In defense of an integrated shipwrecked/Hamlet/DST world

[UnknowX]

I know, I know, this is a controversial opinion, some on the forums outright despise the idea and some can't wait for this to happen outside of a mod. But most of the players are indifferent or haven't experienced the solo expansions to have a solid opinion on the matter.

I personally are all for the integration of expansions content into the DST experience. for the following reasons:

1.- the possibilities for new crafts and events are limitless. Lots of new items could only be crafted by combining resources from the different areas. And more intricate in game events could be triggered by accomplishing different tasks and reuniting resources from the different lands.

2.- having access to the shipwrecked content could rapidly fill the DST sea, that is currently 90% desolate water and sea stacks, and adding Hamlet like ruins to the caves could bring a breath of fresh exploration air to the DST ruins, that for now are all on top of platforms.

3.- adapting and adding all that content could bring more variability to surviving in the constant, as resource management is different on each area. Players could spawn randomly in one of the main 3 areas, making survival a bit harder for more experienced players and struggle to get to the desired location.

4.- merging the lands's into the two current DST Map servers wouldn't be an issue. On the main map server, the main constant continent could be at the center, the Shipwrecked like content could be accessible by boat to the south. To the north out of the edge of the world map could lie the Hamlet Platos. All of this in a single server. The caves server could also house the volcano areas and serve as an access point for the Hamlet areas. The climate system could change between the correspondent seasons depending on which part of the map you are located at the time, the same way the climate changes between latitudes on the real world.

5.- imagine the combination of mechanics you could put in your custom worlds. With some tweaks to the world generation options, you could combine seasonal mechanics. Have volcanic summers, lushy springs, foggy winters, floding springs or windy winters. Or just make it random for more of a challenge.

6.- combining all the content into a single game would allow the DS team to focus on...a single game. Which could also feature the solo experience and adventure mode.

Those are my ideas for a unified experience. What do you think?

[Mencken]

Been wanting this for a long time, incidentally is computer throughput still so constrained that the world can't be made bigger?    I've played 3/4 worlds (not Hamlet) and Shipwrecked is by far my favorite, imagine a multiplayer variant in which everyone spawns on different islands (or max 2 per island).   Shipwrecked:   

- Fantastic ocean with waves and wind (on land as well), deep and shallow areas, tons of interesting content.   Monsoon season is amazing, the gradual flooding of bases not prepared for rising waters.   For an experienced player surviving in DS or DST is a cakewalk, Shipwrecked I find more difficult and unforgiving of any errors in planning.   Volcano season without tributes is sheer terror, a few hits can sink your boat or kill you unless heavily armored.   

 

Integration is probably massively challenging (and SW content wasn't solely created by Klei) but I'd gladly pony up cash for it.   This game is an incredible bargain, I've spent 10 times the money on worthless video games.   

 

[bruhmoment23]

40 minutes ago, UnknowX said:

6.- combining all the content into a single game would allow the DS team to focus on...a single game. Which could also feature the solo experience and adventure mode.

Devs have stated in the past numerous amounts of times that Don't Starve and Don't Starve Together are two seperate entities. Even if they were to be thrown into one bag, it would take years upon years of trying to manage all of that mess in a single game, thus taking time from literal progression onto something that has a high chance of failing instead of focusing on hotfixing and releasing updates. In my opinion it would do more harm than good, both to DS and DST, i think that they should stay seperate and never merge.

[Mencken]

1 minute ago, bruhmoment23 said:

Devs have stated in the past numerous amounts of times that Don't Starve and Don't Starve Together are two seperate entities. Even if they were to be thrown into one bag, it would take years upon years of trying to manage all of that mess in a single game, thus taking time from literal progression onto something that has a high chance of failing instead of focusing on progression and updates. In my opinion it would do more harm than good, both to DS and DST, i think that they should stay seperate and never merge.

Another solution, just have a jump off point like what they do with caves.   

[Hornete]

5 minutes ago, Mencken said:

Another solution, just have a jump off point like what they do with caves.   

What?

[Mike23Ua]

For the sake of everyone’s sanity I’ll avoid leaving my long broken record post here- and will instead say that I’ve discussed this more than enough and have made multiple threads about it, Ultimately we will just have to wait and see where Klei wants to invest all their time and resources into.

I would like to hope that whatever direction they choose to take that the future of this franchise is a bright one.

[bruhmoment23]

13 minutes ago, Mencken said:

Another solution, just have a jump off point like what they do with caves.   

Picture having Caves, Shipwrecked and Hamlet as those devices, on a SINGLE server, running simultaneously, this is a guarenteed crashing train. Sure, if you have a high-end pc its no biggie, but i know a couple of people that can barely run caves, plus we're talking about two packed to the brim dlcs.

[UnknowX]

1 hour ago, bruhmoment23 said:

Picture having Caves, Shipwrecked and Hamlet as those devices, on a SINGLE server, running simultaneously, this is a guarenteed crashing train. Sure, if you have a high-end pc its no biggie, but i know a couple of people that can barely run caves, plus we're talking about two packed to the brim dlcs.

Well, by that logic ROT should stop adding stuff to the sea and main game because it would eventually make it to heavy to run.

Also, not to be insensible to the economic pleas of some of the community, but my 7 year old budget laptop runs the game fine. You can always lower the graphical settings of the game if your PC is strugling, besides, Klei has made some buffering changes to the game to optimise memory use, without a doubt with the future changes in mind.

But getting back to the topic at hand, the DST sea would benefit greatly from more shipwrecked mechanics, like waves, biomes and mobs. Also, I believe that both sailing mechanics could coexist. The big ROT ships are mobile bases and can sustain structures like winch pinch and other craftables that no other shipwrecked boat can sustain. While smaller boats could help for discovery and fighting, while at the same time been more weak and prone to damage by waves.

[Hornete]

5 minutes ago, UnknowX said:

Well, by that logic ROT should stop adding stuff to the sea and main game because it would eventually make it to heavy to run.

There is an absolutely big difference between RoT adding an ocean, and running several servers/shards at once

[UnknowX]

19 minutes ago, Hornete said:

There is an absolutely big difference between RoT adding an ocean, and running several servers/shards at once

Not quite, the new ocean pretty much tripled the size of the explorable map, and my proposal would keep all the content in the same two servers

[Mike23Ua]

2 minutes ago, Hornete said:

There is an absolutely big difference between RoT adding an ocean, and running several servers/shards at once

Yeah I don’t know the in’s and outs of how all that works.. I’m just going to say that the free games with gold on Xbox live for this month includes Portal Knights- a game I didn’t know exists.. and I never knew I wanted.

Portal Knights allows players to travel between various biomes, each one with its own unique themes, weather mechanics, and hostile mobs (something I had suggested a while back having no idea Portal Knights even existed..) 
 

The thing is- In Portal Knights when you load a new server you actually LOAD A NEW SERVER and Everyone travels to the new location, allowing the game to no longer have to read content from the old area until you choose to return to that area.

Something that Portal Knights, Borderlands, Plants Vs Zombies Battle for Neighborville, State of Decay 2, Destiny 2 etc (Virtually insert any console game with multiple levels here...) Even the old school Tony hawk games I used to play as a kid had to load new levels and abandon the old ones.

If your wanting all of this content mashed together running simultaneously on the same server shards at the same time- I don’t care what high tech ultra advanced platform your playing the game on that suckers still going to explode.

[Frashaw27]

4 minutes ago, UnknowX said:

Not quite, the new ocean pretty much tripled the side of the explorable map, and my proposal would keep all the content in the same two servers

Then thats even worse because then the world would become way too cluttered, eventually running into the same problem of way too much stuff for the computer to handle. A PS4, a system made specifically to run games as best as it can, lags and wobbles under pressure from having too many walls within the same area. Disreguarding all other issues like themeing and balencing, the amount of sh*t that would be so densely compacted into those areas would make devices crash and burn. One of the main problems with trying to implament the dlcs is that it will get laggy as hell due to the amount that has to be considered and added. Quite simply, no matter what happens or how you implement it, the game will always have to run slower, among other issues, if you were to port the dlcs over.

[UnknowX]

25 minutes ago, Frashaw27 said:

Then thats even worse because then the world would become way too cluttered, eventually running into the same problem of way too much stuff for the computer to handle. A PS4, a system made specifically to run games as best as it can, lags and wobbles under pressure from having too many walls within the same area. Disreguarding all other issues like themeing and balencing, the amount of sh*t that would be so densely compacted into those areas would make devices crash and burn. One of the main problems with trying to implament the dlcs is that it will get laggy as hell due to the amount that has to be considered and added. Quite simply, no matter what happens or how you implement it, the game will always have to run slower, among other issues, if you were to port the dlcs over.

The fact that the map tripled in size without detrimental effects to the game speed (at least no one has complain about more lag issues because of the sea), kinda proves that the game engine can manage more expansions in the map size.

[prezera]

I would rather Klei focus on getting RoT updates done and maybe once dst has stopped getting updates add Hamlet and Shipwrecked in seperates servers. Having them all on one server would need a lot of work and even though it would be very laggy for players without a good pc they could just disable Hamlet and Shipwrecked. If they still want to experience Hamlet/Shipwrecked multiplayer maybe they could disable regular dst and go only Hamlet? Either way, no player loses anything from it as long as it's disable-able. Ofc it's up to Klei to decide if it's worth the time and effort.

[wigfrids hat]

1 hour ago, UnknowX said:

The fact that the map tripled in size without detrimental effects to the game speed (at least no one has complain about more lag issues because of the sea), kinda proves that the game engine can manage more expansions in the map size.

what are you on about? no less than once a week someone talks about their game lagging so hard it either runs like a potato or stops being playable, it is also why there is such a demand for item-trashing systems(and why basebuilders have a hard ceiling on how big their base can be). assuredly it doesn't seem like it is a big deal for you because you are not currently affected but that hardly justifies an absolute like 'no one has complained about more lag issues because of the sea', people do complain about lag(though with the waters being quite barren compared to the land it does make for less on-screen lag if you are playing there)

[Frashaw27]

45 minutes ago, UnknowX said:

The fact that the map tripled in size without detrimental effects to the game speed (at least no one has complain about more lag issues because of the sea), kinda proves that the game engine can manage more expansions in the map size.

Not really, a bucket filled to the brim with water will be the same weight as a bucket 3x the size with the same amount of water. Making something bigger doesn't make it better or more difficult to process, it the stuff that's in there that will make the game become a makeshift stove top.  The current ocean is really empty (a topic for a different thread) and because of this, it doesn't really add that much strain. However, with you idea of just shoving everything thing in onto one shard, everything would become so densely packed that all the available space would have something running. The main thing is that the game doesn't calculate things based on the players distance, it instead take everything on that entire server and has the game process it, hence why having to many entities can cause severe lag. Even if it isn't as compact as I'm interpreting it, it would still lag as there would be a bunch of work going on behind the scenes that needs to be preloaded for the game to be as smooth as possible. In short, yes the game can take larger maps, but the problem is how much stuff is in those maps.

[UnknowX]

4 hours ago, gaymime said:

what are you on about? no less than once a week someone talks about their game lagging so hard it either runs like a potato or stops being playable, it is also why there is such a demand for item-trashing systems(and why basebuilders have a hard ceiling on how big their base can be). assuredly it doesn't seem like it is a big deal for you because you are not currently affected but that hardly justifies an absolute like 'no one has complained about more lag issues because of the sea', people do complain about lag(though with the waters being quite barren compared to the land it does make for less on-screen lag if you are playing there)

Yeah, I agree that an item trashing system or at least an item agrupation system (the one used to group monster meat on the ground) in between log ins would be nice to avoid more lag. But my point is that the sea it self is not causing lag just by been there. That is because, as it was mentioned in a previous update, a new rendering system was implanted to load items only on a certain proximity to the players, this was to optimise data usage and prevent lag. If I'm not wrong the first attempt at implementing this system failed and generated some lag, but the thing is that the lag issue is been worked on to allow a better experience

[wigfrids hat]

38 minutes ago, UnknowX said:

Yeah, I agree that an item trashing system or at least an item agrupation system (the one used to group monster meat on the ground) in between log ins would be nice to avoid more lag. But my point is that the sea it self is not causing lag just by been there. That is because, as it was mentioned in a previous update, a new rendering system was implanted to load items only on a certain proximity to the players, this was to optimise data usage and prevent lag. If I'm not wrong the first attempt at implementing this system failed and generated some lag, but the thing is that the lag issue is been worked on to allow a better experience

well, the sea does cause lag it just causes it on start-up and world-gen . this is why some games take longer than others to do the same things. for some people even an empty sea causes lag though

 

but that is getting away to the earlier balk; there is more to sw than just the water itself. more hats, more enemies, more loot and more things on the ground will all cause the game to lag much too hard for some people and if you are on console(a place that is already very limited) then these would take the whole thing. paging-memory might not be as big of a deal as it was 15 years ago but assuredly the more data that needs to be retrieved and reallocated the worse a game will run

[cropo]

Everyone always talks about adding singleplayer content to DST, but I personally would rather have the OPPOSITE. I want the character refreshes, I want the ruins expansion(and merging with the caves). I want the fire changes(although many would probably strongly disagree) and the underground summer change.  The Suncaller staff buff is so important, the items original design was just awful and DST fixed that. 

 

And I would REALLY love it if they could merge our profiles skins to singleplayer and let us use skins from DST in SP. Both games can be monetized that way so why not? Single player has the benefit of no input lag, less bullet-spongey enemies made for groups of people, and is much friendlier to play with a controller due to it having a pause function when you bring up your menu. Being able to do some cool boss fights to renew the ruins, or fight Toadstool to get those fancy mushroom lights would be really fun.(no, the toadstool mod is really dumb I've tried it).