Mod Ideas

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Otter
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Mod Ideas

by Otter » Post

I am quite new here, and new to Minetest, so please forgive my ignorance. My current language of proficiency is Java and as far as I can tell, Java is dying fast, (Thanks Oracle!)
This old dog needs to learn some new tricks and Lua looks interesting. I may not be doing any favors by learning the language. Languages I get good at have a tendency to go away. (Ever hear of Forth? How about Rexx?) Lua does look fun and the Minetest environment is pretty amazing. I mostly write stories for fun, (I have tens of fans) so I will not be hacking away at any great speed.

Here is a list of mods I would love to see. I am going to slowly work on them myself unless someone else has a stable version or someone else likes the idea and has a quick implementation for it.

The first mods I am interested in are all to give mine and woods exploration more feel. These are all classic to cinema, story and real life.

Thrown Torches. The ability to drop a torch in a pit and have it light the fall and then the bottom of the pit for a while. Simple mechanics when you place the torch and there is not a node close enough to be selected, it is tossed to where you would have selected it and it drops from there. Dropped torches should probably burn out or have a flag to set whether it does or it attaches when it hits bottom. A flag to tell it to extinguish in water would also be fun.

Flares. Really bright for a bit. Usable like the torch above. Not very long lived but able to survive water.

Flare guns. :)

Graffiti. No urban ruins are complete without the ability to spray paint marks or words boldly. For old caves, an auroch drawn on the wall would be pretty neat. Blazes on walls like arrows pointing are also the sort of thing to enrich the feeling of an old cave. Paint like this would be useful for exploring. Blazes carved or painted on trees are also common methods of marking a trail. The warning of monsters in the cave, tick marks on a cell wall, or messages about running out of provisions are all classic.

Old campfires. A charred ring of stones would do. Old bones lying around a old campfire would make a great scene in a cave.

Bats. Mostly they just stay on the ceiling. Then they just fly past. Mostly. Flags to limit or change their behavior would make these even more interesting. Having bats fly out of caves at night and be missing from the caves at night is also kind of cool. Seeing them fly in or out at dawn and dusk could be a rather nice mood setting event. Nice thing is that after the bats are implemented in a mod, birds and butterflies are going to follow soon enough. Especially if someone figures out how to be sure they don't lag the system much.

Repelling. Hold down sneak and bounce just before you hit ground. I saw a mod, (I haven't tried it yet) that had hand holds for climbing. If you had a grappling hook or an established line, you could climb the hand holds put in a chance of slipping and even worse a chance that the grappling hook failed after the hand hold slipped. A set of flags to change behaviors here would be cool as well.

An occasional fallen tree across a chasm would be a fun addition to the world generation system.

Swinging on vines is kind of classic and it needs to be possible in jungles at the very least. A Spiderman mod would be pretty cool if the mechanics worked well.

Swinging bridges over chasms. A range in how well made they are is pretty cool. The ability to cut the line is also rather classic. Having a broken swinging bridge become a rickety, rope ladder up is also classic.

Zip lines. Being able to have a zip line over a chasm or between structures is another fun possibility. It could be placed or it could be with one of those zip line guns so common in cinema and so hard to find in real life.

A miners helmet with a close up glow and a narrow directional beam where you are looking, would really help make the caves easier to explore and even more creepy. There is a flashlight and quite a few torch mods that look like they might do, so this is probably already made or nearly made and I have not done enough testing to find it.

The above ideas are from my short and mostly realistic list. :) Since teleportation, flying carpets and floating islands are all things, I think the high fantasy potential of Minetest is unlimited.

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Casimir
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Re: Mod Ideas

by Casimir » Post

Otter wrote:Simple mechanics when you place the torch and there is not a node close enough to be selected, it is tossed to where you would have selected it and it drops from there.
That's a great idea, and shouldn't be that hard to do. And it would be quite fun to have it work for all nodes. We would need on_secondary use and then span a falling node with some acceleration. When I get this working I will definatelly include it into my subgame :]

Edit: First rough sketch

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Re: Mod Ideas

by Otter » Post

That was fast!
I tested it. As a noob it took a bit for me to find, games\minetest_game\mods\default\init.lua and games\Voxelgarden\mods\default\init.lua for testing.

I threw it up just before --Load Files like this,

______________________________________________
-- Enable dropping objects on use.

**Casimir's Code Pasted Here***

-- Load files
______________________________________________

It also worked much better in Voxelgarden than Minetest_Game because it plants itself instead of being just a dropped item. It does not glow and light the path as it drops,so part of the feel is still missing. I am not complaining, this was a brilliant and nearly instant fix, Casimir! Now when exploring a cave, a torch can be dropped to the bottom of a pit!

Another neat effect is that I can start tossing cobble and gravel to build a pile that can be used to climb down. I played with it a bit. I can't toss the water from a pail, but being able to toss things off of a cliff is a pretty nice addition. Suddenly all the landfill that is collected when mining has a lot more value.

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Re: Mod Ideas

by Casimir » Post

It does not glow and light the path as it drops,so part of the feel is still missing.
Yeah, that's a missing feature in the engine. We don't have any light source for entities (technically the thrown node is an entity like mobs or dropped items), but only for static nodes. I think with the client side modding currently in development we have a chance of getting this someday in the future.

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Re: Mod Ideas

by Otter » Post

I think there is a way, but I am not sure about how lag free it might be. A mod that got added in but only partially, https://github.com/minetest-mods/torches has a weildlight method that places a light node on the user that updates position a few times per second. With a sort of persistence of vision effect where three or four light nodes are created and then removed along the path of the torch as the torch falls, the effect of a glow as the torch dropped might really work. Especially if the light level was higher when the torch is dropping.

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Re: Mod Ideas

by texmex » Post

Very good ideas here, I like em!

I'm thinking that perhaps particles can be used in some way for torch glow, since they are getting light source properties this coming release?

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Re: Mod Ideas

by Otter » Post

Thanks, Texmex! I have another interesting one, Trees falling over when cut down.
If the calculation for direction was based on leaves, then removing leaves would allow you to control the direction a tree fell.
If damage where involved on the tree falling, then players will quickly learn to stand at an angle to the tree when doing random chopping. This mod would mean that the forest will not end up with missing trunks and levitating tree tops. This mod would allow someone to cross a small gap by cutting down a tree.

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Re: Mod Ideas

by texmex » Post

Otter wrote:Thanks, Texmex! I have another interesting one, Trees falling over when cut down.
If the calculation for direction was based on leaves, then removing leaves would allow you to control the direction a tree fell.
If damage where involved on the tree falling, then players will quickly learn to stand at an angle to the tree when doing random chopping. This mod would mean that the forest will not end up with missing trunks and levitating tree tops. This mod would allow someone to cross a small gap by cutting down a tree.
It's a weird feeling when someone else has exactly the same idea as yourself pretty much at the very same time (Hello FaceDeer!). It should be possible i think, but I wonder how one would solve the multitude of cases of other nodes obstructing the destination positions of the "falling" tree.

Image

In the example the space above the terrain is free, so I can imagine placing the tree nodes by laying the tree on the side and "sink" it onto the ground somehow. In the case of space partially blocked, for instance with the often case of neighbouring trees, I'm not sure how it would work.

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Re: Mod Ideas

by Otter » Post

Some of it is simple, the rest we can justify. :)
In woodworking, in nearly every case, limbs are discarded. The problem with limbs is that they grew to resist gravity at an angle so wood in them tends to warp and move more as humidity changes and time progresses. In a few old crafts, this is an advantage but for most woodworking it is enough of a problem to make limbs only good for making paper and particle board.
So the limbs that are in the way can go away. No problem there. They could become twigs or whatever. Best to keep the fallen materials as objects found in default if possible. That said, I would love a stair/ramp form for tree. If it looked like a ramp of bark, then a tree or a limb could be at a 45 degree angle. Best yet it could be walked up. It does not have to look like steps. :)

Tree physics could go several ways. the trunk breaks, the trunk remains straight, the trunk goes at a 45 degree angle. And for the cases where things just go weird, as we witness them, it becomes an opportunity to make minor adjustments to the physics.

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Re: Mod Ideas

by Otter » Post

I copied falling.lua from voxelgarden\mods\default and then altered init.lua to call it when the rest of the mods are executed. Now I have torches that can be thrown in Minetest Game. And I can throw other stuff. So now Minetest Game is exactly like Voxelgarden. Except you don't need small rocks to cut down trees and dirt still levitates and -- oh never mind -- It still isn't like Voxelgarden.

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Re: Mod Ideas

by texmex » Post

Otter wrote:I copied falling.lua from voxelgarden\mods\default and then altered init.lua to call it when the rest of the mods are executed. Now I have torches that can be thrown in Minetest Game. And I can throw other stuff. So now Minetest Game is exactly like Voxelgarden. Except you don't need small rocks to cut down trees and dirt still levitates and -- oh never mind -- It still isn't like Voxelgarden.
Put it up on Github! :)

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Re: Mod Ideas

by Otter » Post

As far as making a mod goes, it is problematic.
I have used Casimir's code and made a init.lua that allows you to throw things, but I am having issues getting the torch to plant.
I can alter the builtin\games\falling.lua to place instead of create nodes, the only issue is that if I drop a torch on a torch it crashes.
When I try to do this properly and call my substitute falling.lua from a mod's init.lua, it blows up. I was able to do this before the latest minetest build, but now I am pretty well lost. Such is the life of a newby modder.

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Re: Mod Ideas

by texmex » Post

Hey, I know that feel. Recently dipped my toes in modding myself. If dev builds are your problem you probably stay on .4.15 or wait five more days to see .4.16 release a stable.

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Re: Mod Ideas

by texmex » Post

Any news regarding torch drops?

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Re: Mod Ideas

by KCoombes » Post

Otter wrote:-snip-

Bats. Mostly they just stay on the ceiling. Then they just fly past. Mostly. Flags to limit or change their behavior would make these even more interesting. Having bats fly out of caves at night and be missing from the caves at night is also kind of cool. Seeing them fly in or out at dawn and dusk could be a rather nice mood setting event. Nice thing is that after the bats are implemented in a mod, birds and butterflies are going to follow soon enough. Especially if someone figures out how to be sure they don't lag the system much.

Xanadu server has bats - well, single bat that attacks passersby. Birds and butterflies can be found in the sky_mobs mod.

-snip-

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Re: Mod Ideas

by TenPlus1 » Post

texmex: Real Torch handles torch drops... viewtopic.php?f=11&t=15721

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Re: Mod Ideas

by texmex » Post

TenPlus1, yes I should know ;)

But this specific torch idea is about a light producing torch entity, similar to geominer's glowstick.

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