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NikkyD

I am missing reasons to build a shelter

82 posts in this topic

How expensive would it be to have a heat source throw a few hundred random pathfinding tests in an area around itself, spread over a few hundred cycles as it warms up?

 

If it averages its heat output through the distance to the player, based on the results of those tests, and had the player perform a similar test to find the heat source. You'd have something that felt like a heated room after the warm-up period.

 

It'd take a while for the fire to lose heat to the "room" if say, a directly adjacent wall disappeared suddenly. But we're all apparently okay with water spreading like molasses, so I don't think that'd be a problem for most of us.

 

Besides not knowing if MC can actually handle that kind of logic, I'd have to point out again that this wouldn't necessarily work well for warming up containers or anything like that.

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For a bit of reference, chopping an extra-large sequoia tree (maybe 100 blocks in total?) which updates all of those blocks, as well as notifying neighbors to let them know they were updated, is enough to bring some of our players' game to a screeching halt, if not crash it entirely with an OOM.

 

A major source of lag in the initial versions of 1.8 was the basic pathfinding that they implemented so that mobs avoid creepers that are about to explode. Even something as simple as that was enough to create a noticeable lag in standard gameplay with maybe 200 mobs within the loaded area.

 

In essence, Minecraft does not handle large or recursive algorithms very well at all, and is much more likely to throw a crash after X amounts of iterations than actually try and let the process finish.

 

@Cerus - TFCraft is open source, and can be found on github. If you'd like to poke around a bit, let me know and I'd be happy to point in you the correct direction towards some of the classes that handle heat stuff.

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Aww, well that sounds discouraging. I will poke around in there though, thanks!

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Minecraft is NOT efficient java code, the example with the sequoia may be a current state but should not be taken as a measurement.

 

The addition of Forge doesn't really help, i know that, but constantly crushing ideas because of something that could change with the next version is just ignorant.

 

I am not a big Steve Jobs fan but he had an idea and made ppl build it and WIN. I bet every coder/engineer screamed but you can't do stuff like put ppl on mars if you stop at the first hurdle.

 

 

Seems that Cerus and I are the only ones who think that it isn't that big a deal.

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Rather than coding this, why don't you just write down some rules to follow while playing? Ex: Can't sleep in a bed if shelter is innapropriate, or jump down a certain height to wound youself if you spent the night in the rain at 5°C. You can also keep youself from eating a food type to lower your Max HP and pretend being sick. Heck you can have IRL penalties such as doing pushups to motivate yourself to play right.

It may sound silly, but I thinks its better than adding to the devs workload. Wanna eat pancakes in TFC? Good idea! Don't want to program it yourself? Then that bread, egg and fruit sandwich will do the the trick.

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Rather than coding this, why don't you just write down some rules to follow while playing? Ex: Can't sleep in a bed if shelter is innapropriate, or jump down a certain height to wound youself if you spent the night in the rain at 5°C. You can also keep youself from eating a food type to lower your Max HP and pretend being sick. Heck you can have IRL penalties such as doing pushups to motivate yourself to play right.It may sound silly, but I thinks its better than adding to the devs workload. Wanna eat pancakes in TFC? Good idea! Don't want to program it yourself? Then that bread, egg and fruit sandwich will do the the trick.

 

Best comment ever!

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Rather than coding this, why don't you just write down some rules to follow while playing? Ex: Can't sleep in a bed if shelter is innapropriate, or jump down a certain height to wound youself if you spent the night in the rain at 5°C. You can also keep youself from eating a food type to lower your Max HP and pretend being sick. Heck you can have IRL penalties such as doing pushups to motivate yourself to play right.It may sound silly, but I thinks its better than adding to the devs workload. Wanna eat pancakes in TFC? Good idea! Don't want to program it yourself? Then that bread, egg and fruit sandwich will do the the trick.

 

It's significantly less satisfying for many gamers to self-impose restrictions in the way you suggest.

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It's significantly less satisfying for many gamers to self-impose restrictions in the way you suggest.

 

If you don't mind me asking, why? For me personally, staying within a restriction, be it self-imposed or forced upon me by the game, is equally satisfying. The only difference that I can see is that it's easier to break self-imposed restrictions and cheat, but that doesn't make very much of an impact, considering I can almost just as easily break the in-game restrictions using commands, editing NBT data, adding other mods, and switching to creative mode.

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If you don't mind me asking, why? For me personally, staying within a restriction, be it self-imposed or forced upon me by the game, is equally satisfying. The only difference that I can see is that it's easier to break self-imposed restrictions and cheat, but that doesn't make very much of an impact, considering I can almost just as easily break the in-game restrictions using commands, editing NBT data, adding other mods, and switching to creative mode.

 

It's a personal preference, I get much more satisfaction from solving a puzzle that had me thinking for a while, but in the process of solving the puzzle I often find myself annoyed when it pops into my head that I can reduce the difficulty with less effort. As for alternate means of breaking in-game restrictions, deciding to drop a self-imposed restriction is instantaneous, every other solution is not. But hey, I understand your perspective too.

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As a reminder this topic started with OP feeling there was no real need to build a house and so wanted devs to make building a house a requirement. Failure to build a "proper" enclosure would be punished. This isn't a TFC issue, it is vanilla. It isn't even a tricky problem to be solved it is just a restriction on play styles and creativity.

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Maybe for some it is easier to understand in a different way.

 

Games are usually about tasks and rewards -> kill monster, get gold or score. Without reward players lose motivation. There are games like ms flight sim where the act of playing the sim itself is the reward, but thats not the standard.

 

Now in MC creative mode you have only one reward, the finished construct, which may be what some are after. I am looking for more challenging things, like a survival game.

In a survival game some of the things you do simply prevent the end of the game, you eat and drink so you dont die. Any game that is about survival (like DayZ etc) has stuff like food and hitpoints. And you could survive by just walking around and collecting food, but that soon gets boring, no real reward.

 

So lets look at some rewards in TFC. Crafting tools gives you the option to build more stuff or makes certain things faster. A lot of things you construct allow you to craft more useful things. A loom for cloth, cloth for a bed, a bed to pass the night. Other things are not yet implemented or lack proper rewards, like planting grain, harvesting it, processing it, putting it in a barrel to be rewarded with alcohol... with which you can do absolutely nothing unless you turn it into vinegar or fill it in bottles, drink it and pretend that your guy is having fun...

 

Now lets see it backwards, i have a shelter and what is my reward other than having built it ?! If i just want to look at a shelter, i can go creative or turn cheats on etc but i want to play survival. There is no proper reward! There isnt even the "survival is the reward, you dont die!" thing because keeping monsters off is too easy and the environment isnt killing you.

 

So why build a shelter ? What is the proper reward ? Thats what i am talking about. If there was such a thing as "hot/cold hurts the player" than it would help you avoid death and thus is a reward. But the discussion quickly spun into an argument about limitations of the game engine and whether or not it is possible to do it at all.

 

The idea itself seems to be refused by the "i just want to build" players mentioning creativity and "in your head" gameplay. After all TFC is a survival mod for MC so where if not here should such a thing as proper shelter building be implemented ???

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I was wondering if it would be possible to give blocks a 'temperature' value, and have it spread with a random tick. Perhaps heat sources could raise the temperature values in immediately adjacent blocks. Then, whenever a block with a temperature value other than 'ambient' gets a random tick, it adjusts its temperature and those of blocks adjacent to it, losing some of its heat and transferring it to its surroundings. Heat transfer into solid blocks would be reduced so that walls would trap heat. Blocks with a low temperature value would be changed back to 'ambient', so you wouldn't get ridiculous numbers of block-temps to keep track of.

 

Then again, this might be utterly impossible. I really don't have the knowledge to tell. 

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You really would not want to make all blocks ticking entities. That would be very bad for performance.

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But instead of fearing the boogie man some ppl should accept that a certain amount of calculations might achieve something that adds to the game.

 

@NadNerbTB

Something like what you described was my basic idea, the critical point is keeping track of the blocks that have heat. You would need a list of sorts otherwise you have to check all available blocks for heat, which would really kill performance. My idea is to only keep track of the heat source and spread the heat outwards until the difference between blocks reaches some negligable threshold. That check is done with all water sources anyway, now do that in all directions to a max extent of xx blocks and you could heat up a smallish house with one fire in the basement etc. With added rule "a block that sees the sky will always have ambient temp" so you dont need to determine whether or not the block is inside a house.

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And right now there is no reason why one should build a shelter. Monsters can be held off by simple means, a roof can be constructed like a giant umbrella or one of those party pavillions... but why build a shelter with a door etc ?

Blocks already "pass heat" through the ambient temperature system. However, there is no way to determine whether or not a structure is "enclosed". The block directly next to a forge is going to be just as hot if the forge is inside, or if the forge is outside.

It works the way you suggest, except for the heat being negated by view to sky. The well known plan is for body heat to be implimented. And Kitty stated that when players are effected by inclement weather it will likely only look for block over the players head. The negating heat source effect on ambient temperature due to a view of sky isn't belevible and would restrict, not expand gameplay. A bonus for ambient temperature when there isn't a view of sky seems more workable. Simply shifting ambient temperature 2.5oC towards a neutral temperature would effectively reduce the area influenced by a heat source. This is believable, works in hot and cold temperatures and I believe a very simple and light method for the code.
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Sounds like you've just lost the love of the game.  You're getting all technical and meta about it... you build a cool house because its awesome.  You want iron because it's the next thing to do; it's an objective. 

 

If you keep going down this hole... you'll end up with... it's just a silly game that's a complete waste of time. 

 

Maybe time for a new modpack?  Different game?  I got burnt out on TFC a couple builds ago.  I stopped playing it for months.  Then I found myself thinking "Hey, that was a rad mod, I'm going to do another fun world!"  I'm really enjoying it all over again! 

 

Having a nice world to start with is a huge boon to the enjoyability.  I found some good seeds and that really set me off in a good mood to truly enjoy a new world. 

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I don't know, I kind of sympathize here. Yes, you build a house because it's awesome, but when you've played through the game 30 times over three years, the "technical and meta" appeal is kind of all that's left.

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Maybe the trouble is that building a nice structure is a massive effort - some would say a grindfest. This isn't so much a problem in vanilla MC where resources are easy to get. 

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Na, its really as some understand it, "been there, done that" from the Skytower Penthouse to the WW2 Bunker. I've built a lot but always hated the fact how easy it was to survive. Thats what i like about this mod. But some parts are still so undeveloped. Look at the grind you need to make red steel... for what benefit other than having red steel stuff ?! Why not make shelterbuilding more attractive and useful instead of poking the "creative" aspect all the time.

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I am going to side with Kitty on this one. While I can think of a few ways to calculate if an area is enclosed, or variations on that idea that give you relative 'enclosure values' for spaces, all of them are time consuming. Granted its not much time... Its enough.... I'm currently running quite a powerful computer, with WAY more resources than any JVM could effectively utilize, and TFC is already laggy. Chunk loading, especially generation, and whatnot cause a lot of lag, and combat is a joke. Even in SSP I cant reliably engage with ANY mob hostile or otherwise without the mob randomly lagging and teleporting to some nearby location, usually resulting in me taking damage. This type of heavy handed calculation seems to me to be a bit to much to ask of TFC. I would rather see body temperature based entirely on heat sources, and buffs/debuffs being a function of distance, maybe with some logic to nerf heat propagation in certain ways, with respect to certain blocks. I don't think that detecting enclosed spaces is viable, but agree that it would be awesome.

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Na, its really as some understand it, "been there, done that" from the Skytower Penthouse to the WW2 Bunker. I've built a lot but always hated the fact how easy it was to survive. Thats what i like about this mod. But some parts are still so undeveloped. Look at the grind you need to make red steel... for what benefit other than having red steel stuff ?! Why not make shelterbuilding more attractive and useful instead of poking the "creative" aspect all the time.

In my last world, there was an incentive to get to red steel for the buckets, due to the compound I was building I needed water supplies up on a mountain. But still, that was pretty much it.

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Bioxx has stated many times that colored steels are simply luxury items. The incentive for making them is that you have this bright, colorful shiny item that stands out and makes you look more luxurious to other players. It's entirely a status thing.

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Yes I think we definitely do not want to make TFC even more laggy. Much of what we do in game needs an exercise in imagination, so for my part I* would be OK with body temperature incorporating the same kind of mechanic that villages use, so it would check for sky access and proximity to a door. No way for the game to know if you are indoor or on the porch. But in my point of view it would add to the game. So u actually need a shelter of some kind. If you want to mock the game and camp on the open porch feel free. The ones that are looking for immersion will stay inside.

My idea is like this if you are close to a heat source you get heated, if you have no sky access you get a bonus and if you are close so many blocks from a door the mod assumes you are indoors and gives you a extra bonus, allowing you to move away from the heat source as long as you are within so many blocks and between the heat source and the door. If you have a door between you and the fire the game assumes you are outside.

No idea if this is feasible, or piratical, just an idea I had.

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1. Why does a "room" have to constantly be calculated? Couldn't there be a one time calculation that is triggered by the player? For example, lighting a campfire checks for solid blocks in a certain x-y area within z levels above the fire. If they're all solid, then all those blocks receive a bonus to warmth for the duration of the fire. Could you cheat this by building a roof, lighting the fire, then breaking the roof? Sure, but who cares, and who would do that anyway?

 

2. Somewhat a counter to the first question, I don't think room calculation is really necessary pursuant to making compelling reasons to build a house.

  • Heat from fire can be simple proximity to the source. Does it make sense for heat to go through a stone wall? No, but that's not really exploit-worthy breaking of immersion, either. Most people are going to build an open room with a hearth, not a labyrinth of magical hidden heat energy. 
  • A roof should be desirable to protect from rain and snow, which should be far more dangerous. Rain should have the ability to wreck your loot. Unsealed food spoil, wooden chests rot, that kind of thing. And being wet while it's cold should be harsh.
  • Walls should protect from intrusion, and not just hostiles. When you're camping in the woods and a bear finds you, chances are you're not going to be eaten. But your food will. Critters will ransack everything you have while avoiding conflict with you.

These considerations would provide enough reason to secure shelter, without being so restrictive as to demand a certain kind or shape of shelter. 

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The idea with critters is nice. You could create them like butterflies (there is a mod), they just are some 2D sprites and no real entities, you can't touch them or anythings but they could spawn, run around for some seconds and disappear again. This way you could see a rat nibbling on your stuff if it's outdoors.

 

 

But one things that all the "simple" solutions for heat do not provide is that once the fire stops burning, the heat is gone as well. And if there was something like a stored heat value per block you could heat up a house during the day and it would stay warm during the night etc. If the fire needs to be burning, you need to burn 12 logs or so every day in wintertime which is a bit crazy.

 

I still would like to have firewood. Place a log on the ground and right click it with an axe as you would create a food prep place with a knife and it becomes a chopping block. You then add one log at a time to it and just work the block with your axe for a second and boom you got 4 pieces of firewood. Firewood could be generic, no matter what type of log created it, just like sticks. And then make fireplaces accept sticks and firewood only as fuel, depending on how long you want to have heat. For cooking one bread or meat it feels silly to burn an actual log as it would require maybe a quarter of it if at all.

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