Flower's Dev Diary (Oct 2nd)

[garrak_x86]

A little OT in the diary, but, oh well.

I stumbled at the BTW Thread in 1.2.5, at that time i tended more to RP2, so i didn't try it out. I just loved the way you handled suggestions and did your own thing, so after getting reaaally bored with FTB (having 56.000+ iron can be a bad thing, and we had performance issues on our server), i thought about this mod again.
Actually, after seeing some few months old LPs i'm glad i just started this one a few weeks ago. First game since Dark souls which made me actually stop the video on my second screen and get concentrated on playing. *thumbs up*

This has a full-price-title quality (eh, i mean, a good one, in this case), so my "suggestion" would be, check your paypal account ;)

//P.S. i could write an eassay about what i like in BTW, but after weeks reading up, i believe you and the community knows it already. (+ i actually want to play now^^)

[MoRmEnGiL]

Hoo boy.. this is a bittersweet feeling. I'm not good with endings. They force dust particles in my eyes. So I'll just quote Tim from the Office:

"I don't know what a happy ending is. Life isn't about endings, is it? It's a series of moments. And umm... it's not if, you know, if you turn the camera off it's not an ending, is it. I'm still here, my life's not over. Come back, come back here in 10 years, see how I'm doing then. Cause I could be married with kids, you don't know. Life just goes on. "

[Ribky]

Just remember guys, the end is sometimes the beginning :)

[utakataJ6]

I have to say, I've seen BTW go through a long, long process, but nothing has amazed more than the final changes forcing us to use different builds. I'm playing for the first time over LAN in a thoroughly recent world, and I completely love Hardcore Spawn in this sense. We've discovered 9 different HCS locations, and five of them already have a built up death shack, and three are connected. We build roads and bridges not because they look pretty but because we want to live. If we die and respawn at different locations, we play it out there.

There's a lot of work left to go before we start looking for the aforementioned villagers, but I can easily envision a nether and overworld network connecting these places. Only then will we be ready to meet the villagers.

[Folrig]

And to think, this all started with a little frustration and six blocks.

FC, you have made an extraordinary game, and an extraordinary community! It's the combination of the two that keeps me interested when I cannot play for months at a time. You, sir, are a fascinating force of nature. What is it like to know you in person?

I find it bizarre that the labor pains for RTH will soon begin. Just doesn't seem real. I am so excited!

[FaceFoiled]

Dev diary of October second, its amazing how fast time goes when you are having a good time. I actually missed the two year mark of the Edolas BTW server, simply because I have been having too much fun playing BTW. =D

The few praises you get here, are such a minute minority that you might almost forget how much you have brought to the Minecraft community. I'd say most people just update and play, without ever checking the forums or stopping by and say "thanks". Seriously man, without you - Edolas would never have started up, and by now I can't even think of shutting it down. As simple and small as it may be, the friendships and groups that have spawned forth from BTW are amazing. Thanks again! :)

[FlowerChild]

Hehe...sometimes some of my in development tests look pretty cool in their own right:

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I've been working on getting the new(ish) texture system in 1.5 to display procedurally animated textures, in the way the old system used to work, with the goal of both getting the Stoked Fire textures back in the game, and also blending the regular and stoked fire textures seamlessly. The above represents a test texture I'm generating through code for fire just based on random colors (the resulting "static" is animated in game).

Obviously, it works :)

[jakerman999]

Ugh. Procedural code makes my head hurt. I know I don't have the design mindset, but every once and a while you make me question if programming is really what I want to do.

[FlowerChild]

Ugh. Procedural code makes my head hurt.

Well, if it's any consolation, I think most programmers don't want to touch this kind of thing with a ten foot pole. Remember how many mods were animating their own textures pre-1.5? Yeah...I can only remember one :)

[FlowerChild]

Stage 2:

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I actually got that working last night, but decided this morning I may as well give an ongoing description of what's going on with this feature since I already spilled the beans on it :)

Got the procedural stoked fire texture back into the game. It looks a little vertically stretched above due to it being applied to regular fire blocks which render slightly differently. Now it's a matter of getting both the regular fire and stoked fire to essentially draw their textures from a single source so that they blend seamlessly together.

[Mason11987]

Stage 2:

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I actually got that working last night, but decided this morning I may as well give an ongoing description of what's going on with this feature since I already spilled the beans on it :)

Got the procedural stoked fire texture back into the game. It looks a little vertically stretched above due to it being applied to regular fire blocks which render slightly differently. Now it's a matter of getting both the regular fire and stoked fire to essentially draw their textures from a single source so that they blend seamlessly together.

Some men just want to watch the world burn.

[FlowerChild]

Getting there...

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[Calo290]

*sniff* It's so...beautiful *wipes eyes*

[FlowerChild]

*sniff* It's so...beautiful *wipes eyes*

Not yet...but getting there ;)

You'll notice from the glass blocks on the left of the screenshot that the height of the stoked fire is currently greater than a block (it's using regular fire rendering code at present), which is causing the texture to not align perfectly with the regular fire on top of it. That's the next bit I'll be tackling after lunch.

Also, the regular fire texture is far too uniform and looks more like a match flame. I need to integrate some of Notch's old procedural texture code for that top bit to fix that and make it look more like normal MC fire.

However, I got the thing working where both types of fire are drawing their textures from the same source, which was the big part of this task (along with restoring some kind of system for procedural textures into 1.5 which is what I finished yesterday) and why I avoided doing this up until now.

[FlowerChild]

After going on a bit of a KSP forum bender for the last few hours, here's the first part I was talking about above:

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Almost there :)

As you can see, the fire and stoked fire textures are now blending together seamlessly. Just need to integrate some of Notch's code for the top fire bit and we should be good to go!

[Gormador]

Awwwww!

That looks sooo cool man! Stocked fire FTW!
Regarding texture packs, and I know it's not a priority to you (no harm in that), do you think Panda's trick could be redone to fit this new version and better integrate with aforementioned TPs ? If not, well it's not like stocked fire is usually exposed in the open ;-)


As an aside :
A friend and I booted up a new (private) server two nights ago. I hadn't play since early August.
Let's say I wasn't paying enough attention to my surroundings and a taiga was a few blocks away.
I don't think I ever enjoyed HC Spawnso much! Well I was pissed at first, of course, but we had a good laugh about my noob move and it was behind us ;-)

So yeah, thanks again! I'll be sure to send you some dev funds (read "packs of beer" ^^) for RTH as soon as my finances permit it.

[FlowerChild]

And end result:

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In the end decided that blending into normal looking fire was way too much trouble, so opted for displaying both my procedural textures and the normal vanilla ones on the top blocks. Looks good, stoked fire is easily identifiable, and there are no more unsightly seams, so I'm happy :)

Regarding texture packs, and I know it's not a priority to you (no harm in that), do you think Panda's trick could be redone to fit this new version and better integrate with aforementioned TPs ? If not, well it's not like stocked fire is usually exposed in the open ;-)

Please don't bug me about stuff like that man. I have no idea what Panda's trick was, and you guys can easily figure this stuff on your own upon release.

I've set the textures up so that they can be scaled to different resolutions of packs, but that's as far as I'm willing to go.

[Gormador]

I had a hard time figuring out what the difference was between that pic and the last one, but now that I *think* that I've seen it it's seems much more "natural" (well, not procedurally generated ^^).
Nice work!

Please don't bug me about stuff like that man. I have no idea what Panda's trick was, and you guys can easily figure this stuff on your own upon release.

I've set the textures up so that they can be scaled to different resolutions of packs, but that's as far as I'm willing to go.

Yeah, sorry about that. To be honest, this measure seems already largely sufficient :-)

[FlowerChild]

I had a hard time figuring out what the difference was between that pic and the last one, but now that I *think* that I've seen it it's seems much more "natural" (well, not procedurally generated ^^).

Thanks! I also made one more refinement after taking that screenshot where stoked fire blocks neighboring on each other use alternate textures to make things look a little less uniform, but I'll leave it to the release for you guys to check it out for yourselves :)

[FlowerChild]

Was measuring some distances in my base this evening, and this inevitably lead me to do a revision pass on Stakes & string to make them a little more convenient to use.

I normally don't put out releases for such a small amount of functionality, but just wanted to check in here to see if anyone is making extensive use of them, as it may be quite awhile before the next regular release.

If it would help anyone out I can put together a small package to get it into your hands :)

[odemarken]

Well, I'm currently doing some large builds in creative mode, where you can't measure distances by simply setting aside a precise amount of blocks and putting them in a line. I found that stakes are the next best thing, so I guess I'd find it helpful.
I know you don't support creative, but fraction blocks (panels&co.) are absolutely awesome for doing large structures with fine detail. Once I'm finished I plan to share some pics in the show-off thread, I hope it will make up a bit for the time you spend putting out the release. I'm still about a week from finishing the first build, though.

Sidenote: I enjoy building in survival even more (table&fence scaffoldings rock!) , but I deleted my old developed world, and in my new one, just short of finding diamods, i just fell into my fishing ice-hole, fought off a hat, then suffocated under the ice unable to find the hole again, so it's back to square one for me. But the fight for my life was epic, so that's like the third time in this post when I feel the need to congratulate you, FC, for your design brilliance. Sorry for wordiness.

[DaveYanakov]

I am one of those who makes heavy use of the survey stake system. I will never understand the players who work to exclude spiders from their mob traps when the string is so incredibly useful.

[FlowerChild]

Well, I think it was just on the border line between usefulness and convenience, so I think people weren't motivated to use it in many situations where it might have proved helpful.

As a result, I gave it a little push towards convenience, basically allowing you to retract the string without having to run back along the length to pick it all up. That part doesn't affect creative mode too much, so I don't think these changes would make much difference there. Also gave it the ability to cut through snow and tall grass and such as I think it was confusing people as to why it wasn't working under certain circumstances. I know I myself had some "wtf?" moments while using it around snow before realizing what was happening, which is never a good sign.

Anyways, I'll hold onto it for today to see if there are any other little things I want to get into a release, then likely put it out this evening.

[Rianaru]

I use them pretty heavily atm with what I'm working on, so any changes to make them more useful/efficient would be great :)

[odemarken]

That's great. Even though in creative you technically don't need the string back, I did often feel the urge to go and pick it up, so that's a welcome change. I can even see myself using string more often, so thanks for that :)