P.S., when do you think the next demo will be released? I want to know how much time I have to finish my maps.
Hopefully within a month, maybe 3-4 weeks.
However, I have come up with a little idea. I'm not sure what I think of it yet, has anyone else been annoyed when their wood cutter is sitting around doing nothing when he has 5 tree trunks in his house? Well maybe not if he was watching trees grow, but what if he had already cut all the trees down?
My point: what if farmers and woodcutters continued planting their crops even when they reach an overload of resources?
I think that, maybe, we could do a poll on this?
Added to the bugs list, thanks. The reason this happens is basically because workers won't try to work when their output is full, but of course we can have a special case for farmers and woodcutters.
This would also remove some of the time between the "tree harvests" so one doesn't periodically run out of wood.
We've made the woodcutter now plant and chop at the same time, but if there are a lot of trees available (>8 ) he will always chop. This means when you place a new woodcutter in a forest you will still get the surge of wood at the start, but after some time he will settle down to a fairly continuous wood output. There are no longer such distinct "planting" and "harvesting" times, he'll do both most of the time.
Because this means you can't rely on your woodcutter to clear an area, we will add a checkbox to his house "[x] Plant trees" so you can chose whether you want him to plant or not. We've discussed it and this is the best solution we thought of. Greater control than this (e.g. someone suggested a slider between planting and chopping) would be pointless, because it's not really possible to increase the efficiency, this feature is JUST intended to let you clear areas if you want. Let me know what you think.
Something else: as the number of multiplayer maps will only increase, it might be useful to have them in lists (firstly sorted on building/fighting, then on number of players?).
Yes, we'll at least have section for "fighting", "building", "coop" but we might even need to extend this further eventually... However I don't think this is a priority so for now it can stay as is. But I added it to the features list. Maybe you can implement it Danjb?
Good idea. I've not looked at all of the multiplayer maps myself, but do they conform to some sort of standard? It occurs to me that we should perhaps come up with some requirements / guidelines if all maps are to be accepted into the remake, or do you currently hand-pick the best ones?
LOL well the current guidelines/standard is basically: "Does Lewin think it looks good?"
I've seen a fair few missions after running my site for this long so I know the difference between a good map and a bad map, but if someone disagrees with a decision I make please discuss it with me. Also note that just because we have all of these maps currently, it does not mean they will always all be included. I mean when we have 100s or 1000s we can start making "map packs" instead so the installer doesn't have 100MB just for additional maps
Cheers,
Lewin.