TerrainControl

[piranha]

those of you not into minecraft can safely tune out now.

*waves to the three of you remaining*. ;)

soon after i've had the idea of making a new server for the paramour, the poing, and a couple of other friends, the idea has been taking on a life of its own. we all play on a vanilla server now, but i am dissatisfied with that because what i really want is to play OUR game, but our game is so far away still. so i've been pondering how to turn minecraft as much as possible into our game. it's actually a useful exercise because it shows issues we might otherwise not discover.

the way the three of us play is different for each, but there is enough overlap to make building a server fun instead of frustrating. i've been looking for mods that'd work for all of us (and that will play nicely together, which is harder), because we all have played vanilla minecraft (vMC)for a long time now, and have kinda of worn it out. we want more blocks to mine, more recipes for things to build, a better tech tree, more epic terrain. i'll leave the handwringing about how hard it is to get various mods to work together for another post. for now i have settled on CraftBukkit (CB) as my server platform because it is the most mature and has an actual API (something vMC is as yet missing).

one of my favourite things to do is to explore -- whichever game i play, that's the first thing i do, and oftentimes that'll remain my main character's "profession". so of course that's what i do in minecraft too, when i am not building. vMC's terrain generator is getting better, but it's still a far cry from great, so i've played around with in-game editors such as WorldEdit and VoxelSniper. and i've been looking at world generators, with an emphasis on those that allow me to guide the generation to some degree. there's WorldPainter, which is great fun for precisely editing sections of terrain from outside the game, complete with 3D preview. i will definitely use that. but for generating the bulk of the terrain, i'm opting for procedural. the most flexible by far is the little-known TerrainControl (TC). go ahead, gaze at the epicness. awesome, isn't it?

so i'm in the process of creating the base world map now, the outlines of which i am borrowing from various real-world islands. even though some of the terrain will be epically impossible in real life, i still want the whole to seem possible. it looks like WorldPainter might import heightmaps, which would be awesome -- i could get google earth terrain or interesting dem files for special spots on the map.

something that's becoming clear to me is that real-world distances won't work, for several reasons. one is that one can't see very far in minecraft even on a clear day. the other is that even with interesting terrain, it still has limited interest because it has so little life and few things to find other than caves and ores, even if i populate it with extra tree types. i think i will need to create an ancient civilization that has left ruins, so people wandering can find something unexpected. and i'll need to compress the oceans, because while they'll look great when looking at a print of the map, in-game those distances become huge swaths of unrelieved, blue dullness.

Comments

[submarine_bells]

I've been dabbling with mods lately too, for much the same reasons. I've had a lot of fun with the Technic modpack, which includes a great mix of "accessory mods" (minimap, continue-simulating-the-world-while-the-character-sleeps type things, chop-a-tree-down-with-one-block mods etc), "content mods" that add a bunch of new things to do in MC (of which my faves are the Buildcraft/IndustrialCraft group and Thaumcraft, all of which are very rich additions by themselves and work together beautifully), and "world generation mods" that add complexity to the world itself, from "'Mo Creatures" that adds much more diversity to the wildlife, to "Better Dungeons", that adds random pirate ships, pyramids stuffed with booby-trapped loot caches, and a variety of other random cool structures. I'm also a fan of Millenaire, which adds villages represnting a bunch of different cultures and a small RPG element with villagers who'll set you quests and have wars or trade or whatever with each other. Unfortunately Millenaire has lag problems that renders it almost unplayable after a while. So sad, because apart from that it's a great mod.

The biggest downside to these kind of modpacks that I've found is that because they contain so much content, it's a long long wait for them to be updated to function with new versions of Minecraft as they come out. So if there's a feature in a recent MC update that's of value to you (as there is for me), it pays to be very patient. *sigh*

[piranha]

i hear you about the patience. for me the main issue isn't waiting for updates so much, but for compatibility. i can wait for opdates. though admittedly because mostly i don't actually have to wait much where my personal game play is concerned -- i run all recent versions of minecraft (including the latest snapshot) and switch to whichever i feel like (i've actually written a program to facilitate switching, *heh*). and since i've become conversant with WorldEdit and schematics, i can build in any of my worlds and can later just move the buildings to the main world the 3 of us play together, when i update that server (it's still on 1.3.2 now, but i'll probably update as soon as 1.4 settles). WorldEdit generally updates very quickly. still, that only works because our common world at this time is basically vanilla except for the in-game world editing mods.

the 1.2 update resulted in a bigger wait for mods than usual because of the change in file format. the 1.3 update is an even bigger rewrite for modders because mojang unified SSP and SMP (totally the right thing to do). i am kinda hoping that things will slow down for a while, because mods are now starting to catch up. i'm also hoping they'll stop with the random additions and put more effort into, say, fixing redstone.

if i were a praying type of person, especially one praying for things in a game, *heh*. i'd be praying on my knees day and night for the mod API. because the horrible mess we have now is so frustrating.

as to the mods i like, i prefer those that seem to stay mostly within the spirit of minecraft. millenaire is what interacting with villagers should be in vanilla, but it always seemed laggy to me, and as a result i don't play it anymore -- well, it's also that i feel villagers and trade are a nice add-on, but RPG stuff does nothing for me; i mostly build these days. Better than Wolves is absolutely spot-on in expanding the tech tree slowly, but it doesn't play well with most other mods (especially the big forge mods), and alas the author is becoming more and more assertive in forcing his particular vision of how the game "should" be played on people. Mo' Creatures is fabulous (please, mojang, just make vanilla like that; it gives the game so much more life), but very far behind now.

i've played for a bit with TerraFirmaCraft because that sounded like it might be going in the direction of OurGame (getting started is more involved and its treatment of ores, minerals, and tools needed to mine them is far better), but alas after a great start it became very tedious and progression became non-obvious. i really hate it if i have to go to a wiki to find out how something works; i hate it in vanilla, and i hate it even more in mods because they should really know better. oh, and TFC'd never work with another terrain-modifying mod since it rolls its own terrain (and not particularly exciting terrain at that).

i was seriously contemplating a Tekkit server, because, as you said, the technic pack is very nice. but it looks like the ForgeBukkit project is dead due to... who knows; conflicts between Bukkit and Forge people? unwillingness to work together? it seems to be centred on the Bukkit side, whose priorities might've shifted considering they now work for mojang and have other concerns. so Tekkit as of now is stuck on 1.2.5, and won't be updating any time soon. they're basically hoping for Forge to take over what Bukkit does. umm. i am not a big fan of Forge.

so yeah. it all works out if i just play by myself, but for running a server that suits a small group of people as well as can be, there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. at least i don't have to worry about griefing and crap like that.

underneath all the kvetching it's kinda amazing though -- you still play as well, and i am not stopping anytime soon. i have never gotten this much playtime out of so little financial investment. even if mojang continues to go in directions i don't care for, i'm immensely grateful. what an awesome little game. and the various game communities are just astoundingly prolific.

[serene]

Just had to show this to james_huber for the sheer geekjoy of it. :-)

[piranha]

*grin*. you guys still playing?

[serene]

I'm not; It wasn't really fun for me, though I may have done that to myself by refusing to get help from James early on, so I ended up in a grind/die/grind/die cycle that was double-plus-unfun for a week or two while I did my class project on it.

( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=USTsQfFIu24 - music is too loud, and I dislike my voice in it, but it was fun to make)

He's got his own server, and until a recent update, was playing many hours a day. Like, many hours. :-) He goes through monomaniacal phases with games. The past few days, it's been hours and hours and hours of Plants vs. Zombies, and he may have one last hurrah with City of Heroes before it goes dark next month.

[matthewdaly]

That was an amazing and very thoughtful video. FTR, I agree that the music was too loud but I can't find anything about your voice to dislike.

[serene]

Thanks! ♥

[serene]

(And I did read your other reply, and appreciated it, and agree with a lot of it.)

[piranha]

so that's what you sound like. ;) nice! the music threw me for a moment when it became louder; i went to my minecraft to turn it off and then realized it was in your video, *heh*. nothing wrong with your voice though, that i can hear -- i hardly ever like my own recorded voice either though.

yeah, i kinda figured you wouldn't take to it, even on peaceful; back when we talked about it you sounded like you Just.Did.Not.Enjoy it. there's a lot of emergent gameplay with minecraft, but at first glance it'll look like all there is to do is fight stupid monsters and build some puny, blocky, boring stuff. i'm not sure how to get somebody to break out of that mode if they don't see it for themselves -- which is a really good question to ask myself for OurGame.

not saying you should have asked for help; i appreciate that you wanted the challenge, and hey, you did it for a project. heck, i played minecraft without consulting the wiki for the longest time -- i derive a lot of fun from figuring things out for myself. which is also why i play mostly on peaceful; it gives me the leisure and safety to work on figuring out what i can find and craft in the game. you don't say anything about that in the video, so i don't know whether you even got to enjoy any of that -- but maybe you don't like that sort of puzzling how stuff works out either. now i am tempted to look at the game you mentioned as addictive to see what it has that causes you to like it. ;) i fully expect that different people have different demands on a game -- heck, i dislike most computer games, and it's a really rare one that holds my attention for this long.

IMO there are actually quite a number of female minecraft gamers, more than what is standard for such a successful game (no actual data, just impressions). you won't usually find them on the pvp (player vs player) or superhostile (cranked-up difficulty) servers, but i see them on the forums, and on youtube (frex https://www.youtube.com/user/2girls1minecraft/videos?flow=grid&view=1), and have seen evidence that they're on RPG and creative servers. there are many female texturepack makers, and even female mod programmers (one of them started the biggest API project around). i wonder now what the actual numbers are, but considering how many minecraft tshirts for women jinx offers, it's probably large enough to make that worthwhile. i don't think minecraft has the same appeal for women as the sims, but it has lots more than even the best FPS (first person shooter).

i'm pondering whether your dislike might not also have had something to do with playing it alone instead of with a group of friends. i do enjoy playing alone, with a bit of that feeling of "wow, i am all alone in this world and i can do ANYTHING without anyone else interfering, or with me having to be considerate of somebody else" -- it functions as a relief for the real world in that regard. but i also enjoy playing with the paramour and the *poing*, and a large part of why this server project is fun for me is that i get to build a really awesome world for them to enjoy. before that i'd been pondering joining one of the really good creative servers, like the voxel box (though i don't think i am good enough). you strike me as a much more social person in general than i am, so maybe you'd like it better if you were to play with a group of people where your game actions complemented theirs? kinda of what matthew was talking about in the other response.

not saying that there has to be some way in which you surely would like minecraft, *heh*. i am just pondering.

some of the stuff i do now is really at the border of actual gameplay, but i think it's part of what's called "emergent" -- not foreseen and planned for by the game's designer. making texture packs to evoke a different mood in-game, creating elaborate terrain to make the world more interesting/unique, building an entire lost civilization's ruins for others to explore.

i leave the girl in you with matt and asia's minecraft wedding, *grin*: