Thorfinn

Kinda reminds me of that old Burt Reynolds flick, The End.

This was an aspirational goal with minetest back when I was submitting hundreds of PRs for it. It looks as though they reached more or less that point , and renamed themselves Luanti. Incidentally, lots of the same discussion came up there, and I ended up walking away because some people got positively vitriolic about insisting no one produced games this way.

It depends on what those 15 are.

Easiest way to avoid this whole thing is to play without the silly map. You only notice straight lines from a few particular vantage points, like relatively high elevations near the end of one of those lines, and arcs are very tough to see from anywhere unless you ladder up to high-elevation clouds.

Oh, yeah, caves cut through fireclay, too. Like many others, I used to actively avoid caves because of the spawns and the falling damage, so that's another thing I don't suggest. Then I set my mind to practicing caving, and found it's not all that hard so long as you avoid doing it on high rift days. Even then, so long as you don't insist on placing/retrieving torches or investigating every ruins you encounter. That's what lets the spawns build up to difficult levels. I still don't turn down the chance to scope out deserts, though. The little grassy patches here and there seem to have a higher concentration of crops.

I wouldn't say I actively seek out fireclay, it's more of an opportunity thing. If I'm in bauxite gravel, heck, yes, I'm keeping my eyes peeled. There's quite a lot there; it's just in small deposits now. Never stumbled on a large- (used to be regular- ) sized deposit. They may be mythical. But even if I didn't find fireclay, I still collected several stacks of flint, so it's kind of the same thing.

That is the standard paradigm, yes. Is it right? Maybe. Time may tell. All the late discussion of IP has me wondering. For example, I could not fork it without making substantial changes, which means whatever some judge thinks it means. But, if I were to develop something based on it, and direct you to Anego to download the engine, everything is peachy-keen. And from a community point of view, I would actually like to have some button to "Browse Other Anego Engine Games". I'll never have to fiddle with sound or graphics or anything else, because once I have the engine set up correctly, I'm done. No fiddling around trying to get inventory mapped to the key of my preference, it just defaults to whatever my Anego engine settings are.

Their developers obviously are operating under a different vision. Anego might ultimately have to go that route, too, because player bias is for the familiar. I think it would be unfortunate to have foreclosed on what, to me, seems a no brainer in terms of good ideas. But I'm just one player.

Or... just hear me out, place a screen one level earlier in the Anego engine where you select the Game, then select the Mode, for those games that have modes? Granted, that means the mods directory in the base game install directory should no longer be used for user-level mods, but that's what the plaintext file in that directory already says. If that directory housed ONLY games or game modes, it accomplishes the same end, but minimizes hassles keeping the engine updated. (Not during EA, obviously. It has to be updated whenever any one of the supported games updates their game that changes something in the engine. This is why the engine/gameplay that @Katherine K mentioned is so important. Presently there are no .dlls (that I know of) in the assets directory, just .jsons. The vision at present seems to be to code most functionality into the engine, and have the game assets be a glorified, massive set of config files. And, frankly, there's a lot to like about that. Look at the file sizes of the basic game (in the install directory). Most are measured in kB, only two in mB, and those both are around 2. The uninstall is the biggest thing in that directory!

Oh, that's cool. Saw a lot of other interesting things on her page. Channel. Whatever. Watched a few, will watch several more when I get the time.

That's how another voxel game that I was very involved in the development of dealt with it, too, though Lua instead of C#, so it wasn't even compiled at runtime. It ran into issues with execution speed, like you would expect of any interpreter-based language. I doubt it would be able to handle the workload of VS.

Nice find, @Krougal! Does that do chiseled blocks too? I don't think it used to, and I don't see anything in that build that was chiseled. But maybe it does. Is that how the BetterRuins stuff was created?

Once you learn to see the differences, it's very obvious. Consider also going into creative (/gm 2; when you are ready to go back to your game, /gm 1) and fly around a little (double-space, I think. Been a while. Yes, I think it's double-space. That's what muscle memory is telling me anyway.) From about 25-50 blocks in the air, things like that (and crops) are a lot easier to spot. I'm pretty good at seeing them at ground level, but I find building enough ladder sections to do it gives me a more relaxed playthrough. Welcome to the forums, @Ghoul Arte!

Hadn't really thought too much about it before you said it, but that's what's so different about VS, isn't it? Engine and framework co-mingled. Means most things that people care to change about the game require not much more than basic literacy in English. Still not thrilled with .dll expanding those capabilities, as that's a security hole waiting to be exploited. Someday, when the game gets big enough to have a malicious subset of the player base, they will have to do something about it. Maybe that's what the announcement a week or two ago that the team was going to start paying more attention to the mods was all about.

I'm not even sure the complaint was the playability. It was the straight lines.

To some extent. It almost always comes down the the general contractor. If he doesn't make the subs toe the line, corners will be cut. Not all subs scrupulously follow code. (Of course, since I lived near Chicago, the same can be said for many generals that have state and county licenses. Fees, like @Krougal says, plus lawyers like @LadyWYT says, plus nepotism. (Mods, before deleting this one and giving me another permanent strike, look up the Strogers or Pritzkers or Madigans or Mells of Chicago. Nothing conspiratorial about that assertion at all.)) Anyway, at least here in the states, while it can be insured, it doesn't necessarily mean a claim will be paid. I've been on the receiving end of that, where their investigators determined that substandard wiring caused my loss, so that was not covered. My only option was to try to sue the sub, who had gone out of business, or the general, who had moved out of the country.

Agreed, @Adnyeus. Something goofy happened when fixing mapgen. C# is modular enough that I'm a bit surprised, but it sure acts like things I used to see all the time where one module conflicts with another's namespace, generally when multiple coders were working on related objects. My money is on a blown pointer.

See, that's exactly what I'm talking about! How the hell do you know what I'm thinking? What my intentions are? You simply assume the worst, whatever will most piss you off. Peace.

This is what irks me about what the world has morphed into. Everything is taken as a personal insult. Almost no one extends the benefit of the doubt, and assumes malice as the reason behind anything he takes offense to. Peace.

I always do a vanilla run-through first, just to take in the changes, then I play what I call Vanilla+, which adds 5(?) mods that don't impact gameplay, things like Spear and Fang's Sortable Storage, and then several with mods that give a different experience. Nothing consistent. Whatever I feel like trying out.

If you've seen the api repo, all you have to do is go up one level to their main page with all the repos. Not sure why I come off that way sometimes. I offered information at the level of understanding you seemed to be. In any event, it should help people who are less knowledgeable, and interested in changing worldgen, and understanding enough background for it to make sense. But, really, it didn't occur to you to check up one level from the API? And I'd point out that the reminder that the API is not the same as the game source is even more condescending. That does not follow. That may mean they just compromised.

Careful with stuff like this. They are handing out permanent demerits for it at the moment.

Michaelangelo?

Breeding is a problem. Eggs are fine until you get slammed by egg production. Then start culling. Easiest to just keep the rooster 10(?) blocks away.

What's the spread?