I don't know what your plans are for the game but here's some of my ideas mostly for more variety.
A variety of wall, floor and ceiling texture varieties to break monotony.
More than just corridors. Prisoner cells, guards' breakrooms, gymnasiums.
Curated singleplayer campaign with human-designed levels and some kind of plot involving a goal like breaking a prisoner out of maximum security in another wing and then escaping, or maybe defeating the big bad superintendent.
Guns maybe? I certainly get some Wolfenstein/Doom vibes walking around all these corridors.
Finally something that feels like its own game with SFX, MSX and custom texturing & HUD. It gets a little repetitive with the same grey brick walls and music, but it's worth exploring several times. The bugs that it does suffer are bearable and there are no huge UX blunders either. I see a great future for it if the author improves it.
The music and a slick looking UI will get you going and ready to play. When you land into the world, you may find it pretty monotonous pretty quick. However, since some of the other reviews I read revealed things I hadn't seen, and I myself discovered more on successive playthroughs/attempts, there's variety out there, it's just a bit sparse at first. I don't know what to say about the inconsistency of props and guards that I found throughout the jail, whether it's good or bad. Finishing your game can be a little anticlimactic and I didn't realise the air in front of me was indeed my escape.
There are two stats to manage: Health and sprint. There is a variety of food, beverages, enemies and weapons to be found. Play it multiple times to discover more. Be aware some enemies are plain-clothed.
The bugs have to be acknowledged: Health sometimes won't show, there are randomly dark areas, dynamite blowing up the light, you can cheese it by digging the walls (why are they diggable??), guards that deliberately try to avoid eye contact and pretend they don't see you or who like to stare at the wall for long periods.
The inability to save a game in progress is a little frustrating. The main menu should only show if no level is in progress.
Conclusion: Play it blind for the joy of discovery, bear with the monotony and bugs for a little bit. If not, be hopeful that the author will improve the game later enough for you to enjoy it.
Room for improvement: The minimap should be enabled by default, corridors should not be 2 nodes wide, because the pills end up on one side and not the other. The game should detect when a level is finished. The ghost AI needs to be much, much better and eating ghosts needs to work (punch or collide, I don't care).
Recommedations: Since the game has high walls, the minimap should be toggled on by default; that way you can see what pills have been eaten. I wish the ghosts would also show there, but that's not possible in Minetest (yet?). Also a way to make teleporting sections in the level editor.
Pac-Man itself is a good basis however Arcade3D fails to be fun, intuitive or automate the right parts. It's derivative to the point of probably being copyright infringing (I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice), but it's not worth the rightsholders of Pac-Man suing over. It's also not the first Pac-Man game for Minetest.
However, with a bit of a clean-up, the game could be good. Work has clearly been put into the visual art, I chuckled at the player model in a good way and the use of spheres for pills seems sensible, including not having too many polygons.
The idea of making your own arena is defeated when you realise the game has no way to spawn ghosts and pills for you. A good level editing experience is possible within the Minetest engine, so I exhort the developer to make better tools, which would be marking spots for the ghosts and pills to spawn, being able to start/stop a game intuitively, and of course not leaving the player inside the arena wall when placed.
Pacmine, part of myArcade, has the game starting feature down pat: right-click a starter node. The pink gates in Arcade3D make no sense, something myArcade handles better by having you right-click a node to start a game. However, Pacmine also suffers the issue of poor pill collision detection with server lag, so having the pills as nodes is better for that. Some comparisons to Pacmine wouldn't be helpful; Arcade3D being its own game is fine.
Conclusion: The promise of being able to make your own arenas is enticing, but as-is the game fails to deliver a good Pac-Man clone or level editing experience.
I wanted to enjoy some good movement mechanics and a well-guided experience. Instead I landed on the floor and had no idea how to get back up. There was no mention that it has to be done through a command, not on the ContentDB page, not in the game's root directory README ; instead I just granted myself fly and flew up to the start point again.
The lack of inclusion of a sprint mod lets it down; I don't see why it wasn't included, it's an important part of other block game parkours, and there is no issue with server lag if it's just as singleplayer game. I won't blame this game's developer for the changes to bouncy blocks, where they used to be much more fun but were changed to limit the jump height somewhere in the Minetest 5.x series.
The fact that some of the diggable blocks drop themselves and others don't was arbitrary and shouldn't have been done, especially when they look the same.
Lack of sound also lets the game down. With footstep sounds and a sprint sound it could have been better. Including (toggleable) music could have also help and wouldn't have broken competition rules to include minetest_game footstep sounds and a Creative Commons music track as far as I know.
Overall: A known-good idea for a game, but not implemented well enough as it is to recommend.
This mod is really useful for taking pictures of a small scene like a few nodes in a specific arrangement, an advtrains train or a mob. Just enclose it in a green screen (or one of several other colours) and take a screenshot of it. Then in your favourite editor e.g. GIMP, select that colour and turn it into transparency. Instantly isolated! Note: For best results isolating, disable anti-aliasing,
First let me say this is a well-put-together modpack. Highlights include:
Containers come with locked variants
Good variety of areas of in the house & home
Balanced crafting recipes
Dynamic features like animations, basic interactivity where appropriate
However, homedecor doesn't gel with me, and maybe it won't with you. I'm not intimately familiar with the modpack's history, but it seems to aggregate several mods or parts of other mods, like cottages roofing. This does result in a 'kitchen sink'*, but it's alright as you you're downloading a modpack and can disable bits that don't suit you.
Many models have some combination of curves, noticeable polygon count, and higher resolution texture that doesn't fit into a 16px block type aesthetic. I find that which items have had a high-polygon treatment and which haven't seems a bit random, and each mod has some of these spread through the pack. If all the models had more polygons, the whole thing would be cohesive and the net effect would be better. I'm particularly confused why the couches from lrfurn had curves added that actually seem to make the whole thing look worse. If all models were consistently block or highpoly it would be better.
I think the '3D extras' mod should be a config option.
Homedecor locks you into the Basic Materials system for crafting. Sure, there have to be concessions to add intermediate crafting materials and so that available recipes aren't exhausted. The problems caused might be better explained in a review on Basic Materials. Suffice to say if your server has a forked technic or other mods that haven't commited to Basic Materials it can create minor problems. Given the size of this modpack, nobody wants to be making their own set of dozens and dozens of crafting recipes.
In conclusion, only play with homedecor if you're willing to sacrifice visual consistency to get a large collection of stuff. Otherwise, use a few different decor mods for similar effect.
Ideas thread
I don't know what your plans are for the game but here's some of my ideas mostly for more variety.
Finally something that feels like its own game with SFX, MSX and custom texturing & HUD. It gets a little repetitive with the same grey brick walls and music, but it's worth exploring several times. The bugs that it does suffer are bearable and there are no huge UX blunders either. I see a great future for it if the author improves it.
The music and a slick looking UI will get you going and ready to play. When you land into the world, you may find it pretty monotonous pretty quick. However, since some of the other reviews I read revealed things I hadn't seen, and I myself discovered more on successive playthroughs/attempts, there's variety out there, it's just a bit sparse at first. I don't know what to say about the inconsistency of props and guards that I found throughout the jail, whether it's good or bad. Finishing your game can be a little anticlimactic and I didn't realise the air in front of me was indeed my escape.
There are two stats to manage: Health and sprint. There is a variety of food, beverages, enemies and weapons to be found. Play it multiple times to discover more. Be aware some enemies are plain-clothed.
The bugs have to be acknowledged: Health sometimes won't show, there are randomly dark areas, dynamite blowing up the light, you can cheese it by digging the walls (why are they diggable??), guards that deliberately try to avoid eye contact and pretend they don't see you or who like to stare at the wall for long periods.
The inability to save a game in progress is a little frustrating. The main menu should only show if no level is in progress.
Conclusion: Play it blind for the joy of discovery, bear with the monotony and bugs for a little bit. If not, be hopeful that the author will improve the game later enough for you to enjoy it.
Comments: Ideas for improvement
Room for improvement: The minimap should be enabled by default, corridors should not be 2 nodes wide, because the pills end up on one side and not the other. The game should detect when a level is finished. The ghost AI needs to be much, much better and eating ghosts needs to work (punch or collide, I don't care).
Recommedations: Since the game has high walls, the minimap should be toggled on by default; that way you can see what pills have been eaten. I wish the ghosts would also show there, but that's not possible in Minetest (yet?). Also a way to make teleporting sections in the level editor.
Pac-Man itself is a good basis however Arcade3D fails to be fun, intuitive or automate the right parts. It's derivative to the point of probably being copyright infringing (I am not a lawyer; this is not legal advice), but it's not worth the rightsholders of Pac-Man suing over. It's also not the first Pac-Man game for Minetest.
However, with a bit of a clean-up, the game could be good. Work has clearly been put into the visual art, I chuckled at the player model in a good way and the use of spheres for pills seems sensible, including not having too many polygons.
The idea of making your own arena is defeated when you realise the game has no way to spawn ghosts and pills for you. A good level editing experience is possible within the Minetest engine, so I exhort the developer to make better tools, which would be marking spots for the ghosts and pills to spawn, being able to start/stop a game intuitively, and of course not leaving the player inside the arena wall when placed.
Pacmine, part of myArcade, has the game starting feature down pat: right-click a starter node. The pink gates in Arcade3D make no sense, something myArcade handles better by having you right-click a node to start a game. However, Pacmine also suffers the issue of poor pill collision detection with server lag, so having the pills as nodes is better for that. Some comparisons to Pacmine wouldn't be helpful; Arcade3D being its own game is fine.
Conclusion: The promise of being able to make your own arenas is enticing, but as-is the game fails to deliver a good Pac-Man clone or level editing experience.
Recommendations in comments...
I wanted to enjoy some good movement mechanics and a well-guided experience. Instead I landed on the floor and had no idea how to get back up. There was no mention that it has to be done through a command, not on the ContentDB page, not in the game's root directory README ; instead I just granted myself fly and flew up to the start point again.
The lack of inclusion of a sprint mod lets it down; I don't see why it wasn't included, it's an important part of other block game parkours, and there is no issue with server lag if it's just as singleplayer game. I won't blame this game's developer for the changes to bouncy blocks, where they used to be much more fun but were changed to limit the jump height somewhere in the Minetest 5.x series.
The fact that some of the diggable blocks drop themselves and others don't was arbitrary and shouldn't have been done, especially when they look the same.
Lack of sound also lets the game down. With footstep sounds and a sprint sound it could have been better. Including (toggleable) music could have also help and wouldn't have broken competition rules to include minetest_game footstep sounds and a Creative Commons music track as far as I know.
Overall: A known-good idea for a game, but not implemented well enough as it is to recommend.
This mod is really useful for taking pictures of a small scene like a few nodes in a specific arrangement, an advtrains train or a mob. Just enclose it in a green screen (or one of several other colours) and take a screenshot of it. Then in your favourite editor e.g. GIMP, select that colour and turn it into transparency. Instantly isolated! Note: For best results isolating, disable anti-aliasing,
First let me say this is a well-put-together modpack. Highlights include:
However, homedecor doesn't gel with me, and maybe it won't with you. I'm not intimately familiar with the modpack's history, but it seems to aggregate several mods or parts of other mods, like cottages roofing. This does result in a 'kitchen sink'*, but it's alright as you you're downloading a modpack and can disable bits that don't suit you.
Many models have some combination of curves, noticeable polygon count, and higher resolution texture that doesn't fit into a 16px block type aesthetic. I find that which items have had a high-polygon treatment and which haven't seems a bit random, and each mod has some of these spread through the pack. If all the models had more polygons, the whole thing would be cohesive and the net effect would be better. I'm particularly confused why the couches from lrfurn had curves added that actually seem to make the whole thing look worse. If all models were consistently block or highpoly it would be better.
I think the '3D extras' mod should be a config option.
Homedecor locks you into the Basic Materials system for crafting. Sure, there have to be concessions to add intermediate crafting materials and so that available recipes aren't exhausted. The problems caused might be better explained in a review on Basic Materials. Suffice to say if your server has a forked technic or other mods that haven't commited to Basic Materials it can create minor problems. Given the size of this modpack, nobody wants to be making their own set of dozens and dozens of crafting recipes.
In conclusion, only play with homedecor if you're willing to sacrifice visual consistency to get a large collection of stuff. Otherwise, use a few different decor mods for similar effect.