Amaz wrote:Sorry for not answering any of your questions, Kilarin
NOT a problem, you have a life. :)
Amaz wrote:and the horrible code which accompanies them!)
Code was not horrible. I made the mistake of searching on GIT instead of just searching through the downloaded content on my own hard drive. GIT was only showing my tiny snippets of the code, and didn't seem to be finding all of it for some reason. Anyway, once I started examining the code on my own machine, the functionality became clear.
Amaz wrote:Apologies also for the difficulty of crafting rings
Quite the opposite. I think this is a positive. by the time I started crafting on the rings, I had built up a pretty good stash of materials. In MOST Minetest games I've played, by the time you have that much stuff, the challenge of the game is mostly over. There is still a lot of building and exploring to do, which is GREAT fun, but you pretty much have the stuff to craft anything you want. NOT SO in LOTT. At that point you find that there is still an enormous amount of work and effort to do if you want to craft a ring of power. You realize that you do NOT have enough mithril. That you need to find lava and obsidian. That you have many things you have to work on and struggle to accomplish yet. And that is GREAT in my opinion. It really extended the interest of the game for me. I do think you might want to mention the lava in the ring making notes. But perhaps surprising the players with that last obstacle was the intent?
I also really like the way you made the crafting books so that each one you crafted, revealed the secrets needed in order to craft another crafting book. This helped to make it so that the player keeps having new things to play with and discover. I like it much better than just starting off with a crafting book that explains everything at once. It makes learning new things feel like much more of an accomplishment!
Some more observations about LOTT:
The MOBS were both one of the best and worst aspects of the game. There is a wonderful variety of peoples in the game. And the bad guys are deadly. Try wandering around in an enemy biome, especially at night, and you are dead meat. I've got a collection of like 30 tombstones from how many times I died. I really like the fact that the mobs were challenging. It wasn't until I finally got a full set of gavalorn armor that the trolls and orcs finally quit killing me so quickly. And that was a LONG way into the game.
On the negative side, the mobs had no edge avoidance logic at ALL. I built my castle on top of a low floating island. Mobs were spawning on it, and the cliffs around it, and then plummeting to their dooms so rapidly that at times it felt like it was raining horses, men and dwarves. I fed myself for the first part of the game by just gathering up meat from all the horses that plummeted to their deaths.
At one point, an elf came walking up to me. As he passed I right clicked on him and he said, "It is not wise to delve too deeply into the art of the enemy!" and then immediately leapt off a cliff to his death. It was both profound and funny at the same time. :) I realize that MOB AI is a general MineTest problem and not LOTT specific, of course.
Also, I found the mobs spawning in my mine shaft to be frustrating. It doesn't matter if I build a nice locked door so that no one can get in to my mine. Dwarves will spawn, and spawn so thickly that they block my ability to walk through. And if you are digging with your pick, and a dwarf jumps in front of you and accidentally gets hit, then they all get VERY ANGRY and try to kill you. This was a minor irritation, but it was an irritation.
It would be REALLY NICE if when you put your cursor over a mob, or at least when you right click on them, if it would identify their race.
I think it would be great if defeating mobs gave you experience that eventually started making you better at fighting mobs, more rpg style.
Now, I don't want that list of negatives to overwhelm the fact that overall, I really liked the mobs in LOTT. I'm trying to give useful feedback, I'm NOT griping. I had FUN!
Another issue that was both positive and negative is the metals in the game. Once I figured out how it worked, the progression of gradually increasing metals was very nice! Game balance wise, I thought it worked great. The problem was that it was so counter intuitive that it wasn't until I read it on the wiki that I figured out that steel was the weakest metal in the game, copper was stronger than steel, and tin was stronger than copper. That is exactly the opposite of their order in reality. I don't know if this needs to be "fixed", but it was something I found disconcerting.
Farming Mod suggestion: Xanadu is using a farming mod that allows plants to mature based on how long it has been since they were planted, even if the player is not in the area at the time. I think it is a VERY nice variation. Not certain exactly which mod it is, but you might want to consider that variation.
Also, there were several varieties of trees that I could not seem to get to grow no matter what I did. Elm trees, for example. Even planting them in the right biome, the saplings NEVER seem to grow. I may have been doing something wrong.
This is not an important point, but I found the bacteria injector to sort of clash with the theme of the mod. Seemed anachronistic.
A search function in the crafting manuals would be a very nice edition.
I ended up with chests full of axes and war hammers and armor, because enemy mobs (and friendlies who jumped off cliffs or got taken out by enemies) kept dropping them. And I never found anything I could DO with them. I did find some merchants, but the goods they would buy were very limited lists and never seemed to include the stuff I wanted to sell. :) I think it would be really nice if weapons and armor could be melted down to gain back a portion of the metal that went into making them. Perhaps 1/2 or 1/3rd? It would make gathering loot off of the mobs you defeat feel like it was really worth while.
My opinions, take them or leave them as you wish. I had (and am still having) a LOT of fun with this game. I want to thank you and everyone else who worked on it for the time and effort you put in to lovingly crafting this piece of art.