Parent/Child room relationship bad

[iKhaan]

Parent/Child room relationship complely wrong.
For example:
I need to destroy this Hall. Its T3 Hall. 

 

To do it. I need to destroy half of my dodjo from the other side including many well-decorated halls and corridors.
So why this system even exisist?
Why not just unlock halls forever from first build and then allow player to destroy them in anytime?

Edited August 8, 2018 by iKhaan

[EmberStar]

54 minutes ago, iKhaan said:

So why this system even exisist?
Why not just unlock halls forever from first build and then allow player to destroy them in anytime?

Because that's how the system was coded.  At this point altering it would require rewriting the dojo system more or less from scratch, I think.  Other people have pointed out other flaws with the system, but those are simply what you have to deal with.  Another issue is that even if you get the rooms to line up, you can't make a hallway that loops through several rooms and connects back to itself.  Since every room has to be either a parent or child node, you can't connect a child node back to a point closer to the root of the tree.

Changing it would require a complete overhaul of the system.  There was already lots of shouting when they updated the visuals, from players who had complicated dojos built using the original tileset.  Altering the system to allow rooms to just be snapped into place as tiles on a grid without needing a parent/child tree back to the root would turn *all* existing dojos into legacy builds.  Some people would welcome the chance to rebuild, but a lot of others would shout loudly about how *their* dojo has to be rebuilt, why would you do that, the existing system was awesome.

Unfortunately, the only thing I can suggest is to try to plan your layout in advance.  I don't know if there's any kind of tool to assist with this, you might be stuck with the ancient "pencil and graph paper" method.  😞  Try to consider the limits of the system a challenge to your design skills, maybe?

[iKhaan]

2 часа назад, EmberStar сказал:

Because that's how the system was coded.  At this point altering it would require rewriting the dojo system more or less from scratch, I think. 

That just nonsense. it's not how coding work

 

2 часа назад, EmberStar сказал:

Unfortunately, the only thing I can suggest is to try to plan your layout in advance.

I'm sorry. But i can't all predict dojo updates. And i shouldn't really.

 

2 часа назад, EmberStar сказал:

Changing it would require a complete overhaul of the system. 

No. That's not how programming works.

[iKhaan]

2 часа назад, EmberStar сказал:

Some people would welcome the chance to rebuild, but a lot of others would shout loudly about how *their* dojo has to be rebuilt, why would you do that, the existing system was awesome.

It was already rebuilded btw. Before updates came in. 
With those dojo updates it's needed an upgrade. But i can't just trow days of hard work in trash.

[DaganEldr]

I do agree that the parent/child style of dojo building indeed needs an update. I think the ability to connect rooms segment by segment (on far smaller scales than a 'hall-by-hall placement) would be convenient, and would allow for much more convenience in player creativity. However...

Even though I do like your idea very much, this does bring up a point in the general formatting of current dojo room construction, especially pertaining to capacity and grid connectivity. I'd find it far more complicated to work with decoration capacity with that suggestion, which, bringing things back around to your reason for posting, falls back to your simple suggestion of being able to freely re-arrange the rooms after they're initially 'unlocked'.

Not doing this properly, however, could also leave irritating gaps where rooms are inaccessible because a room was removed that connected the two, and you'd have to deconstruct everything anyway-- either that, or you'd better hope you have a teleporter to the other rooms, at least, but either way, it would still make for a very complicated mess if someone isn't careful about the placement of their tiles.

A good way to solve this problem might be if rooms could be 'stored' without destroying them, or the decorations within them. That way you could take all of the other rooms apart, still have all of the hard work saved, and then you'd be able to conveniently store (or destroy) the room and replace/build it where it's more appropriately desired, but undoubtedly, that would require a lot of scripting work to do. If this is possible, however, it could lessen much of the frustration that can come with trying to fit rooms together in particular ways.

As with all things that need improvement, it's good to weigh both the pros and cons of ideas in critique, that way wrinkles eventually get smoothed out. I'd say that while your initial idea might be rough, with enough refinement and eventual integrity, it could open up a reasonable thought path for future changes, if DE thinks the idea is good enough. 🙂

 

[EmberStar]

On 2018-08-08 at 1:23 PM, iKhaan said:

That just nonsense. it's not how coding work

 

I'm sorry. But i can't all predict dojo updates. And i shouldn't really.

 

No. That's not how programming works.

Yes, it is how programing works.  When you have a live game that has active systems that already depend on the existing code.  They can't just rip out the existing dojo code *unless* they're will to completely delete every existing dojo.

And in terms of online multiplayer games, it seems to be *exactly* how programming works. 

Two examples:  City of Heroes had super hero bases.  The person who designed the system eventually left the company.  Meanwhile, the remaining dev team started talking about how they wanted to overhaul the system and make all kinds of improvements and quality of life upgrades.  Until suddenly they just stopped mentioning it, and none of the upgrades ever happened.  Why?  Because it turned out no one who still worked there had the *faintest* idea how the base construction code actually worked.  A dev admitted later on that the code was *so* strange, and wound through so many other systems that they were afraid to even look at it, in case they broke it and took half the game down with it.

Champions Online has the Nemesis system, which allows you to create a custom NPC character to be the Joker to your character's Batman.  Again, the devs have abandoned any attempt at upgrading the system, and for exactly the same reason - no one who works there can figure out the code.  At this point their only option would be to completely rip out the existing Nemesis system and rebuild it completely from scratch.  In the case of Champions this will NEVER happen.  Saying the game is in permanent maintenance mode would be generous.  (It's really on life support, and it's probably only even gotten *that* much because it shares a large number of systems with the companies other two MMOs and doesn't take up a ton of server space to keep running.  At this point it's still easier to just ignore it than it would be to actually kill it.)

If you think otherwise and that changing the dojo system would be "really simple," please provide actual evidence.  Otherwise,  I'm going to assume you have zero clue what you're talking about.