New terrain, poles and a ton of little stuff I never realised I did

[DarkLadyPhoenix 62]

I think I'm really starting to dislike the 'poles' update.

For one, every world I've been on has a shit ton of ocean. Several thousand blocks of it in either direction.

It's nice to be realistic but realistically, I'm playing a game and can't live in the ocean. Also, having to travel that far crashes the client every single time. On SMP, having to travel that far crashes the server. Fun, huh?

This brings me to my next point: inserting AFK encouragement as a feature.

ANY game that encourages AFK play has terrible mechanics. It's really tedious to cross that ocean, so the best way to do is put the game on auto run and go read a book.

Seriously?

I'm getting very bored with the same climate and any attempt to change climate results in the above: dying of boredom. I've never seen snow nor a desert nor plains since the poles were put in. I'm actually starting to miss my desert homes. So much so that I created a new world and I went all the way out to the equator. It took an hour. What did I find? No jungles. No desert. Went up to the pole and there was no taiga. No snowy area with trees, just a barren wasteland.

To be fair, I did find a spot with jungle trees that was still marked as plains. One of the biggest draws to this mod for me was the sheer number of biomes it had along with the variable climate. Now I'm seeing none of that.

Mapping is now more tedious. "Where you at?" is now met with "-79332 -93558" :/

I have a very poor short term memory and having long coordinates just isn't fun for me so I tend to stay at places that have at most three digits. I'll also never see double positives again which was my default choice on multiplayer maps.

This change does not promote a different game every time TBH. I thought that was the goal of this mod?

In previous maps, I was a fisherman on an island. I staked out a living in a harsh, wintery area where only birch and pine grew. I lived underground in the desert where no one would think to look.

I'd like that type of game back.

[Fizicks 3]

I'm also not a big fan of the poles. I knew from the beginning that I would never walk over 5k blocks to get anywhere. I haven't really noticed the lack of variety in biomes now but i guess you're right. All i've seen are rivers, mountains and forests.

On a side note, does the calendar always start the game at the same time? It might be neat to see some variety with this or maybe an option to choose when to start your year when creating the game.

[Deviator 51]

It only took me 7 in game days to run the 10k to the equator. That is including setting up shop for the night times and collecting fruit trees and seeds along the way. It wasn't too bad. I just made boats for the 2 huge and 3 small oceans I had which made it go faster since I didn't have to climb mountains and stuff and could just go straight through. The one thing I hate is that the equator is nowhere near as nice as some of the mountain areas I passed on the way.

I have seen plenty of plains and mountains, even a few jungle tree areas but no deserts at all. I have seen rainfall amounts from 8000 down to, I think it was, 125. Not sure the full range but I am assuming the desert areas will be 0 rainfall. Have not seen any snow either but I didn't head to the poles... yet. Once I get settled in, I am going to make a run for all of the tree types and see how far I can get to one pole or the other and check it out.

I was hoping to have enough food soon to be able to do that but my crop harvest never came in. I am in a 1000 rainfall area so I assume I need to move it to a higher zone, I think there is a 4000 and an 8000 nearby but I don't want to drown them lol. Being that I work during the day, I missed all my fruit tree harvests except cherries so I will most likely have to rely on animals. That's the downside to playing on a server I guess.

[Treyflix 277]

First off, why is everybody always bitching about huge oceans? I never run into them. Or maybe other people just have a disproportionate value for "huge". Second, I don't know about you but I have seen tons of stuff. First off there is the new forests, now every forest you run into is different. Then there is the jungles, the sequoia mountains, the jungle mountains, just plain old mountains, plains... I have yet to see a desert admititly. And I really that the sequoia forests should be much rarer instead of being a entire zone. Also there should be a pine forest zone. I think the poles update needs work, we should have more deserts, less sequoia (so they're rarer), shrubland, and savanna, however I think it's one of the best updates yet. Also, the reason you ain't seeing tiagas is because snow is limited to the winter. Which I think seems much better.

If some one could confirm/disprove this that would be great, but I think the farther north you are the earlier it snows, and eventually at the arctic its all snow... Amiright?

[DarkLadyPhoenix 62]

Actually I went to the pole, did a /toggledownfall and it rained.... melting all the snow in the pole, so no.

Huge ocean is 2k+ of nothing but water. The last 3 maps when going to the pole, I had to cross 6k of water, so I'd love to have your seed where you don't run into ocean.

As I mentioned, I have not seen a jungle. Only jungle trees in a tiny 'plains' biome and that was when I went to the equator.

[zoran 31]

I spent less than 3 hours playing, didn't run into any oceans, found a desert, several jungles, the new barren landscape, the frozen tundra, many forests of VARYING trees. I don't know what you're complaining about. The largest body of water I ran into could barely be considered a large lake.

[EstebanLB 183]

I was hoping to have enough food soon to be able to do that but my crop harvest never came in. I am in a 1000 rainfall area so I assume I need to move it to a higher zone, I think there is a 4000 and an 8000 nearby but I don't want to drown them lol.

Those numbers of rainfall ammount doesn't affect crops, it doesn't matter where you plant them except for the average temperature

If some one could confirm/disprove this that would be great, but I think the farther north you are the earlier it snows, and eventually at the arctic its all snow... Amiright?

The same goes here, localized weather (in time or space) is not present in MC yet, so it can't be donde without heavy coding

[Bioxx 796]

As stated in the changelog if anyone bothered to actually read it (Hint: it should be done with every update), snow is not currently working at all pending changes to forge that I am waiting on. Until that time, no, you won't see taiga's etc.

As far as the world looking the same... I only have so much control over it, though I will be tweaking more in the future. That said, the old system was bulky and needed nonstop tweaking and it still never gave desired results.

To the comment of the scale of the world. I do not/have not/will not balance for single player. I try to make sure that the game is still playable for SSPers but SMPers are my priority and I rely on a certain group to give me feedback regarding these things. If I were to scale the world down more you would see far too rapid temperature transitions for each block you travel north and south. The current distances are proving to be perfect balance wise.

[Firestorm13 14]

As stated in the changelog if anyone bothered to actually read it (Hint: it should be done with every update), snow is not currently working at all pending changes to forge that I am waiting on. Until that time, no, you won't see taiga's etc.

As far as the world looking the same... I only have so much control over it, though I will be tweaking more in the future. That said, the old system was bulky and needed nonstop tweaking and it still never gave desired results.

To the comment of the scale of the world. I do not/have not/will not balance for single player. I try to make sure that the game is still playable for SSPers but SMPers are my priority and I rely on a certain group to give me feedback regarding these things. If I were to scale the world down more you would see far too rapid temperature transitions for each block you travel north and south. The current distances are proving to be perfect balance wise.

While I like the SMP-focused direction you're taking this mod, I think you're missing one important fact: There aren't any servers large enough for a huge world to work. I think a TFC server would have to have around 75-100 people online during peak playing hours to work like it's intended. Unfortunately, the fact that the TFC community is fairly small, coupled with the frequent updates, means that a large server is incredibly hard to set up and maintain for an extended period of time.

HOWEVER

This mod is far from complete. Once the updates taper off and get more scheduled, larger servers will start popping up. I'm guessing that by the middle of Beta 3 there will be 3-5 big servers that lots of players will be on, with many smaller servers popping up all the time. It's the way Minecraft itself works (albeit on a larger, more spread out scale) and it's the way TFC will inevitably work, especially with the new SMP focus.

Also, I'd like to suggest that someone consider starting up an "official" server come Beta 3 so that Bioxx can observe how a large TFC multiplayer environment works. It would be fairly temporary (a week at most), and used mostly to test out the various kinks and silliness associated with faction politics and war mechanics.

Just my 2 cents. Hope I didn't piss anyone off.

[DarkLadyPhoenix 62]

The current server I'm on if any more than 7 people get on at the same time, eating and destroying blocks is impossible. How many players can you have on at a time and what server?

[Leosallespoli 338]

I have seen vanilla servers with over 150 users

[renadi 258]

yeah, vanilla servers of around 75-100 active users aren't at all unusual, I find them sort of silly because usually they're modded way too much for my tastes(as I'm using one of the biggest mods there is, TFC).

[Leosallespoli 338]

And from what I've seen they are pretty much wastelands with some amazing buildings

[Jasnatdic 85]

The reason that most servers can't handle more than 6 or 7 maybe 10 people is because of network bandwidth; mostly. Normal minecraft chunk stacks are about 1/3 the data size of a tfc chunk. Normal mineraft bandwidth per player on a normal playstyle of roaming and building and so on is around 100-400 kbits per second depending on how much moving around and chunk loading is going on. This is a huge bandwidth load on 3 functions on a server as it stands. First the world chunk is polled from the storage device and loaded to memory, then it goes through its processing to be sent out across the networks. So seek time on hd, cpu time to process, and transmission time across net.

The hd seek and net transfer are the 2 slower functions involved with this. Hd seek time is an easy fix if you have plenty of memory by running the server instance on a ramdrive, 2-3gigs should be more than enough for almost all servers. The other part is bandwidth, and this part is much more expensive to fix. The important number is the up bandwidth, in America the average up is like 1-2 megabit at most, for tfc this will clog down with more than 4 or 5 people.

As I mentioned above vanilla average is 100-400 kbit, tfc is probably more like 200-1000 kbit per player averaging at 500 for moderate activity. 500 kbits very quickly swamps a 2000 kbit upline. There are 2 solutions. 1 is to pay for the broadest upline you can get. Maybe 20 mbit in residential, maybe more, but this is gona be costly. 2 is chunk caching, which at this point would have to be coded from scratch.

I mentioned spout in another thread. This had chunk caching but it was broken with the new chunk storage system in vanilla, I don't know if they got it working again yet. However, as tfc is vanilla based, either it would have to be coded in spout to take advantage of that (when spout is finnished) or a chunk cache mod or addition would have to be added to either minecraft or tfc.

Another ideal solution though I don't know how possible to code with minecraft is an extention on chunk cacheing. Basically the client and server would have to know exactly identically how each chunk is going to form and load and then only communicate changes made after generation, and entity locations and so on. Then of course the client remembers the changes chunks. Problem with this is the ability to cheat on a server would be increased, as the client now has data it varifies with the server.

Anyhow, wall of text later, main reason for the lack of large server possibilities is bandwidth.

[renadi 258]

Heh, yeah, I get .61 Mbps up, although there are getting to be more options for additional upload speeds, usually for business but depending on the provider the prices can be pretty reasonable, if in an area that offers it(I am not).

[PizzaSHARK! 13]

I spent less than 3 hours playing, didn't run into any oceans, found a desert, several jungles, the new barren landscape, the frozen tundra, many forests of VARYING trees. I don't know what you're complaining about. The largest body of water I ran into could barely be considered a large lake.

Heh, lucky I guess. I've made three worlds and all three of them have been about 40%-60% water. I've just been flying around in creative, filling out a map. The land tends to be normal forests, plains, and mountains. There's been plenty of variety in tree types (I've seen every kind except hickory and kapok now) and rock varieties, but I haven't seen anything that would qualify as a desert and Bioxx said above me that snow won't be showing up right now.

Maybe I'm just being too picky about what kind of terrain I want.