Topic: Artifacts

Mr. Developer can you do something about respawning artifacts.  Take Gamma for instance if you spend enough time on a certain island, eventually, you will have all 10 of your artifacts in places you can't get to.  Ok I understand move onto a different island.  Mathematically after a while you will have no artifacts that you can get to.  Can you implement a system where every couple of days if an artifact hasn't been touched it respawns? 

V/R,
Rovoc

Re: Artifacts

+1

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Re: Artifacts

+1

Keep it simple, stupid.

Re: Artifacts

Yeah, we need to figure something for this.

5 (edited by Annihilator 2014-12-11 20:16:53)

Re: Artifacts

wild guess
any DEV reading this would probably ask
"what are location that you can't get to?"

though, i support the request.
The only reason why someone denied the refresh of artifacts in the past, was a PvP tactic that involved spawning observer stashes ontop of other player... which has no value anymore.

*edit: whaaa, zooom beat me to it sad*

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Re: Artifacts

With the new no terraform areas it's possible that there can be places where you can't reach by any means.

Re: Artifacts

DEV Zoom wrote:

With the new no terraform areas it's possible that there can be places where you can't reach by any means.

wouldn't a single "wavefront" algorithm once every few hours, using all passable terrain maps merged together, draw a pretty accurate mask for all things that need to be limited to "reachable" terrain? (NPC roaming space, Mineral spawns, artifact spawns)

*Disclaimer: This post can contain strong sarcasm or cynical remarks. keep that in mind!
Whining - It's amazing how fast your trivial concerns will disappear

Re: Artifacts

The problem is the difference between finding walkable tiles (easy), and tiles that are walkable AND you can reach them from a designated reference point on the island (hard). The first method occasionally provides you with perfectly walkable areas which are cut off from the main useful area of the island, but unfortunately this is the only method that we have currently.

Re: Artifacts

Protip:  That problem *would* be hard (NP Hard actually)  IF the island wasn't static.  But it is static.  You can pre-map these areas without the use of a walkable tile search algorithm.

Instead use an unwalkable tile search algorithm and identify unpassable zones.

Basically, find all tiles that are not walkable (easy if walkable is easy) then iterate all adjacent tiles of unwalkable tiles that are also unwalkable. Construct a graph containing tile coordinates for nodes and adjacent tiles as adjacent nodes in the graph. Essentially you'll have a graph containing only unwalkable tiles.  Once graph is constructed, identify circular loops in graph (pretty easy DFS algorithm with a "isVisited" flag).  Once circular loop is found mark out a big f'king rectangle containing the coordinate set of all the coordinates in the discovered loop. This will implicitly filter all tiles INSIDE the unpassable zone.  That's your blacklist.

Modify your artifact generation algorithm to never spawn artifacts in aforementioned rectangles.

Re: Artifacts

They are only partly static, the larger parts of gammas can still be terraformed.

11 (edited by Annihilator 2014-12-11 22:41:53)

Re: Artifacts

thats what a wavefront algorithm does.
it starts at a point (static teleporter for example) and then go tile by tile checking if its passable and stores that status.

hell, its the same as if you take you paint software and use the "fill" tool on a 8bit bitmap... a large area will fill (reachable) and enclosed areas that are not reachable will stay white.

you don't even need to find enclosed areas... they will stay clear on their own.

*Disclaimer: This post can contain strong sarcasm or cynical remarks. keep that in mind!
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Re: Artifacts

Rovoc wrote:

Can you implement a system where every couple of days if an artifact hasn't been touched it respawns? 

V/R,
Rovoc

Simple!.

Keep it simple, stupid.

Re: Artifacts

Players and Devs discussing algorithm design on a public forum to improve the game weighing both space-time complexity and ease of implementation. 
Well done.
+1