"Best Played with Friends" or "Too Few Ores"

[Master_Aricitic 6]

While I do like the realism added to this mod I think there are two problems that everyone (not playing with a group) is finding. In real life you are not alone... unless you are stranded. In real life, IF you are stranded you aren't looking to build yourself a home, you are looking to get back to civilization. Even if you are looking to build yourself a home away from civilization it is extremely uncommon to just wander out into the wilderness with only the clothes on your back and start from there... (I had to add that line for those would argue about building houses alone, in the wilderness...)

What I mean by this is the following: with regards to the scarcity of ores, in the real world this is fine because you don't have just one person trying to find and mine said ores, you have a town, village, or city (or nation, etc-point is it is multiple people...). In Minecraft Single Player you have ONE person looking for ores. Now, some people may like digging up their entire world, and I won't fault them for that, but there are certainly others who don't spend all their time underground (or strip-mining) and for them finding nothing but beautiful layer of some rock after beautiful layer of some other rock (with some ugly layers mixed in) gets tedious and boring real quick...

While I certainly understand that this is a work in progress, and in its 'release' form (alpha, beta, release [1.0] are becoming overused IMO) it will probably have more to do above ground as well as below, right now digging alone on SSP is too labor intensive and dangerous for some people (and certainly unrealistic for the reasons stated above). I know there are people who enjoy this in single player as it is, but I know just as well that there are those who would try it for a few hours and never touch it again, in disgust with the difficulty.

I have no intention of asking that the mod be changed, completely, but allowing for changes would be nice and probably necessary for some players. If a few lines were added to the config to allow for modification of ores generation in a world (i.e. amount increase or even decrease; but still within their specified rock layers), this would solve everyone's problem. For those who like the rarity (or people playing on servers) they can leave the config alone, for people who don't (or are playing alone) they can adjust the values to something more suited to themselves.

The idea to add shards of ore at the surface is a good idea, but it still keeps the values static. While there are mods to adjust the amount (and generation) of vanilla ores making one for this mod is much more difficult (well, sort of, you have the added difficulty of 'generate in' rather than just generating everywhere or between two height values or biomes).

Ultimately, if this mod is "Best Played with Friends" then, please, do the rest of us a favor and make it SMP only (or at least state that it is better played with more than one person). Those of us who like to play alone will then be warned that we should either be wary of the single player difficulty of this mod, or should stay away. I have nothing against playing with others, and I have nothing against multiplayer games but IF this is meant as a multiplayer game and ONLY as a multiplayer game, please state that early in the mod description. If it isn't, then please allow for customization of quantity within the mod.

[cevkiv 156]

Even Dwarf Fortress, which this mod is allegedly inspired by, has settings to increase or decrease the frequency of Ores occuring.

There's an option in the configs to change the frequency of cave-ins.

Why not, therefore, an option in the configs to change the frequency and distribution of ores? Or of chest size?

[ThinkTank 77]

I'd say 'best played with friends', and not just because it seems a better way to play with the TFcraft mod.

As of the next few updates it looks like minecraft will be merging SSP and SMP into one, as part of the run up to a workable mod API. So if you are ever frustrated with wandering around on your own, your just a local network connection away from inviting people into your world.

On a less postive note:

Jens Bergensten

Since single-player has been turned into a shell on top of a background server, the game’s resource requirements have increased. When playing single-player, the game needs to be able to both simulate and emulate the world, which take many more CPU cycles. We’re working on optimizing rendering, but those improvements will not be included until Minecraft 1.4.

For resource hungry mods, this could mean SMP or nothing for however long it takes to get to 1.4.

In short, its a distinct possibility that mods will need to be multiplayer (even multiplayer only for a while) if they are to keep up with the game. So if alot of the problems stem from tackling TFcrafts diffculty curve alone, that, along with singleplayer as we know it may become a thing of the past.

[Brodiggan 77]

One point I think many are missing in the debate over the wisdom of designing the mod around the assumption of multiplayer: Even on multiplayer servers the number of active players involved is not predictable. Are mechanics designed to be fun but difficult for 20 players going to still be a challenge for a server with a hundred players? Are mechanics designed to be challenging for 50 players going to be anything but a punishing grind for private servers with just a handful of good friends?

The answer isn't to design for a particular scale, but to try and ensure the mechanics you introduce are independent of how many players are playing. (At least in my opinion)

[Jed1314 420]

One point I think many are missing in the debate over the wisdom of designing the mod around the assumption of multiplayer: Even on multiplayer servers the number of active players involved is not predictable. Are mechanics designed to be fun but difficult for 20 players going to still be a challenge for a server with a hundred players? Are mechanics designed to be challenging for 50 players going to be anything but a punishing grind for private servers with just a handful of good friends?

The answer isn't to design for a particular scale, but to try and ensure the mechanics you introduce are independent of how many players are playing. (At least in my opinion)

The rebuttle to your point is a complex one indeed, rooted in human social behaviour.

To give the shorter and easier version, there is a finite limit to how many people will work together in an environment before they break into separate teams. Thats not saying they will war, merely that they won't always work together. Based on this simple principle, it is unlikely that you would find a server of 50 or even 20 people working as one cohesive unit. The game really only needs to be hard for groups of <10 because that is the largest group that is likely to single-mindedly pursue one task

[Master_Aricitic 6]

I'd say 'best played with friends', and not just because it seems a better way to play with the TFcraft mod.

As of the next few updates it looks like minecraft will be merging SSP and SMP into one, as part of the run up to a workable mod API. So if you are ever frustrated with wandering around on your own, your just a local network connection away from inviting people into your world.

This is, of course, assuming that you WANT to play with others, and have local friends. When I graduated from High School my mom moved from Vermont to Texas and I to West Virginia ~long an complicated story, I won't go into the details~after about a year and an accidental half of no school I moved back with my mom and started college. It's been roughly five years since (yeah, I struggle) and most of the 'acquaintances' I have made here have been short term friends.

<continued> On a less postive note:

<snip>

For resource hungry mods, this could mean SMP or nothing for however long it takes to get to 1.4.

In short, its a distinct possibility that mods will need to be multiplayer (even multiplayer only for a while) if they are to keep up with the game. So if alot of the problems stem from tackling TFcrafts diffculty curve alone, that, along with singleplayer as we know it may become a thing of the past.

This, both by design and programming, is stupid... First of all, the game already simulates and runs the world at the same time... besides the simple idiocies, wasn't this supposed to make it faster? It makes me wonder if anyone on that team, and I REALLY hate to say this, really learned how to program in Java, or if they're all self taught. As a Comp. Sci. major at Austin College we basically are required to learn Java until our third(?) year. While I tend to have an inability to 'finish' anything... I still know that Minecraft SHOULD be able to run at LEAST ten times better than it does.

However, you are right, it is likely that many mods will have to be SMP only because they will require a separate server purely to be runable on most machines (other than the bizarre high-end-to-bleeding-end market machine that someone who is a Minecraft fanatic happens to own).

One point I think many are missing in the debate over the wisdom of designing the mod around the assumption of multiplayer: Even on multiplayer servers the number of active players involved is not predictable. Are mechanics designed to be fun but difficult for 20 players going to still be a challenge for a server with a hundred players? Are mechanics designed to be challenging for 50 players going to be anything but a punishing grind for private servers with just a handful of good friends?

The answer isn't to design for a particular scale, but to try and ensure the mechanics you introduce are independent of how many players are playing. (At least in my opinion)

I'm not quite sure... no, I am fairly certain I don't understand this post. Are you arguing for or against multiplayer enforcement? Your points are good and valid, but, frankly, I don't want to have to always play with others.

I use to play WoW, and at first (well, for most of the time I played it) I was on a PvP server... the idea was that I wanted to possibility of random PvP encounters... Little did I know there were always going to be those thirty or so people who only played the game to harass others... The same is true of any multiplayer game, and while games like Minecraft (with the right server mods) can block (or whitelist) people, you then have to KNOW the right people to play with.

I much prefer an equal single player and multiplayer environment. It's a pitty when multiplayer isn't there, it's even worse when single player isn't... (Yes, I do know that there are quite a few games that ONLY have multiplayer or are basically made for multiplayer, I'm ignoring those as more often than not they have the aforementioned problem of harassment.)

[Brodiggan 77]

I'm not quite sure... no, I am fairly certain I don't understand this post. Are you arguing for or against multiplayer enforcement? Your points are good and valid, but, frankly, I don't want to have to always play with others.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I was arguing that designing around any particular assumption about the number of players playing would lead to fragile designs that become broken or tedious when those assumptions don't hold true in the real world, and that it would therefore be better in the longrun to try and find mechanics that don't depend on a particular scale/number of players to work well. (In response to the people saying that some of the issues people are having with single player don't matter because the mod is intended for multiplayer servers).

[Master_Aricitic 6]

Sorry if I wasn't clear, I was arguing that designing around any particular assumption about the number of players playing would lead to fragile designs that become broken or tedious when those assumptions don't hold true in the real world, and that it would therefore be better in the longrun to try and find mechanics that don't depend on a particular scale/number of players to work well. (In response to the people saying that some of the issues people are having with single player don't matter because the mod is intended for multiplayer servers).

Ah, that I can completely agree with. However, IS this mod meant for multiplayer? I haven't seen anything by the mod developer that states that it is.

I've noted a change to my argument in: http://terrafirmacraft.com/f/topic/1144-ore-generation-is-this-permanant/page__st__20 and as I don't think it necessary to restate myself (causing spam) here I'm just linking it. In any case it's about the scarcity of ore... or rather the difficulty in determining the 'proper' method of actually finding ore (as, once you know it, it isn't that difficult).