v0.7 ThinkTank

[oskarwiksten]

I think this is a great idea. I would like to incorporate a start of some trader in v0.6.9, so that you can trade in those worthless items for something useful.

At least, that was my initial thought when implementing them in the first place . Should be trivial to add as a quest now. I'll see what we can do for v0.6.9.

[DarkSavant13]

Well, here's my two cents.

Sound, sound, sound. Whether you have an option for turning it off or not, sound is very important. There's a reason why any movie director will tell you that ambient sound and music are the most important things if you want a successful movie. Read game reviews and the game reviewer will definitely tell you if a games ambience and music was great of sucked. As said earlier, Android is not only on phones, but tablets, etc.. And, if ya don't want the sound turn it down or disable it. Sound files shouldn't eat up the memory too bad at all, as they can be put on your SD. Just don't make the music or sounds to repetitive or it will drive people nuts. Have different music or ambience for different areas.

Another thing is animated tiles for water, lava, etc.. Even the cheapest smartphone should be able to handle easily a GIF of 3 or 4 tiles repeating for the effect, even with the memory usage for the rest of the game. My phone is a cheap Galaxy Precedent that can barely handle playing YouTube, but this game runs super quick and smooth. I'm confident that it could handle animated tiles of that sort. It's not like we're talking animations of blowing trees and waving grass. These graphics would also go on SD.

I think useless pets would keep people interested. You know, like the useless pets in Wow and Everquest you see people running around with. Just a tile like the character that moves around with you. You could have really hard to find or get pets. It's not something on the top of my list, but it could be a draw to get people playing.

I, too, have at the top of my list the "more quests, bigger world" requests, but I know that is always being worked on, so I won't really go into that.

Our character may be a kid when he first starts out, but he finds a harsh world out there and has to grow up fast. Say the kid is 13-15, he's not a kid living now but a kid that grows up in a medieval-type time period. In our own earth history kids during that time period were expected to join the military. So, character classes seem just fine to me. There are kids on the streets even today who learn to pickpocket at a young age. Choosing a character class at startup doesn't mean that he's automatically superwarrior, supertheif, etc.. It means that is what he'll learn as he adventures and grows as a person. I say, if he can kill a wild boar as a kid, he can do anything, lol. ;P

A HUGE thing for me is the equipment. We need MORE. More variety, more uncommon and rare drops, just more. Class specific armor would be great, even without classes. If we can turn our characters into an assimilation of the class we want to be using equipment, that would be great. We already have some rogue-type equipment, but even more would be nice.

I'll surely come up with tons more later, but that's just a few things mentioned in this thread I thought I'd comment on.

DarkSavant13

[fiernaq]

I too would always have sound turned off. I'm not usually at home while playing AT and the places I am where I do play it are not the kind of places that take well to having game music coming from some guy's phone.

[qasur]

One of the best ways to implement sound for Andor's Trail would be a downloadable patch.

Oskar really wants the game to be as small as possible, and sound files are *huge* (even the small ones).

He could include an option in the settings up the game to download the sound files if you chose to do it, therefore keeping the regular release sound-free and be a smaller filesize.

[lady black]

Our choices in the game are slowly defining our "class." Do we support Feygard or Nor City? Vacor or Unzel? Prim or Blackwater Mountain? All this is being stored in our game and will trigger different actions by monsters, at the least, in the future. Oskar has said he does not envision classes. I think this is why. And this way is much more realistic: "Life is what happens while you are making other plans."

If music is ever added, I would support the idea that it be a seperate "add-on" file that we need not even download if we do not want music. I find at least 90% of the "background music" in any movie very annoying. Occasionally, it fulfills its purported purpose of heightening the emotional impact of the movie. Most of the time it is simply noise and makes it hard to hear the dialogue. That is one reason I very rarely go to movies. I fully realize that mine is a minority opinion-at least among movie-goers. Among non-movie-goers?... There may be more people who agree with me than you think. Silence is greatly undervalued in the modern world.

[Pyrizzle]

If music is ever added, I would support the idea that it be a seperate "add-on" file that we need not even download if we do not want music.

+1 I am the same way, i wouldn't use the music option. I'd rather listen to something i have on my phone, plus game music is usually so repeditive that after 10 minutes you have already heard everything.

[ctnbeh13]

The suggestion of the addition of sound, although not a new topic, has been requested and discussed before. As the game currently exists, sound or music, is not sitting very high on the list of requests for the game. At best, I myself could probably only agree with the introduction of various tones that might be associated with certain events, if that would even be fulfilling enough for the player who wants sounds and/or music, is hard to say. One of the main benefits that Andor's Trail does have in its favor without sound of any kind is the exceptional low battery consumption on the player's device.

If a player doesn't happen to observe this fact for themselves while playing other games on their device that include sound or music, or both, in comparison to Andor's Trail, then they also seldom have any idea as to what's going on in the background while they play any of their games.

Unfortunately, it is not merely the additional download size, and then the ending result of additional device storage space being consumed upon decompression and installation of a game version that would include all of the necessary sound media files that a player might be content with (few who want sound or music, or both, haven't even arrived at a happy compromise for what they'd like to see in the game). Even if the additional total file size increase wasn't an issue, there are the following considerations; one being that Oskar put game development on hold while he works on compiling the code for the smallest in game media player ever, patents it, and includes it in the game, or another being he doesn't concern himself with creating such an in game media player, and includes the media files (either included in the download, or as a separate add on) in a future release, taking up not only additional space once again for download and installation, but now requiring more system resources to be available, for every player regardless of their device, for any media player to run in tandem with the rest of the game, when going with the choice of initiating the built in, default Android media player (or your chosen 3rd party app) to now also run in the background just for the reproduction of sound data it receives from the game. This is where you will probably see a noticeable impact on your game play, unless you happen to have the latest and greatest mobile device technology at the moment. Having multiple apps running in the background that are supposed to be working together to be bringing you one unified experience are all each assigned their own priority to run, and let's not forget, for most of us this happens to be a "phone" we are playing on, therefore the Android OS itself is running in the background to make sure that should you have an incoming call (or other notification you've elected to be made aware of), it's going to put priority on that to make sure you receive it. In my best attempt to find balance in offering more for your consideration, and replicating an excerpt from a technical journal intended for a science fiction film, allow me to move on.

I think I'll try to wrap this up on the referenced issue of the MicroSD card that some have suggested as an appropriate place for storage of the extra data, that would be the audio media files. Unfortunately, as it is usually all too often true with someone in the process of buying a new computer, price and some of the vague component highlights are what comprise the deciding factor for this purchase. For the most part, the limitations found within this new PC are unknown to the average consumer, and possibly learned over time, if at all, the hard way. Similar is the story of your average MicroSD card purchase. As is often the case with computers, that we tend to buy the best that we can afford at the time, so it is also with the MicroSD card. We'd all like to have a 64 GB card, but for some, even an 8 GB card may cost them more than their phone did. Most people seem to consider two main points when making a MicroSD card purchase, storage capacity and price. The 3rd significant point to always consider is the data transfer speed, which is always appearing as a very small printed number inside of a letter C, which stands for Class (this number is often difficult to read clearly, even on the product packaging at times). Obviously the faster, the better, in terms of performance. Most new high end devices record video in HD, up to 1080. For such an amount of data to be sent to a MicroSD card, I would recommend going with a Class 10 card. I recently picked up a 16 GB Class 10 MicroSD card, from a well known memory manufacturer, with free shipping and a lifetime warranty for just under $16, and that was without any rebates to mess with. Long story short on the MicroSD card topic, many who already own one, whether it was pre-installed by your wireless carrier, or installed by its owner, is very likely to be a Class 2, 4, or 6. Unless you are using a Class 6, 8, or 10 card, this will only add to the potential complications for various users (which is also dependant upon the device limitations).

At the present, Andor's Trail is compatible for all Android OS based devices going back to version 1.6, uses little system resources, and unless you have your display cranked up to its highest level of brightness, is extremely kind to your device's battery consumption. When you look at the picture as a whole, it's a difficult recipe to want to alter. However, if requests for audio to be added to Andor's Trail start to increase to any level of significance, various tones associated with certain game events could possibly be the first implementation you might see, if the coding for direct signal processing by the device's speaker(s) can be compatibly implemented with the current code used to compile Andor's Trail.

I truly hope that this rather lengthy post was of benefit to someone, and not simply an attractive opportunity for those I have come to call "poster pouncers".

[kerasi]

even an 8 GB card may cost them more than their phone did

I recently picked up a 16 GB Class 10 MicroSD card, from a well known memory manufacturer, with free shipping and a lifetime warranty for just under $16

I'd love a smart phone for less than $8. I realise you said may just made me laugh reading this.

Your post brings up issues most are quite easily dealt with. I think if you're looking at a new SD card then you're looking at bigger issues than small sound files. Probably you're someone who is taking lots of videos or storing lots of music. The biggest thing on my phone is maps. I've installed 100s of games with sound and they don't even come close to making a dent in my sd card space.

Battery power is a concern but i think in this modern day anyone who has had there smart phone for awhile and uses it for lengthy periods of time would carry there charger or without an available recharge would have a 2nd battery. It's just common sense.

I for one am against music and sound but that's just because i prefer to listen to my own music. I can do that at the same time with no impact on the game. Repeating background music or attack noises, grunts, shouts etc just get annoying after awhile.

[DarkSavant13]

Our choices in the game are slowly defining our "class." Do we support Feygard or Nor City? Vacor or Unzel? Prim or Blackwater Mountain? All this is being stored in our game and will trigger different actions by monsters, at the least, in the future. Oskar has said he does not envision classes. I think this is why. And this way is much more realistic.

I absolutely agree with this as a way to advance the character. It's a great idea. I still think that there should be more equipment that could be used to define your character. As it stands now, everyone is using basically two sets of equipment to be either a rogue or a tank. We need more varieties of equipment, maybe design about 50 sets of armor that are specific to 5 different class types with 10 equipment sets each. This would give everyone plenty of options as far as creating
their equipment set/sets for their character, contributing to Oscar's plans for character advancement and giving people a sense of individuality and creativity when it comes to their character's advancement and equipment. The cries for classes now is because of a sense of lack of customization, this would help alleviate that problem.

Most of the time it is simply noise and makes it hard to hear the dialogue.

Usually this is due to your equalization being off in your equipment, whether it be TVs, or stereo systems. Even movie theatres sometimes have this problem as they don't have people come in and calibrate it as often as they should. Each movie has it's own 5.1 and DTS sound calibration which is usually taken care of within the device, but if the program calibration is off it can still mess up your sound. Most TVs now have an option which will equalize the sound for movies, etc., so that it is matches your original volume more closely, making it so that music is not too loud and speech too faint, for example. But you must select the option yourself from within your TV's sound options. That is probably the problem with music for ya, lady black.

As I stated earlier, it is important that you make sure that the music is not too repetitive. I've actually begun to think that more than music, ambient sound depending on the area would be so much better for this game. A haunting, low pitched wind howling though caves, for example. I've noticed that the blood splatters added a great deal to the fighting, sounds of the battle and of the creature fought would do the same thing. Sometimes I feel as though my character is deaf, lol.

DarkSavant13

[mdmedlin]

For what it's worth, I really don't have an opinion on the music matter. I turn down the sound whenever I play, when my daughter is playing on my phone, I ask her to turn it down because I find all the noise that the other games make annoying. Some may like it, some may not. I got the 8gb memory card for my phone when I first bought it 2 years ago, and I have yet to make any dent in it. I rooted my phone so I could put froyo on it so I would have access to the apps2sd app to make room.