How to handle tents!

[Nofew]

Whoo! I just figured out a way to sanely handle sleeping in multiplayer!

 

I believe it's important that sleeping does not happen instantly; the mandatory, fully-effective wakeup hour must still be the first slice of day. That being said, what happens if you're asleep in a tent and someone, say, comes along and sets it on fire? Or wolves start howling?

 

The solution's easy: dreams. When sleeping, the camera should either automatically follow a teammate (after asking if you can spy on them!), or stay centered on the tent while emitting a fake radius of light. While sleeping, sanity and health should regen rather than suddenly go up, and hunger should go down faster than normal. This allows players to be woken up in the middle of the night.

 

Waking up is easy -- Just move! Internally, the game should have a "barrier" around the tents that only allows players to move from the inside, out. Clicking them teleports them inside (similar to how wormholes work), and there's an emitter object that only emits a VERY small distance that provides the extra regen and hunger penalties. All this allows for minimal programming, save for the camera tracking.

 

 

For balance reasons (So one can't just sleep right before it's daytime and get the full benefit), each slice of time should be worth some amount of what the sleeping item would normally give. For easier calculations (Both on the player's end and the programmer's), each slice of time should be worth a distinct value of sanity and such, and all sanity and such should be awarded by the end of the slice, regardless of when sleep started. Likewise, sleeping sooner in the day restores less per slice.

 

For example, if sleeping would normally restore 40 sanity and there's 10 slices consisting of 5 sunset and 5 night, perhaps each sunset could restore 2 sanity and each night could restore 6. This may make sleeping during sunset seem useless, but not so! Regardless of how much time is spent sleeping, it counts as a full use for the sleeping item in question! In a game where access to important sleeping resources are scarce, sleeping during sunset could prove very useful! In addition, remember that sleep negates any natural sanity degen.

 

If further balancing is required, some stats may be exempt from the sunset-night scaling, or maybe even inverted. Maybe sleeping during sunset can make wetness go down faster and stabilize one's temperature sooner, thus giving players more of a reason to sleep during sunset as well as night. More interestingly, this may lead to some strategies where players choose to sleep only through night or only through sunset!

 

Now, seeing that, one may wonder what happens if they sleep right before sunrise (or night!). Would they end up wasting a use? Sort of, but not terribly bad! Earlier I mentioned that each slice of time, regardless of when its started, restores the full slice's worth of stuff when it hits the end of the slice. This is precisely why. Rather than restoring a measly zero-point-one point of sanity, it'd still restore six. Six isn't a huge number, but it's definitely less of a slap to the face than 0.1 is!

 

 

This may seem like a complicated system due to the length of the post, but take it apart for a moment; most of what's needed is already implemented in the game (such as (de/re)gen auras and teleportation) and only requires some "reordering" of code that already exists! What doesn't yet exist shouldn't be too difficult to write since so much is already done and it turns everything into a game of "fill in the holes". It may still take a week or two to implement the system, but this seems like the best way to go both for balance purposes and for keeping players entertained.

[J20hawkz]

This is a very well thought out solution! I touched briefly upon spectating in my post here but you've done an excellent job.

[mitboy]

I think tent and rolls should have slowly lose durability when you sleep.

[Malan-Tai]

I love your idea but I still think that if everybody's sleeping, the night'd skip.

[PlusFiveCharisma]

He's done it! We have one solution to the list of many problems! Now we just have to deal with the permadeath issue...

[Malan-Tai]

He's done it! We have one solution to the list of many problems! Now we just have to deal with the permadeath issue...

Well,...You, die, you're banned.

[PlusFiveCharisma]

Well,...You, die, you're banned.

...NO! You're banned! Shut up! you're not my dad, you're...you're not my dad!

[Ixmore]

That was exactly how I Imagine how it would work

[nedpeople]

It's nice idea, but i don't think we should be able to sleep at the day don't we?

It should be like origin when we try to sleep at the day the charecter will say "it is still day"

[laforetp]

I think that just moving to stop the sleeping cycle is a bad idea, while all of your other suggestions are good. If you just have to move to stop sleeping that item will be abused. It will become too easy to regen sanity with minimal hunger losses. 

 

I think that the only way you should be able to wake up is after you've been attacked. This is exciting because of possible consequences. You need sanity so you want to sleep but you risk another player getting a cheap shot in before you can retaliate. 

 

They could also introduce sanity losses caused by insomnia. For example if you 2 days without sleeping your sanity starts to decline. I think this works best in co-op so one person could guard the camp while the other sleeps and the next night sleeping and guarding positions will be traded.

[Zandorum]

I think the idea is great, I think this is how it should be done but I have some suggestions:
The server owner can also have one of these enabled as well:

1. If all players are sleeping, the tents will function the way they do currently in singleplayer. This could explain why it works this way in singleplayer too. If all players but for example someone who is playing Wickerbottom as long as everyone who isn't wickerbottoms are asleep it will still make it day.
2. If 50% of the players (People who are playing Wickerbottom do not count) are sleeping it will work like it does in singleplayer making it so the whole server isn't waiting on one person. The percentage of players sleeping is shown in the chat as well as when someone goes to sleep it is said in chat the percentage of people sleeping.

The first suggestion would be for people who are playing with friends; CO-OP and such. The second suggestion would be for public servers making it so its not as annoying and allows sleeping to be possible.

 

If you look over at this post on this topic: http://forums.kleientertainment.com/topic/36834-permadeath-in-dont-starve-together-announced-as-optional/page-15#entry502384

 

I think the whole spectator thing could be mixed with my idea about being a Ghost and just make it an "Out of Body Experiance" mode.

 

Note: I had a different post but after re-reading your post I ended up agreeing with it; I misread it the first time. This is an edited version of the post to make it more connected to your idea.

[Nofew]

Firstly, thank you all for the wonderful comments! The last forum I was on yelled at me pretty hard for making a suggestion like this because I was so new. This place is the polar opposite! Seriously, thank you! o_o...

 

Now, some followups:

 

 

I love your idea but I still think that if everybody's sleeping, the night'd skip.

 

This should be switchable if it's implemented, preferably while in-game -- What if someone only wants to sleep for two slices and it's the beginning of a long Winter night, but everyone else is asleep? Yes, it's a niche case, but so is accidentally sleeping during the very last slice. Accounting for niche stuff is important. Weird niche stuff ended up killing me before.

 

 

 

I think tent and rolls should have slowly lose durability when you sleep.

 

This would defeat the balancing of costing an entire use to start sleep. Yes, your solution is more realistic, but then almost nobody would want to sleep through Sunset and something else would have to be implemented. The end result, since suddenly nobody sleeps long enough, would be an apparent 25% nerf to all sleeping items.

 

Making this switchable might be a consideration, but it'd obviously have to be done during world-gen rather than mid-game and quite a bit of testing would be required to figure out how long items should last. It's doable, but only if there's enough time for that testing.

 

 

 

He's done it! We have one solution to the list of many problems! Now we just have to deal with the permadeath issue...

 

 

Excuse me while I write another post about how to deal with permdeath.. Whoo! Here we go!

[Malan-Tai]

This should be switchable if it's implemented, preferably while in-game -- What if someone only wants to sleep for two slices and it's the beginning of a long Winter night, but everyone else is asleep? Yes, it's a niche case, but so is accidentally sleeping during the very last slice. Accounting for niche stuff is important. Weird niche stuff ended up killing me before.

You're right. Maybe as an in-game message, such as : "Everybody's sleeping do you want to skip to the next day ?" If everyone answers yes, the night skips. If at least one person votes no, nothing happens.