I was working on a proper guide for last minute to-do lists before releasing a map but, seems like there's some new maps coming out lately so, better sooner than later. I plan on making a nicer, better illustrated guide at some point.
What should be included in your map download:
This is just the basics of it. You may want to add a README.txt and/or a LEGAL.txt and that's perfectly fine. However, the junk files shown above will make me cry and you don't want to see that. Clean up your saves!
May I say no! Bad?
First of all, I'd suggest putting your Readme, legal, server-settings etc. in a folder above the main folder, having a structure like:
testmap.zip
>testmap - COPY THIS TO YOUR SAVES FOLDER TO INSTALL
>>all data files
>readme.txt
>legal.txt
>servers.txt
Do NOT remove data. Data first of also containts villages, and if you have villagers you most likely do not want to remove that. Secondly, I consider it very BAD practice to not have your scoreboard setup when starting the map. Sure, with a smaller CTM with about 30ish objectives, it can work, but once you start doing more command blocks, it gets more and more impractical to remove and resetup your scoreboard.
Remember that if you start working on a larger scale, you don't only need to setup objectives. You'll need to setup teams, add entities to those teams beforehand, you'll need to have a bunch of preset scores. Putting all that in a large amount of fill strips is possible, but just impractical if you want to mess with it later.
It's not like it makes for a smaller file size either, because you need the command NBT stuff in your region.dat. You basically move information from one place to another, just so you have the processor do work that can be done before the map is loaded.
I consider it highly INCORRECT and IMPRACTICAL to setup command blocks objectives/basic scores in command blocks instead of in a pregenerated scoreboard.dat
Cleaning up MCEDIT-TEMP is fine, players and playerdata stats etc. usually too. Do NOT remove data, unless you really know what you're doing. It can only screw up stuff.
there isnt a lot of vatiation in here is it? i regognize your use of voxelsniper, and commend your effective smoothing. it doesnt feel natural thou, becuse you make the stone and the dirt separate at a harsh point, make it transition a bit.
I like this area asthetically, but the brush strokes are really obvious. Erode Erode Erode. Also you might not want to give the player that much gold. Because Notch Apples. If you still need an Alpha Tester, just PM me.
1. First of all, I'd suggest putting your Readme, legal, server-settings etc. in a folder above the main folder, having a structure like:
testmap.zip
2. Do NOT remove data. Data first of also containts villages, and if you have villagers you most likely do not want to remove that. 3. Secondly, I consider it very BAD practice to not have your scoreboard setup when starting the map. Sure, with a smaller CTM with about 30ish objectives, it can work, but once you start doing more command blocks, it gets more and more impractical to remove and resetup your scoreboard.
Remember that if you start working on a larger scale, you don't only need to setup objectives. You'll need to setup teams, add entities to those teams beforehand, you'll need to have a bunch of preset scores. Putting all that in a large amount of fill strips is possible, but just impractical if you want to mess with it later.
4. It's not like it makes for a smaller file size either, because you need the command NBT stuff in your region.dat. You basically move information from one place to another, 5. just so you have the processor do work that can be done before the map is loaded.
6. I consider it highly INCORRECT and IMPRACTICAL to setup command blocks objectives/basic scores in command blocks instead of in a pregenerated scoreboard.dat
Cleaning up MCEDIT-TEMP is fine, players and playerdata stats etc. usually too. Do NOT remove data, unless you really know what you're doing. It can only screw up stuff.
1. Yeah, that's exactly where I put readmes and legals. Like I said, my post was brief so if I didn't identify a location for those filesit was because of brevity, not being "NO BAD WRONG."
2. The villages.dat has nothing to do with villagers and everything to do with vanilla village locations. Removing villages.dat, villages_end.dat and villages_nether.dat will not affect custom villagers or villager entities at all unless it is a map with a vanilla village in which case it only removes the location of the center of a village based on proper villager doors, all of which get recalculated and saved by the game as soon as the village is loaded by a player.
3. I think just the opposite. Designing a good command block system is essentially programming good software, Minecraft mapmaking has become a platform for game development so, lazy or sloppy systems just isn't going to cut it anymore. While it may not be necessary, it's just good practice. Trust me, I am alreadyworking on a larger scale.
4. It's not about a smaller file size, it's about not having a bunch of trash in your save files. If I sent you a .zip with a bunch of files you asked for but, also took the liberty to include a bunch of empty folders you'd be like wtf was all that for.
5. That's exactly what the spawn chunks are for, a staging area for loading the game. If a world loader circuit is set up right, it's literally less than a second for the necessary scoreboard and any other dependencies for starting the game to get calculated.
6. It may be impractical if your practice is sloppy or lazy but, it's certainly not incorrect.
1. Yeah, that's exactly where I put readmes and legals. Like I said, my post was brief so if I didn't identify a location for those filesit was because of brevity, not being "NO BAD WRONG."
2. The villages.dat has nothing to do with villagers and everything to do with vanilla village locations. Removing villages.dat, villages_end.dat and villages_nether.dat will not affect custom villagers or villager entities at all unless it is a map with a vanilla village in which case it only removes the location of the center of a village based on proper villager doors, all of which get recalculated and saved by the game as soon as the village is loaded by a player.
3. I think just the opposite. Designing a good command block system is essentially programming good software, Minecraft mapmaking has become a platform for game development so, lazy or sloppy systems just isn't going to cut it anymore. While it may not be necessary, it's just good practice. Trust me, I am already working on a larger scale.
4. It's not about a smaller file size, it's about not having a bunch of trash in your save files. If I sent you a .zip with a bunch of files you asked for but, also took the liberty to include a bunch of empty folders you'd be like wtf was all that for.
5. That's exactly what the spawn chunks are for, a staging area for loading the game. If a world loader circuit is set up right, it's literally less than a second for the necessary scoreboard and any other dependencies for starting the game to get calculated.
6. It may be impractical if your practice is sloppy or lazy but, it's certainly not incorrect.
1. Sure, that´s fine. Should have been a little less direct I guess ;-)
2. No. Villages.dat contains all villages with radius etc. Those do NOT have to be pre-generated. If you build a village in a ctm, with proper doors, villagers will go inside at night etc., but if you remove those files they will be regenerated, usually moving the village center and sometimes removing houses from the villages, causing villagers to walk away from it. Usually a good idea to keep the files there.
3. Yes. It's desiging software, basically, and has a lot to do with programming. It isn't necessary, and it's not good practice imo. To give a little indicator of scale, on a WIP of me from the past 4 weeks, there's about 50 objectives used, with a few hundred preset scores. I *think* that commandstats selectors are also stored in the scoreboard.dat, and I use about 50 of those too. That means, that, to reset it, I'd need a few hundred command blocks to reset all scores etc. I can't just make a big 14x14 of blocks because then I will never be able to find something again, so I'll probably need 10-ish fill strips filled with command blocks. Keeping all those up-to-date everything I change some command blocks gets REALLY annoying, REALLY quickly. Instead, I keep a notepad file with documentation on my pc that contains pretty much all info so I can easily revert a mistype. If I were to /scoreboard players reset *, I'd probably have to reload a backup, but making regular backups saves time in the end.
4. Nobody even sees those files, since you copy the entire folder around them, right?
5. Depending on your map size, yes. But a second of loading is a second of loading, I wouldn't feel comfortable making a player wait a second for no reason. Also, it takes up some of your precious spawn chunk space to fit it in.
6. True, it's mostly sloppy to delete it and reset it everytime.
And Sabre, the area was more of an experiment, I'm still figuring out how I want to make the map. I am keeping the gold though, it'll be balanced.
MCEdit's erode brush is really ugly and unwieldy imo. If anyone has suggestions for replacements, that'd be fantastic.
I've traditionally used Voxel Sniper for eroding and tweaking, but it's being held up and remade. I really, REALLY don't want to edit first and then replace the blocks with prismarine after I'm done and updated.
Maybe I could try dumping the old VS in a 1.8 spigot server... idk
Or, you know, you could just play the map instead of nit-picking what's inside the folder...........
I mean seriously guys, I know you want to help people be "professional" with this cleaning up folders stuff, and that's perfectly fine, but if you have a good map most people aren't going to care if there are unnecessary files in the folder. They're just going to play the map.
Again, if anyone wants to clean out the unnecessary files in their map folders,that's totally cool! But don't act like it is the one great saving grace of all CTM maps.
It cuts down on an insane amount of file space. If you don't want your users to have to download abnormally large files, cut down on the uncessary stuff within the map file. Plus yes, it does look more professional.
Howdy hey friends, I'm back (again). I've been thinking a lot about the state of CTM maps at the moment, and I've come up with a few thoughts that I'm going to include here for discussion's sake.
Firstly, it is important for mapmakers to realize that your average players have much less experience with CTMs than those of us in the community. It seems to me that a lot of people here don't realize this, and that they concentrate way too much on a sort of professionalism, for lack of a better term, that most of your playerbase just aren't going to appreciate. While this is probably a natural effect of people playing Minecraft getting older (i.e. we aren't a whole bunch of twelve year-olds anymore), that doesn't mean it's a good thing. A lot of the greatest CTM maps of all time, for example Legendary, lacked a lot of things that are staples of modern CTMs, like:
-erosion
-block variation
-it had traps (most CTMs nowadays don't)
-custom mobs (granted, they weren't around back then)
-fancy mechanics
-storyline
Essentially, there are so few good maps coming out nowadays because people are focusing so much on making their maps polished- by polished I mean making the map absolutely perfect, balancing it out, making every area jaw-droppingly gorgeous, etc.- that they're failing to do the single most important thing in mapmaking: getting their maps out there for the public to play. I don't care if your map has absolutely beautiful aesthetics, I don't want to have to wait literal years to play it (Fangride). In the words of Extra Credits, Fail Faster: . You need to make maps again and again to finally get good at it. Remember Kaizo Caverns? That map looked awful by modern standards. It didn't have block variation or erosion or anything like that. It wasn't particularly balanced either- the fluctuations in difficulty were pretty significant (also, reminder that you do need fluctuations in difficulty in your map- you don't just want a straight line resembling the difficulty, but rather the difficulty needs to go up and spike sometimes to give the player a challenge and it needs to drop sometimes to give the player a break. I could write about this for days, but essentially just use this image for reference. I might write something on this up later.). But soon after the release of Kaizo, Vechs followed up with another map, and another, and another, until eventually he created great maps like Legendary and Waking Up.
Next, stop caring so much about aesthetics. Seriously. Krose, three_two, other guys I'm forgetting (sorry), you're all cool people but you're really not doing yourselves any favors here. Your purpose when making a CTM map is to make a map where the player can have fun- players will experience a lot of different emotions throughout a map, sure, but the end goal is one where the player is happy. That sort of high that you get when you finish a hard area, or you finally complete a map you've been working on for months, your goal as a mapmaker should be to make that high as, well, high as possible while still appealing to the target audience. Can aesthetics add to your experience of a map? Sure. But they shouldn't be your number one goal; gameplay is. You need to concentrate on your gameplay first and foremost, then you can make it look nice. If the map is really fun, word's gonna get around. Would some people download your map just because you had pretty screenshots? Absolutely, but the payoff for good gameplay is much, much higher than the payoff for aesthetics. There have legitimately been mapmakers, myself included, who have been around here for years and still haven't released a full map because they've spent hours and hours on trying to make each area look pretty. This needs to stop. Stop caring so much about aesthetics, and stop spending so much time on them. They're not your priority.
Also, before I finish typing this up, I just want to mention one last thing: I'm absolutely loving how this community has developed since I last really participated in this community- probably over a year ago. There are so many promising new mapmakers here, and I'm so glad to see this, because quite frankly, I thought most people had moved on from this game by now. Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope to see what you guys think of this! n_n
Well i think infamy's text wall has blocked the progress eating zombie that is arguing (although I think Three_Two already took care of it before then, but now we're extra metaphorical-zombie-proof)
Anyway, I only plan on posting one picture from this area, and I don't plan any major changes too it before then so HAVE THINGS!
Side note: I'm not exactly looking for critique or feedback on this area, as its basically finished now aesthetically, but if you really feel the urge to give me some comments i will take them and cherish them always.*
You know, this post is definitely something to really think about. It may not be something many people might think too much about, but it is something I am going to think about.
Because, albeit being an entirely different person from who I was a year ago, from someone who could barely get out of the hole he was dug in, to someone who is now building a ladder towards the stars, I still struggle with motivation and finding any of my own work worthy. Because I keep comparing myself to everyone else. See how my work stacks up. Usually it doesn't tend to.
It's still a habit I need to break from, I will admit. But things are getting much better now. And that makes me more than ecstatic. I've learned to celebrate small victories. Y'know, if you are going to take anything from my post away, take a step back, and enjoy the small victories.
You know, this post is definitely something to really think about. It may not be something many people might think too much about, but it is something I am going to think about.
Because, albeit being an entirely different person from who I was a year ago, from someone who could barely get out of the hole he was dug in, to someone who is now building a ladder towards the stars, I still struggle with motivation and finding any of my own work worthy. Because I keep comparing myself to everyone else. See how my work stacks up. Usually it doesn't tend to.
It's still a habit I need to break from, I will admit. But things are getting much better now. And that makes me more than ecstatic. I've learned to celebrate small victories. Y'know, if you are going to take anything from my post away, take a step back, and enjoy the small victories.
Go Witty, Go! We all need it sometimes; a victory no matter how small and no matter over what remains a success that calls for celebration!
Stop caring so much about aesthetics, and stop spending so much time on them. They're not your priority.
While I agree, aesthetics attract people, and in 2015 when everyone can make a decent map without having too much of game knowledge your map has to be either godlike looking (The Painter, both Ragecrafts), or have some cool mechanics (Ragecraft 2? Even Inferno Mines with the fleecy mobs?) that player wants to see. If you don't have either of those things your map will just get buried as "an ok map 7/10"
While I agree, aesthetics attract people, and in 2015 when everyone can make a decent map without having too much of game knowledge your map has to be either godlike looking (The Painter, both Ragecrafts), or have some cool mechanics (Ragecraft 2? Even Inferno Mines with the fleecy mobs?) that player wants to see. If you don't have either of those things your map will just get buried as "an ok map 7/10"
Well, you obviously need to do something better then every other map, otherwise your map won't be insanely good right? But why should your map BE that insane map? Why does your map need to be better then everyone elses? What's wrong with "an ok map 7/10"?
If you really wish to be the next heliceo, three_two, hypixel, FVDisco, Vechz, or whomever else, you need to not just make a godlike looking map. Back when Ragecraft came out, there was only vinal fantasy in terms of aesthetics, and Ragecraft was completely over the top compared to those. Vinal Fantasy had these huge, open-sky weird terrain generated areas, while Ragecraft had an immense amount of detail at every block. Just making what everybody else makes, and trying to do that your best, won't make your map the best, then you'r ejust aiming to become the "an ok map 7/10". Even if you were to remake ragecraft, nobody would care, since that kinda stuff already exists.
People want to see something new. Something innovative, something they didn't see before. I'm not saying they want something better, but just something that is more interesting. Making extremely detailed areas won't cut it, since Ragecraft already exists, and even if you make it a little bit better then Ragecraft, nobody will probably care, since they've seen it before.
But, to be fair, if you're mapmaking because you want your maps to get attention, because you want to be "that famous mapmaker", I'd suggest you to quit. If you don't find mapmaking engaging or fun, and aren't doing it for your own, personal enjoyment, there really isn't much to gain from it. Becoming the new "god" mapmaker, takes tons of effort, but also tons of love and inspiration in your work. If you aren't mapmaking just because it's fun, not only will you be wasting your free time, your map will also suffer from it. I completely agree with infamy that perfectionism isn't required. People want new stuff. Look at how Mitheys map took off, because of all the new and original stuff in it. I'm not saying you should get into command blocks, but be innovative. Make something that is yours, don't try to make something someone else already made, yet a little bit better.
But, to be fair, if you're mapmaking because you want your maps to get attention, because you want to be "that famous mapmaker", I'd suggest you to quit
May I say no! Bad?
First of all, I'd suggest putting your Readme, legal, server-settings etc. in a folder above the main folder, having a structure like:
testmap.zip
>testmap - COPY THIS TO YOUR SAVES FOLDER TO INSTALL
>>all data files
>readme.txt
>legal.txt
>servers.txt
Do NOT remove data. Data first of also containts villages, and if you have villagers you most likely do not want to remove that. Secondly, I consider it very BAD practice to not have your scoreboard setup when starting the map. Sure, with a smaller CTM with about 30ish objectives, it can work, but once you start doing more command blocks, it gets more and more impractical to remove and resetup your scoreboard.
Remember that if you start working on a larger scale, you don't only need to setup objectives. You'll need to setup teams, add entities to those teams beforehand, you'll need to have a bunch of preset scores. Putting all that in a large amount of fill strips is possible, but just impractical if you want to mess with it later.
It's not like it makes for a smaller file size either, because you need the command NBT stuff in your region.dat. You basically move information from one place to another, just so you have the processor do work that can be done before the map is loaded.
I consider it highly INCORRECT and IMPRACTICAL to setup command blocks objectives/basic scores in command blocks instead of in a pregenerated scoreboard.dat
Cleaning up MCEDIT-TEMP is fine, players and playerdata stats etc. usually too. Do NOT remove data, unless you really know what you're doing. It can only screw up stuff.
there isnt a lot of vatiation in here is it? i regognize your use of voxelsniper, and commend your effective smoothing. it doesnt feel natural thou, becuse you make the stone and the dirt separate at a harsh point, make it transition a bit.
A wild Garblahooga appeared! Where is your tiger avatar?
Also that are looks pretty good, keep up the good work!
I like this area asthetically, but the brush strokes are really obvious. Erode Erode Erode. Also you might not want to give the player that much gold. Because Notch Apples. If you still need an Alpha Tester, just PM me.
1. Yeah, that's exactly where I put readmes and legals. Like I said, my post was brief so if I didn't identify a location for those filesit was because of brevity, not being "NO BAD WRONG."
2. The villages.dat has nothing to do with villagers and everything to do with vanilla village locations. Removing villages.dat, villages_end.dat and villages_nether.dat will not affect custom villagers or villager entities at all unless it is a map with a vanilla village in which case it only removes the location of the center of a village based on proper villager doors, all of which get recalculated and saved by the game as soon as the village is loaded by a player.
3. I think just the opposite. Designing a good command block system is essentially programming good software, Minecraft mapmaking has become a platform for game development so, lazy or sloppy systems just isn't going to cut it anymore. While it may not be necessary, it's just good practice. Trust me, I am already working on a larger scale.
4. It's not about a smaller file size, it's about not having a bunch of trash in your save files. If I sent you a .zip with a bunch of files you asked for but, also took the liberty to include a bunch of empty folders you'd be like wtf was all that for.
5. That's exactly what the spawn chunks are for, a staging area for loading the game. If a world loader circuit is set up right, it's literally less than a second for the necessary scoreboard and any other dependencies for starting the game to get calculated.
6. It may be impractical if your practice is sloppy or lazy but, it's certainly not incorrect.
1. Sure, that´s fine. Should have been a little less direct I guess ;-)
2. No. Villages.dat contains all villages with radius etc. Those do NOT have to be pre-generated. If you build a village in a ctm, with proper doors, villagers will go inside at night etc., but if you remove those files they will be regenerated, usually moving the village center and sometimes removing houses from the villages, causing villagers to walk away from it. Usually a good idea to keep the files there.
Documentation:http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Villages.dat_format
3. Yes. It's desiging software, basically, and has a lot to do with programming. It isn't necessary, and it's not good practice imo. To give a little indicator of scale, on a WIP of me from the past 4 weeks, there's about 50 objectives used, with a few hundred preset scores. I *think* that commandstats selectors are also stored in the scoreboard.dat, and I use about 50 of those too. That means, that, to reset it, I'd need a few hundred command blocks to reset all scores etc. I can't just make a big 14x14 of blocks because then I will never be able to find something again, so I'll probably need 10-ish fill strips filled with command blocks. Keeping all those up-to-date everything I change some command blocks gets REALLY annoying, REALLY quickly. Instead, I keep a notepad file with documentation on my pc that contains pretty much all info so I can easily revert a mistype. If I were to /scoreboard players reset *, I'd probably have to reload a backup, but making regular backups saves time in the end.
4. Nobody even sees those files, since you copy the entire folder around them, right?
5. Depending on your map size, yes. But a second of loading is a second of loading, I wouldn't feel comfortable making a player wait a second for no reason. Also, it takes up some of your precious spawn chunk space to fit it in.
6. True, it's mostly sloppy to delete it and reset it everytime.
Thanks Apollo, I just changed it for fun
And Sabre, the area was more of an experiment, I'm still figuring out how I want to make the map. I am keeping the gold though, it'll be balanced.
MCEdit's erode brush is really ugly and unwieldy imo. If anyone has suggestions for replacements, that'd be fantastic.
I've traditionally used Voxel Sniper for eroding and tweaking, but it's being held up and remade. I really, REALLY don't want to edit first and then replace the blocks with prismarine after I'm done and updated.
Maybe I could try dumping the old VS in a 1.8 spigot server... idk
It cuts down on an insane amount of file space. If you don't want your users to have to download abnormally large files, cut down on the uncessary stuff within the map file. Plus yes, it does look more professional.
Howdy hey friends, I'm back (again). I've been thinking a lot about the state of CTM maps at the moment, and I've come up with a few thoughts that I'm going to include here for discussion's sake.
Firstly, it is important for mapmakers to realize that your average players have much less experience with CTMs than those of us in the community. It seems to me that a lot of people here don't realize this, and that they concentrate way too much on a sort of professionalism, for lack of a better term, that most of your playerbase just aren't going to appreciate. While this is probably a natural effect of people playing Minecraft getting older (i.e. we aren't a whole bunch of twelve year-olds anymore), that doesn't mean it's a good thing. A lot of the greatest CTM maps of all time, for example Legendary, lacked a lot of things that are staples of modern CTMs, like:
-erosion
-block variation
-it had traps (most CTMs nowadays don't)
-custom mobs (granted, they weren't around back then)
-fancy mechanics
-storyline
Essentially, there are so few good maps coming out nowadays because people are focusing so much on making their maps polished- by polished I mean making the map absolutely perfect, balancing it out, making every area jaw-droppingly gorgeous, etc.- that they're failing to do the single most important thing in mapmaking: getting their maps out there for the public to play. I don't care if your map has absolutely beautiful aesthetics, I don't want to have to wait literal years to play it (Fangride). In the words of Extra Credits, Fail Faster: . You need to make maps again and again to finally get good at it. Remember Kaizo Caverns? That map looked awful by modern standards. It didn't have block variation or erosion or anything like that. It wasn't particularly balanced either- the fluctuations in difficulty were pretty significant (also, reminder that you do need fluctuations in difficulty in your map- you don't just want a straight line resembling the difficulty, but rather the difficulty needs to go up and spike sometimes to give the player a challenge and it needs to drop sometimes to give the player a break. I could write about this for days, but essentially just use this image for reference. I might write something on this up later.). But soon after the release of Kaizo, Vechs followed up with another map, and another, and another, until eventually he created great maps like Legendary and Waking Up.
Next, stop caring so much about aesthetics. Seriously. Krose, three_two, other guys I'm forgetting (sorry), you're all cool people but you're really not doing yourselves any favors here. Your purpose when making a CTM map is to make a map where the player can have fun- players will experience a lot of different emotions throughout a map, sure, but the end goal is one where the player is happy. That sort of high that you get when you finish a hard area, or you finally complete a map you've been working on for months, your goal as a mapmaker should be to make that high as, well, high as possible while still appealing to the target audience. Can aesthetics add to your experience of a map? Sure. But they shouldn't be your number one goal; gameplay is. You need to concentrate on your gameplay first and foremost, then you can make it look nice. If the map is really fun, word's gonna get around. Would some people download your map just because you had pretty screenshots? Absolutely, but the payoff for good gameplay is much, much higher than the payoff for aesthetics. There have legitimately been mapmakers, myself included, who have been around here for years and still haven't released a full map because they've spent hours and hours on trying to make each area look pretty. This needs to stop. Stop caring so much about aesthetics, and stop spending so much time on them. They're not your priority.
Also, before I finish typing this up, I just want to mention one last thing: I'm absolutely loving how this community has developed since I last really participated in this community- probably over a year ago. There are so many promising new mapmakers here, and I'm so glad to see this, because quite frankly, I thought most people had moved on from this game by now. Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope to see what you guys think of this! n_n
[YOUR AD HERE FOR JUST $69.69]
Well i think infamy's text wall has blocked the progress eating zombie that is arguing (although I think Three_Two already took care of it before then, but now we're extra metaphorical-zombie-proof)
Anyway, I only plan on posting one picture from this area, and I don't plan any major changes too it before then so HAVE THINGS!
Side note: I'm not exactly looking for critique or feedback on this area, as its basically finished now aesthetically, but if you really feel the urge to give me some comments i will take them and cherish them always.*
*may only be five seconds
Are you trying to trigger Hybran?!?!
Of course!
You know, this post is definitely something to really think about. It may not be something many people might think too much about, but it is something I am going to think about.
Because, albeit being an entirely different person from who I was a year ago, from someone who could barely get out of the hole he was dug in, to someone who is now building a ladder towards the stars, I still struggle with motivation and finding any of my own work worthy. Because I keep comparing myself to everyone else. See how my work stacks up. Usually it doesn't tend to.
It's still a habit I need to break from, I will admit. But things are getting much better now. And that makes me more than ecstatic. I've learned to celebrate small victories. Y'know, if you are going to take anything from my post away, take a step back, and enjoy the small victories.
Go Witty, Go! We all need it sometimes; a victory no matter how small and no matter over what remains a success that calls for celebration!
*Celebrate with me this Page Get !*
Thoughts?
Yeah, I guess you're right in that there seems to be this need for all these like
-erosion
-block variation
-custom mobs
-really complex structures like wow guys
that's kinda what happened with me in that i made a bad map
then doubled back and made a less bad map
but now I'm stuck in a loop of exactly what you're talking about infamy
", Courier">
While I agree, aesthetics attract people, and in 2015 when everyone can make a decent map without having too much of game knowledge your map has to be either godlike looking (The Painter, both Ragecrafts), or have some cool mechanics (Ragecraft 2? Even Inferno Mines with the fleecy mobs?) that player wants to see. If you don't have either of those things your map will just get buried as "an ok map 7/10"
Well, you obviously need to do something better then every other map, otherwise your map won't be insanely good right? But why should your map BE that insane map? Why does your map need to be better then everyone elses? What's wrong with "an ok map 7/10"?
If you really wish to be the next heliceo, three_two, hypixel, FVDisco, Vechz, or whomever else, you need to not just make a godlike looking map. Back when Ragecraft came out, there was only vinal fantasy in terms of aesthetics, and Ragecraft was completely over the top compared to those. Vinal Fantasy had these huge, open-sky weird terrain generated areas, while Ragecraft had an immense amount of detail at every block. Just making what everybody else makes, and trying to do that your best, won't make your map the best, then you'r ejust aiming to become the "an ok map 7/10". Even if you were to remake ragecraft, nobody would care, since that kinda stuff already exists.
People want to see something new. Something innovative, something they didn't see before. I'm not saying they want something better, but just something that is more interesting. Making extremely detailed areas won't cut it, since Ragecraft already exists, and even if you make it a little bit better then Ragecraft, nobody will probably care, since they've seen it before.
But, to be fair, if you're mapmaking because you want your maps to get attention, because you want to be "that famous mapmaker", I'd suggest you to quit. If you don't find mapmaking engaging or fun, and aren't doing it for your own, personal enjoyment, there really isn't much to gain from it. Becoming the new "god" mapmaker, takes tons of effort, but also tons of love and inspiration in your work. If you aren't mapmaking just because it's fun, not only will you be wasting your free time, your map will also suffer from it. I completely agree with infamy that perfectionism isn't required. People want new stuff. Look at how Mitheys map took off, because of all the new and original stuff in it. I'm not saying you should get into command blocks, but be innovative. Make something that is yours, don't try to make something someone else already made, yet a little bit better.
I make stuff so I can show it off mostly.
How would you folks feel about a Skype Community chat ?