Tsuarok

The only problem I have with this is you need 4 plank blocks to make the workbench to get the 3x3 crafting grid. How would pegs work into this?

That would be a problem... I guess the only solution I can think of is 3 planks and a peg, though I don't find it ideal.

Well, I guess you could make it a multistep item where you take, say, a plank and a peg to make pegged planks and then four pegged planks to make a block.

Still a bit inelegant though.

So, I was thinking how materials stick together in minecraft, and, well... it's not all that believable.

To remedy this, I suggest the addition of pegs, nails, and rivets, and some modification to mortar.

Pegs and nails would be used interchangably, and would be a required ingredient for making plank blocks.  They would also need to be in the inventory to place both planks and plank blocks, and doing so would use them up.

Pegs would need to be made one at a time from sticks using a chisel (or a knife or saw, any of these would be fairly appropriate).  Perhaps placed on the ground and right-clicked.

Nails would be made from metal wire (a new thing) and would finish in batches of 64 (thus saving time in exchange for using metal).

Rivets would be made in a manner similar to nails, and be required to place metal sheets.  They might also find use in the making of armor, though that is beyond the scope of this thread.

Mortar would work as it does now, but would also be required to place stone bricks.

One thing I'd like to point out is that with some carefully planned custom recipes, via custom NPCs, these should work together right now without any other mods.  Maybe not the ideal experience, but it should work, it anyone wishes to play it.

Thaumcraft and Terrafirmacraft both have APIs. These actually mean that:

1) Adding aspects to TFC items become simple, if time consuming.

2) Adding smithing recipes for caps is even easier.

3) Due to the Thaumcraft API, you can simply create a brand new wand with the same abilities of a silverwood wand and only allow that one to be created.

4) And the biome work you mentioned is the hardest (IMO) part. You'd have to write a whole new biome and slot it into TFC world gen.

 

The only other thing: Stabilize the nether? Why? 

Well, the first 2 are good news.  I think we might have trouble with the third, as thaumcraft uses sticks to make the wands, and the specialty trees drop named sticks for that purpose.  You'd need to either have unique sticks for some trees, or add the thaumcraft trees in (which, btw, can't currently grow on TFC dirt).

As for the forth, as I said, I'm not a programmer, so my estimation could easily be off.  I'd assumed you could just take the biome info from Thaumcraft and plug it into the TFC world  generation in some manner.  I hadn't realized a full rewrite would be required.  I know TFC biomes are just terrain, and the plant populations are based on temperature and rainfall data, but I'd thought, since these are supposed to be magical forests and such, that one could simply add them in randomly.  The sharp, vanilla style cutoff between the biome and TFC terrain would actually enhance the magical feel... but it may be that TFC generation simply has no place to put in this style of biome.

the nether is needed for advanced thaumcraft materials and recipes, without it you would either need to make those items available somehow in the overworld or get stuck at an early stage of magic

Also, the nether would fit well thematically with the mod.  

Honestly, I think nether (and end) stability should be part of TFC in general, for compatibility purposes.  But that is a topic for another thread.

It seems more like this is suggestion of merging two mods (especially given you yourself called it 'crossover mod') rather than make them compatible as shown by suggestions to actually add elements from both mods instead of making developers adjust the code behind them. I believe that's how it should be done and how it is in most cases - standarized values and code so elements of different mods can work with each other or, if necessary overwrite in a way that makes the mods work well with each other.Actually changing the features of the mods to depend on each other - porting recipes from one mod to the other, changing them so they need something from Thaumcraft and TFC, adding cross-mod dependancies on textures and so on, and so on - would make both mods either needlessly convoluted or problematic if someone would want to play just TFC or Thaumcraft. Unless you mean it like some sort of bridge between them, installed separately. I am not sure if making third mod is the right way to go in such case, but someone more well-versed in Minecraft modding than I am should answer that.I wouldn't mind some adjustments to be made but frankly, I believe there are things in TFC itself that would use devteam time and effort.

While I agree that out of the box compatibility is desirable for many mods, and that perhaps TFC devs could work on things like easier biome integration and stability for the nether and such, I don't think it would play well to just throw these two mods together.  

Mods such as thaumcraft are balanced with reference to vanilla survival, as they should be.  But TFC changes so much that some items become overly powerful, while others become useless.  Further, TFC has certain crafting systems that add a great deal to gameplay, and it would be desirable to continue using these systems in other content mods.

So what I'm suggesting would be a third compatibility mod, something like we currently have for Buildcraft.  Something well thought out with appropriate omissions and modifications that truly integrates the two.

So, I rather enjoy the addon Thaumcraft, and with the new ore generation config options, I thought I'd check it out to see how much would need to be done for full compatibility.  

I just tried out of the box, without touching the configs, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it didn't crash.  There were a few problems though. 

The first thing I noticed was that animals were EVERYWHERE.  They were TFC animal, but the place was crawling with sheep and chicken and bears and wolves.  Occasionally I came across perfectly square sections where the terrain dropped to sea level, presumably where Thaumcraft biomes would have been.  I searched for a while but was unable to find any thaumcraft biomes or trees.  Or really any plants or mobs.

But the nodes did spawn in normally, which had been my biggest concern.

My test was done with custom NPCs installed, which could be used to work out recipe equivalencies (like pop a tuyere into a crafting table to get wand caps.  Or whatever). 

Happily, all TFC stuff seems to be working normally.  Besides the animal spawn rate.

Obviously some work would need to be done to get a seamless experience.

So, for a crossover mod, we'd need:

Easy Stuff:

Add the thaumcraft biomes, plants, mobs

Reduce the animal spawns back to normal.

Somewhat harder:

Add aspects to TFC materials

add exchange recipes for Thaumcraft items (easily done through custom NPCs, but an integrated solution would be better)

Lots of work

Change entire items and associated textures (thaumium wand caps become Blue Steel wand caps)

or

Add smithing recipes for wand caps, smelting recipes for thaumium, etc.

Change item ablilties to better fit in with TFC progression

Stabilize the Nether and add a way to get there

Now... I'm not really a programmer, so I won't be able to do this, at least not soon.  But seeing how little is now needed to get this working, I thought I might inspire someone who knows what they're doing to work on this.  If needed, I'd be happy to supply some textures, and I'd definitely add thaumcraft to my todo list for my resource pack.

I don't know that simply making nickel rarer will do much for a game focused on survival, at least by itself.  You can already do more or less everything you need with your wrought iron tool, weapons, and armor.  I think it could be fun if you had nickel spawn in caves in the lower levels, and fill them up with tough mobs.  Or something.  IDK, just more than very slight efficacy increases.

Although this has gone quite off topic at this point, Scaling health/damage back down is something that I'll think about since it would do wonders for compatibility.

Yay!!

I don't know about metals, but I used to blow glass (the furnace style, not pyrex).  We would recharge the furnace once a week, during which you had to slowly add a scoop or two of glass, and wait for it to melt.

If metal has similar constraints, the current system is fine.  If not, I'd be okay with just throwing nuggets in.  

But no more than one mold, you're supposed to be pouring the liquid out.

Unfortunately I don't actually know if individual features can be turned off.  I've never been able to use shaders, my laptop is just not up to it.  They discuss the problem a bit here, for SEUS shaders (I don't know if that's the one you're using).  A little past that they say that there is a fix, but not where to get it.  I imagine that a search may come up with something that might even fix the problem and let you keep the angle... though some of the sun and moon effects are in the better skies layer, so disabling it will be the best option (if possible).  Good luck!

If you do figure out how to use the tilt and the skybox together, you could just delete the sunglow and moonglow files -- I believe most shaders have similar (and actually superior) effects built in.  This may require deleting the associated sky(n) files and renaming the remaining files so that there are no gaps in the numbering.

So, I'm going to the US for ~2 months on the 26th, and I cannot bring my computer.  I'm going to do one more release at the end of this week, and then I'll be taking a break until I get back on August 22nd.  On the bright side, I'll be able to take pictures of a variety of temperate region trees and such, which will hopefully improve the pack when I get back.  I'll have my ipad, so do feel free to ask questions and whatnot, I'll be checking in periodically.

Most of the TFC textures are done, the blocks anyway.  The majority of what is missing is vanilla.  If you'd like a more complete textured experience, I recommend dropping the assets folder from my pack into the vanilla pack of your choice, and replacing anything it asks you to replace.  This should shore things up until I can get back to work.

Have a great summer.

-Tsuarok

Okay, after doing some research, I think I may have found your problem.  I don't know which shader you use, but some, including SEUS, have a feature that changes the path of the sun, tilting it at an angle which is more realistic for the higher latitudes and also provides more dramatic shadows.  It appears that this tilts the entire skybox.  

Unfortunately, I have no way of tilting it back.  If possible, you could disable the tilted sun feature to rectify this issue.

I suspect that it would be fairly straightforward to have the behind the scenes health numbers use floating points while having the UI display 100x that number.  That should be a very simple operation...

I've been thinking about it. Unless I can replicate the problem, there's not much I can do, so could you tell me which version of optifine you're using?

Also, do the clouds rotate? They're supposed to slowly go around the world, rotating around the z axis like a merry-go-round. Do they do that, but at that weird angle? Or do they rotate like the sun, sometimes appearing upside down?

Also, do the other layers display aberrant behavior? For example, does the ring around the moon follow the moon? Finally, do the sun and moon follow a path in the exact center of the sky?

To answer yor specific question, they should all be updated by now. I copy/pasted rather than cut/pasted, as I'm planning on doing something with them there, so they should be in both folders. I'll check it out once I get the compter back from my wife. But really, there was never anything that I'd made that should have caused that problem, so I'm not sure that there was ever a problem in the pack files.

Though I could easily be wrong...

huh... I have no idea why that would happen.  When I first saw it I thought that I'd changed the rotation axis by accident, but from your pictures, it seems to just be stuck at that angle.  Which is totally bizarre. 

The clouds aren't cut off per se, that's supposed to be the horizon...

This isn't happening for me with the files I've released... so... I don't know.  Maybe replace your optifine file?  There's a recommended version in the OP.  If that doesn't work, the only thing I can think of is deleting the world0 folder and just using the vanilla sky.  Vanilla's ugly, but that is worse, IMO.

If anyone else is having this problem, please let me know.

Only the sun.png and the moon_phases.png, the rest stays in the world0 folder.

Yes, as Kitty said, exactly right.

One problem I've noticed: it seems I was supposed to put the sun and moon_phases files into the minecraft/textures/environment folder rather than the minecraft/mcpatcher/sky/world0 folder, so you won't see the moon or the sun as they should be.   I'm uploading them again, corrected, but as my internet sucks, this will take another 4ish hours.  In the meantime, if ya'll want to see the sun and moon as they're meant to be, just cut and paste them into the environment folder.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

-Tsuarok 

Maybe just add root systems.

I know when I add custom trees via world painter I always add them with a fairly extensive root system.  While the stump left is flush with the ground, removing everything is something of a chore. 

Go to the Let's Play section and select one of the channels.  Watching someone else play really helps, and some are quite entertaining as well.

okay, everything should be uploaded and working now.  I don't have a percentage, but I still need to do most of the items, all of the entities, about half of the crops, and a few other miscellaneous things, as well as font and opening screen stuff.

Unfortunately, I'm a somewhat slow worker, and I don't have a ton of time.  If you need some more completeness, you could merge a different HD pack with this one.  Most of the missing stuff is vanilla, so if you just place the terrafirmacraft folder into your choice of vanilla pack, and replace whatever tiles are in the minecraft folder with mine, you would have a more or less complete pack.  Maybe photorealism or something similar would go well with this.

To all:

Last week I released some better sky stuff, which I was really happy with.  And then I played with it a bit, and saw a ton of flaws.  So I spent the week working both on the visual flaws and the timing, and I added the sun and moon, and various effects for them.  The result may look pretty similar to last week's release, but I really have, in my opinion, improved it quite a bit.  As always, let me know what you think.  And please continue to post any errors you find.  I spend most of my time doing the actual textures, not playing, which means that I miss some things.  Thanks for your support.

-Tsuarok 

okay, I think I've found the problem, I'm uploading a new version now.  Unfortunately, it's seems to take about 4 hours to get them all uploaded.

The clouds, BTW, are supposed to rotate around the horizon...

oh... that wasn't happening in my tests... it looks like the rotation axis was changed  

I'll fix it and reupload, thank you for pointing this out.

Whoops, thanks for pointing that out.  Fixing now.

Edit: Should be fixed now... unless I accidentally uploaded the 256 file into the 128 location... in which case it will be fixed by tomorrow morning; a new version will be ready by then.

I do think it takes too much durability.  If not for the game breaking lag caused, I would have every single block chiseled up.  Did you know that you can (in single player) edit the NBT data to make the block appear as nearly anything?  I've made some nice trimmed hedge sculptures in the past using that.

There are several texture packs to choose from in the resource pack section;  try a few and see if you like any of them.