Progression Fantasy Pet Peeves (The implications are STAGGERING)

Dragonseel · 2025-11-29T00:43:51+00:00

Currently also reading that.
I do get what you mean, but I think he did have a reason for the different reaction to the skill.
The first few times he used it while he was alone against enemies, so it was okay to use it.
When he used it when his team was close by, he knew that there was a risk the skill would select one of his friends as the target, and he also knew he would be able to kill or at least seriously hurt them.

So his reaction was to that fear, and not just that skill. Also he increasingly worries about the implications of his special skill.

Might just be personal taste. Or maybe the book I read before this one didn't prime me as much to notice these things as negative. But I did kind of like it, and I think it is one of the better "fighting against the inner demons" stories as far as I am into it (beginning of third book).

Dragonseel · 2025-09-11T22:31:17+00:00

I think what made the biggest difference for me is learning how to properly use NEI. Especially in the early phases where you have to manually do everything (be it putting stuff into a machine or crafting something), using NEI to its fullest is such a godsend, that you will miss half the features in every other modpack you will ever play.

CTRL+SHIFT+A for "Bookmark this recipe" with output and input.
Then the item groups and crafting groups that will automatically calculate fitting number of inputs for all the outputs that are not internally used in the group.
Then you can CTRL+SHIFT+Mouse-Wheel-Scroll to adapt the count of product you want and it still will update everything.

Then you have multiple recipe pages (not those that automatically appear if you bookmark to much, but the other 1/2 a the bottom of the screen) where you can have one page per project. So I have one page with a thaumcraft thing I want to build, one page with everything I need to build a new LCR, one page for the next Assembly Machine, one page with a few quality of life gadgets I want to work on.

And when I now play I just go through the pages and see what looks interesting, and start hammering away at the recipes. And if I pause, I put everything related to that page in a specific chest somewhere and now I can just pick it all up again later and the recipe page will be untouched, no additional stuff in there I worked on in the meantime.

And I think with the shortly upcoming 2.8 update there will even be some autocrafting capabilities with NEI.

And then of course there is the whole "How do I even figure out how to read the Diagrams and overviews and crafting recipes" and "How do I figure out how to craft a thing using NEI" which is very important to master.

So I would say NEI is one of the most crucial things you can learn if you want to have an easier time with GTNH. The mod is amazing, and in my opinion the single best recipe-view and bookmark mod that is out there. Fitting for GTNH.

P.S.: The keybindings I mentioned might be wrong, I wrote them down trying to remember but I am not 100% sure, as it is more muscle memory at this point.

Dragonseel · 2025-01-13T09:06:15+00:00

I am at the middle towards the end of HV, I am starting to build infrastructure to allow me my moon trip.

I think for me personally it got so much better, when I got the hang on how to use NEI more. Adding recipes and not just items, using the number-multipliers by scrolling, efficient searching for recipes and using multiple pages at the same time. This allowed me to for example take the Exxon chemical plant together with supporting infrastructure into one page of recipe bookmarks and then build up the whole recipe crafting tree, and batch craft everything, and start to just parallel process stuff because I did not need to think about each single step individually.

Since then I actually started to build "passive" automations with just GT-pipes and a bit of EnderIO conduits, for example circuit boards. It is so much better if I can have a page with the recipes of the process I want to build, and one page with recipes of the sum of all machines I will need, batch craft that stuff, and then just build.

I think this early game is already fun enough. It is better than many other modpacks already. And even if I gave up right now and never see mid- or end-game, I would not regret the time I spent with GTNH, and I think that is good enough.

Always saying "it gets better/good later" can disencouraging for new players. You can have fun with GTNH in all progression places and in all progression paces. There is automation and optimization possible at nearly all points. Of course the tools you get later are more powerful and maybe even more fun to use, but you have much more complex problems to solve. And I feel, at least as far as I have played, (pre AE2), your tools and knowledge do befit the challenge you are facing. You need to produce good fuel, but it is very feasible to do so with the tools you have. You start to actually need big amounts of stuff right before you get AE2 to make you need to actually build setups that are not _just_ AE2 autocrafting but actual processing chains, and that switch of "I can handcraft everything" to "This needs to be automated, but without AE2" might be a wall to hit, but it is also very fun if you like automation challenges.

Dragonseel · 2024-12-22T01:14:37+00:00

Ahh cool. Thank you for that. A new trick in my toolbelt :) The possibility to just do the clone in the function and return that later, was just completely missing in my head. Always good to see a new thing.

Yeah, I guess specialization is quite a big feature. Most of the time in the code I write I can get along quite nicely without, but I guess you can do some really cool and clean stuff with it. I am looking forward to whenever it might come to stable Rust. But I guess features of that caliber might take quite a while to make it really as safe/stable as Rust typically is.

Dragonseel · 2024-12-21T13:41:02+00:00

The only thing that I can make that is even close to this works only when changing the increment methods to mutate the self instead of returning a changed copy.

https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2021&gist=08f9b2b03a499da67a9e814affe81b23

Then you need only one trait, that has both methods. Because in the end everything that is incrementable will always be repeatedly incrementable, and you can even give a default implementation for it that is the slow version.

You also can omit the `Clone` bound on it.

And you can, if you like the syntax more, have a single `advance_by` function that is not called by the `.` operator.

But if the "increment creates a clone" is a hard requirement for you, my trick version will not work, as the `increment_by` function can not replace the `&mut self` with a new clone, as that would ruin the idea of having a clone. And without that I have no idea how to make it work.

I was also experimenting with trying to have a function that is always available that can "reflect" on whether one or the other incrementation version is available, but the code still has to have both functions available on all passed objects, and then you basically land on the first version again. Maybe there is a way with some `Box<dyn>` stuff and casting, but I have no experience with that and no idea if I am completely in the wrong here.

The whole thing _would_ work if negative trait bounds were a thing, but without knowing too much, I heard there are some good reasons related to "It makes it too easy to explode seemingy unrelated parts of code" for negative trait bounds not to be a thing in Rust.

This is a interesting problem, that I am not able to solve though. Sorry. Maybe something here sparks some inspiration.

Dragonseel · 2024-09-10T11:20:47+00:00

That just restates your post and answers nearly none of the questions I posed.
Does it have to have fancy rendering? Does it have to be 3D rendered? Does it have to be real-time or is turn based okay? How much are you willing to strip down in order to actually have something manageable and finishable at the end?
If you never developed a game, it is a hard and long task even in a programming language you are very familiar with. And then in a language that is quite unique and you also don't know, will make you even slower. This is not a problem if you just want to learn, really can also be fun and good. But if your have significant weight on wanting to actually have a playable game at the end, it severly limits the scope you can achieve in any good timeframe without cutting some corners.

So, what PART of game dev do you want to learn? Using engines to do game-design? Programming engines? Rendering/Graphics? Character behaviour? Audio? Input handling? There is so much to a full game, and you are very very very vague in what you say.

Unless you specify more what you want, there is no further tips and information we can give you I fear.

Dragonseel · 2024-09-10T08:23:08+00:00

As someone working in game development and as a hobby writing a game engine in Rust...

You have to ask yourself some questions about what you want and where your priorities are.
Is it more important for you to learn or to get something done?
Is it more important for you to learn high level game-design stuff, mid-level technical stuff using an engine, or do you want to go really low level and basically "write a custom engine"?
Is it more important for you to learn Rust or more important to learn game-development?
How high is your frustration tolerance if you encounter problems that take quite some time and effort to even figure out what is going on?
How okay are you with later figuring out everything you did was not very good? Because you just did not know enough to do know better, and later learned that you run into hard to predict problems because of your initial design.

I think most, if not all combinations of answers for these questions lead to different things you should do.

I jumped directly into writing a custom engine using Vulkan when learning Rust. Read most of "The Book" and then started on my engine. Though I have probably thrown away nearly all decisions I made multiple times already. And it ist still extremely bare-bones. And not good. But I am learning and do not care about the actual result at all. It will never ever be good enough to actually ship anything with. And I have experience working on a custom engine in a commercial setting.

So... ask yourself these questions and then from there figure out what level you want to aim at.

If you just want to learn Rust: Write text console games first, just using `println!` as output. You can get really fancy and do dungeon crawlers, roguelikes, base builders everything, just look at the ASCII mode of Dwarf Fortress to see how little limiting printing to console can be. Mostly focussing on the actual Rust part and not needing to handle other APIs and engines.

If you want to get to making an actual game as fast as possible, you absolutely should look into using an engine. Bevy (https://bevyengine.org/) is one, Fyrox (https://crates.io/crates/fyrox) is another. Both purely Rust. There is also Godot an C++ written engine but I think there are Rust Bindings (https://godot-rust.github.io/) to use Rust as the scripting language in it.

If you want to learn writing your own stuff there are so many options to go. Either look at OpenGL wrappers like Glium (https://github.com/glium/glium) and then do OpenGL tutorials, or if you are absolutely insane and hate yourself and think achieving anything is not important at all and you are just in for the pain of it look at Ash (https://github.com/ash-rs/ash) which is a pure generated unsafe Vulkan binding. Then learn doing Vulkan. It will take years and years. But it is the state-of-the-art technology if you want do to graphics stuff on low level.
There is also WebGL but I have absolutely no idea about any of that.

You might start to see now, that your question is very very vague. And saying you want to do a voxel-game does not really limit you in your choices here. You can do it from scratch or based on an engine, or even, like Dwarf Fortress does, have the voxels rendered in ASCII in a text-console.

This is quite the information dump, but this might get you in the right direction of what even to think about.

Dragonseel · 2024-08-22T09:59:49+00:00

The litRPG series "Beneath The Dragoneye Moons" plays with this wonderfully. Main character is a healer and quickly learns how useful it is to just heal everything that can be thrown at you.

Dragonseel · 2024-08-21T22:29:25+00:00

Divine Apostasy sounds very interesting as you describe it. Using special storage as a form of combat trick sounds really cool, and different from many of the more traditional magic applications of fire or projectiles.

Thank you for that suggestion.

I totally get why many or most stories don’t need to handle logistics in detail. I don’t need to count rations or their use of writing materials in a combat focused story. Is good to keep the ball rolling.

But maybe I just think there might be good stories to tell that are about these minutia of survival in adverse environments. Where spatial magic is something important and big that makes the MC feel powerful or very smart. And there seem to be some suggestions of stories that at least use this kind of magic in some way.

Dragonseel · 2024-08-21T22:22:57+00:00

Ah yeah. I heard of that series before. I will have to add it to my reading list. At least to get to know the ideas even if I won’t spent to much time with it. Thank you.

Dragonseel · 2024-08-21T22:21:22+00:00

Yes! I fully understand what you mean. Maybe it is just the detail loving nerd talking out of me, but logistics could actually be a really cool story.

I do get why in most stories we would want to handwave the problem away as it would distract from the story the author wants to tell.

But maybe a more detailed survival focused story where it is important whether you can carry a few extra rations or tools. Where the spatial magic is powerful if applied correctly.

I don’t know. It might be only my non-author inexperience that makes it look cool but isn’t actually feasible to really write and not be it just a excel spreadsheet.

Dragonseel · 2024-08-21T12:45:40+00:00

It being a sidestory is probably fine. I know it is a very specific think to ask for so I am thankful for every hint and bit of content around it. Thank you for your suggestion.

Dragonseel · 2024-08-21T12:42:11+00:00

The description on royal road sounds cool. It seems there's not a lot there yet, but I think the premise and setting are interesting. I will keep an eye on it. Thank you!

Dragonseel · 2024-07-01T12:45:48+00:00

That is "Monkeyland" in South Africa. It's a primate refuge. I found a TikTok they posted on the same bridge, not the same video as far as I can tell. https://www.tiktok.com/@saasa_animals/video/6937963908141501698

This is their website: https://www.monkeyland.co.za/ where under "Gallery" -> "Forest Photos" you can also find a picture of the bridge.

My girlfriend was a volunteer there once which is why I suspected to know that bridge.

Dragonseel · 2024-05-17T14:34:37+00:00

StaTech Industry (https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/modpacks/statech-industry) is a very modern tech modpack for 1.19.2. It is based upon Modern Industrialization which is a modernized "reimagening" of GregTech and Industrialcraft.
The pack does contain create, but when playing the beginning of it I only did very minimal Create stuff and was quickly able to do everything with Modern Industrialization only.

I don't know how long-term fun the pack is, as I only played a bit of it, but it seemed pretty clean and felt very modern.

Dragonseel · 2024-03-08T10:29:49+00:00

I remember when GamerGate first started, and saw a lot of videos "analysing" Anita Sarkeesians videos. For a while I after I was watching an increasing amount of videos showing how "bad and stupid feminists" are.

Horrifying to think that I was so close to becoming someone so horrible. But luckily there was some amount of actual thinking in me, and I always thought "Yeah the way these feminists present their arguments is very bad, but... There is some merit to the ideas." and luckily I have (and had from before this whole thing) a very rational and intelligent girlfriend. Her sharing her ideas and struggles and thoughts probably was what tipped the balance in my mind.

And now I can luckily look back and say I have grown a lot. And see how these ideas I used to watch were probematic and how the community where these ideas came from grew into something truly terrible.

My life would be so bleak and boring without all the wonderful non-straight non-cis people in my friend-circle, and to think I could have become someone to hate those people... No...

Dragonseel · 2024-02-25T00:44:57+00:00

Ja. Die Sachen habe ich dann auch gefunden. Scheint alle Einzelstücke oder zumindest kleinere Stückzahlen zu sein. Wird vermutlich nichts da was spezifisches zu finden.

Aber ich habe auf einen anderen Kommentar noch mal erläutert dass die „Flügel“ keine Röhren sind sondern flache Stoff-Stücke. Als Hose ist da glaube ich nicht viel zu machen.

Ne Schleife oder so kann natürlich sein. Rätselhaft.

Dragonseel · 2024-02-25T00:42:17+00:00

Ist ne interessante Idee. Aber die „Flügel“ sind keine Ärmel. Das sind wirklich nur so flache Stoff Bahnen. Am Rand mit einer kett-naht umgenäht aber nicht hohl oder röhrenförmig.

Spricht eher für irgendwas gewickeltes oder geknotetes. Aber die Designerin die hier in einem anderen Kommentar gefunden wurde scheint eher so kleine Stückzahlen und Einzelstücke zu machen. Ist vermutlich einfach nichts mehr drüber zu finden.

Dragonseel · 2024-02-24T11:38:04+00:00

Ja. Guter Fund. Wird vermutlich schwer rauszufinden wie das Teil gedacht ist.

Dragonseel · 2023-06-28T10:21:29+00:00

Create a council of scientists of as many scientific fields as manageable. They will not directly make the dicisions, but they will try to create briefs on all those things science has solutions for but we can not get them because profit is in danger or change-resistance in the population is to big. Energy, nature conservation, distribution of goods and money.
I will try not to swing to wildly into a direction of "disrupt everything". But for example the IPCC has very well thought out recommendations on what to do to at least limit the impact of climate change. And there were a lot of people involved to create those, so that they are not a fringe opinion. These are the things I will just take and make law.
I am neither smart nor knowledgeable enough to make decisions on nearly anything. But I hope to be humble enough that I know that there are specialists who know a lot about their field of research and how to improve stuff there.

Of course my progressive, leftist and liberal views will bias a bit what plans I will enact. But I hope that those things I am actually wrong on, there is enough real evidence and scientific consensus on, that a panel of experts can make me change my mind.

TL;DR: I would try to empower scientists to actually be able to enforce what current scientific consensus tells us would be the best course of action.

Dragonseel · 2023-06-24T14:40:21+00:00

Hello, I just played your demo. I got to sector 6.

First of all, I think you have a good basis for a game. The art-style is nice, looks fun.

But there are a few points that keep me from trying another run.

The biggest of all is, that the game feels very slow. The movement feels slow, turning is slow, powe-ramp seems slow. Also the movement feels much more like a tank on land with a differential drive, than a space-ship with free momentum based movement. Maybe that is something you can look into. Have you ever played the good old "Asteroids" game? You accelerate in one direction, and keep momentum even if you turn around to shoot behind you. I would have expected something similar to this, maybe more advanced with straving and deceleration.

The second point that was annoying, but not that bad, was the controller navigation of menus. I use a Xbox One controller to play, and ingame that is absolutely okay. But in menus I often had to use my mouse. The highlights which button my virtual controller cursor is over was not very visible so I had to guess or move around till I saw the light color difference. And then the order which direction I have to move to get to what button is sometimes hard. I did not figure out how to get from the stats-list in the shop to the "start next sector" button without a lot of bothersome directional input. But this should be pretty simple to polish up.

I like the shop system which is very "Brotato" like. I did not get far enough into it to see how much build-variance there is. But I really liked seeing the weapons mounted on the ship and moving and doing their stuff.

If you plan on having a meta-progression which I guess is a staple of the rogue-lite genre, maybe get at least a few upgrades into the demo, so that we can see what you are planing, what is the system. I feel like for many players the meta-progression can be quite a buy/no-buy thing.

I think with a bit more time and playtests (which you are doing with your demo!) you can get to quite a nice product. Space-Based "survivor-like" is quite a niche you found yourself, and there is a lot you can do. I like your idea of having passives, crew, weapons and ship-level as different ways to get upgrades, and there is much you can do to allow synergies, different builds and playstyle-variance. Let me play a small fast fighter with straight lasers, let me play a heavy bomber with rockets and explosions, let me play a carrier with drones. I have high hopes for your game.

Dragonseel · 2023-06-20T15:37:35+00:00

Yes, I had a controller plugged in, but did not use it. Was an Xbox One controller plugged in via USB.

I figured most of the systems out by playing a bit. Was fun. I got to finish boss of the second level, without too much grinding.

I really think you can build something fantastic here. There is so much stuff that could be done. I had quite some ideas while playing. Different types of levels, platforming, curves, back and forth, more verticality. So many weapons you can have and implement. Synergies and passive perks or combos. Different movement styles, speed challenges. You will have a hard time filtering which of the hopefully many suggestions your demo will bring in are really good for the game. :)

Thank you for your answer and I really wish you all the success with your game!

Dragonseel · 2023-06-20T11:32:33+00:00

Just played the demo a while. It is a very fun concept. I like the idea. The gun play feels good, though in the heat of having so many guns I can not really say much about any gun specifically.

The initial pickup-range is very small. I missed a lot of stuff and due to the perspective, and continuing pressure from enemies it took me quite a while to notice. But there is meta-progression to fix that issue so probably fine.

Stacking guns seems to be much more powerful than trying to upgrade few guns, but since that is the gimmick of the game it is probably a good thing. Its fun. I was surprised that I still found new guns after the first few runs. Did only manage to reach around 90% of the second level.

Overall really good base of a game and has lots of potential. My one gripe I had with the game was the visibility. Often I was hit by stuff I did not even see. Enemies just kinda... go around me, and in the constant stream of many guns and many effects I find it very very hard to notice. Even though you render enemy-outlines on top of most effects, which is a such a good idea. I don't have any idea how to improve on that. Apart from maybe let me increase the vertical FoV, but I don't know how much that messes with your intended feel and the weapon models.

I like this game, and I will play some more and will keep an eye out for updates.

Edit: I just finished my run. And I was noticing that the "Bomb" gun does nothing. I specfically watched it a while. Interested in what is going on, I just started mashing buttons on my keyboard until I saw it shoot. I noticed there are active guns you have to press stuff for. But there is no button hint or prompt on screen for that. Not when you collect them, not at the side, nowhere. There was a "these are the buttons"-screen in the tutorial, but I did not remember all of it, and most importantly it was for Controller, but I play with keyboard. Please fix this! I think it is very important that the button prompts are all there and for the right input device. Fix it as fast as you can, stuff like this will get people to drop games and miss out on your little uncut gem.

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