SBURBDEV Forum

[AgentPaper]

There's no need for every single player to visit every single world personally. It would be impossible anyhow, without making the number of gates dependent on the number of players. Each player builds up a house in 4 worlds, explores the countryside in 3 worlds, and fights the denizen in their own world. That seems like plenty of symmetry to me.

[The Cool]

Maybe there arejust other gates around the planet?

Obviously seven isnt eough to cycle through all the worlds,
and seven is how many are above a house,
so if we want to be ABLE to travel to all of them,
we need gates that arent above the players house.

[demosthenes2k8]

Are you suggesting secondary stacks of gates, or just single gates scattered semi-randomly?

If the first, we would have to develop another chain for it, and allow the clients to do something that would let their server (or maybe a second server, for large enough sessions) start building there.

If the second, then they would have to be two-way Gates.

[Legendary]

I believe (s)he almost certainly means two, which is a pretty reasonable idea, honestly. There's already canonical return gates scattered about the countryside, the other gates could easily exist as well.

[Teshik]

Personally, I wouldn't reserve all the gates with the "round robin" switches, as Dave put it. From what we've seen, Gate 1 transports the player from his/her house / starting point to a random point on his planet, and gate 2 to the next player. The other gates could be made free for quest locations. Example: Two-Player session.

Gates above Player 1:

1: Planet 1, Location 1 (some Imp slaying, some consort meeting)
2: Planet 2, Home
3: Planet 2, Home (explaining that one in a minute)
4: Planet 1, Location 2 (quest location / dungeon, with major boss at the end, or frog completion riddle or something)
5: Prospit
6: Planet 1, Team Location (quest location for optional team side quest)
7: Planet 1, DENIZEN

Player 2 gates are vice-versa, except (s)he gets Derse, and "Planet 1, Home" on Gates 2 and 3. (Prospit/Derse obviously depends on how that is implemented)
On the Locations (not the Homes), Return Nodes let you jump back quickly, and other nodes would be needed on the Planets and Prospit/Derse to cut down on travel time.

Gate 3 is reserved for "Gate towards the furthest player's home", which comes into play in larger sessions and is only redundant in two-player-sessions). Imagine you got a 12-player session. Cycling through all eleven gates to get to your client players home is tedious, so: Player 1 gets to jump to Player 7, Player 2 to Player 8 and so forth, at least halving the Gate travel needed.

[The Cool]

okay so after rereading daves explanaton
it looks like

the stack of gates above johns house goes
1>2>1>2>1>2>1
and the stack above roses house from johns persective goes
2>3>2>3>2>3>2

johns first gate goes to somewhere on his planet
johns second gate leads to roses house
roses third gate leads to somewhere on her planet
roses fourth gate leads to daves house

thats what dave said right?

[Teshik]

Dave's full explanation, for reference:

TG: what were you expecting
TG: this is how it works
TG: the progression of gates is like this whole round robin thing
TG: cycling through each planet
TG: gate 2 on your planet leads to gate 2 on roses
TG: then you build up to gate 3 above her house which leads somewhere else on her planet
TG: you look for gate 4 somewhere there
TG: which leads to gate 4 above my house
TG: and so on
EB: wow, ok.
TG: ordinarily rose would have already gone through her gate 1
TG: but shes sleeping pretty hard obviously
TG: and ordinarily you wouldnt have gone through gate 2 until her house was built up
TG: so you wouldnt fall to your death
TG: but you got your cheat rocket so thats fine
TG: see we all got to coordinate on this thing

Then, Dave tells us that John's 4th gate is not above him, but somewhere on Rose's planet. Interesing, I missed that. Ugh, too complicated, need graphical representation. Shitty MSPaint Powers, activate!!!

(Black thingies are the gates, filled arrows John's gate progression, dotted arrows means "building up to another gate".)

Interesting to note: When John PCHOOOOED through his seventh gate to get needlessly killed, by that logic, he would've landed with Rose's Denizen, not his own. Shouldn't Terezi have known that? Oh whatever.

As for gameplay, we have to accomodate for a variable number of players here. Using this logic, it would work - meaning, a player "only" has to cycle through four worlds maximum to get to his denizen. (I'm assuming for two players you simply cycle through yours and your server players world twice each). Also, it gives you the opportunity to see all planets, or avoiding them like Eridans Land of His Douchyness and Dead Wrathful Angels, by circumventing the "natural" progression.

Also, as Dave noted, in the canon proposal, players would fall to their death simply because their server player's server player (i.e., Dave to John) fails to build up to their nth gate in time. We can make this work, providing the system works with n players, although that should be decided first.

[Legendary]

Infographic there is slightly wrong. After Gate 1 there should be an arrow directly to the second gate above Rose's house. John never goes to the second gate above his house; he found his gate somewhere over LOWAS.

It is, by the way, exactly the Denizen weirdness that made me hesitant to go with the full canon version. In the "accepted" version (there's another pic running around on the main forums somewhere), John fights JADE'S denizen and ascends to Skaia from LOFAF. Weird, huh?

[Teshik]

Not exactly: John entered his first gate at the end of Act 3, and entered LOWAS proper. After talking to salamanders and stuff, Terezi guides him back to a return node (http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?s=6&p=003506), so he went back to his house to build the rocketpack, fly into the seventh gate, get killed, then get into the second gate since he's already in the air.

I'm assuming here that in the game's logic, he is supposed to wander around his planet to get to know his consorts and the denizen stuff plotwise, then return via the node to enter his second gate proper, at a time when Rose would already have enough additional floors that her client doesn't go splat on her roof. Alas, as far as I can remember right now, Rose never enters her first gate (onscreen), but travels by flying majjicks.

I do agree with you that while the canon version is workable, it's something we should discuss further before simply taking it as a given.

[Legendary]

Um, look again. Specifically here: Google LOWAS. The Second Gate is WAY away from John's house. He doesn't just go up. The nodes are for easy access to the alchemiters and other things that give players new weapons and other items. There's probably a lot of them, probably placed at regular intervals along the planet surface. And no, Rose doesn't go through her First Gate. She blows it up.

...which is another mechanic we may or may not want to consider.