The Meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
Join Date:
9/10/2011
Posts:
63
Member Details
I love this mod! It is the best meteor mod I have ever seen!
One thing I would add is a more epic impact sound...its kinda pathetic...Right now its "PFFF!" its done. I personally think that its should rumble for a few seconds after a huge explosion sound.
Very nice-looking mod, adding it to my set and hoping it doesn't haven problems. I'll keep my eyes out for that bug with the inability to use doors/furnaces.
Your to-do list was rather modest- do you have more plans to expand on the mod content-wise or are you content as it is? Looking for ideas and suggestions?
The only thing I can suggest so far is to make the meteor shield require obsidian instead of cobblestone to craft- since it's the toughest block we can mine in the game.
I also think it would be cool if there was a "meteor alert" item, something that perhaps can detect the approach of a meteor to Minecraftia and give an approximate X, Y, and Z coordinate destination. The Meteor Summoner might make this superfluous, but perhaps people would simply prefer to seek out natural meteor showers as opposed to forcing them to occur. Food for thought.
Very nice-looking mod, adding it to my set and hoping it doesn't haven problems. I'll keep my eyes out for that bug with the inability to use doors/furnaces.
Your to-do list was rather modest- do you have more plans to expand on the mod content-wise or are you content as it is? Looking for ideas and suggestions?
The only thing I can suggest so far is to make the meteor shield require obsidian instead of cobblestone to craft- since it's the toughest block we can mine in the game.
I also think it would be cool if there was a "meteor alert" item, something that perhaps can detect the approach of a meteor to Minecraftia and give an approximate X, Y, and Z coordinate destination. The Meteor Summoner might make this superfluous, but perhaps people would simply prefer to seek out natural meteor showers as opposed to forcing them to occur. Food for thought.
I do plan on making an update content-wise yes. I just need to get some spare time so I can do it. Balancing work and play can be a little tedious sometimes. But expect something similar to your suggestion in the next update. However, I do not want to change the meteor shield crafting. I don't want it to be too complicated to craft. This is mostly because people don't want their creations ruined due to not having a material that is hard to obtain. Realize though that it is hard to upgrade the meteor shield as the red meteor gems are fairly rare.
Mmm, ok. I just feel it's waaaay to easy to just get some cobb, so perhaps you could think of a block that at least requires a little more effort? Perhaps smooth stone slabs?
I feel that there is way too much cooled metorite available underground- I mined a stack and a half in less than half an hour and that was with ignoring a lot of cooled metorite blocks around me. Again, I suggest making it a bit more challenging. I think if it was as rare as gold and in the same cluster sizes, that would work, I'd personally prefer diamond rarity and ore cluster sizes, but I understand you want people to find the stuff.
Is there a way to change the settings to make metorites rarer once one strikes? I'm getting more than I'd like, sometimes 2 in one night. I'd like to try to set it so that if one metorite strikes, the ticking thing won't start again for 2-3 minecraft days. Is that doable from the config you gave? I can't quite make heads or tails of it.
I have experienced the "no-contact" bug several times. The first was when mining and the second was when trying to access a furnace. It seems to eventually go away if I mine around the area or spam right-click on the furnace. I can't tell what's causing it either, but I do notice that sometimes when I mined the cooled metorite underground, it would crack very oddly- sometimes only showing crack marks on half the block, etc. Maybe it's related?
Also, do ALL the files need to go in the jar? I like to try to invade my jar as little as possible, so if I only need to put X files in the jar and Y files can be put in the mods folder, that'd be nice to know if you're willing to explain which files go where. Maybe in your future versions have 2 folders inside the zip, one for "these go in jar" and one for "these go in mods folder?"
Otherwise, it looks nice, man! Balancing something like random meteor showers is tricky business!
Ok, I have a much more serious experience with the "can't hit the block" bug. This time, it seems permanent and hasn't gone away.
I got a "can't hit" block. I started switching through all my items to try to hit the block with something to trigger it to be hittable- as I had been doing before to combat the bug and that would eventually work. I forgot I had a sword that shoots lightning. It shot a bolt and started a fire. Since then no matter what I do, there a fire texture that won't go away.
Note the position of the fire relative to where I'm standing, and where I'm standing.
I moved to the left and faced the fire- the fire moved with me.
I'm standing where the fire is supposed to be. It doesn't actually exist as fire, just the texture remains.
Admittedly, this is pretty comical! As you can see, the fire texture is still there and is doing it's thing... in the water! I actually had poured the water on top of the fire at first and the fire had been under the water, But apparently I didn't push "F2" hard enough when I took the pic, sorry!
I think the bug may be texture-related and how the textures interact when the player is near a block. Still don't know what triggers it since I've been in very different locations each time it's occured. The only consistency is that I was trying to either break a block or access a block with a GUI.
Not sure if this helps at all, but hope you can get some ideas from the above situation to maybe pinpoint what it could be.
EDIT: The fire went away and I could access the block some time later. Took a while.
Also, will there eventually be an option to turn off underground cooled meteorite generation? How about for being able to only have small meteorite showers? How close are meteors supposed to land? I thought they would vary between close or being at least a couple hundred blocks away at times, but all the showers I've seen have been within 50 blocks at most. Last question: when we get a hint telling us about a shower, does the direction given tie to "Notch North" (the direction the clouds move) or is it in relation to the player's position at the time the message is received? So if it says "a meteor has landed somewhere north" does it mean Notch North, or basically the direction I'm facing?
Sorry for all the questions and thanks in advanced for the answers! I really like what you've done with this mod, it's awesome. I just feel as it currently is, I don't get as excited as I should be when a meteor shower strikes. They're way too common, there's way too much cooled meteorite underground, and they're always pretty close by. I hope you'll add more customization options in the config so people who want that "WHOOHOO! meteor shower! drop everything you're doing and try to get there asap because there won't be another one for days!" feeling can make it as difficult as possible to get your awesome goodies.
As it is, they's so frequent, so large, and so close by, I can ignore a notice of a shower and just wait for the next one if I feel like it.
Funny side note: An Orge from Mo' Creatures destroyed my Meteor Shield (speaking of that, I suggest you take the "Falling" out of the name of the shield and just call it "Meteor Shield") and then very shortly thereafter a meteor promptly struck my airship and turned it into a massive waterfall.
Ok, I double all the "tick" numbers in the config but it appears to have no discernible effect- I'm still getting a meteor crash pretty much each night and sometimes a couple.
Meteor craters are way to close in my opinion; I think you should try to figure out how to code it so that a meteor won't land within 100 blocks of where one has already landed.
Also, I still can't make heads or tails of the "directional assistance" given. It doesn't follow Notch North, and it doesn't seem to compute based on the direction I am facing.
Otherwise, it's pretty fun. I probably wouldn't put this in my main mod set until the meteors become MUCH rarer at the very least and the impact sites are better spread out or computed. My test world literally is becoming one giant crater near my base, and that's with a basic meteor shield in place.
I think you may want to explore ways both to widen the area of the potential impacts (perhaps some code to temporary chunkload the surrounding chunks at the beginning of a meteor decent and then randomly choosing a location in those loaded chunks while computing for previous impact craters), and to make a better meteor impact site directional indicator. I suggest making a meteor compass out of meteorite shards, and this sorta makes sense since meteorites are supposed to be magnetically sensitive. If you're not sure how, I'd suggest PM'ing Azanor (the creator of Thaumcraft 2) because he made a special compass for his mod that points to his structures (without editing any base classes).
Again, good luck growing and working on this mod! It has a lot of promise on top of the already cool features it has.
Ok, I double all the "tick" numbers in the config but it appears to have no discernible effect- I'm still getting a meteor crash pretty much each night and sometimes a couple.
Meteor craters are way to close in my opinion; I think you should try to figure out how to code it so that a meteor won't land within 100 blocks of where one has already landed.
Also, I still can't make heads or tails of the "directional assistance" given. It doesn't follow Notch North, and it doesn't seem to compute based on the direction I am facing.
Otherwise, it's pretty fun. I probably wouldn't put this in my main mod set until the meteors become MUCH rarer at the very least and the impact sites are better spread out or computed. My test world literally is becoming one giant crater near my base, and that's with a basic meteor shield in place.
I think you may want to explore ways both to widen the area of the potential impacts (perhaps some code to temporary chunkload the surrounding chunks at the beginning of a meteor decent and then randomly choosing a location in those loaded chunks while computing for previous impact craters), and to make a better meteor impact site directional indicator. I suggest making a meteor compass out of meteorite shards, and this sorta makes sense since meteorites are supposed to be magnetically sensitive. If you're not sure how, I'd suggest PM'ing Azanor (the creator of Thaumcraft 2) because he made a special compass for his mod that points to his structures (without editing any base classes).
Again, good luck growing and working on this mod! It has a lot of promise on top of the already cool features it has.
I'm just quoting this message but I'm also referring to all your other messages as well. First of all, thanks for all the input you've been giving me. It's been really helpful. I am indeed doing quite the overhaul on the mod as we speak. Many things are being better tuned for different situations. The reason you may be experiencing a lot of meteors falling down concurrently after you've edited the config is probably the meteors that were already "spawned" hadn't fallen yet. I suggest giving it a few minecraft days to clear out and it should be less frequent. I'm hoping going to get everything setup to where the configuration for that isn't as complicated as it stands now.
As for directional landing of meteors, when it says that a meteor has landed north, it means that the meteor has landed in the actual direction north. a.k.a. sun rises in the East, sets in the West. It's not based off of the direction you are facing. This will however hopefully be fixed in the next update as I'm adding a new compass to help find meteor landings and help predict where they will land. With that added, I'm going to spread the meteors out quite a bit more. One issue as you described in one of your replies is the chunk loading. I'm going to have to somehow get the chunks and the chunks around that chunk to load before the meteor drops. This makes things quite difficult but I'm slowly figuring things out.
Thanks for letting me know about Azanor's mod. I've been trying to figure out why my custom Textures won't load right with my compass. My code works great if I apply to Minecraft's default compass, but not my own compass I've created.
But yes, major overhaul hopefully coming soon. I'm just trying to balance this and work right now so don't expect anything too soon. But hopefully by the next Minecraft update I'll have things done.
No problem, I'm glad you saw all my comments were intended to be constructive! I really do love the concept you have going, so it's nice to hear you're trying to balance it better.
I'm trying to think of mods I know that have temporary chunkloading. I know that Thaumcraft 2 and Buildcraft have chunkloading blocks but those are permanent. The best thing I can think of right now is to create an invisible chunkloading entity that starts where the player is (to be able to load it) and then "shoots" in horizontally from there so it can enter unloaded chunks to give the meteor showers more range.
Obviously, that might be tricky to implement when it comes to sending this invisible horizontally moving chunkloader entity to unexplored chunks since that will probably lag the game a bit as opposed to entering previously loaded chunks that aren't loaded by the player at the time of the crash. Perhaps you could make it so that your mod detects X number of visited chunks to ensure that there is a sufficient amount of chunks in existence that have been loaded by the player before the first meteor will fall? Definitely a challenging aspect of your mod will be trying to figure out how to get the showers spread out! The only other thing I can think of is to make another block that acts like a chunkloader and is a "meteor magnet" but that kind of defeats the purpose of your mod and having to throw up a bunch of chunkloaders may slow down the game.
Good luck getting everything done, I hear ya about balancing your enjoyment of working on this mod and real life. Hopefully figuring everything out will be easier than you think; I definitely suggest you reach out to other modders for suggestions if you haven't already because from what I've observed there are some very friendly and helpful modders out there willing to help out other modders.
Also, if there's anything in particular you'd like me to test, let me know. I still get multiple meteors in a night so I'm not sure how many meteor showers were pre-loaded but I'm thinking of doubling the numbers again just out of curiousity.
I have yet to experience a Krenkorite shower so I think your goal of making those rarer seems to have worked. I seem to get an even amount of normal and Frezorite showers though, if not more Frezorite ones.
Another funny episode- I had a meteor shower land on top of a previous meteor impact site that had landed on a previous meteor impact site. That hole is getting deeper and deeper!
Ha! Just consider the constant hammering of meteors to be a form of mining lol. Believe it or not, the meteors are already invisible to the eye. The way it currently works is that there is two timers. One timer (which is the shorter one) is what initializes an invisible meteor entity into the world. The second timer is built in to that invisible meteor entity and is much longer than the initializer timer. Once the entity timer has reached its goal, that meteor will fall. Fortunately, while looking through some of thaumcraft's code, I found out that Forge has a way of controlling chunk loading so that will definitely help out when getting all this done.
But yes, meteor type rarity is still something I'm trying to adjust. I'm also going to change some of the meteor textures since that may very well be the problem with the blocks not being selected properly.
On the good news side of things, compass(es) are up and working now. Now to just fine tune those to work with the chunkloading and things will be in much better shape.
Very cool to hear! Looks like you've got some of the bigger issues figured out concept-wise. Let me know if it's rational or not to get my hopes up that you might release an updated version before 1.3 after all.
Kinda sad to hear you think you may have to change up the meteor textures- the appearance of all three meteors is very well done and I like them a lot. As annoying as it is to mine Frezorite, it's one of my favorite block textures in the game and I have a fair few mods that add blocks!
Content-wise, other than a config that allows players to adjusts what size meteor showers they can get and to turn off underground cooled meteorite spawning in addition to the rarity settings you already have, the only things I can think of is that it'd be nice to be able to combine the different meteorite drops in recipes. Swords and armors are the obvious thing to suggest, so I'll try to think of unique things you could possibly make by combining the shards. That is, if you're interested in the idea of trying to combine the shards into new stuff. Otherwise, looks like you've addressed every concern and suggestion this one little gamer had. Once you get your next update out with the fixes and you're happy with how things are, you should approach some of the bigger mod reviewers about checking out your mod for review!
And I'm a natural dwarf- I don't need no stinkin' meteor to do my mining for me!
One thing I would add is a more epic impact sound...its kinda pathetic...Right now its "PFFF!" its done. I personally think that its should rumble for a few seconds after a huge explosion sound.
Your to-do list was rather modest- do you have more plans to expand on the mod content-wise or are you content as it is? Looking for ideas and suggestions?
The only thing I can suggest so far is to make the meteor shield require obsidian instead of cobblestone to craft- since it's the toughest block we can mine in the game.
I also think it would be cool if there was a "meteor alert" item, something that perhaps can detect the approach of a meteor to Minecraftia and give an approximate X, Y, and Z coordinate destination. The Meteor Summoner might make this superfluous, but perhaps people would simply prefer to seek out natural meteor showers as opposed to forcing them to occur. Food for thought.
I do plan on making an update content-wise yes. I just need to get some spare time so I can do it. Balancing work and play can be a little tedious sometimes. But expect something similar to your suggestion in the next update. However, I do not want to change the meteor shield crafting. I don't want it to be too complicated to craft. This is mostly because people don't want their creations ruined due to not having a material that is hard to obtain. Realize though that it is hard to upgrade the meteor shield as the red meteor gems are fairly rare.
I feel that there is way too much cooled metorite available underground- I mined a stack and a half in less than half an hour and that was with ignoring a lot of cooled metorite blocks around me. Again, I suggest making it a bit more challenging. I think if it was as rare as gold and in the same cluster sizes, that would work, I'd personally prefer diamond rarity and ore cluster sizes, but I understand you want people to find the stuff.
Is there a way to change the settings to make metorites rarer once one strikes? I'm getting more than I'd like, sometimes 2 in one night. I'd like to try to set it so that if one metorite strikes, the ticking thing won't start again for 2-3 minecraft days. Is that doable from the config you gave? I can't quite make heads or tails of it.
I have experienced the "no-contact" bug several times. The first was when mining and the second was when trying to access a furnace. It seems to eventually go away if I mine around the area or spam right-click on the furnace. I can't tell what's causing it either, but I do notice that sometimes when I mined the cooled metorite underground, it would crack very oddly- sometimes only showing crack marks on half the block, etc. Maybe it's related?
Also, do ALL the files need to go in the jar? I like to try to invade my jar as little as possible, so if I only need to put X files in the jar and Y files can be put in the mods folder, that'd be nice to know if you're willing to explain which files go where. Maybe in your future versions have 2 folders inside the zip, one for "these go in jar" and one for "these go in mods folder?"
Otherwise, it looks nice, man! Balancing something like random meteor showers is tricky business!
I got a "can't hit" block. I started switching through all my items to try to hit the block with something to trigger it to be hittable- as I had been doing before to combat the bug and that would eventually work. I forgot I had a sword that shoots lightning. It shot a bolt and started a fire. Since then no matter what I do, there a fire texture that won't go away.
Note the position of the fire relative to where I'm standing, and where I'm standing.
I moved to the left and faced the fire- the fire moved with me.
I'm standing where the fire is supposed to be. It doesn't actually exist as fire, just the texture remains.
Admittedly, this is pretty comical! As you can see, the fire texture is still there and is doing it's thing... in the water! I actually had poured the water on top of the fire at first and the fire had been under the water, But apparently I didn't push "F2" hard enough when I took the pic, sorry!
I think the bug may be texture-related and how the textures interact when the player is near a block. Still don't know what triggers it since I've been in very different locations each time it's occured. The only consistency is that I was trying to either break a block or access a block with a GUI.
Not sure if this helps at all, but hope you can get some ideas from the above situation to maybe pinpoint what it could be.
EDIT: The fire went away and I could access the block some time later. Took a while.
Also, will there eventually be an option to turn off underground cooled meteorite generation? How about for being able to only have small meteorite showers? How close are meteors supposed to land? I thought they would vary between close or being at least a couple hundred blocks away at times, but all the showers I've seen have been within 50 blocks at most. Last question: when we get a hint telling us about a shower, does the direction given tie to "Notch North" (the direction the clouds move) or is it in relation to the player's position at the time the message is received? So if it says "a meteor has landed somewhere north" does it mean Notch North, or basically the direction I'm facing?
Sorry for all the questions and thanks in advanced for the answers! I really like what you've done with this mod, it's awesome. I just feel as it currently is, I don't get as excited as I should be when a meteor shower strikes. They're way too common, there's way too much cooled meteorite underground, and they're always pretty close by. I hope you'll add more customization options in the config so people who want that "WHOOHOO! meteor shower! drop everything you're doing and try to get there asap because there won't be another one for days!" feeling can make it as difficult as possible to get your awesome goodies.
As it is, they's so frequent, so large, and so close by, I can ignore a notice of a shower and just wait for the next one if I feel like it.
Funny side note: An Orge from Mo' Creatures destroyed my Meteor Shield (speaking of that, I suggest you take the "Falling" out of the name of the shield and just call it "Meteor Shield") and then very shortly thereafter a meteor promptly struck my airship and turned it into a massive waterfall.
Meteor craters are way to close in my opinion; I think you should try to figure out how to code it so that a meteor won't land within 100 blocks of where one has already landed.
Also, I still can't make heads or tails of the "directional assistance" given. It doesn't follow Notch North, and it doesn't seem to compute based on the direction I am facing.
Otherwise, it's pretty fun. I probably wouldn't put this in my main mod set until the meteors become MUCH rarer at the very least and the impact sites are better spread out or computed. My test world literally is becoming one giant crater near my base, and that's with a basic meteor shield in place.
I think you may want to explore ways both to widen the area of the potential impacts (perhaps some code to temporary chunkload the surrounding chunks at the beginning of a meteor decent and then randomly choosing a location in those loaded chunks while computing for previous impact craters), and to make a better meteor impact site directional indicator. I suggest making a meteor compass out of meteorite shards, and this sorta makes sense since meteorites are supposed to be magnetically sensitive. If you're not sure how, I'd suggest PM'ing Azanor (the creator of Thaumcraft 2) because he made a special compass for his mod that points to his structures (without editing any base classes).
Again, good luck growing and working on this mod! It has a lot of promise on top of the already cool features it has.
I'm just quoting this message but I'm also referring to all your other messages as well. First of all, thanks for all the input you've been giving me. It's been really helpful. I am indeed doing quite the overhaul on the mod as we speak. Many things are being better tuned for different situations. The reason you may be experiencing a lot of meteors falling down concurrently after you've edited the config is probably the meteors that were already "spawned" hadn't fallen yet. I suggest giving it a few minecraft days to clear out and it should be less frequent. I'm hoping going to get everything setup to where the configuration for that isn't as complicated as it stands now.
As for directional landing of meteors, when it says that a meteor has landed north, it means that the meteor has landed in the actual direction north. a.k.a. sun rises in the East, sets in the West. It's not based off of the direction you are facing. This will however hopefully be fixed in the next update as I'm adding a new compass to help find meteor landings and help predict where they will land. With that added, I'm going to spread the meteors out quite a bit more. One issue as you described in one of your replies is the chunk loading. I'm going to have to somehow get the chunks and the chunks around that chunk to load before the meteor drops. This makes things quite difficult but I'm slowly figuring things out.
Thanks for letting me know about Azanor's mod. I've been trying to figure out why my custom Textures won't load right with my compass. My code works great if I apply to Minecraft's default compass, but not my own compass I've created.
But yes, major overhaul hopefully coming soon. I'm just trying to balance this and work right now so don't expect anything too soon. But hopefully by the next Minecraft update I'll have things done.
Once again, thanks for all the input.
I'm trying to think of mods I know that have temporary chunkloading. I know that Thaumcraft 2 and Buildcraft have chunkloading blocks but those are permanent. The best thing I can think of right now is to create an invisible chunkloading entity that starts where the player is (to be able to load it) and then "shoots" in horizontally from there so it can enter unloaded chunks to give the meteor showers more range.
Obviously, that might be tricky to implement when it comes to sending this invisible horizontally moving chunkloader entity to unexplored chunks since that will probably lag the game a bit as opposed to entering previously loaded chunks that aren't loaded by the player at the time of the crash. Perhaps you could make it so that your mod detects X number of visited chunks to ensure that there is a sufficient amount of chunks in existence that have been loaded by the player before the first meteor will fall? Definitely a challenging aspect of your mod will be trying to figure out how to get the showers spread out! The only other thing I can think of is to make another block that acts like a chunkloader and is a "meteor magnet" but that kind of defeats the purpose of your mod and having to throw up a bunch of chunkloaders may slow down the game.
Good luck getting everything done, I hear ya about balancing your enjoyment of working on this mod and real life. Hopefully figuring everything out will be easier than you think; I definitely suggest you reach out to other modders for suggestions if you haven't already because from what I've observed there are some very friendly and helpful modders out there willing to help out other modders.
Also, if there's anything in particular you'd like me to test, let me know. I still get multiple meteors in a night so I'm not sure how many meteor showers were pre-loaded but I'm thinking of doubling the numbers again just out of curiousity.
I have yet to experience a Krenkorite shower so I think your goal of making those rarer seems to have worked. I seem to get an even amount of normal and Frezorite showers though, if not more Frezorite ones.
Another funny episode- I had a meteor shower land on top of a previous meteor impact site that had landed on a previous meteor impact site. That hole is getting deeper and deeper!
But yes, meteor type rarity is still something I'm trying to adjust. I'm also going to change some of the meteor textures since that may very well be the problem with the blocks not being selected properly.
On the good news side of things, compass(es) are up and working now. Now to just fine tune those to work with the chunkloading and things will be in much better shape.
Kinda sad to hear you think you may have to change up the meteor textures- the appearance of all three meteors is very well done and I like them a lot. As annoying as it is to mine Frezorite, it's one of my favorite block textures in the game and I have a fair few mods that add blocks!
Content-wise, other than a config that allows players to adjusts what size meteor showers they can get and to turn off underground cooled meteorite spawning in addition to the rarity settings you already have, the only things I can think of is that it'd be nice to be able to combine the different meteorite drops in recipes. Swords and armors are the obvious thing to suggest, so I'll try to think of unique things you could possibly make by combining the shards. That is, if you're interested in the idea of trying to combine the shards into new stuff. Otherwise, looks like you've addressed every concern and suggestion this one little gamer had. Once you get your next update out with the fixes and you're happy with how things are, you should approach some of the bigger mod reviewers about checking out your mod for review!
And I'm a natural dwarf- I don't need no stinkin' meteor to do my mining for me!