[0.17] Adding Ore Hardness and Pickaxes back in

[featherwinglove]

So I've looked at this a wee bit more. What appears to be missing from the modding API is an event that fires before a player begins to mine an entity, firing on the initial attempt itself, that has the ability to flag a cancel/invalid state for the mining attempt. I don't know how the implementation of mining category is suppose to work, but sounded like it was a yes/no force state that bypassed any event checks completely?

That would explain a thing I've seen in Stone Age: the mod is supposed to disable all tool-free entity breaking at the beginning of the game, and does this for known entities, but can't seem to do this for unanticipated modded entities until you break your first entity, deadfall trees are the only choice. I'll ask him, brb...

Summon him and he shall apear .

Is that what's going on or am I just talking out of my donkey? (perfect quote block )

[featherwinglove]

But that last did jog my memory on the old discussion about hardness and mining power being removed. Which is a detail worth noting about the simple formula I ran here.

The 0.16 formula for mining is (Mining power - Mining hardness) * Mining speed / Mining time = Production rate (in resource/sec).

In my eyes, the only excessive variable is Mining Time which is attached to the ore, so I should have done player.character_mining_speed_modifier = (Mining power - Mining hardness) * Mining speed for the faithful reproduction of what the sim fans wanted that doesn't include the redundant variable.

Mining time is a good way to express deposit depth IMO, but most mods that implement such a thing (e.g. DOR and YAIOM) already have more creative and interesting ways to screw us Mining hardness has a kind of intuitiveness and realism.

Also, the excuse for just about everything #266 announced the removal of is

this feature was hardly ever utilized in the end.

a) not if you count mods and
b) it's not the end yet!

Realism does have some educational value, so having some is a good idea. Thermodynamic efficiency is a more important concept to understand than Mohs hardness, the only reason it's useless is because vanilla should be giving everything tiers, but it only gives it to axes and-

we completely removed mining tools from the game

Huh? Well, at least we still have assembly mach-

number of ingredients ... we decided to just remove it.

Oh,

PUFF

this game sucks...

We've decided to remove steel furnaces because hardly anyone ever removes or upgrades their old stone furnace smelteries

popuff.png (19.41 KiB) Viewed 1540 times

Why care? Because sim fans and greater sense of progression.

On a more serious note, where I see the #266 changes (and especially if the new campaign/demo - and oh, please drop all traces of that gawdoffal "new player experience" moniker from the public lexicon! - works out just perfectly) taking us is into a situation where our mostly-nerfed vanilla experience becomes a demo for modding, or worse, doesn't seem like all that much compared to the free demo. Seeing the fantastic original Descent Freespace (now Freespace: The Great War) demo had me concerned this was about to happen: it had three missions, two of which were pulled from the campaign and extended to show off main game features that were not available at those points in the full campaign, and the first was the training tutorial. No concerns there: the game was sufficiently huge to overwhelm its demo even without modding (it is now open source and has been used to make a freaking Wing Commander game; take that story back to the '90s and the era's space shooter fans would probably soil themselves!)

We really should stop paring back vanilla at some point. Maybe lock a better boiler and intermediate steam engine behind some of those sweet new #274-5 science packs. Just one more mining drill couldn't hurt, could it?

[Koub]

[Koub] Seeing the thread drifting into off-topicness and general rant about the changes announced in FFF 266, I guess it's time to lock it.