Suggestion [Township] New Townships Code for Discussion

[Multitallented]

Hello, I am a volunteer developer working on a potential overhaul of towns. For those of you that don't know me, feel free to check out my work on dev.bukkit.org.

We are thinking of expanding on the HeroStronghold plugin to let players create war machines, hospitals, graveyards, factories, mines, farms, houses, teleporters, shrines, and many other structures that help make money, items, and nations. Personally I hope that by doing this, we can create communities that live, build, and war together in PvP and PvE environments like never before.

We're in the design stages of this overhaul and we're looking for your thoughts. What do you want to see happen to towns? What is the perfect town and what do the members do in this town?

 

[xMJay]

Will the buildings that you purchase build themselves (pre-built) or do the players themselves make the building then buy the building for the bonuses through the plug-in?

 

[Multitallented]

It would be less work for me to have the player build it themselves. Also towns would not all look the same that way. On the other hand it would be easier for you if the building built itself. What do you want?

 

[WitchOnaRampage]

I'm so excited to see this thread, @Multitallented, and will be responding with a lot of thoughts soon.

May I suggest, however, that you edit the thread title to something like: New Townships Code for Discussion, or similar?

When I saw the thread I nearly bypassed it, thinking it was simply a request from a new player to find a town. I only opened it because I'm actively involved in supporting new players.

 

[Multitallented]

Done

 

[Fjordsen]

It would be less work for me to have the player build it themselves. Also towns would not all look the same that way. On the other hand it would be easier for you if the building built itself. What do you want?

Players should have to build it themselves, no fun in having a plugin build stuff for you. I personally love the idea of HeroStronghold.

 

[Eneokun]

Players should have to build it themselves, no fun in having a plugin build stuff for you. I personally love the idea of HeroStronghold.

I agree. I would suggest simple town region commands that have special flags and allow the mentioned examples (hospitals, shrines, etc.) to kick in. For war machines, I'd add it to the engineer craftbooks or raise the level cap of professions and add it as new ability (siege weapons / war machines). This, of course, would require us then to add additional abilities to the other professions too...

 

[ShadowRavynn]

Hello, I am a volunteer developer working on a potential overhaul of towns. For those of you that don't know me, feel free to check out my work on dev.bukkit.org.

We are thinking of expanding on the HeroStronghold plugin to let players create war machines, hospitals, graveyards, factories, mines, farms, houses, teleporters, shrines, and many other structures that help make money, items, and nations. Personally I hope that by doing this, we can create communities that live, build, and war together in PvP and PvE environments like never before.

We're in the design stages of this overhaul and we're looking for your thoughts. What do you want to see happen to towns? What is the perfect town and what do the members do in this town?

I think this sounds awesome! I would definately say the players need to build the buildings though. Let me think more and see what ideas I can come up with!

 

[WitchOnaRampage]

I see Towns as being key to the Herocraft experience. I would love to see a revitalization of Towns as providing objectives for players, encouraging cooperative experience, and promoting map longevity.

@Multitallented a bit of a tough question to start with - what sort of time frame do you envision for implementing a tailored HeroStronghold, do you think? You see there's a lot I'd like to see sorted out for Towns as soon as possible, so it would help to know what to push ahead with now and what to look forward to for the future.

I'd like to see these objectives for towns on the two servers:

• Town creation/upgrade requirements being specifically tailored to the character of the server they're on, such that building and inhabiting towns enhances the experience of playing on that server
• Town growth more dependent on activity and achievement and less on slogging for difficult to obtain or numerous items.

Questions:

• Will HStrong' replace both the current sets of code, being the town citizenship code and the town regions code?
• Will HStrong' allow for activity requirements, such as taxes and active citizen counts, and for town region decay if activity requirements aren't met?
• For creation/upgrades, will it still be possible to require towns to meet item requirements in addition to the building requirements?
• Will HStrong' robustly provide for the creation of subregions and the protection of player items within towns?
• Can alliances between towns be taken into consideration with upgrades, such as having an alliance with 2 other towns before Capital status can be granted?
• Can HStrong' provide for the creation of "kingdoms" (realms/domains/dominions/nations)?
• Are there any needs met under the current Townships code sets that won't be met by HeroStrongholds (that are known at this stage, at least)?

Some ideas which might be incorporated into or run alongside HStrong':

• Build competitions, run monthly, multiple categories with two drawn each month
  • categories including things such as large towns, towns created in a single style, towns created by individual players, best buildings of a certain type, monolithic buildings, etc
  • a town not able to win two months in a row
  • prizes such as a town graveyard (permanent), a town portal to a requested place on the map (temporary, ie 1 month), a township spawn plot
• Build requirements specific to the map
  • PvP builds to include a conquest point at the town, farms; PvP upgrade requirements could include having an associated Clan and moderate activity requirements at conquest points
  • PvE builds to include pleasure gardens (maybe with a limit on flowing water), farms, a trade hall
  • build requirements outside the town's regions such as the landscape within 100 blocks, and roads/railways to spawn, graveyard and nearby towns

Other Townships considerations:

• Building/item requirements need to be moderately achievable and set to promote growth and competition between towns, not stifle it.
• If buildings of certain types grant items and currency over time, balance will need to be considered to make sure the item granting doesn't devalue some professions.
• If kingdoms in some form are retained, could a requirement be to have at least one town on the other server? The purpose here is to encourage players to use both servers and to have connections with players on both servers.
• If kingdoms are to be retained, structure them so that we can expect to see up to 4 kingdoms achieved over the life of the server.
• Personal residences, spawn plots and LWCs need to be reviewed alongside a Townships revamp.

I'd like to see some forward movement on towns right now, actually - such as moderate activity requirements being brought back in. They don't need to be onerous, just enough to stop the maps getting littered with abandoned towns. Already there are 5 towns on PvP with 4 or less citizens.

@Eldrylars @Jonsoon @RagingDragon5 @Chaosangel30733 @g1ng3r @Cardboardking @ShadowRavynn @j2gay @munchlaxhero @Anoddant @MalaWolf @Yavool @anevia @malikdanab @Dwarfers @BeasttRecon @mikehk @barbas0l @BronyAlex @Osmodian

 

[LightningCape]

Looking at the bukkit notes for Herostronghold I thought it looked pretty interesting.
-------------------------------
Features:

• Allows permitted players to create HeroStrongholds using certain blocks/money defined in config.yml
• HeroStrongholds grant money/items during every cycle (cycle length defined in config.yml)
• HeroStrongholds cost items/money to maintain during every cycle
• HeroStrongholds can be destroyed (and even explode!) if key blocks are broken
• HeroStrongholds can also grant nearby Heroes passive buffs/debuffs
• HeroStrongholds can also grant build protection
• Effect List work in progress
• Super-regions which require other regions instead of blocks. So you could create a super-HeroStronghold called "Town", which requires HeroStrongholds like "Inn", "Farm", a few "House", etc.
• Banks for super-regions
• Separate chat channels for each super-region
• Taxes for super-regions
• Power for super-regions (if a member dies, then their super-regions lose 1 power each. If a super-region reaches 0 power, then it is destroyed).
• Per-user permissions, see Super-Region perms
• Wars!
• Limit the number of regions players can build with groups.yml
• Biome specific regions

-----------------------------------
Main concern I have would be some of the effects. If you compare them to the current professions you'd see that they basically make them completely worthless unless they could be linked with professions.

Spoiler: Effects

• shootarrow.X (automatically shoots players who don't belong to the HeroStronghold if they walk within range. X = arrow damage multiplier * 10. Upkeep will occur whenever an arrow is shot.) Example: shootarrow.10 means it will shoot arrows that deal normal damage.

• periodicupkeep.1 (simply makes a chance for upkeep to occur every 2 seconds. the 1 holds no value)

• scheduledupkeep.X (causes an upkeep to occur every X seconds).

• teleport.1 (when you stand ontop of the chest and are a member of the region, it will teleport you to another teleporter owned by the same person. The 1 has no value. You must put a sign on top of the chest with [Teleport] on the first line, and the region id of the other teleporter on the second line.)

• powergenerator.X (every X seconds, causes upkeep to occur for each super-region containing the powergenerator. Each containing super-region gains 1 power)

• siegeweapon.X (must be built with no blocks directly above it. must have a sign over the chest with the name of a super-region you want to destroy. must be built within 100 blocks of that super-region. every X seconds, has an upkeep, launches 4 tnt straight up, drops a 30s-fuse TNT on the super-region, and reduces the super-region's power by 1. TNT won't do anything to the super-region if it has denyexplosion).

• denyblockbuild.1 (simply denies non-members from building in the region. works for both regions and super-regions)

• denyblockbreak.1 (denies non-members from destroying blocks in the region. works for both regions and super-regions)

• denymobspawn.1 (denies mobs from spawning in the region. Also works with denymobspawnnoreagent)

• denyplayerinteract.1 (denies non-members from opening chests, doors, or using any placed block. works for both regions and super-regions).

• denyusecircuit.1 (denies use of buttons, switches, pressure plates)

• denyusechest.1 (denies use of chests, furnaces, and dispensers)

• denybucketuse.1 (denies non-members from filling or emptying buckets in the region. works for both regions and super-regions)

• denyfire.1 (denies firespread and flint and steel from non-members in the region. works for both regions and super-regions)

• denyexplosion.1 (denies priming tnt and explosions of any kind inside the region. works for both regions and super-regions)

• powershield (for super-regions only, cancels tnt explosions and reduces power by 1. does not reduce power if denyexplosion is also affecting that area).

• denycreeperexplosion.1

• denytntexplosion.1

• denyghastexplosion.1

• denyfriendlyfire.1 (denies pvp between members of the region. works for both regions and super-regions)

• denypvp.1 (denies all pvp inside the region. works for both regions and super-regions)

• deny_noreagent (any denysomething can be active even if there are no reagents or power, or money in the region or super-region if you add noreagent to the end of the effect).

• mancannon.X (launches whoever stands in the region into the air. X is the force with which it launches you)

• landmine.1 (explodes if a non-member walks into the region. the 1 holds no value)

• repair.1 (makes it so members can repair tools by clicking on an iron block in the region using a the tool they want to repair. Repairs cost iron/diamond/gold/etc depending on the tool and the durability remaining).

• port.1 (lets members use /hs port regionid (/hs port 37 for example) to teleport from anywhere to the region. config options are added to config.yml when run for the first time. Stop your server before editing these options).

• gainstamina.X (gives you X food every 2 seconds)

• gainhealth.X (gives you X health every 2 seconds)

• gate.1 (makes it so you can right-click a sign labeled [Gate] to replace all fences in the region with air, or put all fences back. (open/close)
  )

• control (for super-regions only. Gives you herostronghold.admin permission for regions within your super-region.)

• conveyor.X X is for the item id you want to move. See

• evolve.X Tutorial for Evolution X is the number of successful upkeeps needed to evolve. What the region evolves into is set in evolutions.yml like so:

shack: house

• periodicfarm.X (spawns one mob of a certain type during upkeep. Values for X indicate the mob type:

1. Cow
2. Pig
3. Sheep
4. Chicken
5. Squid
6. Wolf
7. Snowman
8. Spider
9. Zombie
10. Skeleton
11. Mushroom Cow
12. Slime
13. Enderman
14. Magma Cube
15. Ghast
16. Pig Zombie
17. Blaze
18. Villager

 

[Kainzo]

We're not wanting to throw out Townships, we're wanting to integrate and add feature-sets from Strongholds. The ultimate thing I want to see is more fluid and renewable gameplay.

What I want to see on PVP for conflict. Townships waging war against each other to prevent other townships from upgrading, acquiring needed resources and expanding.

• 1. Protection should be something that costs townships, so their "buildings" should produce something that can be destroyed by another player but easily repairable by the town.
• 2. There should be a point other than protection, for townships. Resource gatherers / power harvesters etc, so other towns will want to prevent one another from getting too large or controlling too much of an area.
• 3. Graveyards for towns.
• 4. Ability for Townships to give a plot to X user of the Town but Y user wont have access who is also within that town.
• 5. Actual town decay, working removal of townships that are not active via timestamps or some other method.
• 6. Scrapping the current "item requirements" and moving them to a "per" building requirement, to promote clear and more achievable gameplay. Graveyard would take a lot of stone, shovels, etc. Smith would take anvils, and some other configurable thing. Each upgrade should be "a bit of economical value, with a splash of lore"

Everything that comes in also has to be within the Medieval era. So anything overly complex mechanically will need to be renamed to something that fits.

I believe some of the features in Herostronghold could fit nicely within Townships.

 

[Multitallented]

Quote from WitchOnaRampage
I'd like to see these objectives for towns on the two servers:

• Town creation/upgrade requirements being specifically tailored to the character of the server they're on, such that building and inhabiting towns enhances the experience of playing on that server
• That's the whole goal right there isn't it? To create communities that live, build, and fight together for the best experience. We're just in the infancy of the design process, but we were thinking of having PvP and PvE towns be different. PvP towns could get factories for some of the best items at higher town levels (in addition to the war machines). This is going to be a highly customized setup that will cater very much to the server.
• Town growth more dependent on activity and achievement and less on slogging for difficult to obtain or numerous items.
• HS can check for buildings, items, money, power, population, etc. Using a combination of those requirements will ensure that active towns are rewarded.

Questions:

• Will HStrong' replace both the current sets of code, being the town citizenship code and the town regions code?
• I don't know. I'm currently working with Kainzo in looking at the Township code. I think we're leaning towards replacing it with HS, but nothing has been determined yet.
• Will HStrong' allow for activity requirements, such as taxes and active citizen counts, and for town region decay if activity requirements aren't met?
• HS does server taxes and allows town owners to set their own taxes for citizens. If server taxes are not met, then the town could lose it's protections or even be destroyed. Individual structures would retain some protections until blown up or otherwise disabled.
• For creation/upgrades, will it still be possible to require towns to meet item requirements in addition to the building requirements?
• Yes
• Will HStrong' robustly provide for the creation of subregions and the protection of player items within towns?
• Absolutely
• Can alliances between towns be taken into consideration with upgrades, such as having an alliance with 2 other towns before Capital status can be granted?
• Not currently. It's definitely possible. Currently towns can either be at war or not. What exactly would towns gain from alliances that needs to be recognized in server code?
• Can HStrong' provide for the creation of "kingdoms" (realms/domains/dominions/nations)?
• I'm looking into this. This is not currently available for the same reasons as mentioned above. Players can join multiple towns so this has not been a problem in the past.
• Are there any needs met under the current Townships code sets that won't be met by HeroStrongholds (that are known at this stage, at least)?
• No

Some ideas which might be incorporated into or run alongside HStrong':

• Build competitions, run monthly, multiple categories with two drawn each month
  • categories including things such as large towns, towns created in a single style, towns created by individual players, best buildings of a certain type, monolithic buildings, etc
  • a town not able to win two months in a row
  • prizes such as a town graveyard (permanent), a town portal to a requested place on the map (temporary, ie 1 month), a township spawn plot
  • I would personally love the communities help designing structures to be added
• Build requirements specific to the map
  • PvP builds to include a conquest point at the town, farms; PvP upgrade requirements could include having an associated Clan and moderate activity requirements at conquest points
  • If towns can be destroyed then they will have a central structure. If that structure is destroyed then the town is destroyed. There can also be other buildings providing patchwork protections within the town. All structures when destroyed will surely have value.
  • PvE builds to include pleasure gardens (maybe with a limit on flowing water), farms, a trade hall
  • build requirements outside the town's regions such as the landscape within 100 blocks, and roads/railways to spawn, graveyard and nearby towns
  • Roads are nice, but HS doesn't recognize them. HS deals with buildings. Bonuses for roads would have to come from staff. Graveyards are a definite possibility for structures you can build at a certain town level

Other Townships considerations:

• Building/item requirements need to be moderately achievable and set to promote growth and competition between towns, not stifle it.
• Could you be more specific? If you're referring to the factions-syndrome of one town to rule them all, then I can safely say HS does not have that problem. Towns can take days if not weeks to siege. Building structures can be a viable defense. Raids can have only limited potential damage (ambushing people in the streets or finding vulnerable chests). When a town does drop to 0 power it could postpone losing it's protections until prime hours when the majority of the players will be online to fight.
• If buildings of certain types grant items and currency over time, balance will need to be considered to make sure the item granting doesn't devalue some professions.
• If kingdoms in some form are retained, could a requirement be to have at least one town on the other server? The purpose here is to encourage players to use both servers and to have connections with players on both servers.
• This would be difficult to implement. I'm not sure it's a good design idea either as it forces players to go places they might not want to. Perhaps instead we could offer non-required incentives to play on both servers (such as rare items, exp boosts, buffs, etc).
• If kingdoms are to be retained, structure them so that we can expect to see up to 4 kingdoms achieved over the life of the server.
• Personal residences, spawn plots and LWCs need to be reviewed alongside a Townships revamp.
• We're looking into this. If we don't migrate residences, spawn plots, etc. then we will have some kind of transition or parallel implementation at the least.

I'd like to see some forward movement on towns right now, actually - such as moderate activity requirements being brought back in. They don't need to be onerous, just enough to stop the maps getting littered with abandoned towns. Already there are 5 towns on PvP with 4 or less citizens.

 

[Xargun]

I have thought for a long time that towns should be able to 'purchase' these things like its own graveyard, spawn teleporter, nether teleporter, etc... No idea what the costs would be, but it would enable smaller towns to survive further from spawn. This may hurt the wizard's money making by providing spawn ports, but to be honest the last 6 or so times I've tried to get a spawn port no one was selling anyways.

 

[Multitallented]

Very rough outline of town tier system:

 

[Danda]

Here is my first batch that I can remember off the top of my head.

1. Region list for your town's sub-regions
2. Fix offline player checks
3. Admin command for adding/removing players from regions
4. Admin command for removing Sub-regions
5. Fix Mayors not having ownership of sub-regions created by SIC or other region owners
6. Make /town demote <player> promote the successor to owner when the owner demotes himself instead of demoting the Successor to Manager
7. Allow for depositing custom items by name example: /town bank deposit saphire (currently only way to bank them is to hold them in your hand and type /town bank deposit)
8. Make inviting more intuitive by removing the + & - before the players name and instead have a cancellation command for town invites.

 

[Danda]

Very rough outline of town tier system:

Not sure about the hellgates to be honest it kind of takes away from necromancers not to mention it'd be a bit unfair to only give that upgrade option to PvP players same with the ports for wizards & druids

 

[Multitallented]

1. Region list for your town's sub-regions I'm working on a GUI that would do this along with bank/tax history, population, member ranks, power history and a few other things
2. Fix offline player checks
3. Admin command for adding/removing players from regions
4. Admin command for removing Sub-regions
5. Fix Mayors not having ownership of sub-regions created by SIC or other region owners
6. Make /town demote <player> promote the successor to owner when the owner demotes himself instead of demoting the Successor to Manager
7. Allow for depositing custom items by name example: /town bank deposit saphire (currently only way to bank them is to hold them in your hand and type /town bank deposit) Not sure about this one. HS makes you create the bank structure and store items in a physical location. You could purchase storage boxes from the bank owner that only you would have access to.
8. Make inviting more intuitive by removing the + & - before the players name and instead have a cancellation command for town invites.

What if only necromancers/wizards/etc could build these structures and charge a fee per use? That way they could provide their services while offline.

 

[Danda]

1. Region list for your town's sub-regions I'm working on a GUI that would do this along with bank/tax history, population, member ranks, power history and a few other things
2. Fix offline player checks
3. Admin command for adding/removing players from regions
4. Admin command for removing Sub-regions
5. Fix Mayors not having ownership of sub-regions created by SIC or other region owners
6. Make /town demote <player> promote the successor to owner when the owner demotes himself instead of demoting the Successor to Manager
7. Allow for depositing custom items by name example: /town bank deposit saphire (currently only way to bank them is to hold them in your hand and type /town bank deposit) Not sure about this one. HS makes you create the bank structure and store items in a physical location. You could purchase storage boxes from the bank owner that only you would have access to.
8. Make inviting more intuitive by removing the + & - before the players name and instead have a cancellation command for town invites.

What if only necromancers/wizards/etc could build these structures and charge a fee per use? That way they could provide their services while offline.

I think you're miss understanding what the town bank is. The townbank is where items are stored virtually and is the resource pool used for taxes & town upgrades and is not personal storage, any item put in there is gone and cannot be taken back out.

 

[Danda]

1. Region list for your town's sub-regions I'm working on a GUI that would do this along with bank/tax history, population, member ranks, power history and a few other things
2. Fix offline player checks
3. Admin command for adding/removing players from regions
4. Admin command for removing Sub-regions
5. Fix Mayors not having ownership of sub-regions created by SIC or other region owners
6. Make /town demote <player> promote the successor to owner when the owner demotes himself instead of demoting the Successor to Manager
7. Allow for depositing custom items by name example: /town bank deposit saphire (currently only way to bank them is to hold them in your hand and type /town bank deposit) Not sure about this one. HS makes you create the bank structure and store items in a physical location. You could purchase storage boxes from the bank owner that only you would have access to.
8. Make inviting more intuitive by removing the + & - before the players name and instead have a cancellation command for town invites.

What if only necromancers/wizards/etc could build these structures and charge a fee per use? That way they could provide their services while offline.

2 More things.

1. The timer for town taxes is currently broken. Tax dates begin from the creation of unix time and compares it to the current date of course returning false that it is infact that date.
2. When creating a township the initial startup cost for a town region using the /town claim command does not remove the item/monetary costs from the townbank like it should. Town upgrade on the other hand does work correctly in doing this.

 

[Multitallented]

I think you're miss understanding what the town bank is. The townbank is where items are stored virtually and is the resource pool used for taxes & town upgrades and is not personal storage, any item put in there is gone and cannot be taken back out.

No, I understand. Whether you have a personal bank or a town bank does not change what I said. If we use HS, then the town item bank would be a physical location built by the town owners. It would function the exact same way besides that.