Darmo

Oh, you work with charcoal on the daily? Like, you're a blacksmith or something? Or you actually make it? I thought the point of charcoal piles covered in dirt was excluding air, to reduce the amount of wood consumed by the fire. Though I could see where the fire could spread throughout the pit faster through the tubes I guess, and then the air supply gets sealed off. I would think there could also be a severe risk of the pile collapsing so much as to make large gaps in the dirt, due to the weakened tubes collapsing, from the irl perspective. The speed of growth thing, ya, they'd have to change the rates of growth of trees to make that significant in game terms. I've suggested changes to sapling spawn rates and methods before, and was pretty soundly shot down. I think the devs have spent a lot of time getting the tree growth mechanic the way it is, and I would be skeptical of much change, unless there were more reasons than just to give bamboo a growth advantage. And the cleaner thing, again, that's a real life issue, but doesn't really have a mechanism to translate into the game as we know it. I recognize that there can be a lot of things bamboo and it's products do irl, but the question is A: which of them can be translated to a game affecting mechanic, and B: at what cost in dev time and effort? Differing rates of charcoal production would be pretty simple I think. No new graphics or interfaces required. Differing burn times on it's face is simple, but what about mixed piles? Do only pure bamboo piles burn faster? Having even one log of normal wood makes it a normal wood burn time? Anything in between could get complicated. In an ideal world, it'd be great to have bamboo variants of everything, sure. But in a world of having two devs with limited time, trying to keep the item id list down, is it *really* that useful to have bamboo variants of weapons and armor and other stuff? To me, the best strategy would be to treat bamboo as another tree type. It cuts faster than other woods. It can be burned for firewood (burns far less long than actual logs) or charcoaled (for far less charcoal). It can be made into barrels and planks and doors and other stuff that logs can normally be made into. It has the special property of being a ready-made pipe, if there is any use for low grade pipes in TFC2. Maybe grows faster. But it's main benefit (aside from panda habitat) would be a very different, scenic type of forest.

That's fair, I did say 'no charcoal' and that was clearly wrong, since you can make charcoal in some quantity from any plant material basically. I should have spoke with more precision. That said, that wikipedia page has a loooot of citations needed. It reads more like an advertisement for bamboo products than an actual informative and factual page. I don't know what you are referring to when you say 'efficient' but speaking purely from the standpoint of space, it's going to be less efficient to make charcoal out of a hollow tube than it will be a solid log. Air does not turn into charcoal. Logic would suggest that for a given cubic meter, you'll get a lot more charcoal from logs than bamboo. IRL, there are of course other factors. Presumably you can cut bamboo easier and faster than a tree. Though pound-for-pound, I don't know - I think bamboo is rather tough. You could perhaps split the bamboo canes in order to pack them in more densely. But now you're adding more work. You'll never get it packed as dense as a solid log. But in the context of minecraft and TFC2, are we really going to simulate all that? I doubt it. So presuming the system will be basic and you can only get logs of each, and cannot split them and pack them more densely, is it logical to have bamboo yield as much charcoal? I say not. And I think this is fine. I think it'd be great for the various biomes to have advantages and disadvantages. And one disadvantage of a bamboo biome could be greatly reduced charcoal production efficiency. I would suggest 1/8 that of regular logs.

Just for everyone's info here, as I understand it, palm trees are already planned for TFC2. Not sure if they're planned to have coconuts or not. I'd love to see bamboo in the game, for aesthetic reasons if nothing else. If pipes were a necessary thing in TFC2, bamboo would be great for that. Otherwise I don't know of many great uses. I think it'd be pretty worthless as firewood, no charcoal capability. Great for fences though! It'd want to have it's own sapling spawning distance, so it could grow denser than normal trees, I think. I like those images Diego, though the taper is a bit abrupt perhaps.

Pretty sure that the game won't spawn you in deep tundra. I think there's a set range, with the maximum being maybe 15k? Not 100% sure but this seems like the case in my experience.

Good post, but my question is, how does this work with anything other than fire? Fire is easy - big exothermic reaction. Lots of energy. It's the obvious go-to. But what else? Lightning is very exothermic, but the player cannot control it (or at least, *shouldn't* be able to, until later game anyway). Water? Not exothermic, and personally I'm hoping colored buckets won't even be a thing in TFC2. So if the player must destroy a source water, well, water sources are a finite resource, unlike fire. So they player would be forced farther and farther from base as they dry up their area. I'm curious how you envision other elements playing into this. Because otherwise it seems like it's basically going to involve converting fire into everything else you want to do. And at that point it seem like you've lost the charm of making it a 'conversion' system, because there's only one conversion happening. Edit: Also, this probably would have been better posted in the magic thread.

Yes, the further you are from z=0, in either the negative or postitive direction, the colder it gets. Around z+-8k, snow and ice will rarely form. And somewhere between 7 and 8k z, temperatures will never get low enough to kill any crop except sugarcane and jute. Climate does not affect 'biome'. Think of biome as geography. Plains, hills, mountains. You can have forested plains, or empty plains. You can have very wet, or very dry plains. Extremely dry, high temperature plains will be deserts. But there are no biomes as such. There is only geography, rainfall, and temperature (I think EVT is directly related to tempearture and rainfall, but I may be wrong there). Rainfall is what affects the color of grass. The lusher the green the more rainfall. Trees will show up in areas with rainfall and temperature suitable to them. Sequoias have a narrow set of requirements that mean they only seem to show up around 10-12k from the equator. Also be aware that ALL saplings must have a minimum temperature of 20 degrees to generate. So even in a given forest, such as sequoia, new saplings won't show up when current temperature is below 20. Climate also affects directly what animals will show up, along with terrain. Iirc, somewhere around 5 or 6k it gets too warm for cows and horses to show. Sheep stop showing up a bit further out than that. Temperature also affects whether berry bushes will fruit - none of them will bear fruit at the equator. The equator is also too hot for many fruit trees to fruit. Note that ALL fruit trees only bear fruit between 0 and 38, but depending on the time of year a particular type bears fruit, and where you are, it may be too hot at harvest time. So generally the further from "summer" the fruit tree's harvest is, the more likely it is to actually work near the equator. Your water bar will also deplete faster at extremely high temperatures. All these factors combined means that the 'sweet spot' to me is right around 7k from equator. You can find cows and horses (and maybe sheep), your fruit producers will work, your crops will never die. You won't see snow though, so if you love snow it's not for you. You also can't build an effective sky freezer, but with immortal crops it's not that big a deal.

I like the general scale of it. Body and tail seem to be a good length. Head box is overly tall, and the 2-piece jaws feel a bit chunky. I think it'd be better off with one piece jaws and a shorter head box, or, perhaps even rather than a head box, it just has two 2-piece jaws that hinge at the back. That's basically how they look irl - two giant jaws with eyes on top. The teeth will probably be better off as individual fractional size boxes, in order to make them thinner. I think it's justified, to give that extra threat-level appearance. Right now the two downward front teeth, especially, are giving him a buck-tooth vibe. Wish the eyes could be on top. My quick experiments didn't really yield anything great for that, but I think it could be done, especially in combination with two 2-piece jaws. The lower leg boxes, the way they're structured to me makes them seem like feet, and then they look awkward with the paper-flat claws. I'd suggest ditch the flat toes, make the lower leg box look more like a lower leg, and just put a couple pixels there for claws. Crocodiles attack with their jaws so I'd saw emphasize the jaws and reduce the legs to just mainly be legs.

If nobody else has taken this up yet, I'll do it (when I finally have time again). If someone else does want to take it up, it needs to be smaller to start with. The legs need to be single boxes - they're too complicated for such a small creature. Body needs at least a look at being reworked to use less pieces - this arching segmented look should be saved for the armadillo and perhaps pangolin if possible. Mouth box also is probably unnecessary.

The github repository.

Just fyi, it is known that TFC2 is currently at 1.10.2. It seems likely it will be kept at whatever the current version of vanilla minecraft is, unless vanilla goes off the rails into C territory maybe. As for the set pieces, there's going to be dungeons and fortresses at the very least, from what we've seen so far. Biomes will definitely have more variety of animals, at the very least.

I'm with Tony on this. I'd prefer to see mechanical power play a primary role. I'd hold back a bit on electricity, and have it just do certain things like lights and revivifying frankenstein monsters. I'd be less keen on people using electricity to power their doors and grist mills. I'm a steampunk fan though.

As Sequoia says, around -7k and below is a safe bet for most all crops to be immortal. I wouldn't go all the way to z0 though. You've got basically two options there - an acacia forest, or a dry grassland. Both kind of boring. You could get 'lucky' and find a desert or kapok forest, maybe. But your berry bushes will never produce fruit because it's too hot. Some fruit trees also will not fruit. You'll also become thirsty quicker, which is annoying when mining. Also you'll only find chickens and pigs around z0. I think cows stop showing up around z4k, and sheep farther away yet. z0 just isn't that great.

Very normal as far as I know. I don't think it's based on biome. I love single-layer areas, because it's far easier to propick effectively, vs the areas that have like 10 blocks of dirt and gravel, putting the stone just barely in range of propick.

Agreed. I don't know how plants affect the graphic overhead, but I've seen some pretty plant-heavy play-throughs in single player at least, and forests and jungles especially would benefit from new plants. I would think that if MCMC could have a few model pre-sets, for 1, 2, and 3-high plant sprites, and all the user has to do is load their texture they've made, that would make it pretty easy for people to make plant textures.

I noticed that the cheek planes (FluffR and FluffL) are way oversize now. Without a texture loaded it looks like a frilled lizard. Might as well reduce them for the new size. Also, there's a TailAfrican Box. If the plan is to make a separate model for the african lynx, that box should go as well.

Surely boating between islands could be controlled simply by having extra-powerful ocean mobs in the borders between islands? Death at sea is the worst, because all your items go to the bottom of the ocean. People can play risk-taker easily enough on land as they're likely to be able to outmaneuver the mobs and get their stuff back, but not so on the open ocean. The question would kind of be how close could two islands theoretically be? Is there a X-block border around each 4k-ish square sector that land cannot generate in? I guess I kind of agree with Tony that if the mob challenge is designed right, maybe the boating between islands doesn't need to be strictly controlled. It could perhaps be safer, avoiding monsters. But might not necessarily have to be the only way? Maybe the player can make their own boat for free and risk death by monster, pay a sea captain for safe passage at some expense, or make a portal, at reduce or free cost? So there could be several tiers of solution to crossing from island to island?

Yep, same as vanilla cats. It goes from derpy to kind of cute with the inset pupils. If you don't mind redoing the skins Krono, I think this one will be more in scale.

I've found that about 7k blocks from the equator is the boundary between snow and no snow (at sea level) so yes, at -5k you'll never see snow. Also your crops will never die.

Hmm, dunno, still derpy, just the other way. Could I get a model and texture to examine? I can't help thinking the inward eyes, with a 1-pixel long snout, might help. Vanilla cats have that same basic format (5x4 face, 2 wide eyes with pupil inward, 3x2 snout) and I think the short nose makes it so rather than looking like they're staring at the end of their nose, they're looking beyond the nose. May also help to square it up a bit more.

Definitely much more in scale, I appreciate the effort of making a resized model. But they eyes...he's got the derpy eyes. That's not great for a predator, imo. Though a lynx is kind of a small predator - not even sure if he'd be programmed to be aggressive toward a player. I'm looking at pictures of vanilla ocelot and despite having the same eye configuration, he doesn't look as derpy. I wonder if that is in part because his snout is shorter. Lynxes do have very short snouts. Right now the smaller lynx just looks like he's staring at the end of his nose. Can we try a couple things? Maybe a version with nose as-is, but with just single black pixel eyes at the outside edges? And then separately, a version with the eyes as they are, but the snout shorter, and perhaps squared up with the face?

Stingrays come in a pretty large range of sizes. Depending on how crazy we wanted to get, I'd imagine this model could support a variety of skins, and be scaled appropriately. It's true that some are rounder in shape, while others have more of a 'point' to the wings. I'm sure we could get by with one model for them all though.

I'd suggest the bard be as thick as it is wide (.5 in this case). Other than that I like it.

I like it. I'm not sure the barb is necessary, but if so, I'd say use the decimal dimensions to give it some y thickness. It's kind of hard to see from the side otherwise. I think you'd also be fine putting another box on the end of each wing, give a bit more taper to them. This is of course beyond the scope of what we're supposed to be doing now, so it may be awhile before this makes it in.

If I'm hiring npcs to help me around my place, I don't want them teleporting away. I want them working! The problems of lag occurs - as I understand it - when a server has lots of players on, and each player has dozens of npcs (counting farm animals - they all use processor power) within range of them, all doing pathfinding, using processor power. Probably not an issue in single player. But In larger servers I guess it can be a problem. It would probably not be a problem if, via order or server setting, the npcs could be made to not walk around, in cases where they don't need to. But that's the thing, what would these 'other ideas' be? In current TFC the player already knows everything just by reading the wiki. They don't need anyone else to tell them things. So how would an idea exchange be portrayed/enforced? There's no mechanics in TFC1, nor have I seen one proposed for TFC2, that would simulate such a thing. It might be more feasible if certain recipes were randomized. I have myself suggested a certain degree of randomization in alchemy and magic. If those made it into the game I could see perhaps the player learning formulas from npcs. I think randomization of anvil recipes would not be a popular thing. Overall I'm just not seeing this notion bringing a lot to the game, within the known framework.

I think npcs would be a great addition for the game, to help the player with certain mundane tasks. It seems like TFC2 is going to be more action-oriented, and so I see no problem with allowing the player to hire npcs to help with chores, as the player will probably still have to handle most or all of the combat. As long as the player has to pay the npcs a monthly(?) wage, and they vanish if not paid. The problem is, mobs that move around add lag. And npcs would be that. So there would probably need to be provisions for SMP environments to limit the numbers of npcs around. As for cultures, if you mean different skins for different climates, great. Beyond that and how their towns are built, I'm not sure how 'culture' would be depicted, and don't see how blending of cultures would work or be useful. That part could use some elaboration.