Isle of Men 2.0.0 now live!

Yeah I think its the foliage shadows. I dont know how a given server reacts to it so if you find that its bad in one area, let me know and I could patch it sooner than I plan to. I dont want to flood people with 1 gb updates but if its important, I could push it early if I’m sure it will fix it. I’ll look closer on my test server as I’m not 100% its those shadows yet.

Is there an “Isle of Women” nearby?

They should get together.

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Not yet… but there are Breeders on the island… (O.o)

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My incredible and spectacular friend @darthphysicist. Why didn’t you think of a small island of women before? or recreational area. there the players would have some peace in the midst of so much chaos. you better reward your players for the mistake. We would ignore that mistake on your part with a very nice reward. (I have nothing to do and go to bother my friend @darthphysicist ).

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Oh there are lady pockets but look out… Dee Pee the Wretched has a tendency to show up just when you least expect him.

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Hahaha ok.

Working on bringing in the rain cancellation indoors… think I know what’s missing. Thought it would ride along with the weather changes but guess not.

Hi! I haven’t played Conan in ages, but I heard about your mod and decided to try it out solo. One of the biggest flaws of this game is the lack of maps, so it was amazing to see a new one.

Now, I’ve only been able to play for about two hours, and mostly I’ve just run about on the eastern beach for a bit, so I’m sure there is much more to discover. Here are my thoughts and initial impressions so far:

I love the jungle theme. The jungle area on the Exiles map was always my favourite biome, so I am glad to see a map that fully embraces it. One of the best things about the jungle on the Exiles map was the verticality, and you’ve captured that perfectly with lots of hills and sheer cliffs.

I like your creativity and the “true to Conan” feel of the map. It’s like entering a classic Sword & Sorcery / pulp adventure jungle survival story.

One of the best things I’ve stumbled across are the “Manhunters” who seemingly popped out of nowhere when I was running around like an idiot. I love their look.

The only things that have been slightly odd so far are these:

  1. I too love Nine Inch Nails’ music. Some of the pieces you’ve selected go great with the theme. Other times the music is jarring and it takes a while to get used to “synthesizer + Conan”. It’s not a bad combo; it just seems a little weird at first, especially when most of the time (outside of combat and special areas), there is no ambient music at all. This isn’t that big of a deal to me because I often listen to my own mood music on Spotify anyway.

  2. I haven’t gone far from the beach yet, but the edge of the coastline / upper jungle area close to the shore is mostly barren. It’s kind of similar to the problems of the “Savage Wilds” map: compared to the official maps, there are a lot of empty, pointless-feeling areas devoid of NPCs or much of anything.

Some of that is, I’m sure, due to trying to strike a balance between being solo-friendly (where it’s better to pack in more stuff and enemies to avoid having the solo player get bored running forever to get to something to fight) and being PvP/group-friendly (where it’s better to have open spaces for building and for fighting other players). I feel like if you chose to go one route vs. the other, that would be better. For example, if you placed enemy spawns in more of the empty-ish areas for solo players to come across, that would give the solo player more things to encounter while traveling from point to point. (It’s easy to overdo that, too, though.) I feel like the official Siptah map strikes a good balance in this regard, for instance.

  1. The lighting around parts of the beach is kind of weird. Maybe that’s intentional to give off an otherworldly vibe. Still, I’m getting freaky pink-ish purple-ish lighting here and there along the coastline (or alternatively, blinding sunlight). I’m sure lighting is one of the toughest things to get right because everyone’s settings are different, though. The lighting in the jungle itself looks great from what I’ve seen so far.

It’s a neat map and I’m looking forward to exploring more whenever I have the time. Thank you for building another map for the game!

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Very astute observations about a few things. The areas that maybe feel a bit devoid are around what we have dubbed “noob cove” and that was to give people a bit of space at the start to get a foothold to explore from (it was also the first area I created so I am open to giving it another pass!). The lighting on the beach will be addressed in the next patch actually; I don’t like it either and am extending the jungle to the beach and going to rework the sand as I feel the jungle to beach doesn’t transition well either.

The music: I have been itching to use Ghosts for a project for some time as I have the rights to it through their license, and one thing that has been a challenge is getting the right mix of music for the combat. I had to use several different tracks for the humans with a randomizer to keep it from getting repetitive, so if you have an alternate track suggestion from Ghosts I-IV that you think fits better, I’d be open to those suggestions.

Anyway, great feedback! The goal is to do an update every saturday morning so I will definitely have some of your issues above rolled into next week’s patch. I could easily thicken in the enemies and will be adding more “flair” to the map as I comb over it for another pass. What I’ve learned in this whole process is, do it once, do it again, then do it again, then do it another time… each time stuff just gets quicker and I add more detail. If you look closely at the camps and caves, you can probably tell which ones I did first and which ones I did last… I essentially proceeded counter clockwise from the starting location around the map and lastly did the volcano (for a multitude of reasons).

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Oh good. The rain inside my base was giving me the sads. I like building in the jungle but not when everything is moist.

One thing I’ve noticed is the music often alerts me to the presence of the ambushing manhunters long before I’m actually attacked by them. They’d be even more difficult to deal with if I didn’t know they were there until I got orbed in the back.

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That all sounds great! I’m looking forward to seeing how everything develops.

Since I’ll be playing on this map for the foreseeable future anyway, I’d be glad to help “test” it as I go along. What difficulty settings do you recommend for the intended solo player experience? Right now I have everything on default except for the thrall/pet cook times (since they don’t continue while not playing solo).

Also, do you recommend any other mods in conjunction with yours to have a complete experience on your map? Right now I’m not using any others.

Oh, and I’ve noticed the rain inside the base, too. I remember this being a thing on the official maps for a long time, but at some point Funcom fixed it. I’m not sure if it’s actually resolvable or not on your end or if this is a Funcom programming issue. I don’t mind the wet look of everything, especially since my current shelter consists of a flimsy shack on the beach!

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I am balancing everything around 1x on everything but yeah, in SP I would boost thrall convert as a matter of course because it doesnt run unless logged in.

The rain issue is likely because I went for a quick and dirty rain enhancement by swapping the particle effects. The reason this is still a thing is because having weather at all was the last thing holding up release… :rofl: It would have been out a month ago but I literally got weather working the friday before I made it public (the release notes will show a gazillion attempts to fix it on the steam page).

I personally am not using other mods, just so that I can isolate bugs rather than wonder if its a conflict, but I did make the map as compatible with thrall wars as possible which then you would want pippi or thrall wars utilities and sudo exiles. Other than that, there are a gazillion qol mods… but I will say that using a minimap with IoM would kind of defeat the purpose… my players are forever denied a minimap on my server :stuck_out_tongue:

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it would be a shame if they got some of the new orbs… a damn shame…

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new way to get water in the wild in the next patch. Here’s your hint…

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One of our players set up a server with this map and we’re going to add it to our cluster. Haven’t had a chance to check out the map myself yet, but I’m excited to give it a go once we have it added!

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Got a lead on why the hurricane isnt currently working so that is hopefully raging after saturdays patch!

Still looking at rain indoors… it should not be happening but I have not yet run down the cause.

This map sounds incredibly cool, wish I had PC so I could try some of the different and amazing mods and maps people have made!

I know you’ve posted some pics already (they look amazing), but is there any chance you could post a few more (or is there another thread with more)? It’s really inspiring to me to see someone work so hard on such a cool project!

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Yeah I’m going to post a pic of my hurricane tonight. At some point I will make a trailer now that all the key elements are coming together.

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I’m sort of digging the resource distribution. Wood, plant fiber, sticks and aloe are trivial. I’ve yet to find a good location for stone in bulk. I know where you get iron, sulfur and coal now but I’ve yet to find any location where I can get my hands on crystal, yellow lotus, gold, silver or black ice.

I’m sure it’ll annoy a lot of players but I like the challenge. It’s an interesting change from Exiled Lands where I know where everything is and Siptah where everything is everywhere.

I’ve also only really explored the upper right quadrant of the island at this point.

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