building a game from scratch - Sol Aureus

[v-rob]

Birch aren't swamp trees I think. I know I'm pesky.

Well, they might be aspens (although those aren't swamp trees either), but hey, it looks nice.

[firefox]

Birch aren't swamp trees I think. I know I'm pesky.

in germany, birches can grow anywhere, even swamps :P

Well, they might be aspens (although those aren't swamp trees either), but hey, it looks nice.

yes, they are aspens, because the wood colour was too dark for birches. (but they were actually birch textures in minecrap)

aspens grow in cold humid areas which are usually coniferous.
i called neptune the swamp biome because it has mossy grass. it's placed between mercury (glacier) and jupiter (jungle).
cool and humid is good blend for those two, and it's the climate where aspens grow =(^.^)=

[azekill_DIABLO]

German AspenBirch Swamp treez then!

[firefox]

i'm not dead yet, just lazy :P

i reset the trees mod back to 0, because copying the default trees was not what i wanted and in the end it means even more work to use them and change them later. so if i'm working on the new trees mod, it will be my own tree models from the beginning.
for now i'm working on lots of improvements to the biome map.

[firefox]

it's done! the biome map finally works as intended.
i switched from the square grid pattern to a diamond cross pattern. the biome distribution is now much better and the "mismatching beach glitch" is also fixed.
height limit and filler depth have been adjusted for smoother borders between biomes and altitude variants.
the colours of stone across the biome map is now aligned like a gradient. ice only appears adjancent to grey stone, red stone only near yellow stone, brown stone is in between yellow and grey stone.
everything looks just gorgeous =(^.^)=

[wziard]

Birch aren't swamp trees I think. I know I'm pesky.

But they are (?). Where I live the swampy areas are covered with a mixture of birch, willow and alder (closely related to birch) trees.

[migdyn]

Nice! I had a similar idea.

[firefox]

i should be working on tree models, but i'm too lazy.
now i have to work on a server town project.
i promise to get back to work when minetest 5.0 releases.

[firefox]

not only did i not make any progress with trees, i also realized that i messed up the biome map. important ideas for a unique experience, like the glass desert or luminous swamp water, were left out and i ended up with a slightly modified set of the standard biomes.
focusing too much on simple and clean design, i created a boring remake instead of a new original world.

so i started over again, but this time i will focus on making the game playable first and add content afterwards.
the new plan for the biome map still has some holes, but i will fill them eventually.
i also changed the name to Almagest.

still keeping the focus on alchemy, i want to add a lot more node interactions based on heat and moisture, so that instead of using furnaces and autocrafters, the player can construct full functional large scale alchemic transmutation devices.

[texmex]

so i started over again, but this time i will focus on making the game playable first and add content afterwards.

This is, I suspect, the fate of many game makers! Myself included. Core gameplay has ”core” in it for a reason. Good luck! :)

[ShadMOrdre]

Firefox,

Please look at my lib_materials and lib_ecology mods. You'll find biomes, and plenty of tree schematics, as well as node defs for those trees and plenty of plants and other things that could make this easier for you.

Shad

[firefox]

news flash:

during my last free time at the end of summer, i did nothing.
then, when the new semester started, i resumed working on this even though i should have done math homework instead.

no new code yet, but i finally fixed all my previous design problems.
for now i have a diagram of stones and sands, and how they interact with heat, moisture, frost and drought elements.
every resource is renewable one way or another.
stone will drop itself when mined, cobble is a craft product, acting as a simple form of bricks.
sand is crafted from stone (one-way only), even clay and dirt can be created if you have the ingredients.

the plan has 25 solid and 4 liquid materials. no grass or moss for the surface yet and no decorative building blocks either. just the basics for the "ground" mod which makes up the earth.

for the surface i have planned to simply use grass and moss, both can dry out (and regenerate if the dirt is not dry). variations will be based on trees, since growing trees shall transform the grass around them.

and since node names can be different from their IDs, all variations of sand will simply be named "sand" instead of "desert sand", "silver sand" ect.
sand is sand. you can see what colour it is in the world and in your invetory, no need to long descriptive names.