cevkiv

You really haven't read the thread.

I've added plenty to this conversation, which you'd know if you read it.

It's not a matter of opinion. Making a horrible mechanic that a few people might like but that a majority of the population would not like mandatory is something that only a complete and total moron would do.

Are you aware that some of us don't want it forced down our throats because a minority like it?

People don't feel a need to read the Kingdoms Discussion thread, I didn't feel a need to read the whole thread here.

Specifically, it's ISE 500, followed by a 404.

You people make me sad.

Anyone who thinks it's a good idea to stop someone from playing a game for a period of time because they died is a moron. A complete and total moron. Video games should be challenging. They should not be designed to frustrate you for no good reason. You people just don't understand how the mind of a griefer works. Via death bans on SMP, you are giving a griefer a highly effective tool that literally makes someone stop playing the game. Your idea for death bans just makes the game worse. It adds nothing of value. If you want some sort of penalty for dying, how about the fact that, in the system Bioxx implemented in build 56, you restart as a level 0 again, hungry and injured? That's enough of a handicap as it is, considering how hard TFC can be. Jesus Christ, do you even stop to think about things? Can you imagine implementing something like this in another game, like a Mario Game? "Oops, you died, you can't play for 30 minutes". I don't want to log into a server for the first time only to be killed by some griefer in full steel armor with a steel sword and then be disconnected from the server and unable to rejoin. Simply losing all your stuff and coming back weakened when you could have been an uber badass is penalty enough. This mod already walks the extremely fine line between complexity and tedium, and we don't need it moving over in the tedious instead of complex. If I were to propose a system, it would involve wound tracking, which would probably be annoying to implement, since I highly doubt the Minecraft engine is set up for something like that. Players would never be killed. They would be "knocked out". A "knocked out" player respawns at their spawn point, without any XP (and the increase in HP XP now brings), or items, with low HP and Hunger and Water. We will assume that some good Samaritan dragged them back home. With wound tracking, there would have to be a system of medicine added to the game. For example, if I fell from a great height, when I "come to" back in my room, my legs would be broken and I would suffer a penalty to move speed and be unable to sprint. This would slowly go away on its own, or you could speed up the process by creating and using splints and crutches. Or someone else could have to use the splint on you. There are lots of other possibilities, which I leave as an exercise for the attentive reader.

And you have no idea the complexity involved in the coding of any of that.

I am quite positive now that you have not read this thread, and are cherry-picking things from it.

People like Najual. The idea that the "only" way to avoid griefing is for someone to basically have "town guard" as their job is insane. Valid schemes of block protection exist that do not compromise the PvP aspect of the game while making it next to impossible for casual griefing to take place. People who pretend they don't exist are just stuffing their fingers in their ears and going, "LA LA LA LA LA LA LA" as loud as they can because they don't WANT block protection at all, because it makes it harder for them to get their jollies by destroying what other people worked so hard to make. That's really the only reason to be opposed to block protection: you're griefing scum.

I have known it for some time. However, it's one of those things that, just when you think you've come to a full appreciation of it, suddenly it hits you all over again. Like someone being dead.

I swear to the Gods, there is no hope for the human race.

I, personally, think that the method I outlined above is too hard on the side of block protection. I shouldn't have to dig an 80x80x80 cube of rock to reinforce a rather small wall. The problem is that if I suggest making block protection even remotely feasible, people get pissed off because it makes it too hard to grief. With the advent of specialized tools for overcoming block protection, it should be easier to reinforce blocks.

I'm highly confused. Since the client runs a server internally now, do I need to install both the PlayerAPI Client and Server files to my minecraft.jar?

I'd like to see different fish types based on biome, and some of those being edible raw (yay, sushi.) Also, maybe fish could be actual mobs, and you would have to dig up earthworms to use as bait?

31000 square meters equates to an area roughly 180 meters by 180 meters. And you need to remember that the space isn't being evenly divided amongst all the persons in the town. For example, a large portion of the town I lived in was devoted to tree farming, fruit trees, crops, a town hall, a communal foundry, and animal storage. Our town was also built into the side of a mountain. When you take into account things like having nice roads, areas set aside inside the town walls for your crops and fruit trees and animals, and not going overzealous on flattening everything out, that's not a lot of space per person. My house in the town was like a 13x13 tower. If you managed to find a nice, perfectly, completely flat area to build in, and managed to strong-arm everyone into following a precise building code and fixed housing size, and fixed dimensions for roads, etc, you could fit it in smaller. Still, I would say that tree farming, fruit trees, and crop farming took up easily 1/5th of the more or less usable area in our town.

This post (which will be a very large wall of text -- consider yourselves warned) is the product of my previous views on city-building, combined with personal observations of being part of a city, and events related to the city in regards to griefers, of the server I am currently on. In other words: this post is about my ideas in regards to real world data. My views on certain subjects have changed. Town Size The size of the area claimable as a town either needs to be initially very large, or needs to be expandable as more and more people become residents of the town. Our town had about ten citizens, and occupied an area of approximately twenty-five thousand square blocks, maybe closer to forty thousand square blocks (between 150x150 to 200x200 in size). So somewhere between 100 chunks to 160 chunks in size. So, just estimating, an average town of 10 people will need an area of 121 chunks (roughly 31000 meters^2) or an 11x11 chunks space. So, if you take the chunk in which the SpecialBlockUsedToClaimAnAreaAroundItselfAsACity Block is placed in, it would need to take the area five chunks to the north, south, east and west of the chunk in which it is place. Or, the area could be defined as (x+1)2 chunks, where x is equal to the number of citizens of the town. 1 Citizen would result in a claim size of four chunks (2x2), five citizens would result in a claim size of thirty-six chunks (6x6), and 10 citizens (which is approximately the size of the town I was in) would claim an area of 121 chunks (11x11) which works out to be approximately the size of the actual 10 citizen town I was a member of. I originally suggested that the size claimed should be smaller. I feel I was wrong about that. The size of the town should either scale as more people join, or should be fixed something large (at least an 11x11 chunk area). Town Placement As to the placement of towns, I think the following would be good guidelines, which could probably be configurable to the server owner's tastes. No town may be created within 500 meters of spawn. There are multiple reasons for this. Firstly, under no circumstances should it be possible for a user to create a town at spawn. Due to the nature of the Criminal Justice System I envision, placing a town at the server spawn would, unless the town was created by the administrator, allow for easy griefing. I give 500 meters for the reason that most people don't go very far from their town to gather resources, except when mining or looking for very particular things, such as specific kinds of trees or fruit trees. By forcing people to settle away from spawn, we leave a large area where people new to the server have a chance to gather resources before setting out, without having to worry that everything has been picked clean by everyone else (which is often the case). In the event an administrator wants a town at spawn (which they would have control over) they are still able to create such a town, to provide a safe haven for newly arriving players. Furthermore, I feel that no town should be able to be founded within 1000 meters of another town. This avoids a problem: namely, what happens if two towns are close enough to each other that they each attempt to claim the same area? If towns are forced to be at least 1000 meters away from each other, then firstly, it's about a day's journey from one town to another, and secondly, using the above suggested equation to determine the size of a town, you would need sixty people joining a town to cause it to have even a chance of coming into conflict with another town over claiming the same chunks. In fact, you'd actually need something like 120 people, since two towns would have to do this, in addition to being placed as close as possible to each other. This would allow a town to claim, exclusively, a reasonable area of land that would be able to scale upwards as more people joined the town, while still allowing large "no man's land" regions where two towns, even ones placed as closely together as this scheme would allow, could fight over resources, both mineral and otherwise. This would also reward players who take their time scouting out a large area to find the best possible combination of resources to found their town at, as they would be given a small area of exclusivity which would allow them to capitalize on a particularly scare resource. For example, a town could be founded ontop of a newly discovered (and very rare) mineral vein, such as of garnierite, which would allow an economy for the town that focused on exploiting that resource and trading it to other towns for what it needs. Given what I have read of changes coming to biomes, a town could be founded in a very inhospitable area, where it is difficult to impossible to raise crops, on the idea that they could trade the other resources in the area for what they need. Also, under the system of town protection I envision, while there would be a measure of security in the claimed area, this would not be absolute security, and it would be entirely possible for another town to conduct raids, to take by force what they don't want to trade for (or to take back what was stolen from them). Another reason for requiring towns to be such a distance from each other is to avoid someone creating a town pretty much right on top of another town, to try to supress that town from growing by causing conflict over the ability to claim chunks for one town. Block Protection I believe a system of block protection should work as follows: Firstly, only people who are citizens of a town can place blocks within a town's limits, or open any doors other than plain wooden doors. This allows players to have walls that are effective. Walls serve very little purpose, since anyone can pile dirt up and climb over them. If, however, you are able to put a large enough buffer of protected area before the wall, the height to which you would have to pile dirt to get over the wall would result in a fatal fall. And if they do manage to get in, the wouldn't be able to get out easily. A city-founding-stone block can, for the citizens of the town, dispense a Reinforcement Tool. The Reinforcement tool, when used by a citizen of the town on a block within the area protected by the town, will consume an amount of blocks of the same type from their inventory. For each block consumed in the reinforcing process, the block so reinforced must be broken a number of additional times. For example, if an unreinforced block need only be broken once to actually break the block, one that has been reinforced with extra blocks would need to be broken additional times. I suggest the following method of reinforcement: Each block have two internal values, one called Reinforcement Level, and one called Reinforcement Amount.. They are, by default, 0. To reinforce a block, one must expend blocks of the same type equal to 2^(x+1), where x is the current Reinforcement Level. Thus, if a block has not been reinforced, its first reinforcement would require 2 additional blocks of the same type, its second reinforcement would require 4 blocks, its third reinforcement would require 8 blocks, etc. Each reinforcement level would double the number of times a block must be broken to actually destroy the block. A block reinforced once would require 2 breakings to be destroyed, one reinforced twice would require four breakings to be destroyed, and one reinforcedeight times would require 256 breakings to be destroyed. When a block is reinforced, its Reinforcement Level is increased by 1, and its Reinforcement Amount is increased by the resources spent. Reinforcement Amount, therefore, corresponds to the number of times the block must be broken to actually be destroyed. Each time the block is broken, this amount is decremented by 1, and, when it falls below zero the block is destroyed. Attempting to break a block with the reinforcement tool would instead display its current Reinforcement Level and Reinforcement Amount. This would allow one to monitor blocks for damage (attempts to break them). A block could be repaired to its current reinforcement amount by expending resources equal to the number of times it was broken. Circumventing Block Protection Block Protection, as envisioned above, serves to discourage casual griefers. If someone realizes that, while I may live in a 5x5 wooden shack, I have spent eight times as many resources as required to build it to reinforce it, and that it will not be breaking quickly with their stone ax, they will (hopefully) get bored and go do something else. It should be noted that Reinforcement requires a substantial expenditure of time and resources on the part of the person doing the reinforcement. Reinforcing every block in 5x5x5 hollow cube (simple wooden house) so that it would take 256 attempted breakings to destroy any block in the house would require twenty-two thousand, eight-hundred and seventy-three blocks(!). Assuming you have a saw, and your average tree is 7 wood blocks in size, that would require the harvesting of one thousand and ninety trees. If someone is willing to spend the time and energy to harvest nearly eleven-hundred trees, which would take many hours, then I think it should take a large amount of time to destroy their house, approaching the amount of time they spent to reinforce it. But, anyway, this section is about circumventing block protection. Your average griefer has a short attention span, and when they realize they can't just run in and smash windows and rifle through chests, they will get bored and leave. But what about determined griefers (PvP players)? What about war between two rival cities? "How can I raze a city", you ask, "if it's so hard to destroy something that is reinforced?" This is my solution: There would be a class of tools called siege tools. There would be a Siege Axe, a Siege Pick, and a Siege Shovel. These would require metal to make them, and they should be complicated to make, probably requiring, not only a double-ingot to make the tool head itself (as these are heavy duty tools), but an ingot or a double ingot in the form of a metal haft to go along with the tool head. When a siege tool is used against the block it is designed to be used on (pick on stone, axe on wood, etc), the first time it "breaks" the block it counts as having broken it once. The second time it would, instead of simply being an additional, single break, would count has having broken the block two additional times. The third time would count as three additional breaks, the fourth as four, and so on. Example: A granite brick block reinforced four times would normally need to be "broken" 16 times to destroy it. With a Siege Pick, you would actually need to "break" the block 6 times to destroy it -- less than half the time if you used a normal pick. By not completely bypassing block protection, we do not invalidate completely the work done by the person who did the reinforcing. By partially bypassing it, we reward the player or faction of players who spent the time and resources to create the proper tool for the proper situation. A city at war that wanted to quickly destroy a rival city would be able to do so at the expenditure of a large amount of resources, to match the large amount of resources spent protecting the city. A further example: A granite brick block reinforced eight times would need to be "broken" 256 times with a regular old pick to destroy it. With a Siege Pick you would only need to "break" it only 23 times to destroy it. Considering the huge amount of resources required to reinforce a block eight times, I feel this is an equitable solution. To reinforce a wall around a 98x98 area (making the wall 100 blocks long in any cardinal direction) would require over half a million blocks. Let me repeat that for you: To reinforce a wall around an area 100 blocks long in any direction would require five hundred and eight thousand, eight hundred and sixty blocks. If a group of people are willing to spend the amount of time required to dig half a friggin' million blocks to reinforce a wall (around a relatively tiny area), you should be perfectly happy with it taking 2 minutes to go through that wall. That's assuming you're going at it alone. If you had two people, both with Siege Picks, working on the same block would only take each of you 16 "breakings" to destroy the block, or roughly a minute and a half to go through the above mention wall which took half a million blocks to make. With four people, all with siege picks, it would only take each person 11 "breakings" to destroy the block, allowing a four person group, appropriately equipped, to go through the above wall which took half a million blocks to make in just about 1 minute and 6 seconds. To recap: A typical "I joined the server and want to do as much damage as I can in five minutes" griefer will not sit around and spend 25 minutes with a pick axe (assuming he managed to find one, since you sure as hell can't get a pick axe in five minutes in TFC) trying to go through a wall, while a coordinated group of players taking part in City versus City PvP combat would be able to go through the same wall that takes the griefer nearly half an hour to go through in a minute or so. The neatly solves the problem of making it extremely hard to impossible for casual griefing to occur while still allowing for Player Versus Player combat. For servers where the administrator does not want any City versus City combat, there could be a config option that disables the creation of Siege tools, just as there is a config option that enables the creation of vanilla tools. Criminal Justice I propose the following system of criminal justice: The founder of a town (its mayor, potentate, sultan, president, or otherwise its despot) has the ability to remove citizens from a town. Removing a citizen from a town revokes their privileges but does not cause the town limits to shrink. The town will retain its current boundaries, but must be restored up to its previous high number of citizens before it can expand. The founder of the town can also cause the town-creating-stone block to dispense a special Jail Block. Only one Jail Block may be created by any one town-creating-stone block at a time. If there is a previous one in existence and a second is dispensed, the first one is destroyed. When someone not a member of a town breaks a block within the city limits or opens a locked chest (if locked chests are implemented) in the city limits or assaults and/or kills a citizen of the town while within the town's limits, they receive a Criminal Flag. This is a variable that is part of the player's game data, and not visible in the client (their name doesn't turn red, etc.) This flag persists for as long as they are in the limits of the town they violated, plus one minute. Any citizen of a town may have the town-creating-stone block dispense a baton. The baton is a melee weapon which deals a fixed amount of damage. Any person who is currently flagged as a Criminal of the town that a Citizen is a member of and has a baton linked to that town's town-creating-stone block, may use that baton to deal damage to that criminal. Otherwise, it does nothing. Anyone knocked out by a baton (killed by it) has their home point set to the location of the town's Jail Block, as though the Jail Block were a bed that they had slept in (they respawn next to it exactly as if it were a bed.) If there is no valid jail block set up, they respawn where they were slain. The Jail Block would create an area around itself that stops people who have it set as their spawn point (read: been knocked out with a baton after committing a crime) from being able to open doors. This allows the town to designate an area where criminals will be detained, and prevents the criminals from being able to escape. Someone on the outside must let them out or break them out. This means that someone caught stealing from a town can be detained until the town members feel like letting him go, or he can be detained until an admin comes to deal with the problem, or he can be detained until his friends come and rescue him. This would allow for Player Versus Player/City Versus City interaction in the form of rescue missions -- breaking into an another town to rescue your friend. This could be as simple and walking into the town and opening the jail, or require Siege Tools to break through the town's walls and through the jail. This system also, in only allowing players who commit a crime to be jailed, avoids the use of the baton as a tool of griefing. If you can only jail someone who has broken a block (or attempted to open or opened a locked chest, if these are included), then you cannot use it to grief innocent players who are simply passing through, sight-seeing, or there to trade. Furthermore, it could be possible to allow citizens to be flagged as criminals, if, for instance, they kill a fellow citizen, or (if locked chests or "owned" chests are implemented) if they steal from another citizen. Personal Observations: The town in which I lived on the server in which I am currently playing was griefed at least four times. One time, I and another player were online when someone began to steal from us, and when they began to try to kill us. The two of us were able to overcome the other player, even though he had stolen weapons from us and had armor (which neither of us had), and kill him, and then to keep on killing him whenever he came back (when we found him, that is.) We were able to hold him off until an admin came along to deal with him. Another such incident occured when I was offline. Other players were online however, and they were able to deal with the situation. So, when there are multiple players online and active within a town or in close proximity to it, they are able to deal with lone griefers. However, there were incidents that occured when no one was logged in (which was a window that only occured for a few hours) where in large portions of our town were destroyed. Had there been a system of block protection and area claming in place, such as I suggest above, the person would never have been able to get into town, let alone destroy it. And that's what the system is designed for: stopping lone griefers from being able to destroy what people work so hard to create, while still allowing for City versus City combat. Furthermore, with the ability to jail a person, the lone griefer mentioned earlier could have, instead of respawning at spawn, spawned inside our nicely decorated jail, and been forced to wait there until one of us let him out, or until he got bored because he couldn't get his quick fix of chaos and logged out -- that would have taken the need for an admin out of the picture, which is another goal of the system I propose: to allow players to moderate themselves.

Jail breaking should not be easy. It should be possible only under the following conditions: 1) There is no one on to stop you, so you can just get into town and let them out since they're unguarded 2) You have a bunch of people with you and can overwhelm the town's defenders. The only way out of jail is for someone outside to let you out. If you get caught stealing from a town, they may very well let you sit in jail for a whole day before they let you out, and if they catch you again they might not let you out at all. That's what you get for being a thief.

You don't need to read the whole 35 pages. We get off topic at several points. Furthermore, a lot of the points consist of arguing back and forth about specific aspects of specific posts. The general consensus is: There needs to be some form of block protection that makes it hard for people to grief. This form of block protection should be bypassable, but not easily bypassable. There needs to be a tool to allow someone to be placed into a "jail" It should be possible for the jailed person's friends to "break them out" The protections should be put in place mainly to deter people who have been on the server for five minutes from just stealing your stuff, and to make it hard to destroy a whole town in warfare -- that is, you shouldn't be able to destroy a town 10 people took days to make in just minutes.

Just an update. I think the size of the area claimed by the Hearthstone should be larger than I originally thought. I'm currently part of a town on a server, about 10 citizens, and we use far, far, far more than 5x5. I think all our houses combined would take up more than 5x5

Bears repeating.

Search function failed me, so I'm starting a new thread. I have been playing b47, and while digging I got a hit on my propick that said I was near some sphalerite. Excited, I continued digging. I believe the rock I was in was Shale. Anyway, I'm digging and digging and digging, and I'm more or less right where the deposit should be (I know how to use a propick). Anyway, I'm breaking blocks with my pick and I break a shale block and it drops sphalerite. I'm all "WTF, Mate?". And then it happens again and again and again, but seemingly randomly. Anyway, what was happening, if you didn't figure it out (and it took me a while to) was that the sphalerite was extremely hard to distinguish from the surrounding shale. And by hard to distinguish I don't just mean, "I couldn't tell at a glance what was what" I mean I had to turn the brightness all the way up and lean in towards my monitor and get a good, hard, long look at the blocks around me to even be able to get it right 50% of the time. Has anyone else noticed anything similar? The sphalerite was mixed in with a bunch of tetrahedrite -- the tetrahedrite showed up fine. Should ores be made more distinguishable?

And by "I've never seen ore cave in, I mean I have literally seen rock below the ore fall, and rock above the ore fall, but the ore stays the same.

Yeah, I've never seen ore cave-in, and I used to follow the "can't find it with the propick? CAVE-IN TIME" school of mining.