EQN:Landmark Beta Starts March 26th!

Zuuljin_sl said:

Are twitch streams inherently saved at all? When I was watching earlier he went on a great discussion of their tool design and it would be great to link it here.

If not, extreme tldr; They want to have as few tools possible and are NOT trying to recreate a Maya/Photoshop environment in any way. He said if the learning curve becomes more of a chore, or feels like a job, they will fail.

So if that translates into NPC creation and AI scripting, I expect it to be fairly simple, but with perhaps many modifiers that can be combined to produce different behavior. I highly doubt there will be any sort of 'scripting' per say. No mention of when that's going in, but very excited to see what comes of it.

Click to expand...

Oh, dope. I didnt know they were eventually going to allow you to place NPC's and alter their behavior. I love games like Dungeon Keeper and if I can do that on a grander scale, then Ill probably have to use my vacation time!

Zuuljin_sl said:

Are twitch streams inherently saved at all? When I was watching earlier he went on a great discussion of their tool design and it would be great to link it here.

If not, extreme tldr; They want to have as few tools possible and are NOT trying to recreate a Maya/Photoshop environment in any way. He said if the learning curve becomes more of a chore, or feels like a job, they will fail.

So if that translates into NPC creation and AI scripting, I expect it to be fairly simple, but with perhaps many modifiers that can be combined to produce different behavior. I highly doubt there will be any sort of 'scripting' per say. No mention of when that's going in, but very excited to see what comes of it.

Click to expand...

Yup. I'm expecting/hoping something akin to what they showed withProject Sparkfrom Microsoft (similar take on player content creation, but more along the lines of Little Big Planet, and not MMO. Also Microsoft.)

He mentioned it's a bit off on the mob creation but definitely will be in , time to break out the books and get to work when it happens.

I expect mob AI to be pretty simple, since they said we are getting Storybricks in Landmark.

Anomander Rake_sl said:

Mine has gotten up to 10-11 gigs before I deleted it!

Click to expand...

It really only spikes bad if you map hop a lot I tend to stay on 3 different maps and so it has not bloated to much but my friend who likes seeing all the sites has to smack his cache down just about every night.

Lleauaric_sl said:

I expect mob AI to be pretty simple, since they said we are getting Storybricks in Landmark.

Click to expand...

Yes in theory mob Ai if the story bricks works as the promos from the manufacturer show it should in theory be pretty easy to have some basic AI blocks and then let the emergent Ai stuff to its thing. Things like an easy check list of likes and doesn't likes and things it wants to do like patrol an area and things it does not like to do. Once the basic stuff is set into motion then just let the story block AI do its job as it interacts with people.

Pretty cool find. How to manipulate voxels using healed land. Love all these unintended techniques being discovered.

Agenor_sl said:

Pretty cool find. How to manipulate voxels using healed land. Love all these unintended techniques being discovered.

Click to expand...

okay, that is pretty sweet and been needed for a long time. good find! so sick of copying air when i just want to copy the creation and not the air around it. now to figure out how to do it with donuts

Latest roundtable video, on weather in Landmark:


The idea of music changing in response to weather changes is a cool touch, and the fact they're even willing to discuss the idea of weather making substantive changes to the world's geography is pretty awesome, even if they're nowhere close to committing to it.

Decent interview fromGamersNexuswith DG tl;dr'd onreddit.

Georgeson told me that their Storybricks framework component will effectively use a software development flowchart (like those found in Glitchspace or software design docs) in place of a scripting or programming language. To clarify, from what I was told, a form of scripting will be supported, but players will not be expected to have existing knowledge of C, Java, some similar language, nor will they have to learn a proprietary language line-by-line. The flowchart will enable scripting from more of a designer's perspective, as I understand it.

Click to expand...

Also talked about optimization of the datastream, so terrain updates come out faster and less gear loading times.

Update Notes:
403 Forbidden

This week we have a number of new features to play with as well as a bunch of bug fixes. We've added Parties, In-Game Email, Teleport to Friend, Teleport to Hub and Teleport to Claim.

New Features!

• You can now invite people to a party! Join up with your pals and get a 20% bonus to loot when mining. You can invite people to a Party in one of three ways:
  • If they're on your Friends list, right click their name and click "Invite to Party."
  • If you see them standing around in the world, right click on them and click "Invite to Party."
  • If they're not anywhere around, or not on your friends list, you can type "/party invite <player name>
  • We'll be adding UI options for these in the very near future but didn't want you to have to wait to play in parties! Here are the slash commands for everything you can do in a party.:
    • /party invite <playername>
    • /party accept
    • /party reject
    • /party kick <playername>
    • /party leave
    • /party disband
    • /party setowner <playername>
• You can now send in-game mail to other players! Simply go to any Saw Table to craft a mailbox, and place it at your claim. From there, you can Send / Receive Mail and Attachments to any player.
• You can now craft Portal Shards at any Forge, which allow you to Teleport to the Hub of the continent you're on, or to your claim directly. These two Teleport abilities share a 60 minute cool down.
• You can also teleport to any player on your friends list! This ability has a separate cooldown from the Hub / Claim ability, and can be done every 30 minutes (and does not require a Portal Shard.)

Bug Fixes

• We believe we have fixed the last issues with the Alpha Boost potion. In order to help us test this, we've temporarily added a recipe for the Alpha Potion to the Workbench. Feel free to craft one up (it only costs 1 dirt) and help us verify everything is working! We'll be re-granting the potion to everyone that bought a Trailblazer pack at the start of Closed Beta to make sure you get the full benefit from the potion that we had intended!
• We've added your current and max limit on storing voxels in templates to the template window. You can see it at the top of the window in order to help you better manage your templates.
• The categories on the Crafting stations would sometimes show the incorrect items. This has been resolved.
• Previously we did not provide the full list of missing materials when attempting to place a template down. Now we do!
• You were previously unable to use your Material Picker (using the Alt Key) when outside of your claim. Now you can!
• All the prop related permissions listed in the Claim Permission window should now work properly.
• Building tools should now be more responsive, and not get "stuck" when near the boundary of your Claim
• Coal, Essence of Earth, and a handful of other items went missing in your Supplies inventory. They have returned!
• Updated a handful of icons, including all the crafting tables!
• There was an issue when using the Translate widget on a selection volume that would cause the camera to move. This should be resolved.
• Added FX to crafting animations, the Alchemy Table, and when you complete a crafted item
• Your character on the Server Select screen would sometimes have a foggy or oversaturated appearance. This should look much better now. Undo/Redo will now work properly after a /camp and logging back in to the game.
• Previously if you camped (or chose logout on the menu) of the game and then re-entered the game, undo/redo wouldn't work. Now it works as expected.
• Channel tabs would sometimes drop off from existing channels. They should stick around now.
• Amaranthine loot should now look more appropriate while you're out harvesting in the world.
• The material tray will now show the total number of resources you have between your personal inventory and your vault. Previously it didn't include your vault amounts.
• Fixed an issue that made it sometimes difficult to select the faces on a Selection Volume. Previously you sometimes had to click in an area that didn't have a material directly behind the face you were trying to select.
• Tooltips should now position better when the mouse is near the edge of the screen.
• Your claim drop down will now update appropriately when you make changes to the data in the claim management window.

The music will no longer restart when you open and close the map.
Escape should behave more consistently when you are trying to paste something into the world.

Closed beta in 6 days.

403 Forbidden

Lenas_sl said:

Closed beta in 6 days.

403 Forbidden

Click to expand...

They really have fallen behind on that road map. I still can't believe the cave system hasn't been implemented. Not surprising though they want to let more in as the cash shop went in last week.

Agenor_sl said:

They really have fallen behind on that road map. I still can't believe the cave system hasn't been implemented. Not surprising though they want to let more in as the cash shop went in last week.

Click to expand...

lols I went to check the Roadmap for status updates on Caves...

"Uhh....not sure yet."

Agenor_sl said:

They really have fallen behind on that road map. I still can't believe the cave system hasn't been implemented. Not surprising though they want to let more in as the cash shop went in last week.

Click to expand...

Well, that and the fact that the beta package was advertised as starting on or before March 31, so they kinda had to switch to beta about now.

Randin_sl said:

Well, that and the fact that the beta package was advertised as starting on or before March 31, so they kinda had to switch to beta about now.

Click to expand...

Really painted themselves into a corner with that. Not a big deal, just really thought it would be a bit further along than it is.

Aside from the lack of caves they've hit on a large portion of the Phase One stuff and they never promised all of it would make it in before Beta. Need to get in this weekend and get my templates made. Been lazy in that regard.

Caves is a pretty significant addition. All of the resources are going to be moving underground, which is going to require underground mobility, lighting, assets (stalagmites/tites, gem nodes, etc). Every tier will need to be added (I believe there are 5), and I'm pretty sure they'll be adding the pulverizer tool with the cave update, so that people can get around and make tunnels between natural caves.

I'd imagine it would require a wipe, since you're altering the entire landscape to have caves in it. It would make sense to add them during the transition between Alpha and Closed Beta, since there's going to be a wipe anyways, but it'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

Though, on second thought, it could work similar to how they rolled out new biomes; they just add new islands that have caves, and the rest of the islands are old-school. Not as interesting, but it prevents wipes.

Yeah, I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find that they try to power through all or most of the remaining phase 1 stuff so that they can implement it during the transition, as it would make sense to have things like caves in the beta build from the get-go.

The cave system will definitely roll out different than the biomes will. The progression of mining will change drastically. Everything is on the surface right now. It's not intended to be like that. Your high end materials will be buried deep in the ground.

Edit: From the announcement today they stated the servers will be down for two days, to implement the new islands. Perhaps they will drop the caves in during that time frame.

Edit 2: Saw DG post caves not ready for closed beta launch...