Hallo meine Kinder. Adam Hier! We got another devblog examining some new logistics ideas and overall Quality of life changes coming to Foxhole. Let's take a look, shall we?
Disclaimer: All of the content below is heavily work in progress and is subject to change.
Collaborative Logistics @Adam
We drastically altered the UI and UX on pretty much all in-game screens with the intention of not only improving the player's experience but to allow for more design space. Design space is best described as the canvas that we the designers can paint on. How far can we expand a feature? What are the boundaries? How can we encourage higher levels of play? We could have all the colours of the natural world at our fingertips but if we are working on a canvas that's a few centimeters large, we might be challenged to paint something beautiful within such tight constraints. Working within constraints usually allows for the most creative and simplified solutions, but sometimes you just need a bigger canvas.
Foxhole requires us to maintain a very basic set of functions (Gather, Build, Move, Attack) while at the same time allowing for layers of complexity that players crave. This was proving to be difficult within the old system. With the capabilities of the new system, we have decided to focus our attention now on making logistics more collaborative. One of the most exciting features that we are playing with is the inclusion of pickup permissions for Factory orders. This will change logistics in two important ways:
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Players can allow their Factory orders to be picked up by Squad mates or any friendly player
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Scrap Mines and Sulfur Mines can now be communally operated as requested by many players
The intention is to provide more advanced tools for serious logistics players to collaborate and manage their supply chain. Here are some of the ideas we tossed around:
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Maintaining the current default ‘Private’ Status for the majority of players. The people who do not want to participate in complicated logistics will not be forced to
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Players able to change order status from ‘Private’ to ‘Squad Only’ to ‘Faction Wide’
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Adding Filters/Tabs to toggle between the different order states.
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Applying this feature to structures like the scrap and sulfur mines
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Potential of tying this feature into the region/world map to help communicate logistics on a global scale
Let us know what you think is needed in this feature. How would you use it?
The tech part bad luck protection @Rohun
Tech parts have a chance to drop when mining scrap and certain other resources. By design, it has to have quite a low chance to drop. This is not inherently a bad design choice. Randomness adds variety and uncertainty to games so that when it does drop, it can be a good feeling. I’m sure most of us are familiar with the joy of getting a rare drop in games like Diablo. The problem with tech parts was that players could go on long streaks without getting any drops. In fact, sometimes during testing, we have wondered if there was some bug introduced into the tech part system when we’ve mined several hundred scraps without getting a drop.
Our goal was to smooth out the randomness so that the chance to get a tech part remained, more or less, the same, but without the long streaks of bad luck. Being an avid player of World of Warcraft, I took inspiration from their RPPM system (Real Procs per Minute).
Here’s an example of how it works in Foxhole with completely hypothetical numbers:
Let’s say you have a 1% chance to get a tech part every time to click on a scrap pile with your hammer.
The design of the system is that you should get approximately 1 tech part every 100 hammer hits. Now if you were to take a million swings at scrap, this ratio would hold up. However, it doesn’t always work out this way for a lower number of swings. (If you’re curious about this sort of thing, look up how sample size affects statistics).
The new bad luck protection system looks at how long you’ve gone without getting a tech part to drop.
Let’s say you’ve performed 50 hammer hits without getting a tech part. We now start ramping up your chance. So on your 51st hammer hit, you might have a 2.5% chance. On your 65th hit, you might have a 5% chance. On your 80th hit, you could have a 19% chance. (Again, completely hypothetical numbers.) This means that it gets increasingly likely you’ll get a tech part within 100 swings.
Once you do get a tech part drop we reset your chance down to the default chance.
With this system in place, it should be fairly rare to go on long streaks without getting a tech part at all.
Quality of Life @Markfoot
Whenever we release a big update like 0.17, we like to spend some time tweaking the changes and working on less flashy changes like quality of life, bug fixes, and maintenance. As Adam's post above shows, we're utilizing the new UI framework we put in for 0.17 to add more tools for logistics. Besides that, we're also working on a few other small tweaks that will help players on a day to day basis.
1. The Grenade throw aim indicator will be changed to show when the throw trajectory is clipped with the environment. This should reduce the number of bad throws that can result in friendly fire or suicides.
2. A "Submit starter kit" button will be added to the Base screen action bar. We hope to find a more elegant long-term solution in the future, but for now, this button should help players quickly get rid of their starter kit which in turn should reduce the clutter of dropped items around stockpile structures.
3. A region's Home Base will now be migrated to the first town that is claimed if the current Home Base is a Fort. Having a Fort as a Home Base sucks so much that we've often seen invading parties bypass Forts completely to avoid having their Home Base stuck there. In other cases, we've seen players allow their own Forts to get destroyed just so they can "manually" migrate their Home Bases to a town. This change should fix both of these issues moving forward.
That wraps up another Dev Blog. Be sure to check out our Foxhole Dev Stream for more information about upcoming features. If you have any burning questions you want answered be sure to tweet them to @Matt directly on Discord or Twitter, if your question gets selected it will be answered Live on stream!
Adam
Grasping the tufts of coarse hair on the wyvern's head, Adam takes to the skies.
