I would like to talk about weather in Ryzom regarding foraging.
sorry in advance for my english...
Thanks to players experiences over the years (but I guess mostely thanks to those able to analyse the source code since it's free) this is no more a mystery, neither a random thing.
But it was impossible to find a clue within the game itself, because of a complex calculation issue, the weather was different between each clients, depending on OS, and more importantly, it was different between clients and server.
So any attemp by players to analyse what climatic conditions to get poping materials was pure waste of time, from the fact that what they can observe was not the truth.
Code-readers went into the core, and understood the mathematical function that calculate the weather. And, that the result is depending of absolute date and time, so you can recalculate the weather oustide the server.
Then the "right weather" could be displayed by third-part apps. And then players were able to understand (or maybe thanks to code source analysis again, I don't know...) the correlation between seasonnal availability of a given material in a area and the right climatic condition(s) to have for that material to pop. Well done.
And on the top of that, as you can recreate the weather calculation over time, you can calculate what it will be in the next few hours, so you can now predict when and where a given material will be available ! (without knowing if the source is already empty, however)
Of course this is a tremedous advantage from a player who still look and a false minimap weather and spent hours waiting for the right time, counting on his luck and patience.
But the information was spread, little by little, by "word of mouth", and the weather calculation was made public, and even a calendar gives real-time evolution of the weather.
This is a good thing that one of the code-readers provide this information rather than keeping it secret. I regret only it wasn't more official to make it fair.
There is no doubt that the weather calculation was not meant to be exposed in the game conception. We can call this like a side-effect of freeing the source code.
Much efforts on source code have been done for the "steam" client, and many bugs resolved.
This is a good thing that the weather in minimap will display a right information. So it would not be vain efforts for a newplayer trying to understand its impact.
BUT I still fill uncomfortable that in order to play this game "properly", I mean enought competitive, you have to use a third-part app, or at least a external web page, that predicts for you the weather to come. Ballistix mystics is sure a great website, with tons of "static" informations like maps, mobs lists, material properties, etc. But does it have to be become part of the game ?
What I expect is that while reforming the weather calculation in order to make it the same over all platforms, the Devs introduce a mean that the weather cannot be predicted outside the server (for example, introducing the server reboot timestamp as a seed in random number generation ?). The knowledge players have acquired will still be usefull, looking at the current weather, but without predictions.
If "professionnal diggers" think it's so cool to be able to predict weather and would be so disappointed loosing this feature, then this prediction should be something available in-game. For example with the help of a Karavan technician or Kami oracle ( just a example ).
Thanks for reading that long text.... :)
sorry in advance for my english...
a) The current situation :
One challenge for diggers is to get the right climatic conditions for the materials to appear.Thanks to players experiences over the years (but I guess mostely thanks to those able to analyse the source code since it's free) this is no more a mystery, neither a random thing.
But it was impossible to find a clue within the game itself, because of a complex calculation issue, the weather was different between each clients, depending on OS, and more importantly, it was different between clients and server.
So any attemp by players to analyse what climatic conditions to get poping materials was pure waste of time, from the fact that what they can observe was not the truth.
Code-readers went into the core, and understood the mathematical function that calculate the weather. And, that the result is depending of absolute date and time, so you can recalculate the weather oustide the server.
Then the "right weather" could be displayed by third-part apps. And then players were able to understand (or maybe thanks to code source analysis again, I don't know...) the correlation between seasonnal availability of a given material in a area and the right climatic condition(s) to have for that material to pop. Well done.
And on the top of that, as you can recreate the weather calculation over time, you can calculate what it will be in the next few hours, so you can now predict when and where a given material will be available ! (without knowing if the source is already empty, however)
Of course this is a tremedous advantage from a player who still look and a false minimap weather and spent hours waiting for the right time, counting on his luck and patience.
But the information was spread, little by little, by "word of mouth", and the weather calculation was made public, and even a calendar gives real-time evolution of the weather.
This is a good thing that one of the code-readers provide this information rather than keeping it secret. I regret only it wasn't more official to make it fair.
There is no doubt that the weather calculation was not meant to be exposed in the game conception. We can call this like a side-effect of freeing the source code.
b) the steam client
Much efforts on source code have been done for the "steam" client, and many bugs resolved.
Karu
When steam client is released (and server side patch), weather should be same for server and client because calculation is changed to integer math (integer hash actually).
This is a good thing that the weather in minimap will display a right information. So it would not be vain efforts for a newplayer trying to understand its impact.
c) my expectation
BUT I still fill uncomfortable that in order to play this game "properly", I mean enought competitive, you have to use a third-part app, or at least a external web page, that predicts for you the weather to come. Ballistix mystics is sure a great website, with tons of "static" informations like maps, mobs lists, material properties, etc. But does it have to be become part of the game ?
What I expect is that while reforming the weather calculation in order to make it the same over all platforms, the Devs introduce a mean that the weather cannot be predicted outside the server (for example, introducing the server reboot timestamp as a seed in random number generation ?). The knowledge players have acquired will still be usefull, looking at the current weather, but without predictions.
If "professionnal diggers" think it's so cool to be able to predict weather and would be so disappointed loosing this feature, then this prediction should be something available in-game. For example with the help of a Karavan technician or Kami oracle ( just a example ).
Thanks for reading that long text.... :)
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Beauté, curiosité, virtuosité !