Why this mod is important.

[Najual 46]

Minecraft is a milestone in the evolution of VR. Deformable terrain has been a novelty in a lot of games, and yes there was Infiniminer, but no one had done a 3D game where practically everything in a vast simulated world could be moved or interacted with in some way. Eventually when we get much better processors and programming algorithms, all those 1 meter blocks will be reduced to individual pixels, all still interactive with the player and each other. We're still a long way from that. But perhaps not that long.

TFC is taking this evolution one step further with the introduction of semi-realistic internal geology. No one else, to my knowledge, has done that in a 3D game before either. Blockscape maybe prettier, but it lacks the geological depth of TFC.

To put that statement in perspective, here's an excerpt from Neal Stephenson's recent book, REAMDE. Anyone familiar with his work (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age) will appreciate the reference even more. Anyone who isn't should read his stuff. He's one of the most brilliant sci-fi and historical fiction authors alive.

Richard’s crazy idea was to eliminate the possibility of such fudging by having the availability of virtual gold stem from the same basic geological processes as in the real world. The same, that is, except that they’d be numerically simulated instead of actually happening. Idly messing around on the Internet, he discovered the mind-alteringly idiosyncratic website of P. T. “Pluto†Olszewski, the then twenty-two-year-old son of an oil company geologist in Alaska, homeschooled above the Arctic Circle by his dad and his math major mom. (He) had spent a lot of time playing video games and seething with rage at their cavalier treatment of geology and geography. Their landforms just didn’t look like real landforms, at least not to Pluto, who could sit and stare at a hill for an hour. And so, basically as a protest action—almost like an act of civil disobedience against the entire video-game industry—Pluto had put up a website showing off the results of some algorithms that he had coded up for generating imaginary landforms that were up to his standards of realism. Which meant that every nuance of the terrain encoded a 4.5-billion-year simulated history of plate tectonics, atmospheric chemistry, biogenic effects, and erosion. Of course, the average person could not tell them apart from the arbitrary landforms used as backdrops in video games, so in that sense Pluto’s efforts were all perfectly useless. But Richard didn’t care about the skin of Pluto’s world. He cared about its bones and its guts. What mattered very much to Richard was what an imaginary dwarf would encounter once he hefted a virtual pick and began to delve into the side of a mountain. In a conventional video game, the answer was literally nothing. The mountain was just a surface, thinner than papier-mâché, with no interior. But in Pluto’s world, the first bite of the shovel would reveal underlying soil, and the composition of that soil would reflect its provenance in the seasonal growth and decay of vegetation and the saecular erosion of whatever was uphill of it, and once the dwarf dug through the soil he would find bedrock, and the bedrock would be of a particular mineral composition, it would be sedimentary or igneous or metamorphic, and if the dwarf were lucky it might contain usable quantities of gold or silver or iron ore.

Bioxx and the TFC devs are doing something revolutionary and awesome here. Get on board or stfu. That is all.

[Ryuugumo 88]

... Bioxx and the TFC devs are doing something revolutionary and awesome here. ...

This is more true then you know. MoJang made a wonderful 3d render, Bioxx modified that render's terrian generation, we learn from a game, gamers profit. People over-look Minecraft as "just a game" when it's really one of the best 3d renders in which you can freely and easily alter shapes, items, buildings, and inventions, and this is not to mention the amount of logic that people obtain by creating complex redstone circuits and using them in inventions or recreations that are vastly easier to explain in the larger scale than real life allows. TerraFirmaCraft is also as valuable as Minecraft; however, it's valuable in a different way. It plants a spark in people to go find-out what things are in real life (that they may never had any interest in at all before) and it gives them the tools to explore and try things that they either wouldn't have the time or money to do in real-life. Both MoJang and Bioxx should be proud of their work, because it has put tools in the hands of people who would otherwise never had a chance to explore, learn, or create the things they do here.

Good job and keep it up. You're changing the world one bit at a time.

[dunkleosteus 2,425]

Bioxx and the TFC devs are doing something revolutionary and awesome here. Get on board or stfu. That is all.

Just Bioxx and me, as far as coders go.

(officially)

[Just_Another_Guy_:) 1,066]

Why every time i see that Dunk wrote "officially" while talking about the TFC coders, i have the feeling there are more coders but they just don't want their names to be known? :

Maybe because that's what he is trying to say?

[uoheinrich 10]

Because Dunk is tricksy like that. I always read his signature just so I don't get my hopes up on a lot of things he goes on about. It sounds cool but unless said elsewhere or otherwise... is complete speculation. Although in this case... I tihnk Dunk is trying to mess with us.

[EstebanLB 183]

...when it's really one of the best 3d renders in which you can freely and easily alter shapes, items, buildings, and inventions...

yeah, right...

Did you hear that Bioxx? Why are you taking so long to mod Minecraft? It's so damn easy!!

[Just_Another_Guy_:) 1,066]

yeah, right...

Did you hear that Bioxx? Why are you taking so long to mod Minecraft? It's so damn easy!!

He was talking about alter shapes, items, buildings and inventions in-game, Esteban. Of course coding is much harder; i haven't found yet a game that was easier to code than it is to play.

[dunkleosteus 2,425]

Why every time i see that Dunk wrote "officially" while talking about the TFC coders, i have the feeling there are more coders but they just don't want their names to be known? :

Maybe because that's what he is trying to say?

Because Dunk is tricksy like that. I always read his signature just so I don't get my hopes up on a lot of things he goes on about. It sounds cool but unless said elsewhere or otherwise... is complete speculation. Although in this case... I tihnk Dunk is trying to mess with us.

Crysyn helps us with code a lot (specifically world gen, he was who got us into 256 world gen), but he never gets mentioned as a developer. I say it for him.

[Najual 46]

It plants a spark in people to go find-out what things are in real life (that they may never had any interest in at all before) and it gives them the tools to explore and try things that they either wouldn't have the time or money to do in real-life. Both MoJang and Bioxx should be proud of their work, because it has put tools in the hands of people who would otherwise never had a chance to explore, learn, or create the things they do here.

Yes. I was an environmental geology major in college before I became a net eng instead. I chose to follow a different path, so honestly I don't even remember most of the details about hydrology and core samples and how to build things that won't sink into the earth or collapse. Oh wait, yeah I do, at least conceptually. And here it is again, in TFC, and you don't even have to slog through differential equations as a requirement. I would still strongly recommend RTFM though.

I've spent most of my adult life immersed in the Net since the Vax/VMS days, when everything was text based and MUDs/MUSHs were the most awesome thing ever. I've watched these games evolve from ASCII Rogue and Nethack to Dwarf Fortress, from Intellivision classics like Utopia to Age of Empires and Civilization, and now MC and TFC are finally bringing them together. There's still a lot of unrealistic sillyness in MC, and to some degree TFC too, but that's to be expected. It's a game. And it's getting ever so closer to mirroring the actual world.

I'm still waiting for 3D glasses that don't give you a headache within half an hour. I want my VR! We were promised in the 90s!

Just Bioxx and me, as far as coders go.

(officially)

By devs I meant dev team, anyone who contributes to the development, like Crysyn. Artists, wiki editors, bug reporters, forum admins, server admins, idea spammers, even the players themselves are testing limits and shaping the mod. A lot of hearts and minds have converged here to create something new, something that wants to be. Of course some titles and credits need to be clearly defined, but what matters most to me is that it works and undergoes the formality of actually occurring.

There's something else that isn't mentioned nearly enough with this kind of work. Thank you.

[TheBlindPeople 31]

I don't really see this as any more revolutionary than what Dwarf Fortress does. This mod attemts a poor mockery of what geology is in the real world. It simply applies various names to differently colored blocks and places the blocks to make a little sense relative to eachother. Beyond that there are a ton of silly inaccurate things like square chunks, various stratas not influencing eachother, no tectonic activity and no variable layers.

It's a cool mod and plays fun with what it has, but this is perhaps taking things to silly places. Minecraft just isn't made to handle what you envision unless somebody really overhauls world gen. And that is fine, the game has already surpassed its expectations. Hopefully some future game will provide the versatiity to fulfill this fantasy of yours.

[Najual 46]

I don't really see this as any more revolutionary than what Dwarf Fortress does. This mod attemts a poor mockery of what geology is in the real world. It simply applies various names to differently colored blocks and places the blocks to make a little sense relative to eachother. Beyond that there are a ton of silly inaccurate things like square chunks, various stratas not influencing eachother, no tectonic activity and no variable layers.

It's a cool mod and plays fun with what it has, but this is perhaps taking things to silly places. Minecraft just isn't made to handle what you envision unless somebody really overhauls world gen. And that is fine, the game has already surpassed its expectations. Hopefully some future game will provide the versatiity to fulfill this fantasy of yours.

One question. Can you do better? By all means, please, get right on that.

[TheBlindPeople 31]

That weaksauce argument has no place here. It doesn't matter what I could do, it only matters how accurate your statement is. This does not reduce the quality or fun of the mod in any way. Probably just getting over excited over how novel it is. I want to point out the issues with this before a buncha people agree without really thinking about this.

And really, TFC is using the best of the current modding standards to provide a different experience. It does this well and strives to loosely follow real-world geology in a way that works well with the engine we have. This makes it a neat mod, but not a revolution.

[Najual 46]

That weaksauce argument has no place here. It doesn't matter what I could do, it only matters how accurate your statement is. This does not reduce the quality or fun of the mod in any way. Probably just getting over excited over how novel it is. I want to point out the issues with this before a buncha people agree without really thinking about this.

And really, TFC is using the best of the current modding standards to provide a different experience. It does this well and strives to loosely follow real-world geology in a way that works well with the engine we have. This makes it a neat mod, but not a revolution.

Correct, we don't have some future game to fulfill this fantasy, as you put it. We have MC, and Bioxx, and buggy Java to work with right now. The world gen has been and is being overhauled with real world geology as a model. No one has done this before in a fully 3D environment. If it's not revolutionary, it is at the very least evolutionary. Is that accurate enough?

Debating the accuracy of those terms as they apply to TFC is really just trolling, and trying to discourage excitement over how novel it is. Why? Seriously. Oh hell, I fell for it again. But thank you for at least saying some positive things too.

[Ryuugumo 88]

-snip-

Dude! Don't feed the trolls.

However "realistic" or not, doesn't change the fact that I have been affected by both Minecraft and TFC. I'm a blacksmith by trade and TFC got me introduced to geology. Minecraft itself got me interested in both using my creative side of the brain and in architechure. It's because of this that both Minecraft and TFC will have a special place in my heart. Without MoJang and Bioxx I would never have found that I love more than working with metal.

Instead of turning this into a troll thread try saying why this mod means what it does to you.

[dunkleosteus 2,425]

By devs I meant dev team, anyone who contributes to the development, like Crysyn. Artists, wiki editors, bug reporters, forum admins, server admins, idea spammers, even the players themselves are testing limits and shaping the mod. A lot of hearts and minds have converged here to create something new, something that wants to be. Of course some titles and credits need to be clearly defined, but what matters most to me is that it works and undergoes the formality of actually occurring.

There's something else that isn't mentioned nearly enough with this kind of work. Thank you.

Crysyn I think choses not to be included under the term "developer". But you are right that I include Rogue and (sort of BreatheSleep) under the title of developer.

But I wouldn't go as far as to say that the community is part of the dev team. There are few community ideas we've implemented or will implement that Bioxx or I hadn't already thought of when it was suggested.

[Pyrocantaes 8]

It's a shame there isn't a geology mod or a version of the rock geology system for TFC for vanilla MC that just replaces the standard cobble/smooth stone gen with the different rock types in TFC. Playing vanilla MC is somewhat boring now as I don't have enough types of stone block to build decent structures with.