transcengopher

We're talking about a major rewrite of the code that will undeniably result in a bug-free, optimized game with better graphics

I'm sorry, but what rewrite are you talking about? They haven't still fixed a bug that wouldn't let Skype to hide in a tray on win7. That was what, five-ish years of "hard work on rewriting a code"?

It won't change anything for the development of TFC as long as Microsoft still allows modding of Minecraft.

Five minutes of conspiracy theories.

See, Microsoft seems to be making an attempt at trying to monetize MC in one way or another. The one way they can do it is paid content. I don't think paid content can fly if thousands of people across the world can make the same exact content for free, so mods are actually detrimental to the whole monetizing thing.

Looks like our devs need to move the "back" equipment slot to some other array, this causes issues with mods compatibility.

I think TConstruct is a descent example of how that can be achieved, except I don't know about it rendering extra stuff onto the player model.

You can craft redstone torches to get a dim light emitter. If I remember correctly, that hasn't been disabled here.

Other than that and to try to resolve some issues with current protection implementation - can we get slight protection value leak into the chunks outside of the 5x5, to make in not drop off instantly, but rather have stair-like decrease? I feel like that's more believable behaviour to what it's trying to achieve.

Occasionally getting some gravel actually is not a bad idea, I think.

About wood, the crafting grid would not give you access to high tier wood constructions since they would need nails (metals)

There's plenty of ways to create complicated wood constructs without metal nails at all or with wooden substitudes for them, don't overvalue metal, please.

I'm actually not quite sure what is tried to achieve here, honestly. It's not like players want to place many torches around their homes - it's vanilla mechanics that beat them into doing so.

This is good suggestion. Considering monsters ain't gonna disappear and I'm usually making a calculated grid to achieve more placement efficiency, would be nice to have both indication of where was the torch placed and how long it's left until it'll need a replacement.

I'm not really sure about complete gradual reduction, since torch is actually useless once its light is reached a level of 6, and with gradual reduction you then might as well place one on each and every block around, since at some point there always will be a spot with 6 or less in the grid. That latter thing would make the whole torchfield thing even more obnoxious, and as I understand from Bioxx's SotM, that is exactly what he wanted to avoid.

I designed the new bear model after a grizzly bear I saw at the zoo. I wanted to capture the lumber in the way it walks, the shape of the head and the way the front paws angle inwards. I guess I focused too much on all the aspects that make it a bear without balancing it against simplicity. The best model is one that says what it is so clearly in as few words (or boxes) as possible. Hopefully, I'll be able to design a new model which is unmistakably a bear in its basic form. Thanks for the support

You did a fine job with the deer, so I'm in no doubt you can do the same with the rest of the models (namely one, unless animal-that-can't-be-named counts as well, considering I havent heard about the latter for a good while now).

Rain being global is a problem in itself, one we'd rather fix than simply ignore. One of the advantages to having tree spawning independant from latitude is that it means that trees can grow in much warmer climates at higher altitudes. Similarly, you can get animals like sheep, bears and wolves spawning much closer to the equator on high mountains- almost like small climate islands, completely isolated from their surroundings. My point is that trees should spawn on the equator, but I'd rather do this by fixing the underlying issues with the system than to bring back vanilla mechanics. When we start using explicit values, they become visible. You'd be able to walk to -5000 z for example and see the boundary.

How DO you fix the rain though? There's no real weather hooks I can see, you yourself will have to implement weather system from scratch, pretty much. Not that you weren't able to, but still.

That said, old mines are a lot more dangerous now. Hopefully still bearable.

I think the new deer model is much better than the old one.

I'm editing the starting post, actually, adding a new bullet that I've forgotten at the time of writing it.

Also, seeing as there's this texture map now, I think it should be made for each complex model in a bit higher resolution, given a legend in form of signed parts, like already done in an example, and  in some way included in the TFC download, maybe in separate archive or something.

What the title says - as time goes on, I see more and more steps towards making animal models closer to how they are looking in the real world. I thought about this and realized this isn't as amazing an option as that might sound.

Reasons:

1. Style compromising. Minecraft has quite distinct blocky style to it. Mostly. More often than not shapes are parallel or perpendicular to each other, which fits well with the looks of the rest of this world. Higher model quality looks out of place in this.

2. Animation quality. There seems to be a great deal of compromises done in the engine's innate animation handlers and providers - models do not have turning, jumping, falling animation states, walking animation triggers on any movement, including entity being moved via minecart. I bet there's no real hooks for resolving these problems either. Now, for simplified default models that isn't a problem. However, as detail count increases, it starts to look more and more stupid. There's a reason "big" developers are starting to rely on motion capture as graphics get better.

3. AI. Not that it is an insolvable problem, but I myself will actually expect more detailed entities to behave more life-like. As far as I understand, these things are a massive PITA to code into minecraft, which is the reason we had so little in terms of mods that add and/or improve this particular aspect of the game as opposed to mods that simply add some plain blocks with "magic" machines and some tools (no matter the actual mechanics of said blocks and tools), and considering that most of aggressive mobs just charge the player head on, occassionally taking detours for navigating pits and walls.

4. Performance. This one is miniscule and the least of a concern out of all three, but I just felt like having three bullets to my point, so it's in there too.

I'm not saying I don't like models Dunk is making, mind. All I'm saying is these models are far better being used somewhere else, and for TFC we need to have simplified ones with a not a lot more details than in current vanilla minecraft models have. I'd say twice as much body parts (that would make 12-18 pieces) should be a max number.

Example!

Oh, nice. Thanks.

Completly agree. My meat deposit is located on a mountain where temperature is low enough to slow down decay so much that i still have meat from 2 years ago...Around my home there are plenty of sheeps and deer that i feel that i'm not "surviving" anymore. The same "survival" nonexistence as vanilla.

 

Bad balance then. Cooperative multiplayer makes all things more easy: one player go east another go west...double crops, double bushes, double meat. Just one trip means no trouble AT ALL in surviving.

 

The fact is that terrafirmacraft doesn't make survival really "survival". Is still a "Creative on hard" like vanilla, or maybe a "Creative on Very hard" just because monsters does more damage and player less.

 

Don't get me wrong, i like the mod and i'm enjoying it, but i feel that all those intentions about making minecraft a real "survival" experience are just intentions. The fact about developer that don't want to listen any suggestions about the UBER grind fest prospeting pick is tells a lot about what they want from the mod: a game that's a "more grind" experience instead of a survival one.

Prospecting is probably the most arguable game mechanics added by the mod, due to the bad implementation (you can place and prospect a block of thacth to help in locating surface ore...) and to the stone grind it force to do.

Hope that at least they will add more mechanics to make food more rare and hard to obtain, like disease and plague to animals and crops.

Basically, you "froze" the meat in a fridge, what do you think it's supposed to do then? Rot anyway? I have a piece of meat from three years ago sitting in my fridge IRL, it's doing fine, you know.

Disease won't happen, I'll tell you that much. Some predators probably will though, when those finally make it in.

By the way, telling that propick is grindy is something from another world for me. Do you not exploit those mechanics the same way you do with food decay, or what? Far as I'm concerned, you don't even need no stinkin' thatch to find surface ores, loose rocks alone are plenty'o'clue.

Reading diagonally (post probably will be updated several times, considering a give a flying whirl):

Yes, I DO put pickles in my meals. Soups, ragouts, that-stuff-in-the-pot-where-you-throw-everything-in-and-it-comes-out-pretty-delicious-I-don't-know-the-english-name-for, etc.

I also can name couple of meals that benefit from having some dehydrated ingredients, but those are rare and far between.

Just stick it up to the tree layer or specific tree type to mushroom type map. I know that's what I'll do.

And what do you exactly mean with that last edit sentence, Gopher? I cant brain that sentence.

Once you detach an player energy component from stomach fullness, I'll then expect stomach to be an inner reserve of nutrition and energy that is converted into player's energy as stomach empties rather than immediately be available. That would mean a second inner nutrition pool that is filled by eating and is empying into the main pool at a certain speed. Such speed should depend on current player activity, but be capped at some arbitrary point.

This in its turn does open a possibility for someone to die of hunger while he is eating or even has full stomach. In certain conditions.

This is good, but I think TFC is taking a big steps towards longer and longer terrain generation lately. With all this we might then be required to externally pregenerate a considerable chunks of our worlds in some sort of external software. Oh, and obviously, loading a chunk containing that much more data is an impact as well.

Isn't a normal green bar already representing energy? Why do we need a second one?

Edit:

I get it now. But then stomach fullness will not supposed to immediately affect energy/nutrition/whatever. And that would mean a pretty funny situations of people dying of hunger while chomping on some beef steak.

Great advantage of Right clicking to get nuts and fruits. No need to break the leaves. Balance is only works on the right season.

Just how believable is that you can go around in the middle of the winter breaking oak leaves and it will drop saplings?

Well, about that. It's true that you get a huge amount of seeds when you do that. But then once you plant the seed, it will grow a lot (and I do mean a lot) longer than even normal tree sapling in TFC does, let alone the vanilla tree. We are talking months here, not days.

I don't even have a problem with planted seed to die off with some chance while it's still deemed to be weak enough to do such a thing. That way planter and/or fertilizer can be used to lessen this chance, but requiring it? No and no. I have enough beef with most mods for their "I'm gonna give you a way to do this and you either are gonna love it or you gonna not do this at all" to be backing up similar approaches to TFC designs.

Reason I'm so vocal in this regard is I do have a fleshed out design for nature overhaul addon that includes most of the things we are talked in this thread.

Why won't you just install a separate mod that will leave gravestones in places of your death?

Why do you people require specifically TFC to be all-in-one-package mod that includes everything you need and can think of? It's not a coremod anymore, time to use all these utility mods that Forge API can provide.

wild plants also have staggeringly high failure rates for seeds, only a tiny fraction of seeds produced in a plant's lifetime will manage to grow into a new plant naturally.

The reason for that is not that seeds themselves are as weak as you are making them out to be - it's because they have to compete for space with all the seeds that happen to fall in that particular place at that time, as well as they have to survive all them birds and animals that will happen to want to eat it. None of it can be emulated in TFC, by the way.

Other than that, I have seen plenty of tree seeds that happen to feel just fine growing in tiny cracks in the asphalt road. And I've seen how many saplings can sprout in a relatively small area around a single oak tree (in short, you can't place a foot out there without stepping on three or four of them, and I'm not even a Bigfoot).

As I stand, I don't see the reason to add more steps to planting a tree. And for them requiring to be fertilized is even more so. The reason they fertilize soil in pots on tree farms is really because those pots more often than not contain severely overused, dry soil with next to no nutrients.

--snip thatch decay snip--

Most of this is fine and I actually like it, except for the part about browning-out thatch blocks. There's no way to tell when the block was placed in a world without making it a ticking tile, and it's even worse with your idea of reinforced things that would last you a year. Generally speaking, you don't want to have much of those tickers around for performance reasons. I would suggest implementing something like this, but using rain/thunderstorms to trigger the decaying effect (with some fairly-not-big chance on a tick, like 2% for each block). Reinforcing will then be used to lower that chance. You might think 2% is low (what a casual-shit kiddy I am, amirite?), but in actuality it's not at all, if you think about a chance of fairly sizeable thatch shack not to be affected by this after one tick iteration.

It raises the question as to why there was never any full flowing water blocks in vanilla.

Where would they flow to? World isn't generated enough for them to decide to flow towards any particular direction most of the time. Pregenerating this much terrain at once would kill servers left and right.