individually and not time down while the player is offline. Paying taxes keeps you listed as a member of the town, and allows the use of communal lots and items, perhaps even the aforementioned immunity to griefing while you're offline. A certain percentage of these taxes must be spent on something that benefits the town in some way. Some examples: expanding borders, upgrading city-wide defenses, paying guards, or supplying guards with weapons. You could even add communal benefits like an orchard that is free for any citizen to harvest from, with city workers replenishing saplings; or a bank that uses one of the many ideas for personalized locking chests, all stored in a place where they can be watched, for a reasonable enough sum to prevent the guards themselves from taking advantage of their position, of course. The mayor can try and take more money than he is alloted. So, towns have to enact safeguards to prevent abuses of the tax controls. Auditors, careful attention to how quickly and how lavishly the mayor's house grows, etc. If the people catch their mayor dipping into city coffers, they can install a new mayor. Naturally, this means that some system must be in place to prove the claim, and prevent false accusations and abuse of the power. All of the additions to a town that the mayor pays for come from members of the town who provide the services rendered, which ensures that the money stays in circulation and citizens can pay future taxes. 73 from gcountach from a much langer post about a king style hirearchy and system What about the Guards?: Guards would have to be assigned or "promoted" by the nobles and kings, as their job requires a lot of trust. They do not pay taxes per se, but they do have to do their job patrolling, arresting those who don't pay their taxes, killing those who don't belong in their kingdom, even going off to fight if a war is on. If this isn't done, their rank will be in jeopardy (if this will be automated or not remains to be seen). Guards shouldn't be allowed to do any other job if they've been promoted to such position, to prevent an entire town of guards. There is nothing to prevent you from giving non-guards armor and weapons though, if you wish to have a standing militia, but loyalty can be a fickle thing. Now would be a good time to mention that no one is required to join a kingdom. You can live away from civilization as long as you want, but you'll miss out on the perks of joining a town... What about the Guards?: Guards would have to be assigned or "promoted" by the nobles and kings, as their job requires a lot of trust. They do not pay taxes per se, but they do have to do their job patrolling, arresting those who don't pay their taxes, killing those who don't belong in their kingdom, even going off to fight if a war is on. If this isn't done, their rank will be in jeopardy (if this will be automated or not remains to be seen). Guards shouldn't be allowed to do any other job if they've been promoted to such position, to prevent an entire town of guards. There is nothing to prevent you from giving non-guards armor and weapons though, if you wish to have a standing militia, but loyalty can be a fickle thing. Now would be a good time to mention that no one is required to join a kingdom. You can live away from civilization as long as you want, but you'll miss out on the perks of joining a town... The Problem with Death: The current problem I find with death is it has been cheapen. If you die now, you respawn at spawn or your bed and proceed to run to your items before they despawn (if no one is in the area, they can last indefinitely). This would cause robberies and fights to turn into a "throw an endless wave of cloned bodies at the fight til the attacker dies" strategy. Some people may say "hardcore servers will fix this", but it won't. Instead, it'll leave servers empty since, once you are banned, there's no going back in. My solution to this problem is to have a time limit before you can respawn. For simplicity sake, you could just implement a 1-hour death ban if possible, but my idea has you being throw into "the end" area for X-amount of time (1 hour seems to come up here again) at which point you are teleported back to your bed or spawn. This will make fights decisive. Once you lose, you're out. When one entire side of the skirmish is killed, fights over. It gives attackers a chance to rummage through the spoils, lay waste to a kingdom/house, whatever they wish to do. It will also make death costly since if you die, you can't protect your land and items. Armor will have value. Weapons will have value. Looting and Greifing: Totally possible without exceptions, though it will be limited in towns because of perks (and the fact that the town guards tend to be paid to prevent just this thing). After all, if you don't have to worry about defending your homestead, why would you ever consider paying for a kingdom's protection? You Keep Mentioning War?: War isn't just possible, it's built in! Each kingdom will have a.. can't think of the word... "status" we'll say toward every other kingdom. Alliance, Neutral, At War. Names aren't in stone here, but you get the idea I'm going for here. Neutral is going to be the one most common one and is the one each kingdom will be set to by default. War is an interesting one. When you're at war, the blocks for each waring kingdom are set to normal values, but only for those kingdoms. Example: Kingdom A and B go to war with C staying neutral. A and B can attack each other and their blocks break at normal rate. Kingdom C still takes the extra amount of time to break them since they aren't in declared conflict. In an alliance, some of the kingdom perks are ignored for the two kingdoms, namely if doors open (more here would be handy, but I haven't really fleshed out kingdom perks). If possible, names above aligned kingdom players would be green/blue instead of default white to signify they aren't a threat, but it would have to be only between those aligned together... pg 7 74 from hindmost 1) Sealed agreement/contract/pact/order - the effect depends on personality of seal-holder. Just like IRL it could work or could be poked into the ass of bearer. I mean, NO IN-GAME INFLUENCE, only on the personality of the player, Player should roleplay - not the game itself. 2) %Metalname% enforced stone - requires >= (>?) tier metal to break... slowly. What? You have no metal? It is bad to be you. Let do it by IC 2 reinforced stone recipe. 3) Hireable guards - they are placeholders for players. Regenerating placeholders. They should not only be hired, they should be also armed. By you. Can your funds deal with that? No? IRL none would stand for you. 1) Sealed agreement/contract/pact/order - the effect depends on personality of seal-holder. Just like IRL it could work or could be poked into the ass of bearer. I mean, NO IN-GAME INFLUENCE, only on the personality of the player, Player should roleplay - not the game itself. 2) %Metalname% enforced stone - requires >= (>?) tier metal to break... slowly. What? You have no metal? It is bad to be you. Let do it by IC 2 reinforced stone recipe. 3) Hireable guards - they are placeholders for players. Regenerating placeholders. They should not only be hired, they should be also armed. By you. Can your funds deal with that? No? IRL none would stand for you. 75 from too-damn-much how about this for something to chew on: when a chest or other storage item is created it's stamped with the creator's name, if someone removes something from that chest it could have a little red flag pop up for the owner to see that someone's taken something and have a log of the last people (say about... max 5-10, at most?) to open the chest that actually changed it's inventory in some way, i have to say full stop right now i am definitely against automatically enforced laws or bots with town guard tags doing all the policing. ok, so how does it get policed then toodamnmuch, i hear you saying, well that's a good question and the answer is by the community that plays on it, if someone changed the inventory of a chest and it's not theirs when the owner gets back to check on it and sees that the non-creator access trigger has been sprung it would allow the chest creator to optionally set a bounty in emeralds on the head of that person, any player who is able to dispatch that person without destroying other people's things (pretty obvious, just stated, in case i guess) or stealing from someone else can then collect the bounty at any town hall thing or whatever it winds up being called, i think also it's good to note here that money should have it's own inventory space, a coin pouch if you will that is protected (or maybe not, configurable by server admin) from dropping on death. now of course, people are still going to want to fight and engage in fisticuffs and all that good nonsense, i propose Colosseums, yeah, roman ones right next to the town hall so that everyone can peer down into the pit and watch the mongrels fight to the death, basically i'm saying disputes over ore and resources are probably going to happen, probably inevitably if the server is large enough, i'm not saying the colosseum should be part of any justice system rather that it would probably be a good idea to let people have a place to fight it out all legal like if that's what's desired. in closing and this is the best part of the idea as far as i'm concerned, but there would be no need for automated guard NPCs that try to and (yes probably) fail to determine who is a criminal or not and then GM bolt them into obliteration (or maybe you'll stand a chance, who knows) but at the same time it makes being unscrupulous not entirely impossible, it makes it very risky however and also gives an incentive for people who wish to act as police to do so, look at the bounty's list, find one you like, collect the head, it also importantly so in fact gives a very large incentive to the person the crime was committed against to go and fix it themselves, i'm sure it won't cause problems but how much overhead do we really want to dedicate to full time and active NPCs and portions of code that pour over interactions trying to perceive a crime or a not crime, if someone steals from you you could actually stand to turn a profit with a system like this so long as you're willing to fight for what's yours. i think lastly, if any sort of automated policing type thing is implemented, it should not be a babysitter, it should take revenge on those who are wronged unprovoked, not float around your head like a mosquito you just can't seem to swat because it's always scrutinizing what you're doing to see if it could be a crime. 76 from ryuugumo I'm not sure but I think Bioxx is looking for ideas for features that he can add to help us make these decisions ourselves. It does nobody any good to talk about "I would do it this way." or "No that's stupid it should be done this way." We need to help come up with ideas for tools that help us do whatever we decide ourselves. Multiplayer has multiple players and people have a tendency to disagree. The only real good option is to find tools that are flexible enough for us all to use them for the wide varity of decisions we make. Bioxx saw that security is important so he added a town block. Maybe he sees it won't do everything we want it to and adds an ability to configure it to our own needs with some of the good ideas we have seen so far. One way or the other we should focus on developing tools that help us all out instead of focusing on "My oppinion is better than yours." Give us the tools and don't force us into someone elses ideas. 77 from lumireaver Excuse me while I continue not reading. (Actually I'm just too lazy to address every idea that I want to talk about at the moment. I promise I'm reading. ...It's that I just spent hours driving around town looking for my immunization records because US Universities are dicks. ...I didn't even find them. :C) Have some random ideas I may elaborate on later: Various Rulestones crafted of gems and (primarily) precious metal (alloys), each with different properties activated by engraving. For example, a Wardstone that keeps only engraved mobs away (limited to XX mobs per stone), a Harveststone that improves crop yield (but only for one type of crop), and a Reinforstone that makes buildings nigh impossible to destroy (on this stone you would just engrave the names of the unaffected players, I guess). An anti-pvp Kinshipstone (Not sure, maybe it would have a list of people who *could* be killed. Like a town blacklist/wanted dead-or-alive list?) Also more government oriented stones so players could build their own government piece by piece, only picking the features they want. For instance, a Keystones/Lordstones could give players permission to engrave Rulestones, Commerenstone would dictate who could buy/sell in shops, if those are added, and so on. Engravings could be No-Undo deals, or rewritable, depending on how serious you want people to consider their decisions. Each stone would be crafted of different gems and metals. You could literally build your own government block by block. :U Totems could only be destroyed with some kind of consumable Nether resource in a 1:1 ratio in a time consuming manner, or by the player who placed them with any tool. Rather than affecting a predetermined area spread evenly around the stone, they would affect a rectangular area comprised of a limited-by-tier amount of chunks specified by engraving two corner coordinates. The game rounds them to the nearest chunk. (If coordinate/debug is ever patched out of TFC in order to force REAL-MAN-NAViGATION, a Waystone, or similar consumable/durability based tool could be used to gather this information). Unspecified Rulestones just use the default centred square area. Reasoning for specified area Rulestones is to better facilitate nice looking towns, and to enable hiding your Ruletotem in some kooky hidden dungeon filled with traps instead of building your town around it like some giant bullseye. Spoiler Also Rulestones ought to depower (indicated by a sprite with less vibrant gems--perhaps active stones will posses a faint glow?) after a Minecraft month/year, requiring refills of their primary gem, or secondary gems, not sure, but yeah. Some kind of maintenance... In commie societies they'll go to their Rulewall/totem/ect and slot the gems themselves. In kingdoms the peasant miners will sell the gems to royals for wealth and such.