Yeah since mineclon* modifies the physics of the items quite substantially, it's basically impossible to make this mod work properly with it without making the mod only for for that one game and no others. See https://codeberg.org/SumianVoice/item_physics/issues/5
The visual bugs was mostly the glass being weird (black glass is correct but the white glass just had a white dot on it for some people including me). I can't remember what the soft lock was, I just remember having to restart the world a couple of times to reset the level. I don't know if it was an actual full logical lock though.
Make sure to check the controls and difficulty settings too; the upper two difficulties are meant to be nearly unplayable, more like a "I have 10 people on my server and we'll try it as a hard challenge" kind of thing. In the controls there's also the shortcuts to use weapons and specials (sneak, and jump) in case you haven't seen those, which make things about half as hard. Glad you like it!
Thanks!
Yeah that's one of the big limitations of my approach. I found the same when trying to run it through wine on linux (to test the older versions). Both the graphics and serverstep tanked and it became unplayable because it assumes a certain level of performance as a minimum. I wonder if I can actually fix that (it will be a thing I'll be looking at if/when I come back to this after the jam)
Thanks!
Yeah mapgen is harsh, I hope it's not overdoing pathfinding though as well. Probably particles are also part of it. I'll look into it and make cheaper performance options for stuff, I didn't get around to adding the settings api into it all.
It is a little worrying that you actually got it that slow, is this natively running? Like, windows version on windows or linux version on linux? I know when running through wine it's substantially slower in every regard. What CPU do you have?
I got stuck in the room with the blonde haired character in the glass tube, where neither doors worked but there didn't seem to be any solution. There were two wire segments that could be moved but both were in place already (I tried all combinations I believe) and a switch which also didn't change anything. It could also be that I just missed the solution instead of it being an actual soft lock though.
Full disclosure, the textures are from Polyhaven, I only edited some of them for blending and color correction.
The hope is eventually in the far future create a whole new system for the gamemode stuff, including leaderboards which would be hud elements instead of a formspec so you can show it any time with a key. That, and an in-world menu for selecting "levels" that would have different conditions and restrictions on gear etc. similar to something like Alien Swarm.
You can press aux1 to show the compass again at any time by the way. I probably should have shown the controls to everyone on their first join ;.;
The divide between "used to this kind of game" and "newbie" is so incredibly vast. I needed probably another 40 gradations of difficulty before I got to the third checkpoint.
The issue is not just "game hard", it's "game unapproachable". The only people who will enjoy it are those who have already gotten over the massive difficulty cliff elsewhere, everyone else will be left stranded. That is the game's responsibility in my opinion; to initiate the player into the skills and understanding needed to enjoy the game. You could argue that the intended audience is only hardcore puzzle lovers, sure, but I would argue that if you have to go somewhere else to train to be able to play and enjoy a game, there's something wrong. The game should be for enjoyment, not an examination of prior learned skills.
Just adding more gradations of difficulty would be enough to fix the issue, but ideally there would be some kind of choice of difficulty so that if you want a really hard challenge you can skip past the more gradual difficulty curve set for the uninitiated.
The mechanic is very smooth though, every move feels satisfying. You can tell work and thought went into this.
Unfortunately I got softlocked at one point, but other than that, the mechanics of pipes and the general atmosphere was great. The cutscenes are very cool, but a suggestion would be to perhaps use a formspec to lock the player's look direction (I guess there's the downside of showing the cursor...) and speed them up a fair bit, particularly the first one. There's lot of walking, but the atmosphere mostly makes that ok. Probably it would be best however to add either more teleportation or use seamless teleports to give the illusion of a shrunk down space, to reduce walking distance a little and spend more time on puzzles and building the world and sense of wonder.
The atmosphere, the worldbuilding and the mechanics are on point. Seriously impressive. The mechanics themselves are super fun, because they're predictable yet varied and challenging. The music is good, the atmosphere is great, you feel like you want to know more about the world just by being in it. The difficulty is probably a little high overall, but it's much better than most would do for a puzzle game and that is commendable. There were some visual bugs like the glass textures but other than that it was (so far, I got stuck) a super solid experience.
Mild spoilers:
The dark sphere level (9) is absolutely cruel and unusual punishment. Like, that's just... ouch. I got stuck on the tower unfortunately, and couldnt find a way to activate the eyes on the top floor, so I gave up after searching for quite some time.
Oh and for reference, allfaces is up to 12 tris, 6 visible, mesh is always 6 tris although they take up more transparency draw space, but there are substantially less of them than if using allfaces. You could probably get that down to 3-4 tris per mesh if you're ok with jagged edges that cut off pixels (not as much of an issue with high res textures I suppose).
If the rotation could be randomised it would speed things up a lot, but meshes are actually way faster than allfaces / allfaces_optional + fancy. The only reason they're a little slower than opaque is because there is just more geometry to render than not having them. The main slow down is having to rotate them on creation, checking for leaf decay, and drawing transparency. Static node meshes are pretty fast.
Thanks for the review! The colorised textures do look very good. I'll add that in an upcoming release. I really should go around and fix all the placeholders up too honestly (the leaves are all the same texture with different color palette at the moment but that's planned to change).
For the textures in general I get what you mean. I'm terrified though of setting a precedent that things should look gritty and realistic.. Not just because it's more difficult to make textures for but also because of the clashing with simple geometry (which is less of an issue as I develop more graphics features like grass etc but minetest has its limits and I'm approaching them fast unfortunately heh ;^^). It's tempting though I'll give you that. When done right it looks great. Higher resolution would help make items prettier too.
Even though working alone has its occasional downsides - like not working on it for 6 months at a time - I'm still very proud of having single handedly (except for a few APIs) created ~42000 lines of code, 500 textures, 120 sounds and 40 models :D Makes the design and decision making process and licensing very easy too :)
Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean, what are maploaders? Do you mean selectionboxes (the outlines on nodes)?
Also, make the blocks have a level of 1 or higher so we cant break them
It should be impossible to break anything outside of creative and mods already, but if you're able to break nodes in unmodded, non-creative worlds then be sure to document which nodes can be broken and I'll try to fix it.
I think a sprint mod/mechanic would be nice
You can sprint by using aux1 while moving forward, and there is a light stamina effect when you sprint for a short time.
I can't seem to reproduce it so far. I'm guessing it would have been player_model which handles the sneak height and tests whether the player is allowed to stand or not. Was it an index / compare nil?
I'll investigate further.
Because claiming in the license file that my 36kloc game was created by you because you wrote the line minetest.register_alias("mapgen_stone", "mymod:stone") is ridiculous.
Most people don't know how to respect licenses. For void game you would need to copy the license file into both mod folders and then completely delete the readme and game.conf and recreate them without referencing the original. Who does that?
The alternative is to respect the license perfectly, and then you get the above case of inappropriate attribution.
Nobody actually cares about license if it's MIT, including original game developers.
Yep. They don't. But someone might decide to screw you over and blackmail you because you absolutely objectively did break the terms of the license and probably documented yourself doing it (i.e. git).
Yes, I understand these legally and technically cases, but I don’t understand people who litter their heads with this, instead of concentrating on the main goal - developing the game. I don't see nothing terrible in MIT.
Yes. Licenses are literal and legally binding. MIT is fine. People worry about this (rarely) because if you ignore the license, then you are objectively breaking the law and most people would prefer not to. I would say that someone is more likely to worry about the fact that they have documented themselves breaking the law than they are to worry about having not broken the law at all.
Well, when there is a tiny tiny chance that the author, someone claiming to be the author, or their heirs might, maybe, some day in the future be able to take your project down and sue for damages, that's not a thing you want over you, hence why I'm such a license puritan :3
While true practically, it's legally and technically not the case. If a project uses MIT, you must include their license in your project until all content under that license is removed from your project. A judge might say that one or two lines is not "substantial portions" or rule that something is not copyrightable due to being the only way to do something, but that's about all the legal protection you have. One person's biased opinion of what two words mean some time in the future.
The license in this project is fully permissive by the way; it's not public domain technically since that's known to be a near impossible thing to do, but you could even completely remove the license from the project or claim you created it and you have the legally assured right to do that. Unlicense to me seems like too much surface area.
You can make a lot of furniture-like stuff with the existing shapes. I'm definitely avoiding it looking not voxel-y enough, so furniture might not be added in the traditional sense. The oven, campfire and furnace are the most furniture-like things that I'm planning to do for now, but I might make some kind of modular nodes like a generic table shape, generic chair shape, generic drawers/cabinet shape. They would all need to be extremely low on detail to fit with the world though, with an emphasis on the pixel art instead of the model.
Tip: hold aux1 and sneak while placing slabs and it will place them flat against walls unlike in minecraft. That and a stair at the bottom can make a fairly convincing chair. Most things you just need to make much bigger than you think; instead of making a house 6x6, make it 20x20 and things will work out better. With the emphasis I have placed on making it easy to obtain materials (which will get easier in subsequent updates) it should be relatively easy to build large structures.
I'm planning to add an entity API to the game, but I just have to make sure it won't break anything first and interfaces properly with the way the rest of the game is coded.
Level 167 is loosely based on the world of Shoujo no Shuumatsu Ryokou. It's an industrialised world brought to ruin and left in that deteriorating state for thousands of years. Somewhat of a nuclear wasteland almost. The dust particles in the air are supposed to be reminiscent of nuclear fallout and the ash region of Morrowind.
It's the placeholder player character from my game: https://content.minetest.net/packages/Sumianvoice/pmb_core/
It's freely licensed, and if you want the .blend that can be arranged too, but it is fairly limited, and not compatible with any existing games.
Yeah I wanted it to be mostly game agnostic so I didn't add it as armor. It would require a lot of compatibility code (basically remaking it twice) to make it work both ways :3
Yeah I tried to mitigate the scroll position as much as I could but I think I need to actually calculate the exact location of e.g. the middle recipe and try to scroll back to that position. There's I think 0.5s of grace time where it won't update, but it's still a big problem.
I would have made a grid but the trouble is the extra stuff like the x10 craft button and the ingredients list. I might be able to do 3 wide though, provided people don't mind some visual glitches if a recipe uses like 10 ingredients :p
Not sure about having all recipes visible, since you'd have a lot of dead space, but I am planning to add a craft guide that would do that.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll put these on the issue tracker :)
On paper it makes sense, but when played, respawning ruins it for me. I find I'm inherently careful and fearful of heights regardless, though I wonder if others are
The main reason I haven't done this is because it opens things up for minetest's builtin functions to ruin the rest of the game. There are mostly ways around this, like overriding health to not decrease when falling, but it's just a lot of work.
I'll look into it though, might be able to just remove the hud element and override falldamage.
Health bar would never be added though, mods would have to do that, since it would ruin the base liminal experience which this game focuses on.
Absolute godsend for saving schematics for decorations and mapgen. It's fairly manual, but you can have a single flat map with all your schematics in it, and update them really easily.
Yeah since mineclon* modifies the physics of the items quite substantially, it's basically impossible to make this mod work properly with it without making the mod only for for that one game and no others. See https://codeberg.org/SumianVoice/item_physics/issues/5
Ok I've had enough with English, that's absurd. That said I'm not sure why you're giving a neutral review based solely on the name...
Also "materiel" in the wiki page. Come on people this has got to stop.
The visual bugs was mostly the glass being weird (black glass is correct but the white glass just had a white dot on it for some people including me). I can't remember what the soft lock was, I just remember having to restart the world a couple of times to reset the level. I don't know if it was an actual full logical lock though.
Thanks!
Make sure to check the controls and difficulty settings too; the upper two difficulties are meant to be nearly unplayable, more like a "I have 10 people on my server and we'll try it as a hard challenge" kind of thing. In the controls there's also the shortcuts to use weapons and specials (sneak, and jump) in case you haven't seen those, which make things about half as hard. Glad you like it!
Thanks! Yeah that's one of the big limitations of my approach. I found the same when trying to run it through wine on linux (to test the older versions). Both the graphics and serverstep tanked and it became unplayable because it assumes a certain level of performance as a minimum. I wonder if I can actually fix that (it will be a thing I'll be looking at if/when I come back to this after the jam)
Oh right I had to power the switch while there was no wire connected...
Thanks! Yeah mapgen is harsh, I hope it's not overdoing pathfinding though as well. Probably particles are also part of it. I'll look into it and make cheaper performance options for stuff, I didn't get around to adding the settings api into it all.
It is a little worrying that you actually got it that slow, is this natively running? Like, windows version on windows or linux version on linux? I know when running through wine it's substantially slower in every regard. What CPU do you have?
I got stuck in the room with the blonde haired character in the glass tube, where neither doors worked but there didn't seem to be any solution. There were two wire segments that could be moved but both were in place already (I tried all combinations I believe) and a switch which also didn't change anything. It could also be that I just missed the solution instead of it being an actual soft lock though.
Thanks!
Full disclosure, the textures are from Polyhaven, I only edited some of them for blending and color correction.
The hope is eventually in the far future create a whole new system for the gamemode stuff, including leaderboards which would be hud elements instead of a formspec so you can show it any time with a key. That, and an in-world menu for selecting "levels" that would have different conditions and restrictions on gear etc. similar to something like Alien Swarm.
You can press aux1 to show the compass again at any time by the way. I probably should have shown the controls to everyone on their first join ;.;
The divide between "used to this kind of game" and "newbie" is so incredibly vast. I needed probably another 40 gradations of difficulty before I got to the third checkpoint.
The issue is not just "game hard", it's "game unapproachable". The only people who will enjoy it are those who have already gotten over the massive difficulty cliff elsewhere, everyone else will be left stranded. That is the game's responsibility in my opinion; to initiate the player into the skills and understanding needed to enjoy the game. You could argue that the intended audience is only hardcore puzzle lovers, sure, but I would argue that if you have to go somewhere else to train to be able to play and enjoy a game, there's something wrong. The game should be for enjoyment, not an examination of prior learned skills.
Just adding more gradations of difficulty would be enough to fix the issue, but ideally there would be some kind of choice of difficulty so that if you want a really hard challenge you can skip past the more gradual difficulty curve set for the uninitiated.
The mechanic is very smooth though, every move feels satisfying. You can tell work and thought went into this.
Unfortunately I got softlocked at one point, but other than that, the mechanics of pipes and the general atmosphere was great. The cutscenes are very cool, but a suggestion would be to perhaps use a formspec to lock the player's look direction (I guess there's the downside of showing the cursor...) and speed them up a fair bit, particularly the first one. There's lot of walking, but the atmosphere mostly makes that ok. Probably it would be best however to add either more teleportation or use seamless teleports to give the illusion of a shrunk down space, to reduce walking distance a little and spend more time on puzzles and building the world and sense of wonder.
The atmosphere, the worldbuilding and the mechanics are on point. Seriously impressive. The mechanics themselves are super fun, because they're predictable yet varied and challenging. The music is good, the atmosphere is great, you feel like you want to know more about the world just by being in it. The difficulty is probably a little high overall, but it's much better than most would do for a puzzle game and that is commendable. There were some visual bugs like the glass textures but other than that it was (so far, I got stuck) a super solid experience.
Mild spoilers: The dark sphere level (9) is absolutely cruel and unusual punishment. Like, that's just... ouch. I got stuck on the tower unfortunately, and couldnt find a way to activate the eyes on the top floor, so I gave up after searching for quite some time.
Oh and for reference,
allfacesis up to 12 tris, 6 visible, mesh is always 6 tris although they take up more transparency draw space, but there are substantially less of them than if usingallfaces. You could probably get that down to 3-4 tris per mesh if you're ok with jagged edges that cut off pixels (not as much of an issue with high res textures I suppose).If the rotation could be randomised it would speed things up a lot, but meshes are actually way faster than
allfaces/allfaces_optional + fancy. The only reason they're a little slower than opaque is because there is just more geometry to render than not having them. The main slow down is having to rotate them on creation, checking for leaf decay, and drawing transparency. Static node meshes are pretty fast.Thanks for the review! The colorised textures do look very good. I'll add that in an upcoming release. I really should go around and fix all the placeholders up too honestly (the leaves are all the same texture with different color palette at the moment but that's planned to change).
For the textures in general I get what you mean. I'm terrified though of setting a precedent that things should look gritty and realistic.. Not just because it's more difficult to make textures for but also because of the clashing with simple geometry (which is less of an issue as I develop more graphics features like grass etc but minetest has its limits and I'm approaching them fast unfortunately heh ;^^). It's tempting though I'll give you that. When done right it looks great. Higher resolution would help make items prettier too.
Even though working alone has its occasional downsides - like not working on it for 6 months at a time - I'm still very proud of having single handedly (except for a few APIs) created ~42000 lines of code, 500 textures, 120 sounds and 40 models :D Makes the design and decision making process and licensing very easy too :)
It might be finished in 2040 :p
Hmm, I'm not sure what you mean, what are maploaders? Do you mean selectionboxes (the outlines on nodes)?
It should be impossible to break anything outside of creative and mods already, but if you're able to break nodes in unmodded, non-creative worlds then be sure to document which nodes can be broken and I'll try to fix it.
You can sprint by using aux1 while moving forward, and there is a light stamina effect when you sprint for a short time.
Not sure that's actually possible with the clientside modding API since you can't (as far as I know) redefine entities.
Thanks for the report! Should be fixed now.
Ah yep, they aren't properly mirrored, I should probably fix that somehow. Thanks for the details!
Thanks for the review <3
What would you want to see in terms of the inventory?
Oh dear...
I can't seem to reproduce it so far. I'm guessing it would have been player_model which handles the sneak height and tests whether the player is allowed to stand or not. Was it an index / compare nil? I'll investigate further.
Because claiming in the license file that my 36kloc game was created by you because you wrote the line
minetest.register_alias("mapgen_stone", "mymod:stone")is ridiculous.Most people don't know how to respect licenses. For void game you would need to copy the license file into both mod folders and then completely delete the readme and game.conf and recreate them without referencing the original. Who does that? The alternative is to respect the license perfectly, and then you get the above case of inappropriate attribution.
Yep. They don't. But someone might decide to screw you over and blackmail you because you absolutely objectively did break the terms of the license and probably documented yourself doing it (i.e. git).
Yes. Licenses are literal and legally binding. MIT is fine. People worry about this (rarely) because if you ignore the license, then you are objectively breaking the law and most people would prefer not to. I would say that someone is more likely to worry about the fact that they have documented themselves breaking the law than they are to worry about having not broken the law at all.
Well, when there is a tiny tiny chance that the author, someone claiming to be the author, or their heirs might, maybe, some day in the future be able to take your project down and sue for damages, that's not a thing you want over you, hence why I'm such a license puritan :3
While true practically, it's legally and technically not the case. If a project uses MIT, you must include their license in your project until all content under that license is removed from your project. A judge might say that one or two lines is not "substantial portions" or rule that something is not copyrightable due to being the only way to do something, but that's about all the legal protection you have. One person's biased opinion of what two words mean some time in the future.
The license in this project is fully permissive by the way; it's not public domain technically since that's known to be a near impossible thing to do, but you could even completely remove the license from the project or claim you created it and you have the legally assured right to do that. Unlicense to me seems like too much surface area.
Ah, that's weird. Fixed in next release. I don't think dropping inventory is actually implemented yet.
You can make a lot of furniture-like stuff with the existing shapes. I'm definitely avoiding it looking not voxel-y enough, so furniture might not be added in the traditional sense. The oven, campfire and furnace are the most furniture-like things that I'm planning to do for now, but I might make some kind of modular nodes like a generic table shape, generic chair shape, generic drawers/cabinet shape. They would all need to be extremely low on detail to fit with the world though, with an emphasis on the pixel art instead of the model.
Tip: hold aux1 and sneak while placing slabs and it will place them flat against walls unlike in minecraft. That and a stair at the bottom can make a fairly convincing chair. Most things you just need to make much bigger than you think; instead of making a house 6x6, make it 20x20 and things will work out better. With the emphasis I have placed on making it easy to obtain materials (which will get easier in subsequent updates) it should be relatively easy to build large structures.
Yep, the textures are freely licensed:
Every texture in the project aside from the basic tools (stone, iron, bronze, diamond) were created by me, so you can credit it like this:
Or just
Usually this goes in a credit.txt or LICENSE file along with the mod that uses the media.
I'm planning to add an entity API to the game, but I just have to make sure it won't break anything first and interfaces properly with the way the rest of the game is coded.
Level 167 is loosely based on the world of Shoujo no Shuumatsu Ryokou. It's an industrialised world brought to ruin and left in that deteriorating state for thousands of years. Somewhat of a nuclear wasteland almost. The dust particles in the air are supposed to be reminiscent of nuclear fallout and the ash region of Morrowind.
Should be fixed now! It was deserialising "" (nil) and never actually saving the player data about the status effects they had.
Thanks for the review!
Do you know what you were doing when it happened? If it happens again, be sure to post the error message on the issue tracker (https://codeberg.org/Possible_MT_Blockgame/Possible_MT_Blockgame/issues) or here.
It's the placeholder player character from my game: https://content.minetest.net/packages/Sumianvoice/pmb_core/ It's freely licensed, and if you want the .blend that can be arranged too, but it is fairly limited, and not compatible with any existing games.
Yeah I wanted it to be mostly game agnostic so I didn't add it as armor. It would require a lot of compatibility code (basically remaking it twice) to make it work both ways :3
I'll add more info to the description!
Yeah I tried to mitigate the scroll position as much as I could but I think I need to actually calculate the exact location of e.g. the middle recipe and try to scroll back to that position. There's I think 0.5s of grace time where it won't update, but it's still a big problem.
I would have made a grid but the trouble is the extra stuff like the x10 craft button and the ingredients list. I might be able to do 3 wide though, provided people don't mind some visual glitches if a recipe uses like 10 ingredients :p
Not sure about having all recipes visible, since you'd have a lot of dead space, but I am planning to add a craft guide that would do that.
Thanks for the feedback! I'll put these on the issue tracker :)
Thanks for your review! <3
What ways do you think the crafting interface should be improved? Do you just mean the way the formspec jumps around when it updates?
Yeah I saw it too.. at midnight in bed on my phone
Edit: it's been there since november.. last year
Should be added now. Falldamage is still off by default but you can do on mods loaded -->
To reenable the builtin falldamage if you like.
Currently the hud also doesn't display health, so that would need to be re-enabled too
On paper it makes sense, but when played, respawning ruins it for me. I find I'm inherently careful and fearful of heights regardless, though I wonder if others are
The main reason I haven't done this is because it opens things up for minetest's builtin functions to ruin the rest of the game. There are mostly ways around this, like overriding health to not decrease when falling, but it's just a lot of work.
I'll look into it though, might be able to just remove the hud element and override falldamage.
Health bar would never be added though, mods would have to do that, since it would ruin the base liminal experience which this game focuses on.
Absolute godsend for saving schematics for decorations and mapgen. It's fairly manual, but you can have a single flat map with all your schematics in it, and update them really easily.
Ah thanks for the heads up, fixed it and removed the need for the depend