magmaguy
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Should we remove schematic dungeons (and convert them to world dungeons)?
🕑 Added 2024-02-07 23:14:10 +0000 UTCGreetings everyone.
We've been hard at work improving documentation for everyone, and preparing a lot of things that I hope will really improve the long-term experience of installing, updating, managing and creating content for all of the plugins I've created.
There is, however, one rather complex feature in EliteMobs that I am currently considering getting entirely rid of: schematic dungeons.
What are schematic dungeons?
Schematic dungeons are dungeons that get pasted where you are standing. This means that they were initially designed to be installed in a normal survival server at a location in the world of your choice.
At one point, the majority of people wanted every build (including Primis!) to be schematic dungeons so that these dungeons could be installed in their worlds. However, with the advent of BetterStructures, and with seeing just how much more content we can do in proper world-based adventures, there seems to have been a big shift in interest, to the point where it seems like there is no interest left in schematic dungeons at this point.
Why would schematic dungeons get removed?
Schematic dungeons were the first dungeons we ever designed. The idea was to make dungeons that could easily be integrated into any survival world, and that people could navigate to by just walking there.
As it turns out, this comes with several problems, which I will list here:
1) A lot of terraforming work is required to install the dungeon into a world properly, meaning that while you can install it with a single click, you will then have to fit the terrain to the build
2) The larger the builds, the worse the dungeon becomes. This is because the amount of terrain required to terraform becomes higher, and it becomes increasingly hard to find a good fit for the location
3) They are not easy to uninstall, as the build will remain in place
4) They are not easy to update for servers, as it requires re-pasting the dungeon on the same spot or saving the anchor point and remember where that was and using a special command
5) BetterStructures now has shrines, which are by pretty much every metric a much better execution of what the schematic dungeons should be. You can find shrines by exploring the world, the level of the shrines adapts to the nearby players, once defeated the combat arenas get unlocked and players can build... It's just a much more advanced system.
6) There is no good way to put the schematic dungeons in a way where the levels really make sense without making a whole dedicated map in your server for them, at which point you'd be better off making an adventure map instead
7) They are, by far, the kind of dungeon that takes up the longest time to do support for, as people keep thinking that it is a bug that they pasted in front of them
8) Maintaining these dungeons into the long term is also a very time-consuming thing, and it takes time away from working on the many cool new features that I want to work on such as FMM decoration packs or modular builds for BS.
9) Navigating to these dungeons and figuring out the levels of the schematic dungeons isn't easy for new players
Which dungeons are currently schematic dungeons?
Right now, the catacombs, the dark cathedral, the ruins, the pirate ship, the airship and the vampire manor are the only schematic dungeons. Due to the many limitations of schematic dungeons, even if we keep the system, we have no plans to make more of these (the vampire manor was incredibly tricky and time-consuming to make).
How would the schematic dungeons get replaced?
I do not wish to simply delete content. If the desire of the majority is to get rid of these schematic dungeons, we will work in the coming weeks and months to put these builds in their own dedicated worlds, and will almost certainly add more mobs, loot and builds to them to make the worlds feel a bit more well-rounded.
How are you going to decide whether to remove this feature?
I will respect the wishes of the community on this matter. However, I also think it would be inadequate to remove a long-standing feature such as this one without this representing there interests of the vast majority of current users of EliteMobs.
Thus, I am making 4 options. If over 80% of the sentiment is positive or neutral on this, I will probably replace the content with world-based content. However, I don't want to go strictly by the numbers, and would greatly appreciate your commentary on this matter in the comments of this post.
Comments
SkyHigh Studios
I dislike that they have to be pasted manually and everything else doesn't. I also don't want to take away from the people who appreciate the way it is currently.
Vaspei
It's always been a chore to update a schematic dungeon like you said in your post. Need to remove the old one, then paste in the new one and do terra forming around it. The small ones aren't too difficult to do but the larger ones like colosseum or vampire manor it's time consuming to have to terra form around them every time there's an update. I 100% love the idea of making them simple world dungeons. For the small ones just add a small world border
Mark
I had trouble placing some of the schematic dungeons in my world. Other ones were easy like the Air and Pirate ships. It would make it easier and better if some of the more complex Dungeons were non-instanced. I like the idea that more content could be created for them while other smaller ones like the ships could be instanced dungeons as there would really be no need for a more elaborate setting and new content. Unless they were expanded and multiple ships and content were added in a location that fit them. Lots of great work already which is one of the reasons I support MagmaGuy.
Baldarek
I wholeheartedly support this! Let EM dungeons be in separate worlds.
