The awesome art is mostly thanks to TEMHOTAOKEAHA and Dragoni, our awesome pixel artists :)
The mech model looks nice, I only wish it had animations.
This was planned but the model had to be added last minute and there was no time left to add animations unfortunately. In fact there even is an animated model that just couldn't be added yet.
I believe that the music in the ice layer could be more varied, as you're bound to spend more time in there to stockpile supplies for the danger ahead.
Agreed. IIRC I had to sort out some tracks due to nonfree (non-commercial) licenses.
I couldn't complete the game because the enemies simply frightened me too much: when I poked my head in a cave close to their spawn depth, a swarm of 10~ of them attacked me and caused me to flee. When I tried to fight them, they always overwhelmed me with numbers because of their fast spawn rate.
Hostile spawning has been limited post-submission.
The pixel art in the opening and menus is very clean too.
That's mostly thanks to TEMHOTAOKEAHA and Dragoni, our awesome pixel artists :)
especially for drilling
There is a sound effect for drilling, but it requires MT 5.7-dev... Should be fine as soon as 5.7 releases though. More sound FX are definitely planned long term.
There were some plants that were kind of floating a few blocks off the ground that looked like they should be hanging from the ceiling.
Hmm indeed, I'll look into this.
Hostile spawning has been limited post-submission.
What was confusing is the game tells you to go to a spot on your radar but I did that and found ... nothing. Strange. Probably this wasn't coded yet?
This definitely is implemented ("beacons"). How many of these (and of which kinds) you manage to obtain determines your ending. Note that the dot on your radar gets larger the closer you get to the beacon on the vertical axis. Perhaps you were at the wrong depth? (It is possible that there are issues with beacon spawning code though; in my tests I have always been able to dig at least one beacon though).
This game should actually be called "Speedrunning Down" because that's the winning strategy. :D
Heh, not quite. You should have gotten the "bad" ending if you just went down immediately; that is, "you find the same fate as the astronauts before you". Speedrunning Down is an "ending" strategy, but not a "winning" one :D
Minetest actually allows you to let a texture span over multiple nodes
We considered world-aligned textures but preferred mapgen randomization of textures.
Also, using the spray gun triggers an error message (not a crash).
Yep, added that last minute and the Minetest player name vs. player ref inconsistency got me :)
Fixed post-submission.
[Performance Problems]
I have fixed mob overpopulation post-submission. Optimizing the mapgen further is hard. I think it is already asymptotically optimal (or close to it), and I haven't been able to go much further on the constant factors using the LuaJIT profiler. In hindsight implementing the custom mapgen probably wasn't the best idea as it took an immense development effort and largely wrecks performance, even after optimization.
The acid sprayer is functional (it requires acid though); it's only the sound playing that's not working (I added that last minute). Fixed on Git (post-submission).
The lag is definitely a major problem - we didn't have enough time to optimize it properly (optimizing the mapgen in particular is very hard). We learned that implementing a fully custom, sophisticated Lua-only mapgen for a game jam game probably isn't the best idea.
I have fixed the mob overpopulation already, it's just post-submission as well. I'll also look into further optimizing stuff.
TL;DR: Not enough time in the game jam timeframe to polish everything (esp. as mapgen dev was very time consuming), but we will get there :)
Uranium Stuff author here, don't get discouraged by his negative review, you will figure out unique features to add.
I've actually added some very unique functions to my mod (beyond just radiation protection). The red thumbs down still stays though, lol.
No it doesn't :)
I've converted my review to a thread seeing that you added unique features.
Your stuff mod is a random stuff mod. It provides unique-ish items rather than just different tiers of the tools that already come in 5? tiers. The only thing it shares with this stuff mod is the "stuff" in its name.
The Uranium Stuff mod was even more unique than this - this is just pretty much a copypasta of the typical MTG stuff - ore, block, tools - without any unique-ish features like protection from radiation. As such, a copypasta review feels appropriate.
(plus even more stuff mods which do not live on CDB or have died with MT 0.4.x, such as galvorn & mithril in LOTT; besides, has anyone ever considered a more specific name like "equipment" rather than the insanely generic "stuff"?)
This is boring. It already was boring in Minetest Game - the tools don't differ except in their stats. Generally, the better the tier, the better the stats. "Stuff" mods just add yet another boring & redundant tier. The only notable exception here is LandarVargan's Lava Stuff, which has special effects (e.g. the lava pickaxe already "cooks" everything you dig with it like the MTG furnace).
Yes. The newest modlib update gets rid of modlib.conf in favor of a better API. I have updated hud_timers, but did not create a release yet. Fixed in rolling-9.
Minetest's profiler provides insufficient granularity for doing any serious profiling. Sure, in larger games it may point you towards the culprit, but that often still is a large globalstep or mapgen function.
More often, you already know the culprit - mapgen, in our case - and want to optimize it. To do so, you need a maximum of granularity, down to every function call, every vector operation, to be able to micro-optimize the hottest spots where it matters. The LuaJIT profiler provides this granularity and this mod makes it accessible (without having to go through the hassle of reinventing this mod).
Back to mapgen: After algorithmic optimizations were exhausted, this mod allowed me to gain a 2x speedup, bringing mapgen to an acceptable performance, by confirming that certain vector operations were better off localized and helping me uncover a nasty bug in my memoization (which wasn't working).
You only have 100ms between two globalsteps; Minetest is mostly single-threaded. Taking any more time will create noticeable lag. Thus practically all mapgen, ABMs, pathfinding, mob steps, and some expensive globalsteps are performance-critical.
Adoption of this mod will hopefully cause the widespread performance issues observed across the mod landscape to slowly cease existence.
The globalsteps runs only once per second (!); this is way too poor granularity. It could be a lot smoother if it ran as often as possible since it is a rather cheap globalstep.
Insufficient approach: This subtracts one from the player pos on the vertical axis. Player pos is a feet pos however. Thus this will fail horribly when standing on slabs and is always on the verge of failing (due to precision errors) when standing on full / almost full nodes. A more accurate approach would only subtract a small epsilon from the feet pos and take node boxes into account (e.g. when standing on smaller nodes (slabs) or larger nodes (doors)).
Misc. other (minor-ish) code quality issues:
Use of deprecated methods: player:getpos() (should trigger a warning?) and {x=...,y=...,z=...} vector (rather than vector.offset).
Unnecessary loc ~= nil check.
Poor formatting: Inconsistent use of indentation & semicolons.
Custom fields should use underscore prefixes. This mod does not abide by that convention for on_walk_over.
In conclusion, I would strongly advise against depending on this library in its current state. Modders should rather roll their own.
I've created this mod just because emerald equipment is one of the most basic ideas for Minecraft modders, and implementing that in MineClone was obvious.
"Others do it" and "it's obvious" doesn't really sound like a point to me...
So I think Emerald Stuff isn't a good example of MTG stuff mods (especially because it's for MineClone and not MineTest Game)
I'm aware. I wasn't listing MTG stuff mods only; I was listing stuff mods in general:
This mod unfortunately is no exception. It adds another purpose for a rare-ish material, and of course, rarity must correlate with usefulness, so Uranium stuff is more powerful / useful than, say, iron stuff. This is however not realistic at all for Uranium: First and foremost (putting radioactivity concerns aside), Uranium is heavy (dense). This would make an armor as pictured infeasible to carry around; if you did, it would slow you to a crawl. Radiation protection is what lead is already for, making this realistic aspect of the mod mostly redundant; Technic provides a dedicated hazmat suit for this. Uranium is also significantly less suitable for sharp tools (except for clubs I suppose) than iron.
Uranium may have a use, but this is not quite it. In the real world, Uranium is often used for armor-piercing projectiles due to its high density - a projectile of the same size traveling at the same speed can carry a much higher kinetic energy than a lower density lead equivalent.
(plus even more stuff mods which do not live on CDB or have died with MT 0.4.x, such as galvorn & mithril in LOTT; besides, has anyone ever considered a more specific name like "equipment" rather than the insanely generic "stuff"?)
This is boring. It already was boring in Minetest Game - the tools don't differ except in their stats. Generally, the better the tier, the better the stats. "Stuff" mods just add yet another boring & redundant tier. The only notable exception here is LandarVargan's Lava Stuff, which has special effects (e.g. the lava pickaxe already "cooks" everything you dig with it like the MTG furnace).
I can't understand all the bad ratings. 400+ ants and no loss of FPS !?
That doesn't mean it's efficient on the server; it merely means that Minetest manages to render the (low-poly) ants just fine, which - despite Minetest's poor entity rendering performance - is to be expected.
FPS simply is the wrong metric. You need to measure lag on the server.
It's simple: When attaching the arrows, just set their properties such that you divide their visual size by their parent's visual size. That way, when the parent visual size is multiplied with it, it cancels out.
The inventory images for Skis is a boat. Skis float significantly above snow in some cases; the physics are pretty much boat physics. Skis are apparently just modified boats that work well on land. The surface you're skiing on doesn't seem to matter - snow works as good as grass or stone. Also missing a release for sfence's updates it seems.
[...] I didn't find the i3 error in minetest debug.txt! Test it yourself. Problem with i3 code.
First of all, stop being this entitled. Be polite when you want others to dedicate time to support.
Second, why would you expect an "i3 error"? Nobody mentioned an error, jp just explained how i3 behavior differs from that of unified inventory and that it hides more items (for good reason):
i3 collapses the items in the list [and] doesn't show some items without any recipe if the creative mode is disabled
I suppose i3 just has better checks for whether items are valid. Without giving examples for items that are shown in ui but not in i3 this "bug report" is completely unhelpful. The title is also misleading; a bug doesn't render a mod "obsolete".
Glad you like it! Thanks for the bug report. Fixed in rolling-2. You'll also have to upgrade modlib to rolling-96. texgen now requires an insecure environment to write the downloaded palette files to its mod folder so you'll have to add it to both secure.trusted_mods and secure.http_mods.
Thanks for your review.
The awesome art is mostly thanks to TEMHOTAOKEAHA and Dragoni, our awesome pixel artists :)
This was planned but the model had to be added last minute and there was no time left to add animations unfortunately. In fact there even is an animated model that just couldn't be added yet.
Agreed. IIRC I had to sort out some tracks due to nonfree (non-commercial) licenses.
Hostile spawning has been limited post-submission.
Bugs
Thanks for your review.
That's mostly thanks to TEMHOTAOKEAHA and Dragoni, our awesome pixel artists :)
There is a sound effect for drilling, but it requires MT 5.7-dev... Should be fine as soon as 5.7 releases though. More sound FX are definitely planned long term.
Hmm indeed, I'll look into this.
Hostile spawning has been limited post-submission.
This definitely is implemented ("beacons"). How many of these (and of which kinds) you manage to obtain determines your ending. Note that the dot on your radar gets larger the closer you get to the beacon on the vertical axis. Perhaps you were at the wrong depth? (It is possible that there are issues with beacon spawning code though; in my tests I have always been able to dig at least one beacon though).
Heh, not quite. You should have gotten the "bad" ending if you just went down immediately; that is, "you find the same fate as the astronauts before you". Speedrunning Down is an "ending" strategy, but not a "winning" one :D
We considered world-aligned textures but preferred mapgen randomization of textures.
Yep, added that last minute and the Minetest player name vs. player ref inconsistency got me :)
Fixed post-submission.
I have fixed mob overpopulation post-submission. Optimizing the mapgen further is hard. I think it is already asymptotically optimal (or close to it), and I haven't been able to go much further on the constant factors using the LuaJIT profiler. In hindsight implementing the custom mapgen probably wasn't the best idea as it took an immense development effort and largely wrecks performance, even after optimization.
The acid sprayer is functional (it requires acid though); it's only the sound playing that's not working (I added that last minute). Fixed on Git (post-submission).
The lag is definitely a major problem - we didn't have enough time to optimize it properly (optimizing the mapgen in particular is very hard). We learned that implementing a fully custom, sophisticated Lua-only mapgen for a game jam game probably isn't the best idea.
I have fixed the mob overpopulation already, it's just post-submission as well. I'll also look into further optimizing stuff.
TL;DR: Not enough time in the game jam timeframe to polish everything (esp. as mapgen dev was very time consuming), but we will get there :)
(accidentally posted under a shared account which obviously may not reflect the views of only a single member)
Nothing more to this game. About 30 lines of Lua:
and
which mostly are taken verbatim from the Void Game (and which are just boring definitions anyways). No game logic behind it.
You can simply pillar up using your own feces. On a roof, you won't be disturbed while packing your feces.
Massive robocop overpopulation also causes insufferable lag.
Screenshot
No it doesn't :)
I've converted my review to a thread seeing that you added unique features.
Converted the review into a thread as the author has started adding unique features.
converted review into a thread
Your stuff mod is a random stuff mod. It provides unique-ish items rather than just different tiers of the tools that already come in 5? tiers. The only thing it shares with this stuff mod is the "stuff" in its name.
I don't want to discourage you from modding. Many people seem to start modding with a "stuff" mod. You don't need to upload every mod that you create.
This doesn't change the fact that I would not recommend any of these stuff mods to players.
The Uranium Stuff mod was even more unique than this - this is just pretty much a copypasta of the typical MTG stuff - ore, block, tools - without any unique-ish features like protection from radiation. As such, a copypasta review feels appropriate.
Quoting my review of the last stuff mod:
I have fixed them (except for deathlist) already but haven't fixed the script that releases new versions on CDB...
Oops, looks like I forgot to push; should be fixed now. Sorry.
Yes. The newest modlib update gets rid of
modlib.confin favor of a better API. I have updated hud_timers, but did not create a release yet. Fixed inrolling-9.Minetest's profiler provides insufficient granularity for doing any serious profiling. Sure, in larger games it may point you towards the culprit, but that often still is a large globalstep or mapgen function.
More often, you already know the culprit - mapgen, in our case - and want to optimize it. To do so, you need a maximum of granularity, down to every function call, every vector operation, to be able to micro-optimize the hottest spots where it matters. The LuaJIT profiler provides this granularity and this mod makes it accessible (without having to go through the hassle of reinventing this mod).
Back to mapgen: After algorithmic optimizations were exhausted, this mod allowed me to gain a 2x speedup, bringing mapgen to an acceptable performance, by confirming that certain vector operations were better off localized and helping me uncover a nasty bug in my memoization (which wasn't working).
You only have 100ms between two globalsteps; Minetest is mostly single-threaded. Taking any more time will create noticeable lag. Thus practically all mapgen, ABMs, pathfinding, mob steps, and some expensive globalsteps are performance-critical.
Adoption of this mod will hopefully cause the widespread performance issues observed across the mod landscape to slowly cease existence.
Have you considered converting your review into a thread?
player:getpos()(should trigger a warning?) and{x=...,y=...,z=...}vector (rather thanvector.offset).loc ~= nilcheck.on_walk_over.In conclusion, I would strongly advise against depending on this library in its current state. Modders should rather roll their own.
See my review on the last stuff mod.
converted review into a thread
"Others do it" and "it's obvious" doesn't really sound like a point to me...
I'm aware. I wasn't listing MTG stuff mods only; I was listing stuff mods in general:
This mod unfortunately is no exception. It adds another purpose for a rare-ish material, and of course, rarity must correlate with usefulness, so Uranium stuff is more powerful / useful than, say, iron stuff. This is however not realistic at all for Uranium: First and foremost (putting radioactivity concerns aside), Uranium is heavy (dense). This would make an armor as pictured infeasible to carry around; if you did, it would slow you to a crawl. Radiation protection is what lead is already for, making this realistic aspect of the mod mostly redundant; Technic provides a dedicated hazmat suit for this. Uranium is also significantly less suitable for sharp tools (except for clubs I suppose) than iron.
Uranium may have a use, but this is not quite it. In the real world, Uranium is often used for armor-piercing projectiles due to its high density - a projectile of the same size traveling at the same speed can carry a much higher kinetic energy than a lower density lead equivalent.
We have plenty of "stuff" in addition to the stone, wood, iron, bronze, mese & diamond "stuff" tiers usually provided by MTG already:
(plus even more stuff mods which do not live on CDB or have died with MT 0.4.x, such as galvorn & mithril in LOTT; besides, has anyone ever considered a more specific name like "equipment" rather than the insanely generic "stuff"?)
This is boring. It already was boring in Minetest Game - the tools don't differ except in their stats. Generally, the better the tier, the better the stats. "Stuff" mods just add yet another boring & redundant tier. The only notable exception here is LandarVargan's Lava Stuff, which has special effects (e.g. the lava pickaxe already "cooks" everything you dig with it like the MTG furnace).
Open the review thread to read more...
git gud
Why would WhyNot not be Free & Libre Open Source Software?
heh, fixed
What you're missing is that this is still useful when other mods (shooting mods, bow mods) use the look direction for raycasting.
Having looked into the code I doubt that.
That doesn't mean it's efficient on the server; it merely means that Minetest manages to render the (low-poly) ants just fine, which - despite Minetest's poor entity rendering performance - is to be expected.
FPS simply is the wrong metric. You need to measure lag on the server.
For the record: The killer santa might be a Futurama reference.
It's simple: When attaching the arrows, just set their properties such that you divide their visual size by their parent's visual size. That way, when the parent visual size is multiplied with it, it cancels out.
Very much something to do with this mod: It fails to account for visual scale propagating when attaching arrows.
Please see https://bitbucket.org/minetest_gamers/x_bows/issues/6/doesnt-work-arrow-entities-get-removed
The inventory images for Skis is a boat. Skis float significantly above snow in some cases; the physics are pretty much boat physics. Skis are apparently just modified boats that work well on land. The surface you're skiing on doesn't seem to matter - snow works as good as grass or stone. Also missing a release for sfence's updates it seems.
Typo in the description.
See https://bitbucket.org/minetest_gamers/x_bows/issues?status=new&status=open
Code quality overall is very poor (IMO). Don't use this if you're trying to build a reliable server.
First of all, stop being this entitled. Be polite when you want others to dedicate time to support.
Second, why would you expect an "i3 error"? Nobody mentioned an error, jp just explained how i3 behavior differs from that of unified inventory and that it hides more items (for good reason):
I suppose i3 just has better checks for whether items are valid. Without giving examples for items that are shown in ui but not in i3 this "bug report" is completely unhelpful. The title is also misleading; a bug doesn't render a mod "obsolete".
Glad you like it! Thanks for the bug report. Fixed in rolling-2. You'll also have to upgrade modlib to rolling-96.
texgennow requires an insecure environment to write the downloaded palette files to its mod folder so you'll have to add it to bothsecure.trusted_modsandsecure.http_mods.