[Mod] Zoonami [1.2.0] [zoonami]

isaiah658
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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.0] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

Version 0.6.0 is released. There are no new monsters or moves, but it has a lot of other new content.

The chat command /monsterstats was changed to output the stats to a formspec instead of the chat. The command now shows all of the monster stats due formspecs having textareas with scrolling.

Monsters have a chance of dropping item rewards after defeating them in battle. If rewards are dropped, a formspec is displayed after the battle ends with an option to claim the rewards or to discard them. This will need to be refined once more items are in the game so monsters can drop more appropriate rewards. The rewards and the chances of getting rewards varies for each monster.

The temporary healer item has been replaced with a healer machine. Right clicking on a healer fully heals any monsters in your party. Something important to note is that healer machines don't drop anything when broken. This is a design choice to prevent players simply carrying a healer machine with them and using it wherever they want. All new players are given one healer when they start, so choose wisely where you want to place it. In order to craft more, you will need to do some mining for crystal fragments.

Crystal fragments can be found underground from -75 to -31000. They spawn on stone nodes in caves. However, they are not your typical ore. The fragments spawn in a hollow crystal structure. The floor of this structure has blocks that have lights on and lights off. Before the crystal fragment can be broken, all the lights must be turned off. Right clicking a light inverts it and inverts the surrounding adjacent lights. This is similar to "Lights Out" in real life. Once the puzzle is solved, the crystal fragment can be broken. After the crystal fragment is broken, the lights can also be broken, but they don't drop anything. Keep in mind that if two crystal puzzles spawn next to each other, you might have to solve both before you are able to break the crystal fragment. This is due to the crystal fragment detecting the lights from other crystal puzzles.

Villages were added to mapgen. For anyone who has dealt with village mapgen, you will know it's hard to make. While researching this feature, it seemed there were only two paths. One path was to simply place random schematics, but it wouldn't actually form any villages. The other path was to do a lot of complex coding to find flat areas to place buildings. Both paths also had to deal with trees and not spawning buildings on sides of cliffs. However, neither of these were what I wanted. I needed something in the middle. Luckily, I was able to figure something out. By using an invisible node, I can use one mapgen decoration to sparsely place single invisible nodes. I then use a second decoration that is placed next to the individual nodes and give it a large fill ratio. The result is circular shape of invisible nodes. I then use decorations for the building schematics and place them by the invisible nodes to form a small village. I've also limited where the villages can spawn via biomes and map height to try giving the villages ideal spots to spawn. Buildings can certainly spawn in undesirable locations, but for a mod like mine that uses villages for gameplay instead of aesthetics, this is reasonable.

However, villages will not spawn if using v6 mapgen. The reason is v6 does not have biomes. This means villages would spawn in forests inside trees very often. Villages only spawn in savanna, savanna_shore, grassland, grassland_dunes, plains, and snowy_grassland around y level 3 to y level 10. Currently there are two building types in villages. There are houses and shops. Shops have a chance of having a healer machine for trainers to use. In a future update, shops will also have vending machines for purchasing items.

NPCs were also added to the game. They are still a work in progress. When a village is generated via mapgen, villagers are randomly spawned in the village. There are currently two types. There is a chatterbox type and trainer type. Chatterbox NPCs have different messages when a player right clicks on them. The message can be random banter or useful game tips. These messages change depending on the time of day in Minetest. Trainer NPCs are NPCs that you can battle by right clicking on them. Trainiers will only battle once every day in Minetest. At the moment, trainers keep the same monsters, but I might make their level scale to match the player's monsters. You can also tell if an NPC is a trainer because they will have an orange backpack similar to the item that players carry. I have plans to add merchants, monster traders, and possibly other NPCs. As mentioned, the NPCs are still very much a work in progress.

There were a bunch of decorative blocks added for the village houses. Most of these blocks have crafting recipes. Some recipes might use special Zoonami flowers that can be found growing in different areas of the map. Flowers can also be a reward from certain monsters. The purpose of these flowers is mostly to provide a way for Zoonami to have crafting recipes without having dependencies on other mods. Many recipes use a few items from Zoonami and then item groups rather than specific nodes.
Last edited by isaiah658 on Mon Aug 09, 2021 02:47, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.0] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

Here are some screenshots. While taking the screenshots, I noticed NPCs weren't spawning in the generated villages. I'll be looking into it and fixing any bugs I can find.
crystal_puzzle.png
crystal_puzzle.png (55.82 KiB) Viewed 4353 times
Last edited by isaiah658 on Thu Mar 17, 2022 22:37, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.0] [zoonami]

by freshreplicant » Post

Wow, version 0.6.0 sounds awesome, especially the villages and NPCs. Really like the look of the buildings. Can't wait to try it out when I get the chance.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.0] [zoonami]

by freshreplicant » Post

Got a chance to play with the mod for a little while.

Possible Bug

When breaking berry bushes, something goes wrong with the dropped item. A brief glance at the code tells me there may be an issue with concatenation, as the dropped item name is just in the format of "zoonami:colour", so "zoonami:green", etc. It looks like it was meant to have "_berry_bush" or something similar at the end of it. [Edit: Confirmed this only happens to the berry bush with berries on it, not the one without berries on it.]

Villages

I can confirm that villagers also don't appear to have spawned by the first few structures I found. I spotted one house that had a row of sand blocks spawn through a wall, an another which had leaves on the side of it, as if it displaced a tree. Not a big issue though and doesn't seem to be very frequent.

The villages themselves are pretty nice so far, though some additional decorations would be cool in future.

Unsolicited ideas

Just some minor ideas for villages and other aspects of Zoonami:

1. You could add lanterns, torches or some other external light sources to villages. Right now the only light comes from the interior light through the windows.

2. You could make biome variations, so different biomes have different building styles, maybe also NPC costumes. This would encourage exploration. Not sure if Zoonami spawn by biome already.

3. Perhaps you could make one extra machine, namely a 'Jelly Machine'. This node, when placed would then work kind of like a furnace, with two input slots. It would take sand in one (to explain how suddenly there's glass around the berry jelly) and the berry, giving you the jarred berry jelly as an output. You wouldn't really need to change the advanced recipes I guess, unless you wanted to make a second 'Jelly Enhancer' (this could take 4 inputs for the basic jellies), which would 'recycle' the 4 smaller jars and use the jelly to give you the 'Advanced Jelly'.

4. Using the healer, running from battle, etc. could still really use some feedback, maybe even just in the form of chat entries or messages to the player. Things like "Ran from battle!" or "Healed your Zoonami!"

Closing

Zoonami is really coming along, glad you're still working on it. Will you accept PRs/contributions anytime soon? If not, is there another way to help you in the development of the mod (besides the tasks you mentioned here)?

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.1] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

Good catch on the berry bushes. My intention was to have both the berry and the bush as item drops if a player breaks a bush that has berries. I didn't want players to accidentally not collect berries. I had the code for that all wrong which resulted in the unknown item. I released version 0.6.1 to fix this.

As for the sand in one of the houses, it's most likely due to the way I made the house schematics. Schematics can be created where individual nodes can have a chance of being included when a schematic is placed. This allows me to have one schematic for a house, but the painting, bookshelf, and table have a around a 50% chance each to be placed. This adds some variety to keep the houses from being completely identical. The problem though is when they aren't placed, the empty space is filled with a void block instead of an air block. This means any existing nodes in that spot won't get erased. I'm not sure if it's possible to have it fill it with an air block instead. I'll have to look into it. This same issue can be observed with the crystal puzzles. I designed the puzzles to be solvable even if one of the lights are missing. This means each schematic effectively have two puzzles. When the node is missing, there will often be stone in it's place. Not really a big deal, but it would be nice to remove it as it does look like something is "broken".

I'm not sure I really care to have lanterns in the villages, and to be honest, my method of spawning villages in doesn't really allow for this. They would be randomly placed in the village. It would look strange and form no coherent path. Additionally, there are actually several "villages" that spawn with no houses due to randomness, the village size, and due to some tricks to try getting houses to only spawn on flatter areas. This means lanterns could spawn in a town with no houses. This is why making villages in Minetest during mapgen is so tough. The only options are to go insanely details be having very complex spawning conditions that analyze the individual nodes or have Minetest randomly place schematics and hope for the best.

The reason why the jelly recipe includes no glass is because glass nodes have no special groups. I really wish the default mod had added a "glass" group to glass nodes. Since they didn't, other mods didn't add it either. This is the same issue with other resources, like steel ingots. It's the reason that the healer machine uses stone instead of steel ingots. In order to make a mod that doesn't have a bunch of dependencies on other mods, the item groups like "stone", "sand", "wood", and "soil" are about the only groups you can rely on in order to allow resources from other mods to be used in crafting recipes. The vessel mod does include a "vessel" group, but I don't think it's safe to assume that every game type will include items with the "vessels" group. Stone, sand, wood, and soil are much more common and reliable. I could perhaps have a machine that makes empty glass jars from sand, but now we go back to the issue of not being able to use steel ingots as the recipe for the machine. This is why some of the recipes are very weird in Zoonami. I want to make sure it will work with as many "games" as possible. I'll have to think about it more and see if I can come up with a reasonable crafting recipe.

As for the tree issue, yes, houses can spawn in trees. The only real control I have over this is to have houses that spawn in biomes that have no trees or minimal amounts of trees, like the grassland and savanna. It the reason villages are disable on mapgen v6. v6 has no biomes, thus villages would regularly spawn inside trees/forests. There isn't much I can do to fix this.

The healer does play a sound when a player clicks on it. So there is some feedback. I might be able to have the healer have some sort of animation after clicking on it by swapping nodes to one with an animated texture and then changing to back. I'll think about how to do something for battles.

If someone is interested in contributing, they just need to post a message saying they are looking for help and what they might be interested in. I can then tell them if there are any tasks that they can help with. But most of the tasks are going to be tough, time consuming, and involve coding. For example, I'm sure I spent at least 20 hours making the village mapgen. Half of that time was spent researching because the solution I wanted didn't seem to exist. The other half was spent making it and trying to refine it. Even after that, it still has bugs like NPCs not spawning in. That's the main reason nobody wants to contribute. It's not really fun spending tons of hours working on someone else's mod. This isn't an issue exclusive to my mod. There are plenty of other fantastic Minetest mods that have one person who made and maintain everything.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.1] [zoonami]

by freshreplicant » Post

isaiah658 wrote:
Tue Aug 10, 2021 01:47
Good catch on the berry bushes. My intention was to have both the berry and the bush as item drops if a player breaks a bush that has berries. I didn't want players to accidentally not collect berries. I had the code for that all wrong which resulted in the unknown item. I released version 0.6.1 to fix this.
Nice, will check it out later.
isaiah658 wrote:
Tue Aug 10, 2021 01:47
As for the sand in one of the houses, it's most likely due to the way I made the house schematics. Schematics can be created where individual nodes can have a chance of being included when a schematic is placed. This allows me to have one schematic for a house, but the painting, bookshelf, and table have a around a 50% chance each to be placed. This adds some variety to keep the houses from being completely identical. The problem though is when they aren't placed, the empty space is filled with a void block instead of an air block. This means any existing nodes in that spot won't get erased. I'm not sure if it's possible to have it fill it with an air block instead. I'll have to look into it. This same issue can be observed with the crystal puzzles. I designed the puzzles to be solvable even if one of the lights are missing. This means each schematic effectively have two puzzles. When the node is missing, there will often be stone in it's place. Not really a big deal, but it would be nice to remove it as it does look like something is "broken".

I'm not sure I really care to have lanterns in the villages, and to be honest, my method of spawning villages in doesn't really allow for this. They would be randomly placed in the village. It would look strange and form no coherent path. Additionally, there are actually several "villages" that spawn with no houses due to randomness, the village size, and due to some tricks to try getting houses to only spawn on flatter areas. This means lanterns could spawn in a town with no houses. This is why making villages in Minetest during mapgen is so tough. The only options are to go insanely details be having very complex spawning conditions that analyze the individual nodes or have Minetest randomly place schematics and hope for the best.
Hmm, I bet - villages sound very challenging. Have you ever used the version of settlements maintained by FaceDeer? It's probably the best village mod I've come across. Towns can spawn even on uneven terrain, with street lanterns, smithies, that kind of thing. I think it's broken into an API and schematics like these. Maybe some of it it is transferable to Zoonami? Or perhaps you could just use the API and make schematics for Zoonami.
isaiah658 wrote:
Tue Aug 10, 2021 01:47
The reason why the jelly recipe includes no glass is because glass nodes have no special groups. I really wish the default mod had added a "glass" group to glass nodes. Since they didn't, other mods didn't add it either. This is the same issue with other resources, like steel ingots. It's the reason that the healer machine uses stone instead of steel ingots. In order to make a mod that doesn't have a bunch of dependencies on other mods, the item groups like "stone", "sand", "wood", and "soil" are about the only groups you can rely on in order to allow resources from other mods to be used in crafting recipes. The vessel mod does include a "vessel" group, but I don't think it's safe to assume that every game type will include items with the "vessels" group. Stone, sand, wood, and soil are much more common and reliable. I could perhaps have a machine that makes empty glass jars from sand, but now we go back to the issue of not being able to use steel ingots as the recipe for the machine. This is why some of the recipes are very weird in Zoonami. I want to make sure it will work with as many "games" as possible. I'll have to think about it more and see if I can come up with a reasonable crafting recipe.
I never realised there is no glass group. But I suppose it would still work with sand as an input. Interesting predicament regarding the crafting of the healer and other machines.
isaiah658 wrote:
Tue Aug 10, 2021 01:47
The healer does play a sound when a player clicks on it. So there is some feedback. I might be able to have the healer have some sort of animation after clicking on it by swapping nodes to one with an animated texture and then changing to back. I'll think about how to do something for battles.
It does play a sound, but it isn't very intuitive. I also wasn't sure that it was the healer (this is especially true if you don't have the mod installed that shows item names). I also didn't realise going into it the first time that placing the healer was permanent! I really don't think it would need to be complicated, or even animated. Chat messages are pretty standard, similar to how Pokemon does things like print "Sytcher used Cut!" when using a HM.
isaiah658 wrote:
Tue Aug 10, 2021 01:47
If someone is interested in contributing, they just need to post a message saying they are looking for help and what they might be interested in. I can then tell them if there are any tasks that they can help with. But most of the tasks are going to be tough, time consuming, and involve coding. For example, I'm sure I spent at least 20 hours making the village mapgen. Half of that time was spent researching because the solution I wanted didn't seem to exist. The other half was spent making it and trying to refine it. Even after that, it still has bugs like NPCs not spawning in. That's the main reason nobody wants to contribute. It's not really fun spending tons of hours working on someone else's mod. This isn't an issue exclusive to my mod. There are plenty of other fantastic Minetest mods that have one person who made and maintain everything.
I'd like to contribute, but I am nowhere near experienced enough with coding or LUA to jump in right away. I can certainly try and tinker with my locally installed version to see what I can come up with.

One thing I was considering was running a small server with Zoonami installed, just as a test. I know it's super early and still in heavy development, but it could be interesting to see how well it works in multiplayer.

I was wondering, Is there any particular reason you chose to make Zoonami a mod, rather than it's own game? It really seems to have potential for the latter. It could easily incorporate a stripped down and modified version of MTG (maybe even with a glass or metal group).

Alternatively, I was thinking, if you didn't want to make it its own game, since you have such a unique visual style, it'd be cool if you created a texture pack for MTG (or Mineclone, if Zoonami is compatible) that would mesh perfectly with Zoonami. Player skins would be cool too. But at that stage maybe making it a game is the easiest thing to do...

With a bit more content and some kinks ironed out, I do think that dedicated Zoonami severs could be quite popular.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.1] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

freshreplicant wrote:
Tue Aug 10, 2021 09:14
Hmm, I bet - villages sound very challenging. Have you ever used the version of settlements maintained by FaceDeer? It's probably the best village mod I've come across. Towns can spawn even on uneven terrain, with street lanterns, smithies, that kind of thing. I think it's broken into an API and schematics like these. Maybe some of it it is transferable to Zoonami? Or perhaps you could just use the API and make schematics for Zoonami.
I saw that while researching. In one of Facedeer's forum posts, it was intended to be used in Facedeer's commoditymarket mod, but checking the content database shows that the settlements mod was never added to the content database and the commoditymarket mod never added it as a dependency. It appears it's still a work in progress. Even if it is finished, I would not use it for my Zoonami mod. I have different plans which I will explain further below.
freshreplicant wrote:
Tue Aug 10, 2021 09:14
It does play a sound, but it isn't very intuitive. I also wasn't sure that it was the healer (this is especially true if you don't have the mod installed that shows item names). I also didn't realise going into it the first time that placing the healer was permanent! I really don't think it would need to be complicated, or even animated. Chat messages are pretty standard, similar to how Pokemon does things like print "Sytcher used Cut!" when using a HM.
If you weren't sure it was the healer, can't you open your inventory and hover over the item view the name? The healer isn't "permanent." It can still be broken if a player wants to remove it, but it won't drop anything. It has the same node groups as an obsidian block to prevent accidentally breaking it. You won't be able to break it with just fists. You'll need a pickaxe. I already planned on giving a guidebook to every player and explaining the healer was going to be one of the first things. The guidebook will be like an in-game wiki.
freshreplicant wrote:
Tue Aug 10, 2021 09:14
I'd like to contribute, but I am nowhere near experienced enough with coding or LUA to jump in right away. I can certainly try and tinker with my locally installed version to see what I can come up with.

One thing I was considering was running a small server with Zoonami installed, just as a test. I know it's super early and still in heavy development, but it could be interesting to see how well it works in multiplayer.

I was wondering, Is there any particular reason you chose to make Zoonami a mod, rather than it's own game? It really seems to have potential for the latter. It could easily incorporate a stripped down and modified version of MTG (maybe even with a glass or metal group).

Alternatively, I was thinking, if you didn't want to make it its own game, since you have such a unique visual style, it'd be cool if you created a texture pack for MTG (or Mineclone, if Zoonami is compatible) that would mesh perfectly with Zoonami. Player skins would be cool too. But at that stage maybe making it a game is the easiest thing to do...

With a bit more content and some kinks ironed out, I do think that dedicated Zoonami severs could be quite popular.
Zoonami is a mod because I want it to be compatible with Minetest the Game, Mineclone 2, and other games. I want people to have the freedom to use it with whatever they want. There's nothing stopping me or someone else making a game that uses the Zoonami mod. It's better to keep focused on making the mod first, then make a game that expands on the mod later. Many projects aim too wide, burnout, and never finish. None of the "main goals" listed on the first post are even completed. Zoonami still has a long way to go. I don't expect it to be finished or even "fun" for the next year.

Zoonami isn't compatible with Mineclone 2 yet, but it will be at some point. As for a texture pack, I did make a texture pack for the default mod. It's not specifically a Zoonami texture pack, but maybe it matches the style better? https://content.minetest.net/packages/i ... ixel_pack/

As for hosting a Zoonami server, that would be very helpful when I get player vs player battles are made!

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.1] [zoonami]

by freshreplicant » Post

isaiah658 wrote:
Wed Aug 11, 2021 01:08
I saw that while researching. In one of Facedeer's forum posts, it was intended to be used in Facedeer's commoditymarket mod, but checking the content database shows that the settlements mod was never added to the content database and the commoditymarket mod never added it as a dependency. It appears it's still a work in progress. Even if it is finished, I would not use it for my Zoonami mod. I have different plans which I will explain further below.
It feels like the most polished village mod by far to me, not sure why it's not on ContentDB actually. I understand however if you want to figure it out for yourself.
isaiah658 wrote:
Wed Aug 11, 2021 01:08
If you weren't sure it was the healer, can't you open your inventory and hover over the item view the name? The healer isn't "permanent." It can still be broken if a player wants to remove it, but it won't drop anything. It has the same node groups as an obsidian block to prevent accidentally breaking it. You won't be able to break it with just fists. You'll need a pickaxe. I already planned on giving a guidebook to every player and explaining the healer was going to be one of the first things. The guidebook will be like an in-game wiki.
Ahh, ok good to know it's not unbreakable. I've only been running it on test worlds so I usually don't have all the gear together that I usually wood.

Fair point regarding mousing over the healer when in your inventory. Also like the sound of the guidebook! Reading right away that moving the healer after placing requires special gear would make it less of a shock.

Just personally, I would still appreciate more feedback from events like running away, using the healer, etc. But maybe I'm the type of player who needs stuff spelled out for them!
isaiah658 wrote:
Wed Aug 11, 2021 01:08
Zoonami is a mod because I want it to be compatible with Minetest the Game, Mineclone 2, and other games. I want people to have the freedom to use it with whatever they want. There's nothing stopping me or someone else making a game that uses the Zoonami mod. It's better to keep focused on making the mod first, then make a game that expands on the mod later. Many projects aim too wide, burnout, and never finish. None of the "main goals" listed on the first post are even completed. Zoonami still has a long way to go. I don't expect it to be finished or even "fun" for the next year.
I think you're right in your approach, now that I think of it. Burnout is definitely a real problem, especially with all these half-finished one man game projects. As far as Zoonami being fun though, I wouldn't be surprised if that milestone is closer than you think.
isaiah658 wrote:
Wed Aug 11, 2021 01:08
Zoonami isn't compatible with Mineclone 2 yet, but it will be at some point. As for a texture pack, I did make a texture pack for the default mod. It's not specifically a Zoonami texture pack, but maybe it matches the style better? https://content.minetest.net/packages/i ... ixel_pack/
Perfect! I forgot that I saw that another day. It works very well with Zoonami.
isaiah658 wrote:
Wed Aug 11, 2021 01:08
As for hosting a Zoonami server, that would be very helpful when I get player vs player battles are made!
Well feel free to send me a message when you're at that point, I'd be glad to help out. Either I can host it on my server or donate enough to spin up a VPS for a month or two if for whatever reason the former doesn't work.

P.S. I got my first crystals today...I've never played 'Lights Out' so after lots of trial and error and solving some via random clicking...I had to look up the strategy online, hah. It was harder for me than it looked at first glance! Very unique feature for this type of game, I like it.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.1] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

freshreplicant wrote:
Wed Aug 11, 2021 21:14
It feels like the most polished village mod by far to me, not sure why it's not on ContentDB actually. I understand however if you want to figure it out for yourself.
I agree. It does look like one of the best village mods. My plan is to use the simple village generation I have now with my mod, but I would use the settlements mod if/when I would make a game for Zoonami.
freshreplicant wrote:
Wed Aug 11, 2021 21:14
P.S. I got my first crystals today...I've never played 'Lights Out' so after lots of trial and error and solving some via random clicking...I had to look up the strategy online, hah. It was harder for me than it looked at first glance! Very unique feature for this type of game, I like it.
That's actually good to hear! I tried to make the puzzles have some difficulty, but not too difficult.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.2] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

Version 0.6.2 is released. This version refines the village and NPC spawning.

Villages are less likely to have no buildings. Villages now spawn on "soil" and "sand" nodes instead of only "spreading_dirt_type" which means villages are in savannas now. Tried to make villages favor flatter areas. The amount of villages have been reduced for "flat" and "carpathian" mapgen as those mapgens feature near perfect spawning conditions which resulted in an excessive amount of villages. Overall, villages should hopefully be more consistent. Look for flat areas close to sea level in grassland and savanna biomes.

NPCs now generate with villages during mapgen. This was trickier than I anticipated. This was an issue with Minetest (https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/4759). Spawning an entity in the minetest.register_on_generated function doesn't actually spawn anything. This appears to be due to the generated chunks not being active chunks (too far away from the player). In fact, mobs redo specifically blocks spawning mobs that are not near the player presumably because of this. Luckily, I figured out a workaround. When an NPC is going to be spawned, it waits five seconds, uses minetest.forceload_block to force load the node that the NPC will spawn on, spawns the NPC, and after five seconds it uses minetest.forceload_free_block to unload the force loaded area. This for me has resulted in consistent NPC spawns outside of villages. NPCs currently don't generate inside buildings for several reasons (not easy to push them, buildings are small, etc), but the NPCs will stay near gravel paths and the invisible nodes used to generate the village. Placing gravel paths can be used to control the general area that an NPC will stay by.

NPCs also rarely spawn in the wild on "soil" nodes. This spawn rate is increased for mapgen v6 to make up for the fact that v6 can't have villages. v6 has no mapgen biomes which would result in most villages spawning in the middle of trees. The spawn rates for NPCs in the wild still need to be tested to see if they spawn at a reasonable rate.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.2] [zoonami]

by freshreplicant » Post

Awesome, found the villagers! They look great and work pretty well. Though I did accidentally forfeit my prize once or twice!

Is it possible that there's some issue with Scallapod's pincer move, specifically the player version? It doesn't seem to find the proper file name. Haven't had a chance to dig into the code, but I might later.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.2] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

freshreplicant wrote:
Thu Aug 19, 2021 21:33
Awesome, found the villagers! They look great and work pretty well. Though I did accidentally forfeit my prize once or twice!

Is it possible that there's some issue with Scallapod's pincer move, specifically the player version? It doesn't seem to find the proper file name. Haven't had a chance to dig into the code, but I might later.
Thank you for catching that. The texture is missing. I'll release a fix soon. What happened is that during the 0.6.0 release, I screwed up my code repository. I commited things to the master branch instead of my 0.6.0 branch and it became a mess. Since I only use the web GUI and not the command git stuff, I couldn't fix it. I instead made a mirror of the repository to have a copy, and then created a new repository. During that process, I missed uploading that texture.

I find git, the actual command line stuff, to be incredibly frustrating and confusing. When I previously was on Github, I could not find a way to commit using actual git without also having my email attached to the commit. I need to sit down and try again. At the moment, it's not that big of a deal, but if someone were to contribute code, it would be an issue because all of the commit history is erased if I remake a repository from scratch.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.3] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

Version 0.6.3 is released. This fixes missing move animation textures.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.2] [zoonami]

by stdh » Post

isaiah658 wrote:
Fri Aug 20, 2021 22:15
I find git, the actual command line stuff, to be incredibly frustrating and confusing.
Not sure if it's an answer to your trouble, but I had a lot of help learning git from Oh My Git, a game that shows what the sometimes mysterious git commands are doing under the hood. It really explains the concepts and a lot of common situations one may face while wrestling with a git repository.

If you want to do advanced stuff like rewriting a repository with a differently configured user (without private email address), I suppose you could use one of the myriad special purpose tools that exist for git. A lot of people find git to be complicated, some of them must have had the same problem you have, and probably a few of those may have made some software to fix it! It often works like that in the world of free and open source software...

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.2] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

stdh wrote:
Fri Aug 20, 2021 23:58
isaiah658 wrote:
Fri Aug 20, 2021 22:15
I find git, the actual command line stuff, to be incredibly frustrating and confusing.
Not sure if it's an answer to your trouble, but I had a lot of help learning git from Oh My Git, a game that shows what the sometimes mysterious git commands are doing under the hood. It really explains the concepts and a lot of common situations one may face while wrestling with a git repository.

If you want to do advanced stuff like rewriting a repository with a differently configured user (without private email address), I suppose you could use one of the myriad special purpose tools that exist for git. A lot of people find git to be complicated, some of them must have had the same problem you have, and probably a few of those may have made some software to fix it! It often works like that in the world of free and open source software...
Thank you for the response! My struggles are mostly with getting connected to an online repository and not having my email published with commits. I haven't been able to test out the actual commands yet.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.6.3] [zoonami]

by stdh » Post

I think that's a matter of configuration, at least for new commits. If you don't have a public email address I believe you can just set a fake one. The old commits will probably still show your real email, but if there's no commits by other people among the predecessors of your current commit, it should be possible to fix this. In Debian testing, I found git-filter-repo which looks like it could help you to rewrite git history if you want, but I'm sure there are alternatives.

I'm not a git expert by any means, so take all this with a grain of salt!

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.7.0] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

v0.7.0 is released. It's not as exciting as v0.6.0 which introduced villages, but a lot of work has went into it. This update focused on adding Zoonami Coins (abbreviated ZC), the currency for the Zoonami mod. ZC is a "digital" currency. There are no actual coin items. ZC is given as a reward after defeating monsters. You can see how much ZC you have by looking at the "player stats" page in the backpack menu.

ZC can then be used at vending machines. Automatic vending machines can be found in shops in villages. Every shop has one machine. Automatic vending machines stock a new item at varying prices at the start of every day (midnight). Currently they only stock berries and flowers, but a few more things will probably be added later on. Additionally, there are vending machines that players can craft and stock with their own items. These machines have three item slots. Hovering over a player vending machine will show the owner's name. These machines are meant to be a safe way to trade ZC for items. The items can be any item, not just Zoonami items.

If for some reason you would like to transfer money to someone without making a purchase from a vending machine, there is a new chat command added to do just that. The transfer-zc command can transfer ZC to any other player as long as they are online. Here is an example to transfer 100 ZC to playername: /transfer-zc 100 playername

One thing to mention, the monster stats command was changed from monsterstats to monster-stats to make it easier to read and match the transfer-zc command.

This update also features some improvements. Doors and berry bushes now support protection. When protected, doors can only be opened by owners and players with the protection_bypass privledge. Likewise berry bushes can only be picked by owners if they are in a protected area. Doors no longer delete nodes above them when being placed. A Zoonami Backpack is given to players after dying and respawning due to how important this item is. It can still be crafted if necessary, but this should make the game flow better. And last but not least, eight new monsters and five new moves were added.

Since this update added things like Zoonami Coins and vending machines, please make sure to report any bugs you can find. Any bugs involving these features have a high chance of causing item/money duplication. Please make sure to test only on new worlds as well.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.8.0] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

v0.8.0 is released, however, it's different from other updates. You may have noticed Mobs Redo is no longer listed as a dependency. FSC is now the only requirement. What happened?

While playing Zoonami, I noticed that mobs accounted for most of the CPU usage. This lead me down a rabbit hole of optimizing mobs. I discovered that creating my own method for spawning in mobs was going to be necessary no matter what mob framework I used. Zoonami is going to have a lot of different mobs. Registering an ABM for each mob would not be a practical way to spawn them. The second thing I investigated was optimizing mob behavior. Zoonami is a bit unique in that it needs quantity more than quality. If players are wandering around not finding monsters, the gameplay is going to get boring. There needs to be a lot of simple mobs for players to find.

The first issue I worked on was the spawning code. I used the spawning code from Cube Mobs by Xanthus as a base. Here is how the new spawning code works. The spawning code runs on a interval. By default, every 10 seconds the spawn code will try to spawn one mob around each player online. The first check is to make sure that there aren't too many nearby mobs, otherwise spawning is stopped. Next, an area around the player is searched to find all nodes that monsters can spawn on. If there are enough potential spawning spaces, one node will be chosen at random. With the node chosen, the spawning code begins gathering the five spawning variables to find a suitable mob to spawn. There's rarity, node group, time of day, light level, and height. If no mob meets the conditions, nothing will spawn. If multiple mobs meet the conditions, one is selected at random and spawned. If a mob has a requirement to spawn near another node, such as water, this last condition is checked before spawning.

Something to keep in mind is that Zoonami only has 20 monsters at the moment. You're going to see a lot of the same common monsters over and over. Additionally, there is only one water monster and it's not a common spawn. Thus, oceans are going to feel very empty. As more monsters are added, spawning quantity and variety will balance out.

The second issue I worked on was optimizing mob behavior. Minetest has a profiler that can be used to view the amount of CPU time that mods use each game step. The CPU time is measured in microseconds. More microseconds means the mod is using more CPU. I created a basic mob that was comparable in Mobs Redo and Mobkit. This allowed me to use the Minetest profiler to compare each mod. Surprisingly, Mobkit used on average 3 to 4 times more microseconds than Mobs Redo. Specifically, the on_step function in Mobkit is the cause of the extra CPU usage. My guess is that it is due to the physics that Mobkit uses for each mob.

At this point, Mobs Redo was the best option I had, but I wanted to investigate creating my own mobs. This would allow me to optimize every aspect of mob behavior to fit just what Zoonami needs and nothing more.

I started with PilzAdam's Mobs mod as a base and cut it down to only what I needed. The biggest thing that uses CPU for any mob is the on_step function. This function is ran every game step (multiple times per second). The way I made it use less CPU was to approach it similarly to the spawn code. Rather than running the logic that controls the mob's movement every game step, I've adjusted it to only run on an interval. By default, it runs every 1 second. This does have the downside that mobs can only make decisions once per second. Certain actions, like checking if a swimming mob is floating in air and needs to fall, are tied to this update speed. I was able to adjust most behaviors to take this delay into account. Overall, I was able to make mob behaviors similar to Mobs Redo.

I used the Minetest profiler to compare Mobs Redo and my mobs and the results vary a bit. In some situations, Mobs Redo averaged 2 times more microseconds than my mobs. In other situations, Mobs Redo averaged 7.5 times more microseconds than my mobs. In my opinion, these performance gains justify the switch to using my own mobs. It should allow players to have more mobs in the world.

Lastly, I've made many of these spawning changes configurable by players. Players can choose if mobs can spawn, if they can spawn in protected areas, the maximum amount of nearby mobs when spawning, the area around the player that mobs can't spawn, the total amount of active mobs, the spawn interval time, and enable or disable mob AI. Most of these were already available with Mobs Redo, but the last two are new.

Spawn interval time is the amount of seconds between attempting to spawn a mob around each player. The default is 10 seconds. If you want mobs to spawn more often, lower the amount of seconds. If you want mobs to spawn less often, increase the amount of seconds. Enabling or disabling mob AI determines if mobs roam around or if they will stand still after spawning. By default, the mob AI is enabled. I don't expect many players will want to turn this off. The main reason for turning this off is the CPU usage is dramatically decreased. This could be useful if you are playing on a very low end device. However, I recommend trying Zoonami with the mob AI enabled at first before deciding to turn it off.

To conclude, mob spawning and mob behaviors have been overhauled. This wasn't something I planned on, but I noticed it was going to be necessary at some point. The end result is that Zoonami should use less CPU. If you notice any bugs, please make sure to report them!

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.8.1] [zoonami]

by j0j0n4th4n » Post

That is such a cool mod, I love what you did with the engine! You mentioned there are currents 20 mobs, I made these two, they were based on a drinking bird toy and on the flute who hypnotize the snake. If you like them I can make a few if you wish =)

https://www.deviantart.com/jojodaggerba ... -896961321

or if the link isn't working properly:

Image
cdb_894a100ddd76

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.8.1] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

j0j0n4th4n wrote:
Thu Nov 04, 2021 17:46
That is such a cool mod, I love what you did with the engine! You mentioned there are currents 20 mobs, I made these two, they were based on a drinking bird toy and on the flute who hypnotize the snake. If you like them I can make a few if you wish =)

https://www.deviantart.com/jojodaggerba ... -896961321

or if the link isn't working properly:

Image
Thank you for the response! It's nice to know people have an interest in the mod. The monsters you made are cool! There's a few things I need point out though.

Zoonami monsters follow a color limit. Each monster can have black + four other colors. This color limit helps keep a consistent look and style. The back sprites in Zoonami are full body instead of just the back of the head. There's a few reasons for this. The first being that Zoonami has 2D mobs. Having full body back sprites allows them to be used on the 2D mobs so they have both a front and back image. The second reason is that as a kid I was always disappointed whenever I would find a monster with a really cool front sprite, yet the back sprite barely showed the monster. One other loose rule is that "stronger" "rarer" monsters should take up more of the 64x64 space. "Weaker" "common" monsters usually take up less space. It's not a definitive rule, but making a monster too small or too big can be really hard to adjust once it's been finished. Lastly, in order to have other people use your art, you would need to choose how the art is licensed. In my opinion, the best way to do this would be to share the art on opengameart.org. This makes it easier to reference and a bit more official as an actual license must be chosen. Personally, all of my art assets are licensed as Creative Commons Zero (CC0). This is one of the least restrictive licenses. It doesn't even require any credit which is why some people don't like it. However, most people still give credit even though they don't have to.

With all of that being said, I'm a little hesitant about asking people to help make monsters for Zoonami. If someone spends a lot of time working on a monster, but I don't like it or I need to change it to make it fit how I want it, they'll probably be a bit offended and upset. There's also the issue that many people don't understand copyright laws and will copy someone else's work thinking that it's ok because they changed it a little. By making my own monsters, I don't have to worry about that.

Currently I have several big features I need to finish before I will start to adding more monsters. I need to make a way for players to store monsters. This will take a lot of thinking on how to design the user interface with the limitations that formspecs in Minetest have. I also need to make a formspec for teaching moves to monsters. There's also player vs. player battles which I have no idea how hard that will be. At the moment, monsters aren't the biggest hold up to completing Zoonami. It's all the other stuff that will take the longest.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.8.1] [zoonami]

by j0j0n4th4n » Post

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, I didn't knew about opengameart.org, I'm just finished creating an account there and the creatures I made are now on the CC0 license, just making them is good enough to me =)
Zoonami monsters follow a color limit. Each monster can have black + four other colors.
I had a feeling that may be the case, but wasn't so sure. Anyways, if you like the ones I made, I can change the palette to fit within the color limit (and make full body back sprites).

I understand your hesitation, copyright is kinda of a monster in itself. I create my art from a blank canvas and for the photo manipulation from my DA gallery I always make sure to only use photos which are allowed to be used and modified in any way.
cdb_894a100ddd76

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.8.1] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

j0j0n4th4n wrote:
Fri Nov 05, 2021 04:02
Thanks for the thoughtful reply, I didn't knew about opengameart.org, I'm just finished creating an account there and the creatures I made are now on the CC0 license, just making them is good enough to me =)
Zoonami monsters follow a color limit. Each monster can have black + four other colors.
I had a feeling that may be the case, but wasn't so sure. Anyways, if you like the ones I made, I can change the palette to fit within the color limit (and make full body back sprites).

I understand your hesitation, copyright is kinda of a monster in itself. I create my art from a blank canvas and for the photo manipulation from my DA gallery I always make sure to only use photos which are allowed to be used and modified in any way.
I definitely like the snake! It would need a few changes. The first change is that it should be looking more towards the bottom left where the opponent will be. Even just a simple mirror image would be ok that way the snake is still looking at the flute and being distracted by it. The second change is that it's a bit big. It would need to be smaller. Really big monsters should be reserved for stronger legendary type monsters. The colors could also be a bit brighter. I've put together a picture with all of my monsters to make it easier to reference them below. That should help with matching sizes and styling. While putting the picture together, I noticed four of my monsters accidentally went over the color limit. I've adjusted them to only have black + four other colors instead of five. And to clarify, if white is needed, that does count as one of the four colors.
Monster List.png
Monster List.png (26.97 KiB) Viewed 4351 times
Also when I saw the snake, I had a bit of an inspiration. If you wanted, you could make a smaller snake that is holding a pair of maracas by it's tail. A "rattle" snake pun. :) That could be the younger snake that then grows into the older snake with the flute. The older snake could also maybe be playing the flute as if it's learned how to charm and control other snakes with it or something.

As for the drinking bird, it's not bad, but I don't know if it fits in with the other monsters I've made. It's a little strange. I know some people do like the weirder monsters. If it were to be added, it would need the same changes that the snake would need. It would need to face the bottom left, be smaller and not have the hat cut off, and have a full body back sprite.

If you would like to try making them in that style, you're more than welcome to!
Last edited by isaiah658 on Mon Dec 13, 2021 01:31, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.8.1] [zoonami]

by j0j0n4th4n » Post

I see. I apply the changes you asked and here is the new flute snake =D
https://opengameart.org/content/flute-snake-lite

I will work on the maracas snake then ^^
cdb_894a100ddd76

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.8.1] [zoonami]

by j0j0n4th4n » Post

I also made a water monsters, see if you like it:
Image
cdb_894a100ddd76

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Re: [Mod] Zoonami [0.8.1] [zoonami]

by isaiah658 » Post

j0j0n4th4n wrote:
Mon Nov 08, 2021 13:42
I also made a water monsters, see if you like it:
Image
Thank you very much for snake! I will probably experiment with the color palette and a few other minor edits, but this helps a lot.

I also like the water monster. Good color choices and monster concept. One issue I have with it is the shell position. Perhaps I'm seeing it wrong, but the shell appears to be rotated differently on the front sprite and back sprite. On the back sprite, the shell opening appears to be at the bottom and swirls up around clockwise getting smaller. On the front sprite, the shell opening appears to be at the top and swirls down counter clockwise getting smaller.

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