Sokomine wrote:Most servers are dedicated to players who want to build there. Servers that place more emphasis on survival and fighting for mobs also exist. Those are more likely to want pre-generated structures. I know none that uses the structures directly. A few smaller servers (experimental AdventureTest server, Maikaumines old Test server, some very few smaller ones) use my mg_villages mod which does also produce villages of type "taoki" with your structures.
The structures-mod seems to work well with latest MT and MTG. There are some adjustments you'll have to do so that all will work again. Doors where changed some time ago into two node high meshes. They work diffrent from the old ones. Your old doors spawn now as unkown nodes. Torches where changed as well. There's a special type for beeing fixed to a wall. "Normal" old torches look odd if placed that way. But that's about all I could find and ought to be not too much work to adjust.
Houses are often embedded inside stone and not really integrated into the landscape. Getting down to a building can be tricky. Roads cannot be walked on as there seems to have been an earthquake which moved parts of the roads up and others down, leaving too high walls to jump.
Those multi-floor houses of varying height are very nice to have.
Hope you'll be working on your mod again. Mine isn't really finished either - there are still situations where bugs cause single houses to spawn above villages, and the main road is too often cut off at the end of the village. My current project is a mod that supports citybuilding - something where the player founds a city and decides where structures ought to be built.
Thank you for the useful info! The door and torch problems make sense, and it sounds like I'll need to update the schematics sometime. However this will be very tricky, as I need to create a new world and import then re-export every structure... if only Minetest schematics could be edited by hand. Perhaps I should take this opportunity to create new and better buildings altogether, I don't know.
Other than that however, it sounds like all else is working fine! I was worried important functionality might have changed, which could break reading of mapgen terrain or per-chunk spawning. Sounds like Minetest has been keeping its API steady, and not mindlessly deprecating or changing important functions that would break existing mods... this is always relieving to hear for a mod creator!
Houses cutting through stone is normal, and not much can be done about it; Last time I worked on the mod, I used every possible approach I could come up with, in order to achieve the perfect balance between cutting into terrain versus leaving parts of a structure floating. Roads being offset by one unit was the best compromise; It's the only way to allow road systems to climb up and down somewhat, with the only alternative being perfectly straight roads everywhere. There's only so much that can be done when the world is made of 1-meter voxels, but personally I'm happy with the final patterns.
And yes: Structures as well as Creatures are intended for survival based servers, especially adventure and story based worlds. A server meant for players to build their own things would not have much use for them, and they would in fact be an annoyance. Still there should be a good distribution of each genre, and perhaps someone would like to try my mod's approach to survival based worlds.
Also, if you're working on a village / town / city mod as well... perhaps you can take a more in-depth look at what I did with mine, and see if it might already offer the functionality you need! Obviously you'd know best, as your mod likely has features mine can't support... however this does aim to offer every mechanic and bit of flexibility one could need, when it comes to procedurally generated cities. Players demolishing or creating buildings however is a bit different: I'm not sure if I could ever support that with schematics... although the mod does allow players with a special privilege to use the structure I/O machine and spawn or despawn buildings in-world.
