Creeper World IXE Duster

Dev Talk: Creeper World IXE Duster
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[@linuxdragon8016]

Nice to some experiments done live! :D About the constant mixing: it is hard to believe that two liquids have the EXACT SAME density. ^^

[@Lurkily_Esh]

There are oscillating chemical reactions and things like boiling that can self-mix a fluid. You'd only really know by opening the properties of the 'sand.'

[@iHaldur]

Water, when it freezes, expands, so it is less Dense than water, so it floats on water. Physics.

[@uberwaffe9766]

Being able to assign a small (16x16 maybe ?) pixel icon to a sand type might be useful for display purposes in various UI elements.

[@ikmor]

A way to show what you've vacuumed up is to have small icons of the material, and only show the name "sand" or "stone" when you hover over the material icon. That way you could fit many more types in the bar.

[@epic1527]

Would be nice to see the dropper ship vacuum the stuff. Only that ship would be able to gather. Otherwise other ship would destroy the material.

[@Redneck353]

iirc there was something like that a bit ago, some sort of cargo chip that picked up and dropped stuff

[@iwantagoodnameplease]

@@Redneck353 Yes, I was confused about it's absence in other videos and the re-implementation here. It already seemed to have an interface for that, so unsure of why there's a new one now!

[@Redneck353]

@@iwantagoodnameplease prefered the previous one where you pick on the ship tho, might need 2 dumper to drop diffrent stuff, anyway, it's still moving so will see what happens

[@PierceArner]

These are all super neat changes, and it's always fun getting to see this sort of in-progress work and getting a better understanding of the underlying system. A huge fan of the idea for using iconography for sand, water, land, gas, etc. as material types for whether it flows, sticks, stays solid, etc.

[@x11tech45]

That UX is unintuitive. And, making the user click on left side of the map and right side of the map for the total control of unit behavior is also awkward.

[@bewilderbeestie]

For the UI: have an eyedropper icon on the duster info box. Drag that either onto the map or onto the material list to select.

[@grafando]

Can you make it so you can tell the digger a specific material to dig and it will dig all of that material within it's range?

[@bustervoodoo8125]

I'm pretty sure that the guy on the right is the game developer, but who is the guy on the left?

[@brianm4393]

I think that's his boss. He's a real hardass!

[@iwantagoodnameplease]

Misc community member

[@bustervoodoo8125]

@@iwantagoodnameplease But why is he always in the videos?

[@Cgeta4]

I assume it's his proud dad being interested in what his son does

[@ldm125]

I'm 98% sure I remember that being his dad!

[@ldm125]

I for one like the technical explanation! I'm learning to program and having the general lesson is a good framework of thought for future projects!

[@Lurkily_Esh]

@knucracker, Rather than having any kind of interface, I'd use a 'dropper' technique. Select the dropper, then click the substance you want to collect or drop. Have a drop-down menu button in the menu to access a specific substance, just in case it ONLY exists in storage. This menu also displays what's currently selected. These have the advantage of being recognizable from basic UI design, meaning the user is already trained to use them. A dropper is an extra click, but is also intuitive. I think the packet transport is important. You can make packets transport MORE per packet, if the concern is clutter. But I think it's important to be self-consistent. You need to transport energy, and ammo, and AC, and I think it's a normal expectation to need to move dirt. All the reasons you stated -- knowing why it's not working, does it add to gameplay -- are also questions for AC and for ammo. An interesting interaction between ice and water might be to freeze water particles in contact by a percentage chance - higher percentage chance an adjacent water particle (in a 9x9 square) will freeze if it's closer to fewer ice particles. This might encourage interesting crystal-esque patterns, rather than just a creeping line. The verb you want is 'ignite,' I thnk.

[@HanakoSeishin]

1:30 "You would have never guessed to do it" Actually, it was my first thought after noticing there's no selection in the upper left interface.

[@daleforbes1031]

Always interesting listening to your design ideas and rational and see it in action. Love your work.

[@tigidou3344]

Maybe a "drop down" for select type to drop.

[@guigs4467]

That's would be the combobox he mentioned in the beginning. Though I have to agree, it would be more intuitive.

[@Sweetdude64]

You're right, I WAS going to comment that I wish we could just click the resource on the map instead of the list, and that a hotkey/toggle would be great for the overuse of left click! :P

[@thejam200]

This is reminding me a lot of the old powder games I used to play. Powder Toy by Dan ball was recently released on Steam even.

[@benshaw9951]

For the scroll bar thing, you can add the Colour of the thing behind it, and a picture of a rock/raindrop to say solid or liquid, and Arrows to indicate it flows upwards or sidewards etc. So if its affected by Gravity an arrow downwards. If its anti Gravity, an arrow upwards. So each bar would look like a small sample of itself, with its name over it and a small icon and arrow next to it.

[@FourKelvin]

oh nice, with the smoke and everything, it kind of reminds me of the noita engine

[@Paradox_Edge]

That would be because it _is_ the same engine.

[@iwantagoodnameplease]

I'm glad it's been named by the community. That means it has half a chance of describing what it actually does! I'll never forgive you for "strider" from CW4.

[@jmatt440]

what was the strider again? was it the unit that dumped AC when it died?

[@iwantagoodnameplease]

@@jmatt440 it was one of the slug-like, legless units that surfed on the creeper. I can't remember if they existed in the final game or were named that, but they were present in all of the CW4 dev diaries as one of the main enemies.

[@jmatt440]

@@iwantagoodnameplease so blobs or skimmers?

[@besoten]

you can right click on the ship and pop up few icons of what you have then right click on the icon to drop that material so love your work and wish the best for you

[@besoten]

also i am huge fan of carriers or even super carriers hope we get super cool weapons

[@Sweetdude64]

I'm not sure if this is possible, but it would be cool if dusters could continue to drop material as it is moving. I don't think other towers should necessarily be able to operate while moving, but dusters in particular would be cool!

[@stefenboney7145]

love watching game dev stuff

[@gurkanbozkurt8776]

Double click to dig all of the water kinda feature would be great

[@merikmalhads1676]

Hmmm... I feel like having container units would be a better way to manage the inventory. Instead of some infinite backpack, you have a ship or building that holds a set amount of particulate so you have to manage where you are going to place your chemicals while you're building. That way, part of the strategy can be collecting and converting resources for specific breaches

[@nondescriptname4968]

This is a really cool demo. I wonder if there will be a brush feature like in CW4 to collect/mine all of a specific material that you select and vice versa with deselecting in case you fat-finger a material

[@happyhafer1403]

if you want to keep that material list on the right, i suggest adding an arrow/marker or a colored outline on the currently selected material when having a duster selected. it adds a nice small indicator for players without adding extra visual clutter. well, you would need to move the material names a bit to the right if you decide on using an arrow marker, but that is nothing difficult to adjust. as for the packet cluttering with all materials enabled, personally i wouldn't mind it, since even with four diggers the clutter wouldn't be that bad. though i can see your side as well, so i suggest making it an option and giving the final say to the players. or make it part of certain missions where the connectivity is a mission difficulty point and enable it only there.

[@darianleyer5777]

A simple way to do it would have been not entirely unlike a priority queue. It would have checked to see if the most recently rendered stationary (e.g. built or stopped moving) one was set to true, at which point all of them would be set to false, and then the least recently rendered stationary one would release contents.

[@DonnyHooterHoot]

Can't wait! Any date yet? Thx!

[@benshaw9951]

Can you add a way to freeze and heat stuff, so it hovers above and uses a ray to freeze or a heat wave effect to warm up. Also could add a way to split/separate and mix. This could be cool way to make new things. So a unit that hovers over stuff and seperates them left and right, or mixes them together so mixing ice and water to make ice water etc

[@ikmor]

So the "duster" is really a dumper, and you should totally make it so any material that, say a digger, picks up would need to transfer (as ships and material transfer themselves now) from that digger into the dumper. Else theres a logical problem with why the dumper magically has access to anything you suck up, while energy and materia has to go TO and FROM the mother ship. Edit: You bring it up in the vid, about packages being sent or not, but the packages NOT being sent would change my experience to the worse, because it goes against the logic the game itself puts down for us.

[@scraglit1064]

I actually disagree. I already have fps issues just on the demo with how many packets and environmental effects happening. Implementation of no packets for terraforming/environment saves frames and doesn't effect core gameplay of energy and combat. I don't see much use for the duster anyway besides blockading or a tedious method of making anti creeper liquid when you can just mine ac and dump it. Unless there's a level where you have to specifically use the duster to bulk eliminate creeper, I'd probably make it minable like ac then since then it would have impact on core gameplay

[@tomaspecl1082]

When you mentioned that all the AIs could not figure out your problem, as far as I know they are basically one pass algorithm, you feed the input in linearly and they spit out output linearly, they can reference/use their previous output when producing the next letter/token/word. But they can not do iterative thinking. Basically they have to answer with the first thing that comes to their "mind". So I am thinking that once we make AI "think" iteratively in a loop to enhance the answer then they will become much better. I have seen some videos where someone tried to instanciate multiple AIs and feed the output of the first to the second and basically critique it and provide feedback and then a third AI using the critique to improve the answer. Or something like that. But still that seems quite not the right thing as there is a lot of information loss when transferring the "thoughts" just with text when you should instead iterate on the whole state of the AI as that contains much more data/details than just the output text.

[@Sweetdude64]

18:30 I like this system. I don't know if this is possible, but could you remove elements from the list when the resource no longer exists in a map? Like if you use ALL your anti creeper and can't make more, it would disappear from the list. Or, more conveniently, give the player the ability to remove items from the list if they wish.

[@ikmor]

A detail to make things less cluttered with text is to only show whatever material you currently hold, instead of "water = 0".

[@dann8924]

Mb not for release but adding t he ability to move around parts of the ui with a default ui button for those that gone .. up would be really nice, gives those of us with mountainous screens the option

[@zdenekmutina7937]

who is that other, older gentleman? I feel like i know him, but name is out of my memory...

[@Axel-wo6qu]

I wonder if acid will be used to melt through terrain before unlocking the ability to dig directly. Maybe it's more quick or energy efficient.

[@Jasey357]

Can we design our own ships like PF Emergence?

[@GaminRiolu]

i kinda wish you could set an area to be continously dug up till its empty, that way if i need to clear an area entirely of stone or sand or whatever i don't constant need to repaint it with the dig command

[@75Karsten75]

There is a "keep" setting to the excavation marker. It's described in the Demo tutorial, IIRC?

[@franciscogameiro4373]

hmmm, I thought of a solution to the multiple dusters droping the same resource, I remember reading somewhere that you used packet distribution for the. well, packets in early creaper worlds, so why not use a system similar to the old network architecture, the token ring

[@mrb79ar]

Wouldn't it be ideal for matter to be collected, transformed into energy, then travel through packets and reach its destination to be dropped as matter?

[@Reaverblade]

What if you have a few different modes for dropping stuff? One mode be like how you have it now: a stream straight down Another mode repurposed from anticreeper ship and it just distributes it everywhere in an area. Perhaps a third mode would be shooting it to a place

[@mercator79]

Interface idea, from a non UI expert. In some games where there are many choices (most recent for me was Fallout76) there is a wheel interface that I can pull up and select. Would something like that work for all the various elements that can be collected?

[@dmytriievolexandr]

Я думав гра вийде десь у літку 24-го, але щось мені підказує що до зими ми цього не побачимо

[@meansbentnose6281]

All these teasers are starting to hurt. Any way we can have another mission or two added to the demo?

[@MisterManTheBestMan]

If I'm not mistaken, didn't the "trucks" or whatever they were fulfill this role?

[@HanakoSeishin]

He mentions them in the video and says it was too tedious when only the truck who picked up the stuff could drop it.

[@MisterManTheBestMan]

@@HanakoSeishin Oh shoot, thanks for letting me know. I missed it, 'twas getting ready for work.

[@RaveYoda]

As a developer, now I wanna know what the solution was/is.

[@WazheadBoci]

Just a suggestion could you make the list alphabetical OR sort by amount ( or an option to choose )

[@totalice734]

release date ?

[@linuxdragon8016]

when it is done…?^^

[@darianleyer5777]

I, for one, thought the lack of Energy & AC Bars in CW4 was nice.

[@darianleyer5777]

I do think the mixing animation looks nice....

[@darianleyer5777]

Idea: Make it so that when a Duster gets destroyed for any reason, it drops a percentage of each type of sand collected.

[@cooltv2776]

for selecting which sand type gets dropped, what about both having the box in the unit menu that you open and select. and also having an alternate easier method like you have now (or that in map picker if you can figure out implementing that nicely)

[@ArpTakaoTTV]

love seeing looking forward to more

[@NickCombs]

With icons replacing the names, it might be possible to overlay the number over the icon. Additionally, you might then be able to minify the list into a horizontal form factor if you want to fit it into the context box.

[@derstreber2]

Instead of the main way of choosing liquids being from a list that you need to scroll through, you could use an eye dropper similar to photo editors to quick select a liquid type from an area on screen. Then you could hide the liquid selector in a menu button for cases where the player has picked up everything of a liquid and wants to select it and dump it out.