Monday, December 5, 2011

"Garden Box" Mini-injector-- Another sort of opinion poll

So while I was brainstorming the structure and logic of the aforementioned planting-stuff-into-walls agent, I stumbled on an idea that I'm not sure how I feel about.

The goal of this agent is to make world-customizing easier and more interesting, but the way I have the agent currently planned out, it might be a little laborious. If you wanted to plant a strawberry patch, you would have to go to the injector room, inject the strawberry planter agent (assuming you already had the plant-stuff-into-walls-core installed), scroll back to the room you wanted to plant the patch, find the spot to plant the patch (a bit of a pain in large worlds like C2inDS), and plant it. Now imagine you want to plant six, or twelve strawberry patches. You would have to go back and reject the module each time, re-find the place you wanted to plant it, and so on. This, to me, sounds like anything but what the joy of customizing a world should be.

There are a few different ways to make this a bit easier, like creating reusable seed packets that one can just carry around with them to create more patches. I don't know about you guys, but I don't really know what to do with seed vendors once I'm done with them; I don't like to have them imposing on the scenery and if I stick them somewhere I tend to lose them. Maybe that's just me.

My current brainstormed-solution is to, instead, create what I am terming a "Garden Box." This would essentially become and contain the plant-stuff-into-walls-core, and would sit as a little icon in the bottom corner of your screen, that when clicked, would expand into a floating box containing a list of all the garden box modules you have installed. From there all you would have to do is select the plant you wanted, confirm it, and plant your patch. When you were finished, the box could be minimized back to its icon form.

Something like this could be expanded far beyond an easy way to use wall-plantable agents; it could be expanded to contain other seed modules too, and possibly critters, scenery objects, etc., so you would basically have a centralized place for world-customizing stuff. Plants and critters already native to C3/DS would (I think) be fairly easy to add to the box, for easy re-creation in other areas of the world. Creators would have to rewrite any existing 3rd party agents if they wanted them to show up in the Garden Box (hopefully something that wouldn't be too difficult if I can implement it right), so it wouldn't be a universal solution by any means, but it still could simplify things.

What do you guys think? Is there a better solution to this? Does it bother you having to reinject an agent several times? Do you try to avoid having a bunch of seed vendors lying around? Does something like the Garden Box sound worth the wait, or should I just focus on the wall-plantable stuff on its own?

7 comments:

  1. Having wall-plantable stuff would be awesome, and although returning to the injector would be annoying it's still better than not having it at all.

    The garden box idea is even more amazing, and with the ability to expand it to include other agents it would truly be a game changer.

    Personally though I don't have issue having seed dispensers lying about. I either hide them in my side-pannel, behind closed doors, or flush them out the airlock if my creatures get annoying with them.

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  2. The garden box is a good idea. enough said

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  3. I think the garden box is a genius idea: Although I don't have issues with seed dispensers lying around, I think it's an excellent idea! So much easier than what would be required with a standard agent. I'm all for it! And indeed, I would be very happy to wait for it!

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  4. Same here... I love the idea & am willing to wait for it. Customizing the world is probably my favorite part of the game.

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  5. How about ctrl+click or shift+click on the strawberry patch to duplicate it? You could then place the next one where you want, and repeat the process many times. Would this be possible?

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  6. Thanks for your support guys <: Development coming along quite nicely, I'll post an update soon.

    ylukyun -- Unfortunately the agents don't quite work like that. These aren't static agents that you pick up and drop; when you inject the agent, it basically asks you to draw a box where you want the fruit to start spawning, and then fruit (or seeds or whatever) will start growing within those coordinates. The bounding-box itself isn't an actual agent you can pick up and move around; it's just a setting in the invisible agent script (though you will be able to change the settings in some form or another).

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  7. Personally I don't mind seed venders - I just plunk them in my inventory. Or leave them there so norns can play with them and restore the population.

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