Tree species and variety

[Wick]

[please insert greeting according to your time zone :P) folks!

I really like forests in this game, way better than in you-know-which-game! But still thinking there's room for improvement. Specifically I'd like to have a varied age of trees. Not necessarily a complex stage progression but simply a worldgen thingy. E.g. give each tree species a "small" version like the fruit trees with a 1/4 thick block. Maybe even a 1/2 version for more variety. These young trees could also maybe just drop firewood/sticks instead of logs or a "small" log variety usable for the existing palisades or a replacement for the fairly large logs needed for the rough fence etc.

Besides, this worldgen should also include a percentage for spawn rate of these smaller ones. Birch trees are very rare to find in reality with a stem measuring 1m diameter. For these species there could be a 70/30 ratio for small/large individuals.

Also: Maybe include beech trees as new species? Its basically one of the most common trees found in northern hemisphere. Would spice up the temperate climate zones.

I'm trying to learn modding this game, maybe I come up with a proper mod for this :).
 

[Hammerweld]

Not a bad idea, my only concern is that this would make finding fruit trees harder.

[LadyWYT]

I present to you, the Wildcraft suite:

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/10655

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/9909

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/8515

As for the vanilla game, I can't see them not adding more tree and plant species later on. It's just not a big priority right now, as there are other things that need to be fleshed out more first.

[Wick]

8 hours ago, LadyWYT said:

I present to you, the Wildcraft suite:

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/10655

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/9909

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/8515

As for the vanilla game, I can't see them not adding more tree and plant species later on. It's just not a big priority right now, as there are other things that need to be fleshed out more first.

Well, seems like I overlooked a giant mod lol. Gotta test it. Hope its not overwhelming. I like to play close to Vanilla. Thanks, ill give it a try

[Brady_The]

5 hours ago, Wick said:

Hope its not overwhelming.

It probably will be. 50 new trees that seemingly drop hundreds of different kind of sticks and leaves blocks. Not very in tune with vanilla, which I personally prefer my mods to be.

[Wick]

1 hour ago, Brady_The said:

It probably will be. 50 new trees that seemingly drop hundreds of different kind of sticks and leaves blocks. Not very in tune with vanilla, which I personally prefer my mods to be.

Yeah thats what I thought. I am very open to modding and more realism/immersion. But there has to be some limit. I wouldnt mind like 5-10 new tree species overall. Spices things up enough.

Well at least the mod shows its possible. Maybe my own modding gives birth to something more in tune with vanilla. Kinda like Vanilla+ feel coz this game is already a masterpeace on its own. Very uncommon these days in gaming.

[Khornet]

On 11/13/2024 at 10:38 PM, LadyWYT said:

I present to you, the Wildcraft suite:

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/10655

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/9909

https://mods.vintagestory.at/show/mod/8515

As for the vanilla game, I can't see them not adding more tree and plant species later on. It's just not a big priority right now, as there are other things that need to be fleshed out more first.

Opinion alert. I dislike Wildcraft because it goes too hard. 
I'd like for VS to have ~8 more lumber tree species, ~5 more fruit trees and ~5 more berry bush types. Wildcraft adds like 50 of each. It's just bloat.

[Echo Weaver]

5 minutes ago, Khornet said:

Opinion alert. I dislike Wildcraft because it goes too hard. 
I'd like for VS to have ~8 more lumber tree species, ~5 more fruit trees and ~5 more berry bush types. Wildcraft adds like 50 of each. It's just bloat.

I've found that to be true for a lot of mods that add variety. They go way overboard.

[Thorfinn]

Can't you disable canes and leaves via mod config? Admittedly, it's been a while since I looked at it, but everything was set up to do that. There's a single file which toggles (true/false) which trees drop leaf blocks and canes, and I thought you could tweak the modconfig to your liking. 

Yeah, the canes were way overboard. Maybe not for the wattle daub. I don't remember exactly. But definitely for fences and baskets. At least 50x too much, imo. I don't remember whether they also worked for skeps, but that would have made them insane.

[EDIT]

FWIW, back when the rewrite came out, the weight of most of the trees was dropped to miniscule numbers, like 0.1 when base game stuff was often 10 to 100, meaning the world should have been heavily skewed with vanilla trees. (Sum up all the weights, generate a random number between 0 and sum, and select the tree based on the weight. Obviously, the 0.1 tree would be less than a 10th of a percent of trees in the area on average if the only other tree that could spawn there were weight 100.) I have no idea if that weighting was retained, but I'm not sure why it wouldn't have been. Anyway, the upshot is that if there is a vanilla species that can spawn under those conditions, usually it will be a vanilla tree. There were exceptions. I do remember a few species that had weight 100, so may have been more common than vanilla. And some of the species had very broad conditions, like forestMaximum between 70 and 255, meaning those would spawn anywhere from basically parkland conditions clear up to impassable tangle.

Edited December 2, 2024 by Thorfinn

[LadyWYT]

7 hours ago, Khornet said:

Opinion alert. I dislike Wildcraft because it goes too hard. 
I'd like for VS to have ~8 more lumber tree species, ~5 more fruit trees and ~5 more berry bush types. Wildcraft adds like 50 of each. It's just bloat.

It does. It's great if you're wanting a huge variety to play with in your world, but not so great if you'd prefer to keep things simple.

[-Glue-]

On 11/13/2024 at 5:45 AM, Wick said:

E.g. give each tree species a "small" version like the fruit trees with a 1/4 thick block. Maybe even a 1/2 version for more variety.

Honestly, I think more detailed and shapely tree models would really fit into VS, and help set it apart from other block games.
The best example of what I mean would be something like the Dynamic Trees mod from Minecraft. (Image for reference) Where the trees can have trunks of different thicknesses, with branches, uh, branching, out in all directions. It would also add visual variety between tree species, instead of them all having a 1m thick trunk.

[Echo Weaver]

2 hours ago, -Glue- said:

Honestly, I think more detailed and shapely tree models would really fit into VS, and help set it apart from other block games.
The best example of what I mean would be something like the Dynamic Trees mod from Minecraft. (Image for reference) Where the trees can have trunks of different thicknesses, with branches, uh, branching, out in all directions. It would also add visual variety between tree species, instead of them all having a 1m thick trunk.

I was just going to mention Dynamic Trees. That's one of my favorite Minecraft mods. It produces lovely, believable trees.

[Пафнутий]

On 14.11.2024 at 16:20, Wick said:

Да, я так и думал. Я очень открыт для модификаций и большего реализма/погружения. Но всему есть предел. Я бы не возражал против 5-10 новых видов деревьев в целом. Это достаточно разнообразит игру.

Что ж, по крайней мере, мод показывает, что это возможно. Возможно, мой собственный моддинг рождает нечто более созвучное vanilla. Что-то вроде Vanilla + feel, потому что эта игра уже сама по себе является шедевром. Очень необычно в наши дни в играх.

You may like this mod: https://mods.vintagestory.at/historyofexistence

[Thorfinn]

On 12/2/2024 at 6:07 PM, -Glue- said:

Honestly, I think more detailed and shapely tree models would really fit into VS,

It's very pretty, yes. But if you repeat that with the view distances of VS, won't rendering make the gameplay a laggy hell? Your horizon there is, what, 60 blocks? 75? What happens when you try to render out to even 500?

[-Glue-]

1 hour ago, Thorfinn said:

It's very pretty, yes. But if you repeat that with the view distances of VS, won't rendering make the gameplay a laggy hell? Your horizon there is, what, 60 blocks? 75? What happens when you try to render out to even 500?

We all know MC has notoriously horrible optimization, so that's really not a good performance baseline. Especially since VS (I think) uses C# instead of java. I don't think it would be as massive of a performance hit as you'd think. Even if it was, there are definitely ways to optimize it. I mean, just look at the Distant Horizons mod for MC. No one ever thought we would get a render distance like that, and it even improves performance in some cases.
Its definitely a big task though. I don't expect it to happen, and I would prefer seeing other things like birds, improved caves, and more immersive crafting features waaaay before new tree models. I just think it would be neat to have.

[Thorfinn]

Don't know. Never played MC. Only seen a few images posted (mostly here) of it. And I could have sworn it had migrated to C++. But still, that's nowhere near even a 1024 view distance. I've seen serious slowdowns just entering a multiplayer town with lots of chiselwork. I'd hate to see what rendering complex stuff out to the horizon would do.

One of these days, I'll have to try cranking fruit trees up by a few orders of magnitude and shut off all other trees and see how that comes out. Then I'd have a decent idea of what varying size branches and transparencies and such do, rather than just guessing.

[Echo Weaver]

1 minute ago, Thorfinn said:

Don't know. Never played MC. Only seen a few images posted (mostly here) of it. And I could have sworn it had migrated to C++. But still, that's nowhere near even a 1024 view distance. I've seen serious slowdowns just entering a multiplayer town with lots of chiselwork. I'd hate to see what rendering complex stuff out to the horizon would do.

One of these days, I'll have to try cranking fruit trees up by a few orders of magnitude and shut off all other trees and see how that comes out. Then I'd have a decent idea of what varying size branches and transparencies and such do, rather than just guessing.

Bedrock, the Microsoft ecosystem version of the game, may well have migrated to C#. But unlike VS, MC doesn't maintain a modding API. The entire API is built by fans. Microsoft pledged when they bought Minecraft that they would continue to maintain the moddable java version of the game, and last I checked they were sticking to that pledge. I suspect the Internet would erupt if they stopped. Microsoft promotes Bedrock almost entirely, so you have to know to look for java, but the modding community is still going strong despite that. 

At any rate, it still exists on java, and Minecraft Java is probably the relevant version for this conversation.

[MassiveHobo]

On 12/2/2024 at 7:07 PM, -Glue- said:

Honestly, I think more detailed and shapely tree models would really fit into VS, and help set it apart from other block games.
The best example of what I mean would be something like the Dynamic Trees mod from Minecraft. (Image for reference) Where the trees can have trunks of different thicknesses, with branches, uh, branching, out in all directions. It would also add visual variety between tree species, instead of them all having a 1m thick trunk.

Yeah, second this 100%. This mod has trees plant themselves too, farming seeds and replanting forests is way too tedious in VS.  Having trees mature and grow, shed leaves and nuts/fruit doing their seasonal thing while also replanting themselves would be such a huge feature. I think this game needs bigger trees too lol. The redwoods are a little small, I'd like the rare and mythical yggdrasil tier stuff. Forests that are tall enough for elk travel to never be a problem (minecraft sucks, can't even use horses with their awful 1-2 block tall tree canopies)

[-Glue-]

3 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Don't know. Never played MC. Only seen a few images posted (mostly here) of it. And I could have sworn it had migrated to C++. But still, that's nowhere near even a 1024 view distance.

So, what you are likely failing to see then, is that just because one game has bad performance/lower visuals, does not mean all games in that genre are limited to that same standard. All games are made differently, and its all about how talented/passionate the devs are when it comes to quality. Sure, if you just toss a high quality asset into a game, it will degrade performance, but if you actually take the time to properly implement it, and optimize around it, you could probably get away with little to no performance hit.

Cranking up fruit trees would also not give you a good idea of the impact, because they are likely not optimized to be used like that. The only way to know for sure, is if someone actually mods in fancy trees.

2 hours ago, MassiveHobo said:

Having trees mature and grow, shed leaves and nuts/fruit doing their seasonal thing while also replanting themselves would be such a huge feature.

I'd also kill to have trees spawn a bunch of leaf particles during fall, and have leaves pile up all over the place, kinda like snow.

[Thorfinn]

35 minutes ago, -Glue- said:

So, what you are likely failing to see then,

No, not at all. The mention of chiseling should have given that away.

I'm comparing VS at, say, 128 view distance, 256, 512, 1024 and all the way up to the max of 1536. With the current trees, performance degrades rapidly as you extend the view distance. Try it and see if you don't agree.

I have no doubt VS would operate fine at 64 or maybe even 128 with your more complex shapes, but I really don't care to play with view distances like that. If I did, I'd probably get Minecraft.

Go ahead and make your mod. I for one would definitely try it out.

 

35 minutes ago, -Glue- said:

The only way to know for sure, is if someone actually mods in fancy trees.

The mod listed above does some of what you are talking about. There are growth stages of trees, some logs larger than others. If its the mod I'm thinking of, I think all sizes harvest to the standard 1m cube, though. Like most mods, I only used it for a while just to see someone else's interpretation of what the game should be. There was another mod that did growing trees, and planting saplings. Might have been Wild Farming? There's an updated version of it by @Spear and Fang, I believe.

 

2 hours ago, MassiveHobo said:

This mod has trees plant themselves too,

I believe one of the Dana Tweaks does this as well.

Edited December 7, 2024 by Thorfinn

[-Glue-]

4 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

I'm comparing VS at, say, 128 view distance, 256, 512, 1024 and all the way up to the max of 1536. With the current trees, performance degrades rapidly as you extend the view distance. Try it and see if you don't agree.

Ohhh, I thought you were saying that the mod was the reason they had a low render distance in the MC screenshot or something. My bad.

4 hours ago, Thorfinn said:

Go ahead and make your mod. I for one would definitely try it out.

Oh, I wish. I don't know anything about creating mods. My expertise is more so in level design, not coding lol