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      ATTENTION Forum Database Breach   03/04/2019

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oldmanmike

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Everything posted by oldmanmike

  1. Patreon

    This is really interesting because I've wondered for a long time whether a voluntary subscription model like Patreon is a viable way to sustain an open source software project like TFC in the same way it does for Youtube personalities. This is probably the highest profile example I can think of right now, so I'm eager to see how this turns out.I think the rewards are pretty good as they currently are. Maybe branded T-shirts would be good too, though TFC doesn't have that much in it that is visually memetic enough to warrant a T-shirt design (maybe a textual reference to the mod?)
  2. By the time you're tapping out armor for yourself on an anvil, you've already overcome most of the things "keeping this mod from really taking off". I got frustrated with that stage of the game myself the first time I experienced it, but the fact was it took comparably little time in relation to how long it took me to find the copper to make a suit of armor in the first place. At that point, a little frustration couldn't break the game for me anymore. I was invested in my progress through the mod and was willing to grind a bit. And the above comments are accurate in that you do get used to it after a couple times.
  3. [Solved] Dry Grass Rendering Odd?

    So, whenever I'm in an area with dry grass, I get this rendering effect. I first started experiencing it when I checked out the latest 1.7 build on Github back before b79 was released. I dismissed it as a WIP bug and didn't give it a second thought, but I'm still experiencing it to this day since b79. It's consistently occurred with dry grass and dry grass only.
  4. [Solved] Dry Grass Rendering Odd?

    Wow, that fixed it...I guess that's all, folks. Let's pack up and call it a day.
  5. A few things that bother me

    I'd just like to see ravines get worked into the overall world gen in a way that feels more natural rather than just inserting the vanilla ones. Ravines are often the product of erosion from running water, but you'd never know that from playing TFC. It doesn't make sense to have 1 block separating the edge of a ravine from the edge of an ocean or lake.
  6. Torch Poll

    Currently using the mechanic as is and I more or less like it. I think it's a big step in the right direction of making light a resource like everything else. But while the basic mechanic is implemented, its current context doesn't give it much place. Torches are easier to make than ever via spam clicking a placed torch with a stack of sticks.The protection mechanic makes light's long-term protective feature redundant.The temporary lifetime of torches makes said redundant protection unreliable.This leaves me with just using torches for visibility purposes, and for that reason relighting one's torches regularly is just a grindy chore that doesn't add nearly as much as it should. My personal suggestion will sound crazy, but it might be worth a try. Introduce a tiered set of semi-permanent lanterns that require you to reach a certain level of sophistication first - you need a reliable source of fuel. Then, scale back torches dramatically by making them much harder to craft in bulk, provide temporary light, be unstackable, and make your avatar an in-game source of light (dynamic light/unlit torches) while a torch is still active and in your hotbar or 'equipped'. This way torches provide their function of player visibility without requiring that you place a ton of them all over the place and constantly relight them. It would also help the survival aspect by making light a resource you have to plan and ration, you can't just charge to the bottom of a cave with one dimming torch for the same reason you can't go wandering off from your shelter as the sun is getting ready to set. Also, from a multiplayer perspective, this would make bunkering down in a cave a much harder lifestyle during the early game, encouraging players to value the sun as a light source early on and keeping pvp matches from dissolving into a bunch of Batcave bases that nobody can or really wants to find. Also, from a believability standpoint, torches aren't very useful in real life. It's temporary light for your person, and they're not just a stick that caught on fire. Given the time period/level of sophistication that TFC seems to be setting itself in, I don't think there should be a medieval-styled permalight available. Light that doesn't come from the sun must come from some fuel of which the player has a limited amount. Anyone whose used Dynamic Lights or Unlit Torches knows the downfalls of having a light source move with your person in game, it's not easy to render and will lower FPS. But this is my opinion for what it's worth right now.
  7. Ridiculous Suggestions

    Mosquitoes and Loons - Ontario style. Your move, Dunk.
  8. Any guide on how to code my own TFC addon?

    Bump, now that b78 has been released and this post is now quite relevant.
  9. Advancing???

    It's never a good idea to make your first post on a forum complaint-based.
  10. Plate Tectonics WorldGen (co-programmer needed!)

    I'm in a similar position as TowerOfGlass as I've been interested in a very similar project as well. The goals I was personally aiming for were the following:- Basically a "world manager" daemon that runs alongside the Minecraft server and handles the heavy lifting behind world gen and chunk updates separately.- Designed to scale and take advantage of parallel and distributed systems via MPI. It should be able to utilize clusters.- Ideally a modular hot-pluggable architecture that would allow for new environment features to be added and removed without having to regenerate the world or even restart the server for that matter.- Not just geological systems, but support for a dynamic biosphere as well.- GPGPU support???- Written in some combo of C or C++ with possibilities for Python and/or Haskell on the high-level stuff.- Would target Linux and server environments primarily.- Free and Open source.As you said yourself, this all a ton of work much of which lays far out in the future, but one needs to start somewhere. If you'd like another hand, I'm familiar with C/C++ (not C#) too. I don't know what direction you're aiming on taking this ultimately beyond the description you've already given, but the rough list of goals I've given above should hopefully represent where my priorities are. If you see an overlap of interests, I would LOVE to help! And even if you don't, I'd be happy to contribute code anyways. :)tl;dr - I'm a programmer.
  11. TFC Build 79

    The game mechanics behind light and hostile surface mobs should get revamped in addition to food preservation techniques.Maybe I'm crazy, but I don't feel comfortable (or maybe I'm too comfortable) with the ability to make more than enough torches at the start of the game. I was playing around with the unlit torches mod with b78 and felt that using the decay system on torches as well as making torches/lanterns much more of an expensive resource would help make things more challenging on the "safety" side of the mod. The firepit should be your only source of light at the start of the game and keeping it burning all night long should be much more of a priority than it currently is. I know this sounds like a pain, but TFC has always been about scarcity and believability to me and there is nothing scarce or believable about torches as they currently exist. Besides, the original usage for torches was to keep hostile mobs from spawning in your base. But we've got the protection zone, which made me forget about how well lit my base was.As for hostile surface mobs, there should be more of them and they shouldn't *just* be hostile. What's interesting and dangerous about wild animals is their unpredictability/complexity sometimes. Lots of animals can inflict serious harm on humans, but will only do so if they feel threatened in some way. Otherwise, most animals respect that humans are at the top of the food chain and will avoid you. If a bear approaches you at your base, it should be doing so because it smells your food, not just because you're The Player and you need enemies to fight. Honestly, most mobs should be dangerous in some way if you're naive with them. Pigs have tusks, bull cows could charge you, as could sheep. There shouldn't really be such a thing as a "neutral" mob or a "hostile" mob.
  12. Started playing with 77.21 and noticed that there were VERY few animals around to hunt or breed. Most of the time, the world is just deserted, but I'll occasionally run across a pig, wolf, and sometimes a rooster. I have not seen a single sheep and I've only seen the occasional cow in creative. Is this intentional? I remember being able to always get my first meal from hunting in the area that I spawned in. Now, that's never the case. I'm using no additional mods and my config files are freshly generated.
  13. Being kind of picky here, but it always struck me as a cop out to just dig a hole into a clay deposit and not have to worry about shelter again for a while. I did it so much for a while that I now pretend clay doesn't float just so that my early game has more variance and challenge. As long as you can locate a clay deposit, your first night shelter is pretty much handed to you.
  14. Does anyone else ignore the fact that clay floats?

    Yeah, that makes sense. I just wish it didn't always defeat the purpose of thatch, cobblestone, and logs. I'm primarily viewing this from a PvP server perspective where everyone would gravitate to making hiddy holes in clay in order to hide their base from theft and trapping while they hoarded up initial resources, whereas otherwise they'd be restricted to building an exposed shelter on the surface 'til they get a pick.
  15. [TFC 0.78.9] ExtraFirma Addon v1.0.4

    Is anyone else having an issue with adobe clay drying? I placed them on the ground with a thatch roof to protect them from rain, but they never ended up updating to anything other than wet adobe clay.
  16. Single player config option

    I'm also wanting more out of the configs, but in my case the issue is the inability to tweak the challenge of the mod in the opposite direction. I would like to be able to change the rate at which various activities lower your hunger or the base rate that your health regenerates so that basic survival and staying alive remains a challenge longer than it currently does. Then there's the fact that I can't opt out of TFC's original soundtrack and just stick with Vanilla's.
  17. I can't Wait for the new Update Thread!

    'Dat body temperature and Dev API.
  18. What are you looking forward to most in the next update

    I'm really interested to see how extensive the body temperature system ends up being. Food-related commits have been common lately, so that should be interesting too.
  19. Update Frequency Poll

    You should release a major build whenever you feel like its ready, stable, and balanced. In the meantime, you should incrementally release added features and bug fixes as experimental snapshots on a much more frequent interval. It keeps the rest of the community in the know and allows us, for better or for worse, to provide more relevant feedback. We (the community) have the development on github to eavesdrop on, but it would be nice if such development was more representative on the forum/website in the form of pre-built snapshot releases, quick updates/announcements, and polls like this. I don't think there's anything wrong with not having an ETA, but I think its important to keep users aware of where things stand up until a release. I think its healthy to provide users with an active way to participate in the development of the mod they like. Whether it's playing with the latest changes, discussing it on the forums, or submitting bug reports, making TFC development more engaging/involving and less speculative than it currently is would be a great change.
  20. TerraFirma+ : Animals & Carts

    And if this was the case, then winter should have significantly less animals spawning.
  21. food preservation

    Oh god, I wish there were more random events like that. It seems survival games in general have them to keep the game challenging into the late game. I know a friend of mine found the random hound attacks in Don't Starve to be a pretty important feature that added a lot to the game.My main desire for food freshness/spoilage is that its currently too easy to obtain a surplus of food on SMP by logging out while your crops grow.
  22. food preservation

    *facepalm*, yeah you're right. I still like my C pointers, though. :/ You're right that lazy evaluation, if done improperly, can damage load balance, but my original point is that keeping track of freshness via a ton of counters isn't necessary - that's what data structure locality is for. If I create a list of all the food in my kitchen, ordered with the nearest expiration dates at the top, why would I need to keep track of how many hours have passed since I bought each individual item when all I need to do is observe the current date and start tossing out the top item on my list until I encounter one that still has some time on it? Assuming the list is sorted, the rest of my items should still be fine. What useful information would I gain by doing the math. Sure the freshness of the remaining items has theoretically changed, their time til expiration has definitely decreased and we could keep track of exact numbers and cause a ton of lag. But once again, why do the math for all the rest of the items when I know the list is sorted and that the item I'm currently checking happens to be the closest to going bad. I would rather check a couple of relevant consts to TFC's updating calender using a FIFO data structure rather than waste a ton of time performing computations that isn't providing Java or the player with any useful information.
  23. food preservation

    So, this is assuming that we're implementing this via a naive approach. If you're taking every piece of food in nested for loops and applying conditional if statements like there's no tomorrow in order to individually calculate spoilage, then yes I'd imagine you'd have a lot of lag. But that's the naive approach, in reality we have queues, linked lists, skip lists, lazy evaluation, etc. Do we really need to know what the exact level of spoilage is on all food in the game from the moment its harvested to the moment it spoils or is eaten/destroyed? I would imagine not. We're not simulating 10,000 individual samples of fruit gradually decomposing in jars on the window of the science classroom. We don't care, I imagine, about those details. All we care about is "Can I eat this right now and if so, how long will I still be able to eat it provided I store it using method X for time t?" We only need to make updates when it actually matters to gameplay. Provided there's a system of food preservation like spring houses or smoke houses implemented, then you could potentially make a safe assumption that the rate of decay is deterministic and controlled for that which is stored in these preserving environments - they can isolate stored food from the unpredictable side-effects of the environment. If you can make that assumption, there is a lot of freedom and opportunity for optimization you can then make about all the food stored in this manner because its decay is purely functional and you don't need to constantly keep track of it. I'd imagine you could schedule a food item's transition from "fresh" to "stale" to "rotten" via a sorted queue such as a skip list of pointers to the food items themselves (Java doesn't have pointers, but objects should suffice). In order to update the state of the food, you'd only have to check the end of this queue aka the food that's about to switch states. And if memory is the issue, we can initially allocate a reasonable amount of memory via some heuristic (chucks currently loaded, players currently logged on, etc) and extend the queue only when its necessary. It's really just a scheduling problem with some issues of priority and random events. Not all updates are created equal and we can choose to lazily evaluate some of them based on whether they are actually "needed" by a client. We could gracefully choose to "lag" in places where the player won't notice or even care. It's just like being lazy in real life - no one cares what you spend your time doing and when or in what order you do it, just as long as you have it done in time for the deadline that's expected of you. In our case, this deadline would be when the player is about to check the inventory that the food in question is currently stored.The main issue I see is the stacking problem.
  24. Thank you for licensing TFC under GPL v3!

    Yeah, I was assuming you meant that building on code that hasn't been publicly released would cause breakage left and right. So I should be avoiding just the experimental branches like FoodOverhaulTest - and basically everything Dunk does?
  25. [Not sure if this should go under discussion or support]I was browsing through the TFCraft repo on github and looking over all the commits Bioxx has been making. And then I opened up the license.txt and saw GPL v3 - it made my day. I'm assuming Bioxx was the one who made that decision since his name is on the relevant commit, but if the idea came from someone else, thank you whoever you are. It's sad that FOSS, let alone open source software, is not more common amongst Minecraft mods. Modding Minecraft is not that hard to get into and I think the modding community would be a whole lot better off if it was easier to build off of the work other modders have already done. And given how large and full of potential Terrafirmacraft is, giving people a way to make their own changes to the mod is very empowering and helpful. Maybe I'm just being naive of the fact that the Dev API and addons exist, but I would much rather read and screw around with the original source code itself and test out modifications in-game rather than post the contents of my daydreams to the forum.So, I'm a programmer who's trying to get into Java and Minecraft modding and I was excited by the license because of all the things I would want to modify about survival mode Minecraft, Terrafirmacraft makes many of them already and I would rather work to extend/improve than than start something from scratch (for now ). I'm perfectly aware that addons and the Dev API exist, so I'd just like to ask the community and ideally the developers the following questions just for clarifications:0) How deliberate, serious and/or permanent was the decision to use GPL v3? What was the reasoning and/or intentions behind it? 1) Am I allowed to redistribute TFC provided I'm not charging money for it? As part of a modpack? 2) Furthermore, am I allowed to release and distribute my own modified version of TFC provided I'm not charging money for it and making the source of my own changes publicly available and properly credit Bioxx, Dunk, et al. for that which is not my work? 3) Finally, what's the policy on pull requests? Bioxx stated on the Twitter account that he doesn't like others touching his code. Should I generally assume that any features or improvements I make are unwanted upstream and should just get posted as an addon? Upstream for bug fixes, downstream for game changes? Much of this is addressed to some degree within the body of the license itself, but I'm asking anyways because I'm not sure how interested/open Bioxx and Dunk are to suggestions in the form of code. Thank you again for making Minecraft just a little more open.