Where is the water?

[Galadhlinn]

No ponds, streams, lakes, oceans?
No water at all in the entire world?
Really?

[dao]

Originally posted by alpharius:

Originally posted by Sutha:

Keen Software House =/= Keen Games

No. Problem is at your side, im afraid, captainamaziiing.

No, the problem is on your side, jumping on aggressively with an angry tone to defend, well what or who i'm not sure. Keen absolutely should have done a basic trademark/name search to see if there was another Keen already in the game development space. I love the group, but this is an amateur mistake.

[Infamous_Garr]

I know I found an old letter in some ruins and it was telling the person it was addressed to that they need to stay away from Rivers, streams, canyons, and even low valleys as low spots and water sources are where the Shroud are strongest. I would imagine that the shroud fungus absorbed most of not all the fresh water on the map.

[Darkside99x]

Originally posted by Infamous_Garr:

I know I found an old letter in some ruins and it was telling the person it was addressed to that they need to stay away from Rivers, streams, canyons, and even low valleys as low spots and water sources are where the Shroud are strongest. I would imagine that the shroud fungus absorbed most of not all the fresh water on the map.

Then why aren't we waking in a desolate, desiccated world?

I also wondered at the notion of a being that is pretty much the conceptual personification of fire both swimming in or drinking water.

[Galadhlinn]

Crazy to see this thread still going, but From my first 20 minutes in the demo, this was my thought. While it is true that water in games has always been challenging, many games have figured it out, including voxel-based games. I am thoroughly enjoying Enshrouded. It would be great to hear from the devs one day, just out of curiosity, why they opted to not have water in the game.

[Turd King]

The water was corrupted and thats the lava/shroud rivers you see. They mention this ingame

[Galadhlinn]

Originally posted by Turd King:

The water was corrupted and thats the lava/shroud rivers you see. They mention this ingame

I read this. I think I found a total of three messages (lore) in the game about the lack of water in the world. In reading them, it almost felt like the devs were writing in an explanation for why no water in the game. Lore aside, there has to be a reason the devs opted to not have water. There is vibrant, lush land all over Enshrouded that is not in the shroud. Lush forests, farms with crops, buckets, Barrels, troughs. Putting ponds here and there could have been done, but wasn't. To me this points to an intentional decision beyond the lore.

[Darkside99x]

Originally posted by Galadhlinn:

Originally posted by Turd King:

The water was corrupted and thats the lava/shroud rivers you see. They mention this ingame

I read this. I think I found a total of three messages (lore) in the game about the lack of water in the world. In reading them, it almost felt like the devs were writing in an explanation for why no water in the game. Lore aside, there has to be a reason the devs opted to not have water. There is vibrant, lush land all over Enshrouded that is not in the shroud. Lush forests, farms with crops, buckets, Barrels, troughs. Putting ponds here and there could have been done, but wasn't. To me this points to an intentional decision beyond the lore.

I suspect that it is literally because water is hard to do well, doubly so I imagine when creating your own engine and having voxel based physics too.

[simon]

Originally posted by Galadhlinn:

Crazy to see this thread still going, but From my first 20 minutes in the demo, this was my thought. While it is true that water in games has always been challenging, many games have figured it out, including voxel-based games. I am thoroughly enjoying Enshrouded. It would be great to hear from the devs one day, just out of curiosity, why they opted to not have water in the game.

The devs have talked about it. Its not impossible to implement in voxel games (although in a lot of games its beyond jank) but its not easy and requires a lot of work. When you work on a project you have to decide when and where to allocate resources and some are not worth it for the results you get back.I ts an in-house engine done forget and may require a huge amount of work to get water in and working to a decent standard.

[captainamaziiing]

Hopefully the game lasts long enough that they finish the idea of removing the Shroud. Take out the local root and the Shroud evaporates, leaving water where the 'lava' is now. But the lack of water is a huge gap for a building game. Everyone likes water. Leaving it out had to be both intentional and a hard decision. But a different KEEN said water was impossible in Medieval Engineers, and then a single modder put it in. Made it good too.

It's all ones and zeroes. They can add it if they want it. But everything comes at a cost and some folks are already having trouble running the game. Volumetric water EATS processors. and there is no way bored players aren't going to try to exploit water in creative ways the Devs never thought of. Flooding all of Umber Hollow or whatever.

That said, I want at least non-volumetric water. It's just nice to look at. Plus fishing and swimming to my underwater airlock would be TIGHT! (Saw another Ryan George reference, so I'm running with it)

[rdsidwe]

some of the farms have mud "streams" where water would normally be.

[Sneaky Fox]

I think the shroud did consume the oceans, rivers and pretty much all the surface water. it would explain the thick fog and squishy mushrooms all over the place.

[spliff]

in the wells.

[Galadhlinn]

Originally posted by captainamaziiing:

Hopefully the game lasts long enough that they finish the idea of removing the Shroud. Take out the local root and the Shroud evaporates, leaving water where the 'lava' is now. But the lack of water is a huge gap for a building game. Everyone likes water. Leaving it out had to be both intentional and a hard decision. But a different KEEN said water was impossible in Medieval Engineers, and then a single modder put it in. Made it good too.

It's all ones and zeroes. They can add it if they want it. But everything comes at a cost and some folks are already having trouble running the game. Volumetric water EATS processors. and there is no way bored players aren't going to try to exploit water in creative ways the Devs never thought of. Flooding all of Umber Hollow or whatever.

That said, I want at least non-volumetric water. It's just nice to look at. Plus fishing and swimming to my underwater airlock would be TIGHT! (Saw another Ryan George reference, so I'm running with it)

Years back I played a game called Landmark. It was a side game to Everquest II, where Sony was toying/experimenting with the idea of player developed content. Sony sold off the Everquest franchise, and Landmark was canceled. Landmark was voxel-based. It did have oceans at the edges of the maps and large bodies of water, but what I found fascinating was the game's water assets that players could build with. You could take a voxel of water, highlight it and grab one of its corners and drag it out to any size you wanted, say for example, 12X24X2. Then take that box and push it down into a depression in the ground until the water box was defined by the edge of the depression, click ok and you had a pond! It was that simple. The game also gave players a set of water features that could be scaled and rotated (X,Y,Z). They basically looked like waterfalls in short, short-wide, tall, tall-wide (I think there were six total). You could shrink a small waterfall down to water coming out of a spigot. You could make huge waterfalls spilling out of rock formations in series and steps into pools of water. Some of the water features that players made were insane, beautiful. All the waterfall features came with a sound file, so if you scaled to a huge waterfall, that is what you heard as you approached the waterfall. It still amazes me that no other game developer has added water features for builders (voxel-based or not) to date.

[NiceGuy]

It was converted into shroud...

[Imhotep]

Originally posted by Galadhlinn:

No ponds, streams, lakes, oceans?
No water at all in the entire world?
Really?

I hope they do add water, but only as a block that WE can place down.

As someone who has played tons of survival games, water is the DETH in building games.

In a game called creativerse if you put down a pool or pond it was all bad.

Mine craft it was too until people started having way better PC's (the future happened).

So like i'm saying if they do add water, make it something that you don't "Find lakes and rivers" in the wild, make it so you find the block and in the blocks description make it something like "The ocean of CPU temperatures we've always dreamed of. Except this ocean is hot, almost boiling it would seem." lol.

Basically just provide us with a warning that it will require some processing power cause i know thats what it will.