Minetest Forums

vktRus, can you reproduce error? Aka, when does it happen?

Like this mod very much!

Since this mod seems to be pretty much dead, it has been absorbed into my Plantlife Modpack to avoid getting lost to antiquity. Any further changes to this mod should be directed there.

I had a very strange bug using this mod (well, actually it was the version included into Vanessa's plantlife modpack --> viewtopic.php?f=11&t=3898 ).
When i try to use the the shears on a wounded animal (from mobf/animals modpack) , i see a menu with 2 buttons: "debuginfo" and "heal".
If i press "debuginfo" nothing happens, if i press "heal", the server crashes.
here's the log: Probably some conflict with other mods... and i don't even know if the problem is really caused by the shears themselves or by other mods.

But that was actually strange since i don't have any other mod wich includes the shears as item


Any ideas?

This would be a bug in MOBF but I have no idea of the cause.

VanessaE wrote:This would be a bug in MOBF but I have no idea of the cause.

Well, we can't b sure about that. MOBF crashes because the bugged shears try to call a function that mod doesn't have, but this doesn't mean that the bug is there.

It can be also a conflict made by a third mod.

I'll make some test and write again if i discover something.

When you see a dialog box open after right-clicking on an entity, it's because a function in the engine makes it available. In this case, MOBF told the engine to run a bit of code that opens its "debug info or heal" dialog whenever any tool is used when right-clicking.

MOBF just doesn't know how to deal with whatever it is that's special about the shears tool. The crash is in MOBF, that's why the backtrace doesn't go back to the vines mod.

Vines seems to get disabled on it's own. Works in game but each launch requires me to configure the mods and enable it. What could be doing that? A work around that seems to do for now is to place vines into worldmods.

gamergardencat wrote:Vines seems to get disabled on it's own. Works in game but each launch requires me to configure the mods and enable it. What could be doing that? A work around that seems to do for now is to place vines into worldmods.

You may already have vines as part of a modpack. You most likely have VanessaE's plantlife installed, which already contains vines. And since it's only needed once, the program disables one of the two, which you then re-enable.
Have a look in debug.txt and see what that says.

Performance increased immensly. Also has jungle vines that spawn on tree trunks of the jungletrees. You are welcome.

VanessaE, I am still alive thank you very much. I'll make sure to send a pull request to your plants_lib. Still making minor fixes to the recipes and maybe add another feature or two.

It's a very nice mod. The ropebox was used in one of my first Minetest worlds, and it is still enjoyable (and useful :-)) to have in current worlds.

Currently ropes are not minable. This creates HUGE problems... Removing the rope box removes the rope only a small distance down, any further and the rope is stuck there permanently. If rope could be mined by shears that would help... or if it could be mined in general... just a thought.

JoshMars wrote:Currently ropes are not minable. This creates HUGE problems... Removing the rope box removes the rope only a small distance down, any further and the rope is stuck there permanently. If rope could be mined by shears that would help... or if it could be mined in general... just a thought.

That sounds like a pain. Being able to mine rope is fine i guess. As long as it removes the rope beneath it. Also a limit on the length of the rope is something that needs to be implemented.

I haven't tested and polished it enough to consider it a "release" yet, but in the past few weeks I kind of went a little nuts rewriting parts of this mod for my own purposes. :)

* I created nodebox models for the rope boxes so the look sort of like pulleys now instead of just a box
* I added a limit to how far a rope will extend. Currently a basic ropebox extends 100m.
* You can combine ropeboxes to make longer versions, though, up to 5x. They have different nodes so you can tell at a glance how long a rope box can extend its rope for.
* Threw in a rope ladder variant. It only goes 50m. Maybe should extend that to 100m, it uses twice as much material as a rope box to craft so seems only fair. These numbers are easily settable in code, I'll probably make configuration variables for them once I figure out that aspect of modding a bit more (this is my first real stab at modding).
* Answering JoshMars' concerns, the shears can be used to cut an existing rope or rope ladder. The section below the cut disappears and the rope doesn't extend any farther. Removing and replacing the rope box or ladder top will regenerate the whole rope.
* Also fixed the rope's removal when the rope box is removed. Now there's a "rope top" node that is generated when a section of rope needs to fall that eats its way down the rope, if you follow it down it'll eventually remove the whole thing no matter how long it is.

I haven't tested out the vines portion of the mod yet after all that messing around, since I was doing this out of interest in the ropes rather than the vines (I added a crafting recipe to make ropes out of cotton so I could run without vines if need be). I just fired up a game and vines grew on the jungle trees okay, though, so I may not have done too much damage to it.

I'm also thinking of adding a "grapple" rope that extends sideways rather than down, to allow for easier bridge construction and such. That's going to be a bit more complicated though, haven't really got started on it. I also want to make the vines part optional since I'm not sure I'll be wanting that bit in the game I'm cobbling together.

GitHub repository containing my fork
direct download link.

Bas, do you want these changes? I'm new to GitHub too, I can try to figure out this push/pull magic if you like what I did.

Screenshot:

makes me think about...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitfall! :D

A swinging rope is definitely beyond my current modding skill level. :)

Edit: I just noticed that HybridDog forked this mod a while back and came up with a much better mechanism for removing unsupported rope involving voxelmanip that makes the rope vanish almost instantaneously. I've shamelessly copied that into my own code now, and tidied up a few other issues while I was at it.

I think I may no longer need the special "rope eater" node but I've left it in for the time being to make sure nothing gets left behind. Another thing on the to-test list.

Nice work FaceDeer :)

I just did some testing and it turns out the "rope eater" node is still needed. I hung a rope down a 250m vertical shaft, dug out the rope block at the top, then traveled 100m north, 250m down, 100m south to get to the bottom end of the rope without causing the intermediate map chunks to load up. Sure enough it was still hanging there.

So I climbed it, reached the severed top end, and fell to my death as the rope proceeded to collapse out from under me. Perfect. :) I'll call the existing rope code done for now, I just need to test vines at some point next.

Thank you for putting some work into this mod and making it usable. Looking at your other work, we seem to have very similar taste in gameplay mechanics! Issues are turned off in your vines repo so I guess I can put forward some issues here instead.

• Shears. The shears tool in vines conflicts with mobs_redo's shears. Not only does it render two different shears tools but the mob shears also seem to disable the functionality of the vines shears completely (not 100% sure it's the shears tools that does it). Regardless, it would be nice if the mod checks for the existance of mobs:shears and concurrs with it somehow so that only one shears tool is in play.

• Rope ladder. How long can it become?

• Global settings. The length of rope boxes and rope ladders can have very different effects on gameplay depending on the type of world the mapgen produces. Smaller scale landscape may be easily traversed with the shortes rope box while maps with larger topology need the longest rope boxes. It would be sweet to be able to set the different lengths (perhaps therefore also the item name) as a global setting in minetest.conf with the minetest.setting method.

texmex wrote:Thank you for putting some work into this mod and making it usable. Looking at your other work, we seem to have very similar taste in gameplay mechanics! Issues are turned off in your vines repo so I guess I can put forward some issues here instead.

Thanks for the response! I wondered if perhaps the tweaks I'd made to this mod had slipped off into obscurity, I'd nearly forgotten about them myself. :)

This was the first bit of serious modding I did for Minetest, so there's probably lots of stuff I need to revisit. Such as enabling issues on the repo, for example. Anyway.

texmex wrote: • Shears. The shears tool in vines conflicts with mobs_redo's shears. Not only does it render two different shears tools but the mob shears also seem to disable the functionality of the vines shears completely (not 100% sure it's the shears tools that does it). Regardless, it would be nice if the mod checks for the existance of mobs:shears and concurrs with it somehow so that only one shears tool is in play.

That's one thing I remember from when I first dug into this, I wondered why there was a special tool for this at all when the axe already seems well-suited for all the tasks the shears are used for in this mod. I can take a look into fixing that up.

texmex wrote: • Rope ladder. How long can it become?
• Global settings. The length of rope boxes and rope ladders can have very different effects on gameplay depending on the type of world the mapgen produces. Smaller scale landscape may be easily traversed with the shortes rope box while maps with larger topology need the longest rope boxes. It would be sweet to be able to set the different lengths (perhaps therefore also the item name) as a global setting in minetest.conf with the minetest.setting method.

50 meters, same as the shortest rope. There's variables to set the length of a rope ladder and the length of the shortest rope in init.lua, with the longer ropes being multiples of the shortest rope length, so you can twiddle them there to make them fit a different style of map.

Thanks for the link about global settings, I was going to need to learn how to do those before the release of my Digtron mod, I'll add it to all the other stuff I work on too. :)

Something I was thinking about doing back when I was working on this vines mod was splitting it up into a ropes mod and a vines mod. I can easily imagine wanting one part without having the other part, and it'll be easier to import the new ropes into other modpacks (such as castles, which I think still has old rope boxes). I don't know what the etiquette of this sort of thing is though. I know these mods are all under open licenses, but I don't want to swoop in and steal away someone's baby if they're still maintaining it. I've got a similar problem with the Hoppers mod, I did a major rewrite of it and I'm not sure how to approach distributing my version.

FaceDeer wrote:Thanks for the response! I wondered if perhaps the tweaks I'd made to this mod had slipped off into obscurity, I'd nearly forgotten about them myself. :)

Not at all. On my private server we're very delighted.

FaceDeer wrote:That's one thing I remember from when I first dug into this, I wondered why there was a special tool for this at all when the axe already seems well-suited for all the tasks the shears are used for in this mod. I can take a look into fixing that up.

One aspect could be to postpone the discovery of vine ropes a bit: until steel has been produced. Makes those first mining runs a bit more challenging and risky. I like that aspect, but I'll take a functional mod over that preference any day!

FaceDeer wrote:50 meters, same as the shortest rope. There's variables to set the length of a rope ladder and the length of the shortest rope in init.lua, with the longer ropes being multiples of the shortest rope length, so you can twiddle them there to make them fit a different style of map.

Cool, thanks!

FaceDeer wrote:Thanks for the link about global settings, I was going to need to learn how to do those before the release of my Digtron mod, I'll add it to all the other stuff I work on too. :)

Great! With global settings you'll definitely end up on my list of favorite modders :D

FaceDeer wrote:Something I was thinking about doing back when I was working on this vines mod was splitting it up into a ropes mod and a vines mod. I can easily imagine wanting one part without having the other part, and it'll be easier to import the new ropes into other modpacks (such as castles, which I think still has old rope boxes). I don't know what the etiquette of this sort of thing is though. I know these mods are all under open licenses, but I don't want to swoop in and steal away someone's baby if they're still maintaining it. I've got a similar problem with the Hoppers mod, I did a major rewrite of it and I'm not sure how to approach distributing my version.

I see. I think a separation would be very favorable, I probably would have used the rope mod only but now I like the vines too. The fact that the vines part depends on biome_lib may be off-putting to some however. With a modpack they may cherry pick ropes only.

I think given an acceptable quality of the code that most devs appreciate your contribution. An approach of doing pull requests first, perhaps discussing it a bit with the original maintainer shows good intentions. Also respect the code licensing and name earlier contributors and you should be fine. If no one replies or accepts the PR in some time, they are likely not interested in maintaining the mod anyway. Good luck!

texmex wrote: One aspect could be to postpone the discovery of vine ropes a bit: until steel has been produced. Makes those first mining runs a bit more challenging and risky. I like that aspect, but I'll take a functional mod over that preference any day!

I'll leave those in the vines part of the mod for sure, then. I'll try to make the ropes half of the mod allow both shears and axes for severing a deployed rope.

BTW, if you change the settings for rope lengths on your server it should leave existing ropes unaffected. It should only affect the ropes generated by newly-placed rope boxes (or old rope boxes that are removed and then put back by the player to regenerate the rope from scratch). As I recall anyway, it's been six months since I worked on this stuff. :) The way it works is that the descending end of the rope keeps track of how much rope is left as it descends, and that value is set when the rope box is first placed.

Bas080 wrote: The "moretrees" mod has vines now too. I'm thinking of removing the vines from the mod and just make it about the ropebox.

You can split this mod in two, but don't remove the vines

How can I add vines to jungle trees in the mapgen? Doesn't work here on a new map (latest dev of MT, mgv7)

Edit: it seems that the grow slowly and do not spawn while map generation

As a heads-up for those who are interested in playing with in-progress work, I've resumed updating my fork of this mod now that my other mods have reached fairly "settled" states. I've made it so you can sever a rope or rope ladder using an axe as well as the shears, tidying up the collapsing-rope code in the process, and I added documentation for ropes via an optional dependence on the "doc" mod. I also moved the rope and rope ladder length settings into the standard mod settings format.

Pretty soon now I think I'll start the main event, splitting this mod into two separate mods - one for the vines and one for the ropes. The two mods will work together as they do now but it will also be possible to install either of them on their own.