Feynt

Do you have a link on this? I can't seem to find a mod in the listing named "Dynamic Trees", or anything tree related when looking for "Dynamic" alone.

And yet, voxel tractor crawlers are fine. 3D Dot Game Heroes goes for bright and cheery colours and shiny shaders, but voxel art done well can look very different.

I mean... Tailor exists. They're objectively bad at everything involved with exploration besides just walking around, they're frail, and their bonuses are specific to a task that involves staying in the base. At least they aren't inferior fighters, but I feel like that's a low bar to step over. My proposed classes are at least more capable melee fighters than the baseline. Miners aren't fighters, but they're strong too. Lumberjacks as well, but they have to worry about wildlife sneaking up on them from the brush. +15% isn't much of a bonus, certainly not as much as a Blackguard, but it means 1-2 less hits on wolves with a spear or falx (as opposed to 2-3 less for a Blackguard). Since there aren't any other classes with any melee leanings, it rounds out the cast a little.

I was thinking late PS1 era. Retro graphics are in vogue yet again, but there's a timeless quality to well done low poly aesthetics. I qualified it in my second reply. The standard block size that exists now is off-putting, but the 3D Dot Game Heroes aesthetic is appealing. I just don't like the entirety of everything,—player models included—being flat surfaces that fill an entire block space. Especially the world, because it's needlessly hard to navigate "gentle hills" when it's a series of 5 block high peaks and valleys.

I wouldn't mind if they exploited the voxelisation to make the entire world more granular either. I love 3D Dot Game Heroes' aesthetic. I just dislike giant chunky cubes. They're unnavigable, ugly, and bland; there are better things to aspire to than "it's like Minecraft!" as far as looks go. (as an aside for efficiency, if the world was made to be mini-voxels, you could use a quadtree for game world rendering and limit rendering depth based on distance so you aren't rendering tiny blocks out on the horizon of drawable block space. That would also let you scan the quads beyond drawable space to create a dynamic skybox for the horizon) Going with the idea of "everything is voxels", if there was a geometry renderer for spaces filled with voxels, you could store the shape as a simple primitive or marching cube representation and then render the shape using voxels, kind of like ray marching. That way you don't have to specifically create every voxelised asset, you can just ensure that shapes are voxelised from primitives.

I've been enjoying Vintage Story with my friends as a newcomer, and one of them enjoyed being a Blackguard for the damage output, but absolutely hated feeling useless at everything else related to exploration while also being a huge burden on our food supply. He said he wouldn't mind a miner or lumberjack class which had a lesser melee bonus without such an outrageous hunger penalty. Honestly those don't sound like bad class ideas: Miner - Give it the same Hardy buff as Blackguard, "Strongarm" for a +15% to melee and +10% ranged distance, a +10% or +20% bonus to mining resource gains, perhaps better tool efficiency, a unique feature for the propick that lets you determine a direction (but not a distance) when doing node searching for the nearest ore (not necessarily the most abundant if there are multiple), and then Nearsighted and Heavy Handed. Lumberjack - Same deal, but +10% or +20% for log gains and stick drop rates when felling trees instead of mining, +1 firewood per log chopped, and a class recipe to turn firewood into sticks with a knife.

I'm a fan of Vintage Story's personality, but one of the big detractors from Minecraft has been the block aesthetic. I really dislike everything being cubes. Voxels aren't just solid cubes, and the marching cubes algorithm has been open for decades now. I realise at this stage of the game asking for a complete aesthetic rework is a big ask, but there are two things I think are completely viable: 1. Tree primitives - Since trees are generated continuously when planted, they could be generated with whatever primitives you wanted. A six sided cylinder that scales down in thickness as it gets higher off the ground would go a long way to distancing the game from Minecraft's blocks at the addition of only 8 triangles per voxel space. The rendering of "wood" blocks (regardless of the tree type) could be made to render this way without having to regenerate the world. A mod also made an adjustment to the foliage to use low poly spherical shapes rather than cubes, and it adds a lot to the appearance of forests. And this also has the advantage of splitting up the "solid crown" of some trees like oak trees where "branches" spread out but in actuality just form a single shelf of logs. 2. Sloped terrain - The one block variance of the entire world is quite annoying. I have to jump everywhere. It's one of the things I disliked about Minecraft way back when. It was such a bother to everyone that it became a vanilla feature, auto jumping up exactly enough to climb over steps. While I don't expect world gen to continually update the landscape to be slopes, especially when you're digging out the world space, I would appreciate it if you could use the water rendering routine to slope the default terrain vertically. Think of it like anti-aliasing for the ground. Run it once at world gen, all sloped terrain is technically still a solid block so it gives material as if it were a block of that kind, but since it's a slope it can be walked up without having to jump everywhere.