TaeoG

*spooky music intensifies*

hmm, yes, I did promise an alpha release when the world gen is done didn't I? Alright, I'll focus on the Eldritch dimension, treasure chest generation, block aspects, and removing the last few base edits I have left. EDIT: OH, and I have to update the version of TFC I'm building off of, it's had a handful of updates since I set up my coding environment, and I know for a fact they've broken a few of my things.

Well, I think the custom rendering is finished. All grass, tallgrass, ferns, leaves, claygrass etc now render the appropriate color for season and/or biome.Next I'll be moving on to porting all the monsters over, which should be ridiculously simple. (fingers crossed)

Does TFC grass not turn white when there is snow on it, or did I screw something up?

here you can see the leaf gradient as it looks in the fall. You'll notice that the leaves that are completely within the magic biomes don't change color due to season. This seems to be the way it works best without any strange mixes, and helps keep those biomes unique.

Well it took me a while to figure out the best way to mix these colors properly, but we're making strong headway.

Coloring the foliage is a lot harder than I expected. Kitty gave me an excellent Idea to allow me to alter her blocks' rendering behaviour without overwriting the base classes, so thats now a breeze. The problem is Thaumcraft foliage is colored by biome, while TerraFirmaCraft foliage is colored by season. Its quite hard to have the colors properly merge between regular biomes and the magic ones on the borders if I have my rendering code only kick in on magic biomes. Harder yet if I want to make the magic biome colors ALSO respond to seasonal changes. I mean, I could run both sets of code separatelyand merge their results to get a final color, but that essentially means doubling the work it takes to render those blocks, which will likely be a huge performance hit. Looks like I'm probably gonna be rewriting the rendering code from scratch. Bugger.

none of the wand caps in my crossover use nuggets. They have a special anvil recipe. If I remember correctly (its been a while since I coded them) you get 2 caps from one iron bar. This means they're technically 1 nugget more expensive to make per pair, but hey, everything's a little harder in TerraFirmaCraft. EDIT: my math was off, its one nugget cheaper!

The wand caps have all been implemented, and all the wand foci aside from the damage dealing ones should work as is. The focus right now is getting world gen ironed out, but the ice/fire/lightning wand foci will come shortly after that

Silverwood Knots with aura nodes in them act.... unpredictably, when they're modeled after TFC wood. Currently if you chop down a silverwood tree with a knot in it, the knot stays behind. However, maybe 50% of the time the block just disappears after a few seconds. I honestly have no idea why, pretty sure that's TFC wood behaviour. The other 50% of the time it remains floating there, to be captured or left alone. EDIT: Yes, it was the code TFC has to prevent floating trees. A natural log (one that generated, not placed) will disappear when it ticks, if it has no other blocks around it. The reason why some blocks appeared to remain is simply because they hadn't ticked yet. Anyways, added a clause for silverwood knots to ignore that code, so it works now. Silverwood trees are, as far as I'm concerned, complete.

well, that was easy enough. Now just to make it work with TFC axes

Thanks for the encouragement guys, its always helpful to know I'm not just plugging away at this for myself. Currently messing with the silverwood trees. They're generating, and even have the knot where a pure aura node should be, yet the node isn't in there. Not sure why, this will take some digging.

Thats also a wisp in the picture with the pech, not an aura node. It was nice of them to stay close together long enough for me to take a screenshot. I sent Kitty a message, and I'm off to bed. Hopefully she can help me out.

Devise a complicated system of converting from atreelayer integer to an EnumTree to a log/leaf block corresponding to said tree from said layer Discover after all that is done that there is a different getTreeLayer method that actually returns a DataLayer with a block built in that I can reference Say F--- it and use my complicated system because I like big switch statements On a related note, trees in magic forests now are made out of the tree blocks for one of the trees that should have spawned there otherwise. They're still "magic tree" shaped though. My code doesn't actually check to see if that type of tree can survive in that climate though.... hmmm, I may fix that, I may not. Its Magic, after all. Not sure if it's a good choice for converting the trees there, but I like it. Keeps the theme of the area while still allowing for the flora diversity that TFC adds, instead of them just being oak, which was my original plan. The next goal is change the render code for leaves, tall grass and other flora so that they change to reflect the blue/black/purple colourations from the various Thaumcraft biomes. This raises a couple issues though. If TFC didn't give their biomes a uniform, neutral color, you may get some weird looking foliage at random.The second problem being that this is a "Base Edit", which is explicitly not allowed in mods released on this forum. As far as I'm concerned it is a must for this mod though. Either I need to find a loophole, or release this mod elsewhere.

Not a problem, but.... blegh, getting a crash from my cobblestone render code. I know what's causing it, because the magic ore did the exact same thing. but I don't remember exactly how to fix it. So much fun debugging something you know you already fixed, lol EDIT: Fixed the rendering. Rendering in pass 1 is such a pain, I don't know why I ever try that. But I noticed this during testing Its exciting because I wasn't sure if they were gonna show up without me explicitly forcing them to. Looks like thats a potential issue I can cross off my list.

Yep, I was right. "Hilltopstones" were set to generate anywhere over 84, which is EVERYWHERE in TFC. I now have them set to over 175, so they only generate in mountains and tall hills. Works great Next step: Figuring out how to make cutting down silverwood trees with nodes in them work properly

Here is a screenshot of the mossy cobblestones, compared to the vanilla. Back in the day, mossy cobblestone and cobblestone both had the same texture, with moss superimposed on one of them. At some point they redid the cobblestone texture, but not the moss stone, so their textures no longer mesh properly. Since I wanted to use multi-pass rendering to just render moss on top of the TFC cobblestone textures, and not make a whole new texture for every rock, I had to make my own moss texture. It doesn't quite look the same, but at least the moss follows the cracks in the cobblestone properly. If someone feels they can do a better job let me know, low density textures are not my forte.

well that's done. It may not look like much, but Thaumcraft mounds now generate with cobble, mossy cobble, dirt and grass of the appropriate type for the area. Yes, I added a mossy cobble for each type of stone, sorry the moss texture is kinda crap. I still intend on making the chests inside be of the right wood for the area as well, but I think I'm going to work on the shrines next. I think they're generating all over the place because they're supposed to be on top of a hill, and all of TFC's terrain is way above the top of vanilla hills. Just a hunch again though.

My hunch was correct. Azanor's method of generating the mounds was in order X->Y->Z, which caused all kinds of trouble with the physics of the blocks it was messing around with. After rearranging the order of generation, so first the cobble/mossy cobble, then the air/ladders/stairs in Y->X->Z order, then finally the dirt and grass on top, the inside of the dungeon is now devoid of any extra blocks. However the ladders have always fallen off when I go look inside. I don't know why. Minor issue though, in comparison.

Imgur refuses to upload my screenshots, but I'm getting those little obsidian altars with chests on it EVERYWHERE. I don't think they were that common in vanilla. Not sure what to do about that. I may also have to revamp the way Thaumcraft generates mounds, Its just a hunch at the moment, but I think it's actually causing the blocks around it to do a physics tick WHILE generating, and seemingly generating in layers from the bottom up. This means you end up with a few layers of dirt in the bottom of the little dungeon that fell from above while it was generating. Not sure if it's destroying the chests or not.

I can't, with the system I have in place, add extra geometry to the TC structures, I can only swap blocks. You're right that the inside of the mound is stone. Its actually cobblestone, which also collapses. As a potential fix I replaced the cobblestone with bricks, but that meant the mossy cobblestone boulders that TC generates in magic forests became part brick, which is no good. I think I may just replace it with raw stone instead, and replace the mossy cobble in particular with shale or some other greenish rock. Either that or implement a fake version of TFC cobble that doesn't collapse, but still gives real TFC cobble if mined.

I could do that, but keep in mind that those mounds are considerably larger, and would stick out like a sore thumb if they were stone. It seems like these mounds are supposed to be sort of inconspicuous, with only a small door on the side. Still thinking about it.

Lol, just realized something. TFC dirt doesn't float, so when Thaumcraft generates a mound, it immediately collapses. I'm gonna have to sleep on this one, no idea how to solve that. I mean, I could place the dirt blocks without alerting the blocks around it, which should trick them into staying up, but then what kinds of things would make it collapse anyway? hmmm.

TFC not having stair or slab blocks is a HUGE pain, as a lot of the Thaumcraft structures use them fairly extensively. My options seem to be to either decypher how the chiseled block TileEntities work and place "stairs" made out of those, or implement a stair type for every stone. Neither is terribly appealing, but vanilla stairs simply won't do. EDIT: Apparently vanilla stairs are rendered according to their surroundings, and not just their metatype. Makes creating a matching chiseled block pretty much impossible without scanning all the surrounding blocks. Blegh

Yes! Finally tracked down the issue. Its something stupid I should have thought of first, but isn't it always. We're making progress again.