Darmo

That's how taste already works, so I'm sure the devs are aware of this. I think the universal nature is intentional, so that an experienced smith can teach a 'recipe' to a newb smith. This approximates the passing down of knowledge in a trade. If every player had unique recipes, that approximation would be lost. It would make the game more difficult, which is a valid way to go. It just depends on what the devs have in mind for TFC2.

Definitely looks much more natural from the front. The pads at the middle and top though, square isn't really proportional. They tend to be elongated. I'd cut them each in half 'vertically.' And I'd be fine with adding a fourth tine to the uppers.

Not so sure about the increased height of the 'dome', but I do like what you did with the face. Could we see a version with a 2-high dome?

Ok, finally got computer back online. As far as the qiviut texture, I was thinking more along the lines of the middle photo above - the one with a lot of qiviut on the back, hanging down in strings. For a couple reasons. One, having a patchy back leaves floating edges as shown in the picture above. This is ok with things like the camel blanket, where it's actually a distinct material from the animal. But I think for the musk ox, it's better to not have a bunch of exposed floating edges on the top surface, that highlight the separation. So I think if the top surface were mostly qiviut, that would be good. I think the dangling strings of qiviut are the main thing to focus on, for the sides. The free-floating patches just kind of look odd, like splatters of dirt or something. We really don't have the fine texture needed to depict them well I think. So let's just get rid of the floating patches on the sides, and go for hanging strings. They read better, imho. As for the neck, I was thinking something like below: A lot of the musk ox pictures, their neck fur seems to form a ridge somewhat like that. But that's just a suggestion. What you've got for a neck does work. I see you moved the horn bases closer together, which helps, but I do think they'd look better larger.

Ok, things are finally back in order here, I think. I like the look of things, I just wish the model had been built smaller. It's at double scale right now and I think there was room to have made the overall model smaller. It's going to have more apparent detail than other models of similar size. That said, I was awol for a while, and you've already put a lot of work into the two textures, and I like the structure generally speaking, so we can roll with it at the scale it is at I think. But, some minor criticisms: The ear tips, I see, are a large area which is mostly transparent in the current textures. I assume this is for use in an african lynx texture, since they have rather long, and somewhat curved, ear tips. However African lynxes have very different apparent body proportions from the other two - probably mainly due to having less fur, but still, they look very different. So I'm going to ask that if you want to do an african lynx, it be a separate model with thinner legs and smaller head. In that context, I'd also ask that you reduce the ear tip plane size for the bob-lynx to be minimal, 1 pixel wide, and long enough for the lynx, with the bobcat having transparent part to reduce length. Also more nearly centered in the ear.If you do do this model, you might want to consider also making it work for an ocelot, which Bioxx has requested, and has a similar enough look I think. My earlier size comments notwithstanding, the ocelot would probably need the body size of the bob-lynx model, in order to do the texture well. I also feel like the bobcat cheek fluff is still a bit too large. Also both have some pixels below the eyes (or maybe supposed to be part of the eyes?) that I think aren't really necessary. I think 2x1 eyes would be plenty. To me they kind of look like they have makeup under their eyes, like a football(American football) player.

So, ive had a hard drive explosion. Working on fixing, but I don't have Mcmc. Just phone and tablet, both of which I hate typing on. So I won't be of a lot of help for probably several days. I can't tell enough about cheek tufts or ears from that picture. I definitely don't think we need two separate models though. They're close enough in form.

The problem here is one of economy. We don't know yet how ore yields will be in TFC2, but let's put this in context of TFC1. I go to all the effort of mining all this mercury ore, smelting it down to get mercury, all for 5-10% more of certain ores. The efficiency ration would have to be immense to make this worthwhile. I.e. 1-2 units of mercury to obtain 5-10% bonus of those metals. Otherwise, instead of mining mercury it would be far more efficient for me to simply spend that time mining more of the metals I actually want. This is kind of the same issue with saltpeter currently - it's debatable whether it's worth spending the time making gunpowder, vs just spending that time mining out the area by hand. Now in the context of TFC2, it may be possible that it's much harder to find certain metals, given that each 4k square island will be a single layer of a single type of stone. But at the same time, if I have found *some* copper ore, or tin, or zinc, then that means I've found an entire island that can spawn that stuff (unless raw ores can be found in treasure chests in fortresses). So why not just find another vein? In the current TFC, redstones spawn mostly in the same rocks that give native copper. If that remains the case in TFC2, then it's definitely going to be better to just find more copper. Even for silver, I'd rather have fun exploring till I find an island with silver, rather than smelt thousands of times more copper than I'll ever need, just to pick up measly amounts of silver. 'Realism' is all well and good, but how will it affect gameplay? The mechanic needs to be balanced and useful, otherwise it's just a waste of time. Personally I would see mercury as better used in alchemy/potion making, and maybe as a quenching bath for high tier metal smithing. I would love for it to be required to make plate glass, but glass probably just isn't useful enough as it is to justify that. Instead it might be used to form plates of high tier lightweight metals, or to make mirrors for....reasons...magic?...Idk. But marginal metal bonuses sound like a waste of time to me unless the ore situation is changing quite drastically in TFC2.

have any of the blocks above been chiseled? Chiseled blocks are treated as air for forge purposes.

So boxes instead of sprites. It's a good point on the fractional boxes thing. I haven't gotten around to trying that out yet. So the tips could have a pad that is .8 wide, and 'fingers' that are .6 or so. This would prevent z-fighting.

I think that ideally it would be a scaling system. So if the player is in the stone age and has like, 5 maize plants, the game goes easy on them and doesn't hassle them. But if the player is going bonkers with their farms and has 150 planted crops in one hex, up the difficulty and bring in some hassling animals. The more crops (or animals) the greater the chance. So ideally you're only becoming annoying when the player already probably has a lot of crops/animals anyway. And if the hasslers despawn after destroying X crop blocks or animals, you can control the damage. Each hassler will reduce the total crops by no more than a certain amount, so as not to wipe out the player's stuff in one shot. This in turn reduces the chance of the next one spawning. If the chance is based on crops per hex, it could encourage the player to spread their fields out a bit, reducing the chance for each field (or pen of animals) to be hassled. Or it could just be based on a single block check that scans for crops/animals in a 5 block or whatever radius, and depending on the count, maybe gets hassled. Where the hasslers spawn might be tricky. If fences are used as a defense, you don't want the hassler spawning within the fence - that's cheating. That might limit the enclosure size. If it got too large, the check might not realize there's a fence, and spawn the hassler inside. I hope I'm not hijacking your thread Therighthon. Your macro idea of island-wide spawning I like, and don't have a lot to suggest, especially given my lack of knowledge of the code possibilities. I might suggest that aside form picking from the 3 categories you suggested, maybe there should also be only 1 production animal of each type. So an island might only have 1 certain wool producing animal, or milk producer. If some animals produced more than a given commodity than others, then one island might have a really good milk producer, but poor wool production. Another might have both be not great producers, and another might be have really good ones. I guess some could be absent altogether. It just might make the islands have different characters, rather than each one being the same animals in different skins.

I might add, that with regard to the player breeding lots of animals, option C would be best, and moreover they should spawn often in the vicinity of the player's animals. This should also be true of crops. This would be a direct difficulty mechanic. So the player has a lot of poultry? weasels spawn more often, and try to kill the chickens. larger animals, you get wolves, big cats, and other predators. Bears too maybe. If the player has a bunch of crops, then raccoons, deer, and pigs start appearing and attempting to attack the crops. The more of these things the player has, the more predators and crop hasslers appear. Depending on difficulty desired, maybe a simple fence stops most of these. Or maybe it doesn't, and the player must employ a variety of counter-meatures. Weaseles and raccoons can just walk through a split rail fence (if code feasible). So the player must construct wicker fence panels (made from sticks) or simply build a 2-high wall of solid blocks around the chickens. Deer can jump 3 high, so the player has to build an extra-tall fence to keep them out. Bears can break through wood fence, so a stone fence is needed. And if all else fails, guard animals (finally a use for wolves). So I think there should be a game challenge spawning aspect, that is separate from any natural ecosystem mechanic. These challenge spawned creatures might be different in that if they reach their target and kill a few animals or destroy a lot of crops, they then despawn. Or if they can't get to their target for a certain amount of time, again, they despawn. At least, the non-violent ones. If a bear gets in and kills the player's guard animals, and starts killing livestock, maybe it won't go away on it's own and the player has to deal with it. The notion of wild animals respawning on their own to keep a balance, is fun, but I wonder how that would affect the challenge level of the game, in terms of the player being able to always hunt for food. If hunting were made harder, so that non-breedable prey animals flee if the player gets within a certain range and isn't sneaking, that would probably help balance the situation.

well, I like the idea. I don't know if it's feasible but I like it.

That head position seems good. I can look very far each way and the head stays visible, so I like that. I think you could make the horn bases larger, so they nearly meet in the middle. It seems like in most pictures they are very close together. The neck isn't really doing anything for the head though, it's barely visible at any angle. I think what you could maybe do with the neck is move it up and make it a ridge just a little bit narrower than the head. It'll server to emphasize the hump. A lot of musk ox pictures seem to show a shaggy sort of ridge mane up there. So I was looking for pictures of a shaven musk ox and found none. Turns out you don't shave them. Musk ox wool is called qiviut. It's a fine underlayer that is grown every winter, and shed every spring. You either comb out the fibers as they shed, or just collect the clumps that the animal rubs off on stuff. I've attached some pictures of molting musk ox. It seems like maybe it'd be more appropriate to have some boxes that cap bodymain, bodyshoulder, and bodywool. So these boxes would be just 1 or 2 pixels larger, and sit a little bit above the body boxes. They will have transparent textures with lighter long stringy qiviut pieces coming down the sides. The neck ridge I don't think we'll be able to see the bottom edges, so just make it have a color to match the qiviut boxes. No need for a cap box for the neck ridge. Let's just stick with stringy dangling pieces (like the middle photo, with the ox laying down), and not have like, patches hanging around on their own.This will make it so we don't need to worry about upper parts of the legs, fortunately. If you can only get this once a year, that's much less desireable than a sheep that can be shorn every 24 hrs. I think we should assume we'll take some liberties with the actual growth pattern, and the player is able to collect it fairly regularly, like the vanilla sheep. And, you may want to wait awhile to do these things, in case Bioxx overrules me on how this might work. Oh, and the nose texture needs some work, but maybe you hadn't gotten to that level of detail yet.

I made this post awhile back in the Future of Building Thread, which summarized some of the most important posts in the past. Not sure how recently in 2015 you were watching. Magic is still up in the air to the best of my knowledge. I think Bioxx is still working on getting in the basic features, from what I can tell. You might be interested to go over to the development forum and peruse some of the excellent animal models we in the model team have been working on.

Thing is you can get metal without ever opening a mine. If you luck upon an exposed vein you can get a LOT of metal without having a mine. Just getting metal is not that great an achievement. Getting to steel is a pretty good achievement. If you're doing serious mining with ladders, you already have metal, for your crafting grid to be big enough to make them. Although I suppose that may change in TFC2. I've never had a problem with the current torch mechanics. I do mine level by level though, so once I'm done with one level I can close it off and not worry about it again. Mostly I just leave pumpkins till I'm done, but that might not be an option in TFC2. I also take 2-3 jugs, and utilize barrels of water to Maximize my time in the mine. You build up a significant amount of spawn protection mining, which helps when you just make a short run for water or food. Light is pretty significant in minecraft. I'd hate to just give it away for finding 10 nuggets on the ground. That would cut off an entire progression possibility.

Ok, I think we'll compromise on the slanted rump, which I think breaks up the rigid structure a bit, and also keeping the tail base. I'm having Diego do one more model before we add him to the team. Beaver Definitive 3.MCModel

Diego has put together a couple versions of a beaver for us. The differences are slight - one has the rump box orthogonal to the other boxes in the body, the other version has it slightly slanted. The orthogonal version also has a slightly protruding box at the base of the tail. I have preferences in these matters, but they are slight, and I wanted to see what others thought of these details, and the model and texture in general. MCMCBeaverOrthogonal.MCModel MCMCBeaverSlanted.MCModel

That is awesome. This is going to increase the demand for deserts even more though!

Oh right, ya, if there's bonuses involved then there's an incentive. Kind of forgot about that part of the discussion!

I'd be interested in the mining part being harder for sure - recovering treasures from the bowels of the earth is, for me, different than hauling building material. Recovery of the treasure is part of the fun to me. And if one thinks about how the TFC2 ore will be - long sinuous veins - it actually will lend itself very well to minecarts. Unlike the current ore generation which is vertical. So ya, I'm totally on board for ore to be extremely heavy, to incentivize getting it out of the mine via cart. Then there's the question of whether the player processes it at the mine, or hauls it back home. That's kind of another issue. But hauling building material? I know the trees or stone are there. It's fun to first discover a type you want, but then there's no more thrill really. There's always plenty once you find them. In your example Tony, 9 stacks, I almost certainly wouldn't minecart it. Minecarts are too much of a material and time investment. It'd still be faster to just carry it by hand at 9 stacks. We don't know how cart mechanics will work so I can't really comment on that. The cost to make a cart, vs the speed penalties (I presume) and how much more than the player they can carry would dictate if they're more attractive than just making more trips. If they're too easy to make it trivializes them. If too hard, I'll just carry stuff. It will be interesting to see the balance. To me, I think it would be enough to make certain very heavy items the focus of carts. Like here's a bed. It weighs 500. You cannot move while carrying this. Your only option is to move it by hand cart or greater. Same for a barrel full of liquid perhaps, or quern base. Now here's a bloomery block. It weights 1000. You can move it by hand cart at a crawl. Donkey would be faster. Here is a blast furnace. It weighs 2000 and slows a donkey to a crawl. Minecart is best option. Super-heavy items could be limited so that the player cannot place them more than 1 block away from themselves, to discourage a place-and-break chain of movement. I think you can incentivize the use of transport, without making building a house a huge ordeal.

I'd assume that the non-wheel alternative is just a clay knapping system like we already have in TFC1. I think that'll still be the way to go in TFC2, for non-round objects, like the various tool molds. I think if the wheel is done like drkoaeg's suggestion, you pretty much have to have recipes that can only be done on the wheel. Because the knapping method would be far faster and if you can do a vessel both ways, I think people will do it the knapping way every time.

I think it's better to change the item weights, not the carry limit. If you raise and lower the carry limit you're affecting the amounts of everything in the game that the player can carry. If you just affect the weights of certain items, then you can focus on, for instance, just building materials. Things like bloomery and blast furnace blocks can be left to weigh a huge amount (if desired) and thus *always* be burdensome, and incentivize cart use.

My impression was that a large part of the impetus behind this encumbrance system was to make minecarts useful. Personally I prefer the size system we have now. But, if the weights are too much in the final version, someone is going to mod them lower, if they're not made natively configurable. I don't think most people would argue about weights for armor and weapons and stuff like that. I think it's when you get into building material that people differ. For some, I think they like the idea of building material being an extension of the hardcore-ness of the mod. They like the idea of realism, and fighting for every jot of progress, right down to the last door and plank. Others - like me - are more interested in the act of building and design. I want to do big beautiful projects. Not huts. It's already a large amount of work processing the materials to build a big project with, and takes a lot of time. For those of us who enjoy the act of design and building, having to return to a minecart every fourth block is not going to improve the experience at all. It might be that a single config setting would meet most needs. Perhaps a "builder" setting for those who don't want to be burdened overly much by building material weight - which would allow quantities similar to TFC1 to be carried perhaps. A "normal" setting with a mid-range weight of building materials. And a "hardcore" setting with very heavy materials, for the 'realists'. These settings would alter the weight of logs, planks, cobble, stone, etc. But not weapons, armor, food, sticks, etc. That's kind of what I'm hoping for.

a tricky issue. I think something like this could make mining more interesting and difficult at depth, requiring water pumps. My question is how it would work when caves and ravines intersect this aquifer? Would there be water there, in the ravine or cave? If not, you run into an issue where the player breaks a wall of the cave or ravine and now water is spilling all over. What if they place a block of wood or whatever in the cave or ravine. Then they remove it, and suddenly water is there? If not, these blocks could be used to 'clean up' water that appears while mining, without use of pumps. To avoid that I think you'd have to specify whether a block generates water during world creation. Naturally created air blocks - cave, ravine, whatever - won't generate water ever. Even if a block is placed then removed. But the surrounding stone can. I definitely wouldn't mind mine pumps being a thing (more use for engines and mechanisms) especially given that sea level is only going to be at 50 or 60 or whatever in TFC2. So super-deep mining won't be a thing anymore. Seems like we could use something to replace the difficulty perhaps.

I like the more detailed graphic you put in the first post drkoaeg. Much more explanatory about the idea. And I think well within the standards of crafting minigames, imo. All of the processes in tfc are HIGHLY abstracted. I think it's a natural tendency for people to want more detail in the things they're highly experienced in. There's been some suggestions for extremely detailed alcohol brewing mechanics, from people obviously highly experienced irl with brewing. There's nothing wrong with highly detailed suggestions, but drkoaeg's is well within the norm I think. Depending on how much time the player has to respond to bulges, it seems like it's not difficult, just requires attention, and an amount of time greater than clay knapping currently requires, I'd imagine. This seems appropriate for a stone-age craft, to me at least. It's a minigame that is not just removing blocks, and I like that - I think variety is good. Though whether or not it becomes extremely complicated to code is another matter. But it seems like just several rotating sprites which change once in awhile, and several hitboxes, plus a filling-up graphic on the side. My question - and I only have a tiny bit of pottery wheel experience - but isn't the danger less of an ellipse forming (symmetrical bulges) but more that the vessel begins to tilt in one direction? So maybe the bulge is in one spot rather than two? And these graphics will rotate right? So if it starts to bulge, the bulge will rotate? In that scenario I think maybe 8 hit-boxes would be better. Will there be stages of bulge? Or just one stage and if you don't address it in time the pot is ruined? And the bottom row middle image has four X's, for the neck and body. Does this mean the player has to tend to both those levels at the same time? The side view, that slowly fills upward, and acts as the timer so the player knows how much longer they have to go ya? I like the idea overall. I was skeptical at first but the graphics really help get across how it would work. It might be interesting if the player could control the speed. Higher speed fills up the progress bar faster, but more bulges will form, and they will rotate faster, requiring more careful attention.