ARK: Survival Evolved

ARK: Survival Evolved

ArkSettlements
Vas Dec 4, 2019 @ 4:59pm
I tried out the mod, and I got some thoughts for improvement.
I gotta say, I liked the idea of the mod when I saw it first come out ages back but I had quit Ark for a while after a fight with someone and shutting my server down and yada yada. I came back yesterday, and tried out this mod, but I'm a little disappointed. Perhaps my feedback can help, I wish I had been around to help since the beginning though. Sorry about that, I bet I could have helped steer things in a good direction had I been there in the beginning.

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So, the first thing, is that these buildings act like crop plots, I really very much dislike that. Its a large structure that doesn't snap to foundations or let you sort of customize houses in any way. I get why you did this, but there are several methods of improvement here.

1) Snap to foundations.
When snapped to a foundation, the structure no longer has a platform below it, and sits in a slightly lower stance that looks like its built into the foundations deeper so that you aren't taking a giant step over the edge. This should check that the entire area of the structure, has foundation or ceiling under it. No gaps allowed. This way you can set down a nice flat village!

2) Modular Structure Parts
Place beds inside a housed in area as a home for visitors. Beds sharing the same room as another bed will decrease happiness.

Place specific items inside a structure to enable that work place for 2 workers.

Have joy objects that can be placed. Like a tree, or some stones, each providing a specific amount of joy, providing additional bonus joy when used within a specific range of each other.
Town Flags increase some happiness and compliance.
Mailboxes provide additional happiness when placed near a home that has a bed in it.
A tree provides a tiny amount of happiness. Same for a rock and some plants.

Water tap for the town can be placed on existing lines you've made, each tap provides a specific amount of water, the water taps only work if a town intake is placed on the same pipe line. Otherwise, a rain collector would be a good way to supply the town. Specifically named Rain Collector, which would collect rain the same way tanks do on the roof, only this would hold a lot more and be for the town use only.

Tough I'm not sure how this version of the idea would work well, you'd have to scan room sizes and such to determine a number of factors. So this part may not be helpful at all.

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Next, we have this village UI, that doesn't go away unless you leave the town's range. I'd like to be able to open a UI that lets me see what the town needs, has in stock, what the villager stats are, etc.

Could allow the open stats thing be an open screen method rather than an overlay that gets hidden behind levelup notifs and whatnot. And then add a different option, to open a town overlay that stays up.

Something with the UI you can probably do is enable adding dinosaurs to the town's roster to boost certain jobs. I'd say get a list of allowed dinos that the town can use, and boost buildings of that type by some specific amount divided by the number of those buildings. AKA, 1 pig will boost 1 farm by 5%. If you have 2 farms, its 2.5%, if its 4 farms, 1.25%. So on so forth. Or I guess, perhaps just boost global food growth in the town by 5%, and have a max cap on that around 25%. Doed, Anky, Beaver/Mammoth, they'd help resource gatherers, etc.

Checking a people in town screen will show why they are unhappy or what their condition is, how much exp they have. What they are equipped with.

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Town Storage Box could be used to put things into the warehouses you have. This would let you upgrade buildings yourself by filling these boxes with the required amount of materials to upgrade a building from its current state to a new state. Like going from Thatch huts to Stone, it'd calculate based on all the building parts within it, and on the parts that'll be replaced with a cost list on it. Even more interesting, if you accept structures as well as resources, so if building X needs 20 stone walls, 10 sloped roof, 1 stone door, 1 stone doorframe, etc, I can make those and give them to the town to upgrade with that. These upgrades could still cost food. I haven't successfully upgraded anything yet, because I can't get the city to function right no matter where I place it.

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My villagers keep spawning in dump locations, likely because the bound boxes for placing these things are bad, they kept spawning in the water or below the foundations, etc. Should spawn villagers some small distance above the ground so they fall and land in the proper place. Perhaps increase their spawn location height by 2-4 walls, that should prevent fall damage and give plenty of space to land right.

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I'm sorry I couldn't test a whole lot, I couldn't get the town to work, no matter what I did. The biggest issue i had was that buildings kept snapping in odd ways, I couldn't rotate things, I couldn't disable snapping, and I couldn't prevent them from building inside each other, nor could I get my town to do anything. I have no idea of the range the town is allowed to process either, be nice if you could enable a shield on the town center to show where the town's range is so you are able to see what buildings will be qualified as part of the town.

I'm a little tired right now, I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way and that you get some useful ideas here.
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Showing 1-5 of 5 comments
Vas Dec 8, 2019 @ 8:44am 
Yea, I tried this a few more times now and just can't get a town to work at all. I even went to Ragnarock to use large flat areas, and still can't get enough space for these ridiculously large plots that keep snapping badly together.

At the very least, disable snap points on them except for on top of foundations or ceilings. The snap directions are rather bad, its making it a huge pain to try and place these massive structures, you make them snap to the left of the player instead of in front, rotate this so that the player can see what they are doing and it might improve but honestly, I can't stand these mega huge structure plots. It needs to be smaller and more modular.

I'll try and get some good examples soon.
Last edited by Vas; Dec 8, 2019 @ 8:45am
Vas Dec 8, 2019 @ 10:00am 
Your town hall appears to be the biggest, 5x7, with two strips of 1x7 of garden space making it a total of 7x7 foundations in size. Lets not forget the flag zone which takes up another 2x7 cells of invisible space.

I can't replicate the structure because it seems you meshed parts together and such, so I can't make a good example really.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/370987641581207562/653292399212363804/unknown.png

Orange arrow indicates you should move the whole structure over to fit that yellow triangle area, compressing it by 1 foundation width. Green is where the NPCs should spawn, 2 foundations above the floor so that they fall and land properly in the town center.

Red are foundation areas that are no longer needed, space saved. I'd say set the snap point, to the center front foundation there, and then add a key that lets you rotate the structure while snapped or unsnapped. Unsnapped its smooth rotation, snapped, 90 degree rotation. Do not include plot anymore, its pointless and makes it hard to build a custom city. Or rather, add option to use plots, no plot when snapped and able to be toggled on. Same way you toggle foundation support.

Add a new type of item, decoration that adds to the happiness of the city in minor tiny amounts. A tree, a rock, a path. Tree will improve happiness by 1/30th the happiness plot. A rock, 1/50th. A path, 1/40th. Path will have straight, plus, T shape, corner. If possible, you can make NPCs prefer paths when walking around the town. If you want to cut down on path items, can just do a full foundation of walking path stones.

I dunno, its rather hard to try and come up with ideas here in a discussion rather than talking to you so that I can work within the limitations of the game engine.
Kiwiboys  [developer] Dec 11, 2019 @ 2:42pm 
If you can come join the Discord server. I can talk better there since I usually always have it open. I do like the room scanning idea but it would require an entire rebuild of the mod as these systems would change the way the mod works. The buildings themselves "upgrade" when the city is upgraded and due to that the rooms move around if you were to have a bed in the structure there's a high chance it could end up in a wall or something. I did have plans for cleaning up the UI and AI but since I have a new job I don't have as much time and I also needed to replace my computer which I've only done in the last week. Should be able to get back to it soon but definity come chat on discord we will see what can be done
Vas Dec 11, 2019 @ 2:48pm 
Hah, I'm still using my laptop which has a malfunctioning motherboard and 5 year old dead battery to play games on and whatnot. I need to replace it but, they don't make computers correctly anymore.

I'll try and come onto the discord sometime, I'm in like 20+ servers though.
Kiwiboys  [developer] Dec 12, 2019 @ 1:03am 
yeah that's fair. I could probably use my old Laptop but it takes an hour to load the dev kit and by the time it loads I've lost the enthusiasm
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