Citadel

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slopsbucket
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Citadel

by slopsbucket » Post

This place is huge, nearly 300 squares across. The courtyards have formal gardens and fountains as well as 128 houses, each with it's own bed, chest and oven. There is also ample farming to support such a large citadel.
Image

Image

I think I could have done better with the inside of the central keep but it looks good from the outside.

Image

It might make a nice start point for someone's server, No Mods Required, although I did have Technic and it's dependencies installed while I was building. The roof is certainly high enough for solar panels.

Minetest 0.4.15
Citadel.zip ~10Mb

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fi ... 8153118121

Cheers,

Andrew
Attachments
Citadel 03.jpg
Citadel 03.jpg (259.56 KiB) Viewed 861 times
Citadel 02.jpg
Citadel 02.jpg (196.67 KiB) Viewed 861 times
Citadel 01.jpg
Citadel 01.jpg (174.34 KiB) Viewed 861 times

dawgdoc
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Re: Citadel

by dawgdoc » Post

Extremely Impressive.

Makes me feel I have spent my minetest time being lackadaisical.
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Give a kid a fish, it's going to die.

slopsbucket
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Re: Citadel

by slopsbucket » Post

Thanks for the reply Dawgdoc.

I cheat of course, besides extensive use of WorldEdit and Mapfix.

I live in a very remote part of the world, no television, no radio, no phone. Until last Friday I also had no internet, the government just installed a satellite dish for me.

I use Linux but I also have a Windows drive packed full of games, for some reason none of those commercial games can hold ny attention for any where near as long as this tiny little open source project.

Cheers,

Andrew.

hajo
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Re: Citadel

by hajo » Post

slopsbucket wrote:This place is huge, nearly 300 squares across.
The courtyards have formal gardens and fountains as well as 128 houses
That is a really nice work !

With that sandstone-theme, the citadel might fit well into a desert-setting,
so in the middle of that snow-covered plains it looks a bit misplaced.

Are there any real-world buildings like that ?
It might make a nice start point for someone's server, No Mods Required
I found some unknown minerals, eg. at 130,-56,-100 or 91,-58,-146.
It is not tin, silver or mithril.

slopsbucket
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Re: Citadel

by slopsbucket » Post

Hi Hajo,

Thanks for the reply.

No, I have no idea if there are buildings really like that or not, It came from my imagination and like most of my structures it follows a mathematical formula. It takes many different types of imagination to make a world, I can make it look good from the outside but the inside is always cold and empty, I don't have that sort of imagination.

As for the strange blocks, I didn't check the coordinates because I just got back from drinking beer with mates all afternoon. I think it's probably a discrepancy between different versions of mods, and from the depth I would guess it is most likely marble from the Technic mod.

Here's a copy of the mods i've been using:

http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?fi ... 3181266692

mods.zip
~21 Mb

I didn't install Vaneesa's Home Decor at the time but that's the entire collection of mods I use.

What I would suggest is that you use WorldEdit to make a .mts schematic file of the citadel and import that into your own map on your server. Don't forget to take the ground level too. May take quite a while if your computer's running a little slow.

Cheers,

Andrew.

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Andrey01
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Re: Citadel

by Andrey01 » Post

The building is great!!!!!!!!!

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cx384
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Re: Citadel

by cx384 » Post

WOW! Very nice!
Can your read this?

slopsbucket
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Re: Citadel

by slopsbucket » Post

Thought I'd write a quick tutorial on how I make these.


How I start building castles:

For building really big places I prefer to use Flat Maps mapgen but I have Lakes enabled by having the following line in my minetest.conf file:

mgflat_spflags = lakes

The best of both worlds, large flat build platforms and a bit of pretty. For this build method you need 2 mods installed and enabled:

WorldEdit
mapfix

Keep trying new maps with Damage turned off and Creative turned on until you find one you like, the very first thing I do in each is enable flying:

/grant singleplayer fly

Creative mode would be a lot more work without that. Also use the F5 key to display debug information, that gives you your coordinates in the top left hand corner of the screen.

First thing I do when I find a map that I like is restart a new map using the same seed number and don’t explore it. The file size of the map increases massively as you explore more area, if you want to share it then be kind to others and yourself, explore first then start a new map using the same seed. In this instance start point was a huge area of grass and that was all I wanted, I had no need to explore.

The very first consideration is Odd numbers versus Even numbers. If you create a square area using an even number of nodes then the centre of that area will be and intersection of 4 nodes. If you create a square area using an odd number then there’ll be one node at the centre. I like one square in the middle, so odd numbers for me. This is an important consideration in lengths of wall section and tops of towers too, how I do crenelations and merlons looks silly if there’s an even number of nodes to sit them on, you always end up with a gap.

I decided I wanted to build something really big, about 400 squares across. For the sake of an odd number and for ease and convenience let’s say a square 401 X 401, that gives me my 1 square in the middle that I like. There’s a limitation with the game engine and WorldEdit. It’s not a bug, WorldEdit can only work on nodes that have already been “discovered”, your area of “discovery” only covers 80 nodes in front of you. Because I want to do such a big square I have to fly all around and inside this area first, to “discover” it in order that the nodes exist for WorldEdit to work on.

I open World edit and set coordinates for positions 1 and 2. You have to do these one at a time, when you click Set Position it closes and you have to go back in again, typing both sets of coordinates at once doesn’t work. With Flat Map mapgen the ground level on top of the plateaus is 8.

I set the following coordinates:

Position1: 200, 8, 200
Position2: -200, 8, -200

Then I went into Set Nodes and set that area to:

sandstonebrick

Next is to get rid of all the grass and weeds that were growing in that area on level 9, one at a time change the 8 in those coordinates into a 9, then go back into Set Nodes and set them to:

air

Weeds all gone, one more step before we go any further, go back into WorldEdit and set both coordinates again:

Position1: 195, 8, 195
Position2: -195, 8, -195

And Set Nodes to:

dirt_with_grass

Now, technically, I have a huge square of lawn with no weeds surrounded by a 5 node wide road of Sandstone Bricks that is too wide for new weeds to cross, a perfectly clean slate, except for those shadows. That’s what mapfix is for. By default just typing in /mapfix and hitting Enter will fix all the lighting problems within a 40 node radius of you. You can set that radius bigger if you like but use with care, on smaller computers it can take a very long time if you use too big a number. I use:

/mapfix 60

So I fly around the whole area again using mapfix to get rid of all those shadows, with a radius of 60 I only have to stop every 100 nodes to use mapfix and every use overlaps the last by 10 nodes, easy to count and can’t miss any. Be sure to look in a full 360 degree circle after each use of mapfix to make sure that the changes get made, sometimes it takes a few seconds.

Now for the maths. I want 7 towers across a side, 2 of them being corners. That means I want 6 copies of a section of tower and wall plus 1 more tower on the end. Hello WorldEdit. I made a square 401 squares across divided by 6 is almost 67 but I need to leave room for that 7th tower, how about I call it 64 squares a section, I like that number, lots of people do.

For this one I want really big towers and really fat walls and it’s only allowed to be a total of 64 squares a section. 23 squares would be a nice fat tower and that leaves 41 squares for a section of wall. A bit long, what if I break it up with a guard station in the middle, say 15 squares wide. 2 sections of wall 13 squares long with the guard station in between, all odd numbers that I like. But with the 7th tower on the end that adds up to 407 nodes wide, no worries, I just have to go outside my boundary by an extra 3 nodes on each corner.

Image

Spend a bit of time here and make sure that every thing lines up properly, you can see in the picture above that I didn’t get it right. That’s the purpose of a block missing from the centre of every wall, it makes it easier to spot mistakes, if only I looked at my own picture. :D

Once you’re happy with how every thing lines up and that all the numbers are right fill in all the gaps in the walls, put the floor in including putting dirt_with_grass where you have to and put in all your corner pretties, cornices, or whatever you call them. Stairs and Screwdrivers. These will later get copied vertically as well horizontally, doing it now saves a lot of work.

Image

As you can see in that last picture I’ve set an area in WorldEdit, that area includes levels 8 and 9, I’m copying the walls I’ve built and the ground underneath them. It’s important to get rid of any weeds in that area before you copy otherwise you copy them too, even more important later when you’re copying vertically. Doing the gardening now will save you a lot of cleaning up later.

That section of wall and tower is 64 nodes long, I need 6 of them but I’ve already built 1, I need 5 copies in multiples of 64 plus a tower without the wall section at the 6th multiple of 64. By default your Copy mode is set to copy in which ever direction you are currently looking, this is good. Simply face the right direction then go into Copy and copy sections to:

Copy: 64
Copy: 128
Copy: 192
Copy: 256
Copy: 320

Then highlight just the corner tower room and it’s floor and Copy: 384.

Do the same thing for 2 directions, once you’ve got a whole side you can copy it 384 nodes in the right direction to make your square. Then I usually use a section of that outer wall as a template for the inner keep, in this case I used the central 3 towers and the 2 sections of wall in between in a straight copy action, copied to 128 and 256.

Image

From here every thing gets easier, you now have a working floor plan and can easily map out your new citadel. You really only need to keep working on that one corner. Mark coordinates for the section you are working on, this time not including the floor, then look straight up at the sky and copy 1 nodes, 2 nodes, 3 nodes, etc, until you get the hight you want. Put in a ceiling, put torches in, put doors in, when you’re happy with a section use WorldEdit to repeat it for you.

When the area you are trying to copy is greater than 10,000 nodes you’ll get asked to type in //y and hit Enter to confirm and continue. Note the double slash! Also be warned, Copy doesn’t check what direction you’re looking in until after you’ve given confirmation, if you’re looking somewhere else by then you’ll copy in the wrong direction.

Hope that helps someone.

Cheers,

Andrew.
Attachments
StartBuild 05.jpg
StartBuild 05.jpg (79.84 KiB) Viewed 861 times
StartBuild 02.jpg
StartBuild 02.jpg (106.4 KiB) Viewed 861 times
StartBuild 01.jpg
StartBuild 01.jpg (101.23 KiB) Viewed 861 times

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BronzDragonClara
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Re: Citadel

by BronzDragonClara » Post

Dude. That looks sweet. I love your use of sandstone. I think the garden is absolutely beautiful. You should try building more stuff. ;-)
Today is a wonderful day to make a good yesterday for tomorrow

slopsbucket
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Re: Citadel

by slopsbucket » Post

Thanks for the comment, BronzDragonClara.

The example I created in that tutorial was only made for that tutorial and was never intended to be a working castle, but now you’ve stroked my ego a little I think I could make that one work. There’ll be a lot of changes though, I didn’t like the way those walls were going to end up looking.

It’s very difficult to make it look graceful unless you work on a large scale. The main reason I stick to the sand stone bricks is because they seem to show off the lights and shadows the best. Especially from a distance, I like the red desert stone bricks too but from a distance you can’t see all the details any where near as clearly.

I reckon that area is big enough to have a proper town inside the walls but that’s going to take some planning, usually I just like building the castle itself. It could make an interesting community project if I built the outer walls and the inner keep then gave people copies to play with.

As it stands at the moment that inner keep is 151 X 151 squares, take away another 50 squares for the outer walls and some roads and you’re left with 8 areas inside to fill, each about 100 X 100 squares. If 8 different people did 8 different areas you’d get the variation in design needed to make it look more life like.

Food for thought.

Cheers,

Andrew.

slopsbucket
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Re: Citadel

by slopsbucket » Post

The monsoon’s come back in and it’s wet every where, not much else to do except sit inside on the computer so it’s almost done. Kudos to the developers for their work on the data storage system, by the way. At the moment I’ve got frequent electrical storms which means frequent power outages. It seems that this is no longer able to corrupt my world files like it used to. Well done!

Image

I ended up sticking to the original floor plan in the tutorial, it’s not that bad. Instead I went a little crazy with the central keep, it turned into something that could give E M Escher nightmares. Check out the floor plan.

Image

I’ve just got a bit more to do, mostly just tidying up, fixing the lighting and I’m not happy with how the stairs are at the moment. In the floor plan you can see below each of those green squares is a bit over 120 X 120 nodes. Plenty of clean empty build space for people to play with.

Image

There’s only 2 mods installed, WorldEdit and Mapfix, that’s it. And I’m going to include them in the world folder. It should only end up being about a 10 Mb download. Will post soon.

Cheers,

Andrew.
Attachments
Tower Map.jpg
Tower Map.jpg (138.7 KiB) Viewed 861 times
Tower Floor.jpg
Tower Floor.jpg (208.13 KiB) Viewed 861 times
Tower.jpg
Tower.jpg (152.32 KiB) Viewed 861 times

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solars
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Re: Citadel

by solars » Post

I like this building. Impressive! :)

And the tutorial is good too. You build your castles another way as I do. More mathematically. My way is more chaotic. MUCH more chaotic. :D

There will be possibly a day, when I try this out myself.
My big Minetest map Karsthafen: English thread / German thread / Youtube / German webpage

slopsbucket
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Location: Top End, Australia

Re: Citadel

by slopsbucket » Post

Thanks for the kind comments, Solars.

There's nothing wrong with Chaotic. Chaotic is good, unfortunately I'm no good at that, my brain doesn't have the imagination. Instead it just crunches numbers.

Cheers,

Andrew.

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Lord_Vlad
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Re: Citadel

by Lord_Vlad » Post

Oh... man, the link in OP is dead. I really wanted to check this :(

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