A Bizzare Request

[ArchimedesLP]

First of all let me just say that I expect nothing. I'm probably the only person in the world who cares about this, and therefore it wouldn't be justified to put any Dev time into this unless someone is really interested and wants to make it their pet project for a few hours(Also I know everyone is very busy with TftFT and bugfixes etc.)

 

So some of you may know that I'm currently doing a permanent fire challenge on youtube. I have a fire named Frankie that I've kept going in the fishing hut in ML for 75 days so far. The gameplay loop is basically fueling up to 12 hours, then going out to harvest wood, hunt, loot regions, etc. on trips that last 12-24 hours(more on that later.) On return I refuel the fire and then usually sleep. I can get deep into MT, PV, CH, BR, or BI, do some stuff, then return within the 12 hour time limit. I can also use the burn bonus from cold temperatures to spend more than 12 hours away from the fire in ML. I was planning to use this burn bonus to do crazy 23-hour trips to do stuff like summit, HRV, and even the Far Territories.

 

The problem is that the burn bonus does not work when you have gone through a load screen from where your fire is. So for example, I can spend twenty hours chopping wood in Mystery Lake and then return to Frankie and she is still lit. But if I step into Ravine and do the chopping there, Frankie would go out by the time I return(this nearly happened when I discovered this issue.)

 

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and I believe I'm come up with a relatively straightforward fix. The idea would be to track a stat that would just be theoretical burn time of a theoretical fire(at all times.) So it would just be a clock that would run from the start of the game, increasing at 1 minute per minute when inside and at warm temperatures, and increasing at 1 minute per 2 minutes when at cold enough temperatures for maximum burn bonus(and everything in between, using the same calculations that already exist for tracking burn time on existing fires.)

 

Then, whenever a region is unloaded, the value of this clock would be saved. Later(no matter how many region transitions in between) when the region is reloaded, when updating any fires it would be done with this clock(comparing against the saved value) instead of the game clock.

 

If you made it to the end, thanks for reading! I'd be happy to provide additional details or clarification if anyone is interested in this. And even if it does get done, I know it probably won't be for a while until things with Tales start to quiet down. Looking forward to exploring the Zone of Contamination soon!

 

-Arc

Edited December 1, 2023 by ArchimedesLP
clarification

[ArchimedesLP]

One more thought, I forgot to say that I'm thinking about taking this series to 500 days, that's part of the reason I'm so interested in this. It would be pretty fun to do all those crazy treks and would give me something to work on instead of just whiling away the time in ML.

[ArchimedesLP]

Some additional ideas for robust, seamless integration with existing saves:

 

 - When loading a saved game, if the burn clock doesn't exist, it is initialized to the current value of the game clock.

 

 - When loading a region, if there is no saved burn clock value, the (existing) game clock fire calculation method is used as a fallback.