IDEAS FOR RYZOM

I would like to talk about weather in Ryzom regarding foraging.
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.

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.... :)

(mistake)

Thank you for posting this.

How do you start the app?

Roseali

+1

Zendae --

I have to say that I do use the bmsite.net weather map to determine if it is time to run up to Void to dig exe amber or seeds, or to dig forest moon resin in GoC. However, if I could trust the weather indication in the client, I might well go back to making marks on my maps about weather instead of the weather number.,

I look forward to the consistency promised by the new clients.

Nerwane --

I think that at least in digging, "competetive" is not the word I would use. All you need is some materials, not all.

Just a side note Bittty, even if the weather is the same in the client (consistency) , the way it is displayed does not map 1 to 1 to the server weather. You may see 'fair' weather and have different results. Anyway, the consistency is the minimum expected.

*removed*

Actually, MIrakel, I wasn't looking for that at all. That's not what this thread is about. (At least as far as I was concerned).

+1

I agree, weather should not be predictable!

I disagree. Weather being predictable helps the game:

Digging in the roots can be tedious. Getting to a particular spot lengthy and dangerous. Staying there, too. You don't know wether you still find material there anyway or whether you will be attacked (on the multispots).Add to that an uncertainty that you might not even have a chance to find the interesting material simply because the weather will not appear, will make it even harder and not add to the game.

As-is with predictable weather you can plan your digging. You can get ready in time, make your path and get digging once the correct weather appears. It still can be quite a considerable time investment.

The predictable weather is good incentive to get a guild digging-party going also for people who are not digging-freaks when the right weather for the right materials is ahead. Removing that incentive will make this chance disappear or much less likely.

Making that time investment a gamble would only make it possibly frustrating to have wasted hours without a chance for success.

With /appzone 2832 (Weather Forecast 2.0) you now have it available (again) ingame. Arguably this could be integrated better in the game from a RP perspective (but I much prefer to have it also available in the browser)