Anyone want to start thinking about the NPCs? We'll need two parts worked out:
1. The Code
Necessary to let an NPC exist and have a schedule, and let you talk with them, and keep track of their affection for you (as a friend or as a suitor). I know of a great walkthrough that has all the details on the affection variables, and which items each character likes, so no need to go guessing there.
Also need code for stores; might look to Millenaire for wisdom there, seeing as it's the only mod I know of with stores that actually work (albeit they're a bit clumsy). It would be possible to code everything into just one store (Won, traveling salesman), but it'd be better, I think, to go the route of the full complement of stores.
Although perhaps you wouldn't actually buy animals... not sure. Taming the wild animals and even breeding them is something Minecraft is heading toward anyway, so we ought to code around that rather than come up with our own, unless the Minecraft native way really doesn't work out for our purposes.
2. The Characters
Quite apart from code, we need to determine this: Do we make a whole new cast of characters with their own storyline, or just crib 100% of the Back to Nature characters and plot?
If we just took the BtN characters, we'd have everything worked out for us, and wouldn't need to invent things whole-cloth. And it'd be great if someone made a set of Minecraft skins for the BtN cast. The only ones we'd have to mess with would be Stu and May, the kids; we'd need a smaller character to put them on.
Note: I am against Minecraft boobs. Stick with the classic player skin and just make it look like a girl through other means.
If we invented our own plot and cast, we could easily account for the Minecraft world in the overall plot, including how the town got here (in the middle of nowhere) and how it responds to monsters. And it might be fun to invent potential mates who are actually good for something beyond looking pretty.
I'd like to keep the townsfolk from wandering out of their town. Or we might have to get a little better with the AI. Basically, we don't want them to get stuck in places they can't get out of, or stray so far off their schedule that they either can't make it back to town on time or they resort to teleportation.
On the Humans Plus mod, the various humans run around randomly, in the water even... stuck in holes... I'm pretty sure they'd bathe in lava if there was some around. This behavior is not appropriate for our NPCs. They should avoid (or put out) fire and avoid (or sandbag) lava. And they should stay out of the water, I think.
I don't know how much of this would be easy to code without introducing too much lag.
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My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
I wouldn't recommend retexturing vanilla minecraft items to fit purposes for the mod. Because then texture packs can be completely incompatable, and someone might not want to switch packs all the time
I wouldn't recommend retexturing vanilla minecraft items to fit purposes for the mod. Because then texture packs can be completely incompatable, and someone might not want to switch packs all the time
Fair enough. I don't think the Red Mushroom -> Truffle will cause a problem here (it's still a mushroom), but let's make the Bamboo a separate item, then. Both Sugarcane and Bamboo grow wherever Sugarcane would normally grow, and have the same behavior. Any group of reeds would be one or the other, randomly, rather than a mix.
That also means that of my ideas about ores, the "repurpose Minecraft ores into HM ores" isn't going to work. So it's either "stick by what Minecraft has natively" or "invent new ore items a la Xtra Ores."
Compatibility
I'd kinda like to make this mod compatible with other mods that cover similar ground, but I'm not sure how well that'd work; it might make our items just all over the place. But what I mean is, if you have a mod that makes Honey, and also our mod, there should be some way to use the other mod's Honey in our recipes, rather than just "That's not the right kind of Honey."
Examples:
1. Honey overlaps with Beekeeping mod
2. Apple Tree overlaps with Premium Wood and Nandonalt's More Trees
3. Alcohol is going to overlap with the Beer/Booze mod currently in development
(I even gave them my ideas for fermentation, so the overlap could be significant.)
4. Some of the crops will overlap with various "more farming" mods. There are a lot of these.
5. Harvest Moon special ores "Mithril" and "Orichalchum" might overlap an ores mod
... I don't think this is as likely. Still, if there's a Mithril out there, we might want to account for it.
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
For the Shipping Box, I'd like to see a Chest-like entity that you can put only sellable goods in, and can take them out of if you like. So it holds only a certain amount (maybe you buy an upgrade later on?). The sale happens at sunset, when the items get deleted and an appropriate amount of coins show up in the box for you to grab later.
If we could make the coins in a separate inventory slot, like in Terraria, that'd be cool, but for now I think it's best to stick with the Millenaire method of just using a couple of Coin items. 64 copper equals 1 silver, and 64 silver equals 1 gold coin.
Oh, and say! HM crops come in a bag with 9 seeds, but you have to plant them all at once in a 3x3 grid. Perhaps the mod's seed bags could have 9 seeds, but you can plant them one at a time.
The Team
And a hearty welcome to Treece! This brings our team up to 5 active members. In order of joining:
...and also me. And TrickyDonut, who hasn't really started on anything as far as I know, but has expressed interest in helping out. Looks like the team has 2 coders and 1 spriter, and Treece identifies her skills as "I'm one of those creative guys."
I guess I'm the Producer or Director. Don't know Java yet. Not sure how to rip sprites from a Playstation game (things were so much easier with the SNES emulator). Can't find crops sprites online either. But I've got a lot of ideas and I'm eager to see this mod take form :smile.gif:
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
Yay, Harvest Moon on Minecraft.
If you made this true, YOU will be my favourite person in the whole world, after my Mum of course :biggrin.gif:
Anyways, I have several ideas. Your ideas are very good but probably too ambitious.
Let me help you summarise everything.
Harvest Moon Basic Properties
- Farming
- Ranching
- Mining
- Cooking
- Some RPG elements
- Building (depending on the game. E.g. Island of Happiness)
- Seasons
- Wooing
MineCraft Basic Properties
- Mining
- Crafting
- Building
- Farming (including Ranching, though it's nowhere near HM's level)
- Some RPG elements
As you can see, Minecraft and Harvest Moon share about 4 properties that are similar.
And as you know Mining and Building does not really need to be expanded on in Minecraft world.
Building is also more advanced in Minecraft than Harvest Moon.
The RPG elements
Farming, on the otherhand, is more advanced in Harvest Moon, for obvious reasons.
Since we are using MineCraft as a base, we can only expand upon or add upon Minecraft.
Thus forth that leaves us with Cooking and Wooing to be made from scratch while we upgrade/expand upon Farming in Minecraft.
I am no coder but I can say that coding NPCs in Minecraft will be ****ing hard, not to mention I never really married anyone in Harvest Moon because of its too many great girls.
Anyways, let me reorganise the Farming aspect of Harvest Moon in Minecraft.
You pretty much said most of it but I'm just reorganising it.
-Farming-
The most important aspect in Harvest Moon. One and only reason I play Harvest Moon.
Before I talk about seeds, I'll talk about the basic foundation of Harvest Moon
In Harvest Moon, Farming is heavily reliant on several factors:
- Season
- Weather
- Water
Seasons affect what crop you grow. Your income may be affected by this. It also adds variety to the gameplay as you don't sit around for 120 days growing Strawberries everyday.
I think there is a Seasons mod somewhere but I think the seasons there are too short for Harvest Moon Mod. If we can modify it a bit, with permission of course, it'd work quite well.
Weather also affects as rain automatically waters for you. Typhoons destroy your crops (and what game was it that destroyed seeds?). And in IoH/SSI too much sun could harm your crops.
I guess someone could code in typhoon. The vanilla Rain already waters crops.
Water in farming works differently in Harvest Moon and Minecraft. In Minecraft, a water source is required on the ground to farm. In Harvest Moon, you don't need a water source nearby to grow crops. You water them manually via the Watering Can.
I guess you need to negate the current watering system and then create a Watering Can, then allow the watering can to have an effect on the crop block and turn it into saturated block.
Seeds, I think you got that covered pretty much well.
Just make them 1X1 and take advantage of the first person view Minecraft gives you.
Tools
Minecraft has only 2 farming tools: a Hoe and an Axe
Harvest Moon has 4: A Hoe, an Axe, a Hammer and A Sickle
Both has upgrade system.
I think using Minecraft upgrade system is good enough. Just add 'charges' unto it.
For example: A Wooden Hoe can only til 1X1, but a Stone Hoe can til 1X3 when charged (with a right click, preferably). An Iron Hoe can til 1X3, 3X3 (Level 2 Charge). A Golden Hoe can til 1X3, 3X3, 6X3 (level 3 charge). And finally ,Diamond Hoe can till 1X3, 3X3, 6X3, 6X6 (level 4 charge).
A reason to create a Diamond Hoe! Woot!
Same can work for Hammer and Sickle.
Not too sure how to make Axe any different though.
Maybe you can also use the Enchantment table instead.
Gonna stop here for now. Tell me what you think
:biggrin.gif:
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'Squids are evil. I will eat them all. I WILL EAT THEM ALL'
- Cookies to whomever gets the reference
Your ideas are very good but probably too ambitious.
That's usually how my ideas go, yeah. I have tons of half-written stories in my room (and in my head).
coding NPCs in Minecraft will be ****ing hard
I'm not sure how difficult it's going to be overall. It doesn't help that I don't know Java myself (though I do program, and am familiar with Visual Basic, C++, GML (from Game Maker), and some other stuff).
Millenaire managed to create little towns with random NPCs, but it's also pretty laggy. In fact, it seems to be the mod that is giving me the most lag. So if we get around to NPCs, that's one factor we're going to have to be very careful of.
There are two ways to play the NPC game here. One is to make the whole Harvest Moon mod, and just try to do what we can to make NPCs work. The other is to cut it back to single-player everything-but-the-NPCs Harvest Moon, and have just one guy, Traveling Salesman Won, spawn randomly and sell you seeds (for, say, copper, silver, or gold ingots).
I think we'll aim for the NPCs, but that's at least a potential fallback system that'd still give the basics of what I like about Harvest Moon... mostly.
Farming is heavily reliant on several factors: Season, Weather, Water.
I think there is a Seasons mod somewhere but I think the seasons there are too short for Harvest Moon Mod. If we can modify it a bit, with permission of course, it'd work quite well.
Weather also affects as rain automatically waters for you. Typhoons destroy your crops (and what game was it that destroyed seeds?).
I guess you need to negate the current watering system and then create a Watering Can, then allow the watering can to have an effect on the crop block and turn it into saturated block.
1. I'd say ignore the need to water things, and just let the normal Minecraft system take over. Harvest Moon is, in this case, inferior; we've just learned some of the basics of agriculture :smile.gif:
(Agriculture based on infinite water supply, but still.)
This also means we wouldn't have to invent a watering can, unless, say, you wanted to make a watering can that, once filled, could create water source blocks.
It would be possible to code in the HM behavior, but if you ask me, watering took up a ton of time; and on Minecraft, that ton of time ought best be spent mining or exploring, rather than watering. The "mine" isn't a tiny little thing with only ten discrete levels, after all. And we're lucky Minecraft doesn't force you to go to bed every 5-minutes-to-sunrise, which'd make long-term expeditions impossible.
2. Typhoons/Hurricanes
If we add these, we add the option to turn them off.
And I'm in favor of just leaving them out. But I'll leave that to the coders to determine what they're willing to add.
I like natural disasters - I do, and I enjoy the ideas put forth in that other thread about them. But when it comes to Minecraft, hurricanes just meant "Argh" and, once I was able to use save states, "Whelp, that's not going to happen (back up and save it again to get better weather)." My "strawberries in the fridge before the end of the first Spring" plan would be literally impossible if I let a third of my crops get destroyed.
And in Minecraft you can't even go back to a save point!
3. The Seasons mod
...has 7-day seasons, and the summer sun tries to murder you. ("Augh! What's attacking me?! Invisible enemies?! Oh, wait, it's just the sun.") Also, it snows 100% of the days in Winter, which kills my framerate... effectively, the snow ensures that I stay inside the entire Winter.
But yeah, it's a base we could build from. It's up to the coders whether they want to coordinate with the designer of that mod, or just try to make seasons from scratch.
I do like the idea of the tree/biome PNG files changing with each season. More yellowy in the Spring, and turning to oranges and reds in the Fall. Wish there was a way to get foliage to decay during the last day of Fall (or first of Winter) and then grow back to normal in the Spring, but also that this behavior wouldn't happen for Pines. Also, those trees'd look mighty bare with the foliage gone and no branches to replace it. We might have to put up with that Minecraft-style bare tree :\
4. Weather
To make weather actually have a useful effect, perhaps Rain could make crops grow twice as fast that day?
I think using Minecraft upgrade system is good enough. Just add 'charges' unto it.
For example: A Wooden Hoe can only til 1X1, but a Stone Hoe can til 1X3 when charged (with a right click, preferably). An Iron Hoe can til 1X3, 3X3 (Level 2 Charge). A Golden Hoe can til 1X3, 3X3, 6X3 (level 3 charge). And finally ,Diamond Hoe can till 1X3, 3X3, 6X3, 6X6 (level 4 charge).
A reason to create a Diamond Hoe! Woot!
A good reason to create upgraded tools is a must. I remember when I never used a tool higher than Stone unless I literally couldn't harvest it with stone tools... then I found out how fast an iron pick works compared to stone, which changed my thinking from "I'm wasting resources" to "I'm wasting time and finding new resources less often."
Anyway.
If we can take up triggers that currently aren't being used, such as right-clicking with a tool, that'd be awesome! The Hoe already uses this behavior and it works out great.
I'd still like to create the Copper-Silver-Gold progression, and build the Gold tools' behavior on the way we set that up. But it would be okay to avoid the new ores and stick with the Minecraft version, although the Gold doesn't really fit inside the normal progression (it's soft and non-durable but fast).
I'd kind of like to see tools that you can't lose, even if you get killed by mobs or take a bath in lava. Perhaps "no inventory loss on death" could be an option you could select for our mod.
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
Holy crap! this feels like the old mod brought back to life! (this is a good thing) I cant wait to see more as it progresses!!!!!
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Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity.
You could always buy the animals from a vending machine.
No, I'm not joking.
lol XD
Actually, if we wanted to avoid NPCs altogether, we could make a tiny hut that spawns near our spawn point, where you could buy all the seeds and other items, and maybe even animals.
Or we could make do with just Traveling Salesman Won for all buy/sell behavior.
But I think we'll be shooting for NPCs eventually anyway.
... You know, I think maybe we ought to make a multi-part mod. That way players can pick which parts they want to try:
1. The Farming
Crops, seasons, and cooking.
2. The NPCs
The town and all its inhabitants, the ability to talk with them, and all the shops working normally. If you have Farming but not NPCs, you get to buy stuff from a vending machine or shack or the like instead.
Though I still like the traveling salesman idea. Gives me fond memories of Dragon Warrior IV.
3. Stamina/Fatigue
The system that makes swinging a tool tire you out, and allows a hot spring to revitalize you. Also, different types of food help restore some of your stamina and/or take the edge off fatigue.
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
I'd say avoid NPCs.
Too complicated and no girl in Minecraft would look 'cute'
Get the farming down first, then work on NPCs :biggrin.gif:
NO!!! XD
NPCs are not that complicated :smile.gif: It's just tedious. Anyway they are human, so we don't even need to BOTHER trying to make models, just the AI.
I'm thinking, that with the mod, once you make a new world and spawn, you would be in the town. It would be generated at spawn. Then, there is a huge area where the farm is, where the player can build his/her house and start doing the usual Harvest Moon thing.
So right now, I guess Yoshi and I should talk to each other. Treece, I guess you should talk to our "boss" and get the ideas sorted out. XD Let's have fun doing this and not get too stressed out, ok guys?
Also, could we settle on just using Stamina? In the later games, like Grand Bazaar and Tales of Two Towns, they use only stamina, and not Fatigue. I would think that's a better thing to do.
Oh, and say! HM crops come in a bag with 9 seeds, but you have to plant them all at once in a 3x3 grid. Perhaps the mod's seed bags could have 9 seeds, but you can plant them one at a time.
Actually, it's possible to make them plant all around you, and take up 1 seed bag in the process. However, according to what I've played very recently(Grand Bazaar) and what I saw(Tale of Two Towns), seed bags only plant into one block of tilled soil each. that's quite different from the older games, aren't they? XD like Friends of Mineral Town.
Y'know as much as I love this idea, I'm going to be cynical until I see any sort of progress.
Hope you don't mind. I've been involved in plenty of aspiring projects with great ideas and such, only to find out that people were not as devoted as they seemed to be.
Not to mention spare time they have.
If you are serious about this, at least make a private forum so that we can mingle more and know exactly who's working and who's just a spectator.
Also, use the 'Hunger' bar in Minecraft as Stamina.
Okay, and sorry for double posting.
I'ma continue with my analysis/thesis about Harvest Moon in Minecraft.
Note that this is Harvest Moon IN Minecraft, meaning we are bringing Harvest Moon features INTO Minecraft, not creating a new game that has both Minecraft and Harvest Moon properties.
There is a difference which definitely affect and can restrict how we want to implement stuff. We definitely should take advantage of what Minecraft already have implemented so that it'd make our lives easier as well as it feels natural, instead adding new stuff so that it becomes more complex.
There are already 4 'bars' in Minecraft (Health, Armour, Hunger and EXP). Adding another would just be a bit redundant.
Also, I will be mostly going on the notion that NPCs and Villages will not be implemented or not quite done as that would be the most basic and worst scenario.
Anyways, still on the subject of farming, I'll cover three things
- Seeds
- Crops
- Shipping/Currency
-Seeds-
Frankly, how do we get seeds?
This may be same as asking how do we get livestock. Do we go the old Harvest Moon way and buy them (which I'll cover later) or do the Rune Factory way and brush them like your life depended on it.
As for seeds, in Harvest Moon, we bought them from a shop. Assuming NPC and villages will not be included or will be delayed, there must be a way to initially get seeds.
And then how do we get more seeds? I think all Harvest Moon games does not give you a seed unless you use a sickle or use a seed maker. But they are too redundant as they don't give you more than one. I mean, if I grow a turnip, I chuck it in the seed maker and then I'll still have a seed for 1 turnip.
The current Minecraft farming system is something more like Rune Factory 3's farming system, that is, it yields a seed or two on a harvest, and/or you can create seeds from the products. I think wheat always drop two seeds, one you use to replace the wheat you've and other to increase products.
For a Harvest Moon themed mod, I don't like the Minecraft's way of giving you seeds. I liked to manage money by buying seeds and planting them and watch them grow. It's basically like planting your own money growing tree (in some sense, it is, though crops). That was fun. Minecraft's way seem a bit of 'since giving you one seed will get you nowhere, I'll give you two'
There are two ways to go around this.
1. Create NPC that sells seeds.
This will require fair few things. You need to code a NPC, and then a trade system, and then the currency to trade with, then a trading box and probably other lines of coding that I do not know about.
2. Use my idea of a modified version of shipping bin (see Shipping/Currency Section)
-Crops-
Second probably so simple but not so obvious question: What do we do after we grown the crops?
Here's the thing. In Harvest Moon, we have a shipping bin (or sell them directly to the shop depending on the game). Once again, I'm going to go with the notion that NPCs and villages are non-existent or not done yet. Crops, without their main reason of making profit, becomes only tool for eating and cooking, which is pretty much the same thing.
After we harvest literally hundreds of crops, what do we do if there are no NPCs or Villages?
Ship them
-Shipping/Currency-
Though one of the most subtle elements in Harvest Moon's farming, money plays a major role as it governs your actions. Money governs what you will buy, how many you will buy, what you will plant, what you will get after you've planted and how fast they will grow, what you can cook, etc.
It surprisingly influences a lot of Harvest Moon's action and yet it's merely numbers on your screen.
Speaking of numbers, if we are going to have a currency, how will we know how much we have?
Secondly, I hope you'd take consideration of my idea for a shipping bin.
It is based off the Equivalent Exchange Mod (EEM).
What if we can exchange crops into ores? Like the EEM, we could exchange crops for ores. I wouldn't mine trading 100 turnips for some clay and still feel legit that I got clay. And with that clay, I can finally build that cottage I've always wanted to build because of lack of clay.
And likewise, we could probably trade in cobblestone for seeds? Something like 64 cobble for 1 bag of strawberry seeds.
To make exchange easier, we can have a value on each item. Cobble can equal 1 point and such which you can spend on buying other like seeds, though points should be separated into two so that you can't just buy diamond with cobble stone.
This is where the Shipping Bin comes in.
We get something like Cobble stone, turn them into points. We check the points, put them in to the shipping bin and get seeds.
For example, say I have 128 cobble stone. I convert them into 128 points in the Shipping Bin and then convert those point to buy, say, a bag of strawberry seeds. I plant those strawberries which I harvest and turn them into say, iron.
Instead of just going Blocks -> Ore, we could force the player to go Block -> Seed -> Crop -> Ore.
This would minimize interaction with NPCs and/or give the player an option to just farm. It also links Minecraft's properties with Harvest Moon properties.
Y'know as much as I love this idea, I'm going to be cynical until I see any sort of progress.
Hope you don't mind. I've been involved in plenty of aspiring projects with great ideas and such, only to find out that people were not as devoted as they seemed to be.
Not to mention spare time they have.
If you are serious about this, at least make a private forum so that we can mingle more and know exactly who's working and who's just a spectator.
Also, use the 'Hunger' bar in Minecraft as Stamina.
I know. That's why, if you read above, I kept mentioning about finding another place to have discussions. And also, I have already done up the seed planting item. Right now, it plants melon seeds. The way it works is that the tilled soil that you right click with the seed bag will be planted with the seeds, as well as in any of the eight blocks surrounding the right clicked area, if they are tilled.
hmm, good ideas, but I suggest we don't do things the equivalent exchange way. This would take a while to make, so we don't have to rush through. Therefore, we could still go on with using NPCs. Also, the house should have specific "rules" as to what materials are used and what has to be inside. This will help to form up the whole house which harvest moon uses.
Looks like we've got a decent number of onlookers: Kirby360, Delta64, magnus1987, and paladini. Welcome to the stadium, guys! I hope you get to see a fun and fruitful performance.
Lot to talk about. Let's get going:
0. Cynicism
Treece, the cynicism is understandable. I'm frankly amazed that I've gotten this level of response; most of my ideas don't seem to go over this well. If by chance the interest in this mod fades away, I'd hope to have in my hands a half-finished mod that I can either take to new coders or finish myself (neither is likely, but at least the door would be open).
But at the moment, I'm looking forward with cautious optimism.
I'm thinking let's wait a bit before creating our own forum. (By the way, is that something we can do around here? or do you mean on another site? or what?) When we feel a greater need to get organized, we can shift to a more private setting.
I do think that the coders ought to be communicating via PM to make sure they're on the same page and not overlapping too much. That's their lookout, though if they have a problem they can't solve on their own, they can always come to me.
1. Spawn Point
Think about what happens when you faint / get killed. You should teleport to one of only two spots: Your house, or the clinic. Other code should happen too, but those are the two places you should go.
Therefore, the town has to be placed relative to that specific spawn point (whichever of the two makes better sense). We might even choose the House respawn for the no-NPC mod, and the Clinic respawn for the NPC version.
2. Old Maps
The NPC version will create a town upon map creation. If the map already exists, it cannot create a town on existing chunks (would be very troublesome for adventure maps or the Super Hostile series!).
Three options:
A town never spawns on an old map.
If no town exists on the map, a town can spawn on a new chunk. I'd suggest it spawns on the first new chunk generated, except not in the Ocean.
You can create a block to specifically spawn the town around it, so you place it and voila! a town. Or, a town will spawn slowly around it, perhaps one building at a time, or with the villagers "building" the town (which'd take more coding).
The first and last options will not cause unexpected problems in custom maps and old saves. The middle option maintains interest in exploration, and can allow you to get the village placed randomly a ways away from your home. The last option allows better player control.
I'm not sure which would be best, but those are the options.
3. Stamina, Fatigue, Hunger
I think you're right: Having this affect the Hunger bar is way easier than coding in a whole new system. So let's call it this way: If the tools don't currently affect the Hunger bar, then in our mod, they should. After using tools for a while, you have to eat.
If the hunger bar goes completely empty, you pass out and wake up at the Clinic, where the doctor reprimands you and sends (teleports) you home. You get a full hunger bar, and possibly 3 pieces of food, but you've lost the day you were on, the day after that, and half of the current day (it's noon when you can start doing things again).
The non-NPC version would just avoid the middle code about the Doctor's visit, and the spawn point would be set at your home instead of the Clinic.
There's gotta be some way to avoid "death". And the Doctor's dialog should change based on the last type of damage done to you (fall, fire, drowning, etc.), so that he can say, e.g., "Lucky John the Fisherman saw you, or you could've drowned out there!" Also, you never lose items by getting knocked out.
4. Speech
I hope one of the coders (Yoshi, CGuangJun, or TrickyDonut) has "dialog boxes" on their to-do list. We're going to need a way to put words on the screen and pause the game while the player is reading them.
Also, it would be nice to be able to put a character portrait above the speech (to the left side), which'd help with the "Harvest Moon" feel; and for potential mates, a little heart in the bottom right-hand corner, which progresses from tiny gray/black heart through a purple heart and the rest of the rainbow to giant red heart; except for the gray/black heart, all hearts will beat/throb, if that's possible.
5. NPCs
I don't think the girl Minecraft chars I've seen are inherently uncute; and using character portraits when they talk will definitely help matters. (Also, this will partly depend on resolution, and we could make an HD texture pack with much more detailed NPCs.)
NPCs being complicated, that's true enough; and I do think we should save them till we've got the non-NPC mod up and running and debugged and all that. We should be able to make sure that we've got a working mod without any NPCs at all.
We'll have to combat lag once we're dealing with NPCs. But that's a thought for the future.
6. Money / Barter
I'm not hot on the idea of trading crops for ores, but I can see that a lot of other people (not just on this thread) like it, so let's make it an optional mechanic.
Instead of giving you a shipping box right off the bat, what say that you have to make one?
This allows you to exchange goods for money. (One thought I had was that the shipping box itself would keep track of the money, and display it if you opened it; but on the other hand, if you can make more than one shipping box, that might get complicated. And I still think having a specific Coin item (or rather, three such items) would be best.)
Then, once you'd mined a bit, you could make an ore-buying box (automatic drill? duplicator? order-by-mail box? something more plausible?):
...these emoticons have no Redstone Dust? Really? Anyway, that's what the Gunpowder is supposed to be. And then you could exchange Coins for Ores/Gems... maybe even items that aren't, such as Clay (which is now more plentiful, so this might not be an issue), Sugarcane, Saplings, etc.
Other boxes you could make: a seed vendor (perhaps something like an ATM?), a town-creator box (for use in old maps)... maybe a mail-order bride box? (I'm just throwing out ideas. But you might give presents to the box until you see it's very happy with you, and then you can give it one final special item to get just the Wife NPC out of it, for an NPC-lite mod in which you can still have a frontier wife. Who does things (not sure what...), and doesn't just sit around looking pretty or walking randomly into lava pits.)
7. Seeds, Harvest Moon style
I was kinda hoping for the ability to avoid waste... but really, with the Minecraft watering method, waste isn't going to happen, is it? Heck, if the crops work like other crops, you could probably walk right through them on sneak and harvest just fine.
And the 3x3 planting thing is pretty charming, I will admit. Not to mention a time saver.
It occurs to me: Minecraft already has a regrowing mechanic in place, used with Sugarcane and Cacti. We could put that to use with the regrowable crops.
Say, e.g. with Corn, that the bottom part doesn't have any corn on it. The next part up, if it's the highest, has no corn, or just a Babycorn (tomatoes would have Green Tomato, etc.). And the third part would have 2 Corn and make the middle part have 1 Corn. If you chop the top part only, it grows back faster (since it doesn't have to regen the middle part), but if you chop the middle too, you get that third Corn.
8. New Seeds
Okay, here's where we get an option: Do we want plants to grow wild?
You explore around a bit, find some wild strawberries, bring them home and cultivate your own little patch?
I do kinda like that idea. Also, it prevents the "Where do I get seeds?" problem of the non-NPC version... at the cost of (1) random spawns that you might not be able to find easily (but which reward exploration, which is good) and (2) more items in the world, potentially creating more lag.
Actually, if we allowed wild spawns, it'd be nice to be able to turn that option off via the Options menu. In particular, you might be able to then "cleanse" a save file of our mod's objects before dropping the mod (for whatever reason), rather than have to lose your save. Because if you couldn't turn the option off, then exploring would always create new plants as you created new chunks while trying to cleanse the old.
Anyway: If we do have wild spawns, then absolutely you should get extra seeds from harvesting fully grown plants. I suggest this ratio:
Plant always drops at least 1 seed.
1/3 of the time, it drops a second seed.
If the second seed drops, 1/3 of the time it drops a third seed.
The possibilities are 2/3, 2/9, and 1/9 of the time respectively.
For regrowing plants, the seeds either drop when you (1) destroy the bottom part while the plant is full-grown, or (2) destroy the second part while the plant is full-grown. The first option would require you to make the plant regrow from scratch in order to get a seed; the second would allow a natural mechanic for multiple seeds (since you wouldn't be destroying the whole plant to get that new seed). In fact, if we went with the second version, we could make the plant thus just drop one seed, and never more; the ratio for seeds would thus differ between single-growth and multi-growth plants.
If you really wanted to curtail the player's ability to regrow plants, you could require a certain substance (like fertilizer) to be placed on the plant prior to harvesting in order for it to drop multiple seeds... but I don't favor this option.
It always kinda bugged me that in Harvest Moon, you were always buying things, and never able to make a self-sufficient farm. (Same with animals: Why should making my cow pregnant and losing its productivity for the length of the pregnancy cost almost the same amount as buying a soon-to-be-productive full-grown cow??) With Minecraft, the very nature of Minecraft, that would be even worse. In the real world, if you know what you're doing, you turn part of your crops into seed for next year; that should happen here too. Find or buy your initial stock, then re-use what you've got.
9. Spices
This actually made me reconsider my position on spices, like two minutes ago. Instead of having to constantly buy or constantly find spices, what say you bring home a particular spice plant, and plant it in your "Spice Garden" (that acts like a chest of sorts)? Then you get infinite spice out of that plant, with the basic assumption that you continually regrow it. Won't work for the minerals (salt, sugar), but ought to work fine for the herbs.
Whoa. Long post. Sorry 'bout that. Hope I covered everything pertinent at present.
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
From the point of view of a player who's repeatedly changed mod builds and has been very nervous about using old saves with new mods... I wonder how easily we could make a cleansing option for our mod?
It would have to kill all the mod-specific plants. Would have to kill the mod-specific blocks, or change them to vanilla Minecraft blocks. Would have to purge your inventory of mod-specific items, purge all chests of mod-specific items, and kill all the NPCs.
Alt: It purges the world, but leaves items in your inventory (but not in chests), thus allowing you to start from scratch if you like. Which'd make it slightly more versatile.
I've no idea how difficult this would be to do. But it would certainly be very heartening to know that you could just press a button, confirm the PURGE option, and take the mod entire out of your save file.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
Looks like we've got a decent number of onlookers: Kirby360, Delta64, magnus1987, and paladini. Welcome to the stadium, guys! I hope you get to see a fun and fruitful performance.
Lot to talk about. Let's get going:
0. Cynicism
Treece, the cynicism is understandable. I'm frankly amazed that I've gotten this level of response; most of my ideas don't seem to go over this well. If by chance the interest in this mod fades away, I'd hope to have in my hands a half-finished mod that I can either take to new coders or finish myself (neither is likely, but at least the door would be open).
But at the moment, I'm looking forward with cautious optimism.
I'm thinking let's wait a bit before creating our own forum. (By the way, is that something we can do around here? or do you mean on another site? or what?) When we feel a greater need to get organized, we can shift to a more private setting.
I do think that the coders ought to be communicating via PM to make sure they're on the same page and not overlapping too much. That's their lookout, though if they have a problem they can't solve on their own, they can always come to me.
1. Spawn Point
Think about what happens when you faint / get killed. You should teleport to one of only two spots: Your house, or the clinic. Other code should happen too, but those are the two places you should go.
Therefore, the town has to be placed relative to that specific spawn point (whichever of the two makes better sense). We might even choose the House respawn for the no-NPC mod, and the Clinic respawn for the NPC version.
2. Old Maps
The NPC version will create a town upon map creation. If the map already exists, it cannot create a town on existing chunks (would be very troublesome for adventure maps or the Super Hostile series!).
Three options:
A town never spawns on an old map.
If no town exists on the map, a town can spawn on a new chunk. I'd suggest it spawns on the first new chunk generated, except not in the Ocean.
You can create a block to specifically spawn the town around it, so you place it and voila! a town. Or, a town will spawn slowly around it, perhaps one building at a time, or with the villagers "building" the town (which'd take more coding).
The first and last options will not cause unexpected problems in custom maps and old saves. The middle option maintains interest in exploration, and can allow you to get the village placed randomly a ways away from your home. The last option allows better player control.
I'm not sure which would be best, but those are the options.
3. Stamina, Fatigue, Hunger
I think you're right: Having this affect the Hunger bar is way easier than coding in a whole new system. So let's call it this way: If the tools don't currently affect the Hunger bar, then in our mod, they should. After using tools for a while, you have to eat.
If the hunger bar goes completely empty, you pass out and wake up at the Clinic, where the doctor reprimands you and sends (teleports) you home. You get a full hunger bar, and possibly 3 pieces of food, but you've lost the day you were on, the day after that, and half of the current day (it's noon when you can start doing things again).
The non-NPC version would just avoid the middle code about the Doctor's visit, and the spawn point would be set at your home instead of the Clinic.
There's gotta be some way to avoid "death". And the Doctor's dialog should change based on the last type of damage done to you (fall, fire, drowning, etc.), so that he can say, e.g., "Lucky John the Fisherman saw you, or you could've drowned out there!" Also, you never lose items by getting knocked out.
4. Speech
I hope one of the coders (Yoshi, CGuangJun, or TrickyDonut) has "dialog boxes" on their to-do list. We're going to need a way to put words on the screen and pause the game while the player is reading them.
Also, it would be nice to be able to put a character portrait above the speech (to the left side), which'd help with the "Harvest Moon" feel; and for potential mates, a little heart in the bottom right-hand corner, which progresses from tiny gray/black heart through a purple heart and the rest of the rainbow to giant red heart; except for the gray/black heart, all hearts will beat/throb, if that's possible.
5. NPCs
I don't think the girl Minecraft chars I've seen are inherently uncute; and using character portraits when they talk will definitely help matters. (Also, this will partly depend on resolution, and we could make an HD texture pack with much more detailed NPCs.)
NPCs being complicated, that's true enough; and I do think we should save them till we've got the non-NPC mod up and running and debugged and all that. We should be able to make sure that we've got a working mod without any NPCs at all.
We'll have to combat lag once we're dealing with NPCs. But that's a thought for the future.
6. Money / Barter
I'm not hot on the idea of trading crops for ores, but I can see that a lot of other people (not just on this thread) like it, so let's make it an optional mechanic.
Instead of giving you a shipping box right off the bat, what say that you have to make one?
This allows you to exchange goods for money. (One thought I had was that the shipping box itself would keep track of the money, and display it if you opened it; but on the other hand, if you can make more than one shipping box, that might get complicated. And I still think having a specific Coin item (or rather, three such items) would be best.)
Then, once you'd mined a bit, you could make an ore-buying box (automatic drill? duplicator? order-by-mail box? something more plausible?):
...these emoticons have no Redstone Dust? Really? Anyway, that's what the Gunpowder is supposed to be. And then you could exchange Coins for Ores/Gems... maybe even items that aren't, such as Clay (which is now more plentiful, so this might not be an issue), Sugarcane, Saplings, etc.
Other boxes you could make: a seed vendor (perhaps something like an ATM?), a town-creator box (for use in old maps)... maybe a mail-order bride box? (I'm just throwing out ideas. But you might give presents to the box until you see it's very happy with you, and then you can give it one final special item to get just the Wife NPC out of it, for an NPC-lite mod in which you can still have a frontier wife. Who does things (not sure what...), and doesn't just sit around looking pretty or walking randomly into lava pits.)
7. Seeds, Harvest Moon style
I was kinda hoping for the ability to avoid waste... but really, with the Minecraft watering method, waste isn't going to happen, is it? Heck, if the crops work like other crops, you could probably walk right through them on sneak and harvest just fine.
And the 3x3 planting thing is pretty charming, I will admit. Not to mention a time saver.
It occurs to me: Minecraft already has a regrowing mechanic in place, used with Sugarcane and Cacti. We could put that to use with the regrowable crops.
Say, e.g. with Corn, that the bottom part doesn't have any corn on it. The next part up, if it's the highest, has no corn, or just a Babycorn (tomatoes would have Green Tomato, etc.). And the third part would have 2 Corn and make the middle part have 1 Corn. If you chop the top part only, it grows back faster (since it doesn't have to regen the middle part), but if you chop the middle too, you get that third Corn.
8. New Seeds
Okay, here's where we get an option: Do we want plants to grow wild?
You explore around a bit, find some wild strawberries, bring them home and cultivate your own little patch?
I do kinda like that idea. Also, it prevents the "Where do I get seeds?" problem of the non-NPC version... at the cost of (1) random spawns that you might not be able to find easily (but which reward exploration, which is good) and (2) more items in the world, potentially creating more lag.
Actually, if we allowed wild spawns, it'd be nice to be able to turn that option off via the Options menu. In particular, you might be able to then "cleanse" a save file of our mod's objects before dropping the mod (for whatever reason), rather than have to lose your save. Because if you couldn't turn the option off, then exploring would always create new plants as you created new chunks while trying to cleanse the old.
Anyway: If we do have wild spawns, then absolutely you should get extra seeds from harvesting fully grown plants. I suggest this ratio:
Plant always drops at least 1 seed.
1/3 of the time, it drops a second seed.
If the second seed drops, 1/3 of the time it drops a third seed.
The possibilities are 2/3, 2/9, and 1/9 of the time respectively.
For regrowing plants, the seeds either drop when you (1) destroy the bottom part while the plant is full-grown, or (2) destroy the second part while the plant is full-grown. The first option would require you to make the plant regrow from scratch in order to get a seed; the second would allow a natural mechanic for multiple seeds (since you wouldn't be destroying the whole plant to get that new seed). In fact, if we went with the second version, we could make the plant thus just drop one seed, and never more; the ratio for seeds would thus differ between single-growth and multi-growth plants.
If you really wanted to curtail the player's ability to regrow plants, you could require a certain substance (like fertilizer) to be placed on the plant prior to harvesting in order for it to drop multiple seeds... but I don't favor this option.
It always kinda bugged me that in Harvest Moon, you were always buying things, and never able to make a self-sufficient farm. (Same with animals: Why should making my cow pregnant and losing its productivity for the length of the pregnancy cost almost the same amount as buying a soon-to-be-productive full-grown cow??) With Minecraft, the very nature of Minecraft, that would be even worse. In the real world, if you know what you're doing, you turn part of your crops into seed for next year; that should happen here too. Find or buy your initial stock, then re-use what you've got.
9. Spices
This actually made me reconsider my position on spices, like two minutes ago. Instead of having to constantly buy or constantly find spices, what say you bring home a particular spice plant, and plant it in your "Spice Garden" (that acts like a chest of sorts)? Then you get infinite spice out of that plant, with the basic assumption that you continually regrow it. Won't work for the minerals (salt, sugar), but ought to work fine for the herbs.
Whoa. Long post. Sorry 'bout that. Hope I covered everything pertinent at present.
Woah, that's a huge post, dude. XD Hmm, I don't really fancy doing the crops to ores idea. Also, I've pretty much done up the seed planting mechanism. Right now I just need to have the crop blocks(Yoshi, if you're doing this make it start looking like seeds in the soil) themselves as well as textures. I could actually test, but I would need some other things to be done first. Right now sowing the seeds from the seed bag will produce melon plants. I doubt we can use the melons Minecraft gave. They don't start like seeds, and grows too fast. And also, we should prevent it from being used with bonemeal.
1. The Code
Necessary to let an NPC exist and have a schedule, and let you talk with them, and keep track of their affection for you (as a friend or as a suitor). I know of a great walkthrough that has all the details on the affection variables, and which items each character likes, so no need to go guessing there.
Also need code for stores; might look to Millenaire for wisdom there, seeing as it's the only mod I know of with stores that actually work (albeit they're a bit clumsy). It would be possible to code everything into just one store (Won, traveling salesman), but it'd be better, I think, to go the route of the full complement of stores.
Although perhaps you wouldn't actually buy animals... not sure. Taming the wild animals and even breeding them is something Minecraft is heading toward anyway, so we ought to code around that rather than come up with our own, unless the Minecraft native way really doesn't work out for our purposes.
2. The Characters
Quite apart from code, we need to determine this: Do we make a whole new cast of characters with their own storyline, or just crib 100% of the Back to Nature characters and plot?
If we just took the BtN characters, we'd have everything worked out for us, and wouldn't need to invent things whole-cloth. And it'd be great if someone made a set of Minecraft skins for the BtN cast. The only ones we'd have to mess with would be Stu and May, the kids; we'd need a smaller character to put them on.
Note: I am against Minecraft boobs. Stick with the classic player skin and just make it look like a girl through other means.
If we invented our own plot and cast, we could easily account for the Minecraft world in the overall plot, including how the town got here (in the middle of nowhere) and how it responds to monsters. And it might be fun to invent potential mates who are actually good for something beyond looking pretty.
I'd like to keep the townsfolk from wandering out of their town. Or we might have to get a little better with the AI. Basically, we don't want them to get stuck in places they can't get out of, or stray so far off their schedule that they either can't make it back to town on time or they resort to teleportation.
On the Humans Plus mod, the various humans run around randomly, in the water even... stuck in holes... I'm pretty sure they'd bathe in lava if there was some around. This behavior is not appropriate for our NPCs. They should avoid (or put out) fire and avoid (or sandbag) lava. And they should stay out of the water, I think.
I don't know how much of this would be easy to code without introducing too much lag.
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
Fair enough. I don't think the Red Mushroom -> Truffle will cause a problem here (it's still a mushroom), but let's make the Bamboo a separate item, then. Both Sugarcane and Bamboo grow wherever Sugarcane would normally grow, and have the same behavior. Any group of reeds would be one or the other, randomly, rather than a mix.
That also means that of my ideas about ores, the "repurpose Minecraft ores into HM ores" isn't going to work. So it's either "stick by what Minecraft has natively" or "invent new ore items a la Xtra Ores."
Compatibility
I'd kinda like to make this mod compatible with other mods that cover similar ground, but I'm not sure how well that'd work; it might make our items just all over the place. But what I mean is, if you have a mod that makes Honey, and also our mod, there should be some way to use the other mod's Honey in our recipes, rather than just "That's not the right kind of Honey."
Examples:
1. Honey overlaps with Beekeeping mod
2. Apple Tree overlaps with Premium Wood and Nandonalt's More Trees
3. Alcohol is going to overlap with the Beer/Booze mod currently in development
(I even gave them my ideas for fermentation, so the overlap could be significant.)
4. Some of the crops will overlap with various "more farming" mods. There are a lot of these.
5. Harvest Moon special ores "Mithril" and "Orichalchum" might overlap an ores mod
... I don't think this is as likely. Still, if there's a Mithril out there, we might want to account for it.
And so forth.
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
If we could make the coins in a separate inventory slot, like in Terraria, that'd be cool, but for now I think it's best to stick with the Millenaire method of just using a couple of Coin items. 64 copper equals 1 silver, and 64 silver equals 1 gold coin.
Oh, and say! HM crops come in a bag with 9 seeds, but you have to plant them all at once in a 3x3 grid. Perhaps the mod's seed bags could have 9 seeds, but you can plant them one at a time.
The Team
And a hearty welcome to Treece! This brings our team up to 5 active members. In order of joining:
1. VideoGamerYoshi
2. CGuangJun
3. Icalasari
4. Treece
...and also me. And TrickyDonut, who hasn't really started on anything as far as I know, but has expressed interest in helping out. Looks like the team has 2 coders and 1 spriter, and Treece identifies her skills as "I'm one of those creative guys."
I guess I'm the Producer or Director. Don't know Java yet. Not sure how to rip sprites from a Playstation game (things were so much easier with the SNES emulator). Can't find crops sprites online either. But I've got a lot of ideas and I'm eager to see this mod take form :smile.gif:
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
If you made this true, YOU will be my favourite person in the whole world, after my Mum of course :biggrin.gif:
Anyways, I have several ideas. Your ideas are very good but probably too ambitious.
Let me help you summarise everything.
Harvest Moon Basic Properties
- Farming
- Ranching
- Mining
- Cooking
- Some RPG elements
- Building (depending on the game. E.g. Island of Happiness)
- Seasons
- Wooing
MineCraft Basic Properties
- Mining
- Crafting
- Building
- Farming (including Ranching, though it's nowhere near HM's level)
- Some RPG elements
As you can see, Minecraft and Harvest Moon share about 4 properties that are similar.
And as you know Mining and Building does not really need to be expanded on in Minecraft world.
Building is also more advanced in Minecraft than Harvest Moon.
The RPG elements
Farming, on the otherhand, is more advanced in Harvest Moon, for obvious reasons.
Since we are using MineCraft as a base, we can only expand upon or add upon Minecraft.
Thus forth that leaves us with Cooking and Wooing to be made from scratch while we upgrade/expand upon Farming in Minecraft.
I am no coder but I can say that coding NPCs in Minecraft will be ****ing hard, not to mention I never really married anyone in Harvest Moon because of its too many great girls.
Anyways, let me reorganise the Farming aspect of Harvest Moon in Minecraft.
You pretty much said most of it but I'm just reorganising it.
-Farming-
The most important aspect in Harvest Moon. One and only reason I play Harvest Moon.
Before I talk about seeds, I'll talk about the basic foundation of Harvest Moon
In Harvest Moon, Farming is heavily reliant on several factors:
- Season
- Weather
- Water
Seasons affect what crop you grow. Your income may be affected by this. It also adds variety to the gameplay as you don't sit around for 120 days growing Strawberries everyday.
I think there is a Seasons mod somewhere but I think the seasons there are too short for Harvest Moon Mod. If we can modify it a bit, with permission of course, it'd work quite well.
Weather also affects as rain automatically waters for you. Typhoons destroy your crops (and what game was it that destroyed seeds?). And in IoH/SSI too much sun could harm your crops.
I guess someone could code in typhoon. The vanilla Rain already waters crops.
Water in farming works differently in Harvest Moon and Minecraft. In Minecraft, a water source is required on the ground to farm. In Harvest Moon, you don't need a water source nearby to grow crops. You water them manually via the Watering Can.
I guess you need to negate the current watering system and then create a Watering Can, then allow the watering can to have an effect on the crop block and turn it into saturated block.
Seeds, I think you got that covered pretty much well.
Just make them 1X1 and take advantage of the first person view Minecraft gives you.
Tools
Minecraft has only 2 farming tools: a Hoe and an Axe
Harvest Moon has 4: A Hoe, an Axe, a Hammer and A Sickle
Both has upgrade system.
I think using Minecraft upgrade system is good enough. Just add 'charges' unto it.
For example: A Wooden Hoe can only til 1X1, but a Stone Hoe can til 1X3 when charged (with a right click, preferably). An Iron Hoe can til 1X3, 3X3 (Level 2 Charge). A Golden Hoe can til 1X3, 3X3, 6X3 (level 3 charge). And finally ,Diamond Hoe can till 1X3, 3X3, 6X3, 6X6 (level 4 charge).
A reason to create a Diamond Hoe! Woot!
Same can work for Hammer and Sickle.
Not too sure how to make Axe any different though.
Maybe you can also use the Enchantment table instead.
Gonna stop here for now. Tell me what you think
:biggrin.gif:
- Cookies to whomever gets the reference
No, I'm not joking.
That's usually how my ideas go, yeah. I have tons of half-written stories in my room (and in my head).
I'm not sure how difficult it's going to be overall. It doesn't help that I don't know Java myself (though I do program, and am familiar with Visual Basic, C++, GML (from Game Maker), and some other stuff).
Millenaire managed to create little towns with random NPCs, but it's also pretty laggy. In fact, it seems to be the mod that is giving me the most lag. So if we get around to NPCs, that's one factor we're going to have to be very careful of.
There are two ways to play the NPC game here. One is to make the whole Harvest Moon mod, and just try to do what we can to make NPCs work. The other is to cut it back to single-player everything-but-the-NPCs Harvest Moon, and have just one guy, Traveling Salesman Won, spawn randomly and sell you seeds (for, say, copper, silver, or gold ingots).
I think we'll aim for the NPCs, but that's at least a potential fallback system that'd still give the basics of what I like about Harvest Moon... mostly.
1. I'd say ignore the need to water things, and just let the normal Minecraft system take over. Harvest Moon is, in this case, inferior; we've just learned some of the basics of agriculture :smile.gif:
(Agriculture based on infinite water supply, but still.)
This also means we wouldn't have to invent a watering can, unless, say, you wanted to make a watering can that, once filled, could create water source blocks.
It would be possible to code in the HM behavior, but if you ask me, watering took up a ton of time; and on Minecraft, that ton of time ought best be spent mining or exploring, rather than watering. The "mine" isn't a tiny little thing with only ten discrete levels, after all. And we're lucky Minecraft doesn't force you to go to bed every 5-minutes-to-sunrise, which'd make long-term expeditions impossible.
2. Typhoons/Hurricanes
If we add these, we add the option to turn them off.
And I'm in favor of just leaving them out. But I'll leave that to the coders to determine what they're willing to add.
I like natural disasters - I do, and I enjoy the ideas put forth in that other thread about them. But when it comes to Minecraft, hurricanes just meant "Argh" and, once I was able to use save states, "Whelp, that's not going to happen (back up and save it again to get better weather)." My "strawberries in the fridge before the end of the first Spring" plan would be literally impossible if I let a third of my crops get destroyed.
And in Minecraft you can't even go back to a save point!
3. The Seasons mod
...has 7-day seasons, and the summer sun tries to murder you. ("Augh! What's attacking me?! Invisible enemies?! Oh, wait, it's just the sun.") Also, it snows 100% of the days in Winter, which kills my framerate... effectively, the snow ensures that I stay inside the entire Winter.
But yeah, it's a base we could build from. It's up to the coders whether they want to coordinate with the designer of that mod, or just try to make seasons from scratch.
I do like the idea of the tree/biome PNG files changing with each season. More yellowy in the Spring, and turning to oranges and reds in the Fall. Wish there was a way to get foliage to decay during the last day of Fall (or first of Winter) and then grow back to normal in the Spring, but also that this behavior wouldn't happen for Pines. Also, those trees'd look mighty bare with the foliage gone and no branches to replace it. We might have to put up with that Minecraft-style bare tree :\
4. Weather
To make weather actually have a useful effect, perhaps Rain could make crops grow twice as fast that day?
A good reason to create upgraded tools is a must. I remember when I never used a tool higher than Stone unless I literally couldn't harvest it with stone tools... then I found out how fast an iron pick works compared to stone, which changed my thinking from "I'm wasting resources" to "I'm wasting time and finding new resources less often."
Anyway.
If we can take up triggers that currently aren't being used, such as right-clicking with a tool, that'd be awesome! The Hoe already uses this behavior and it works out great.
I'd still like to create the Copper-Silver-Gold progression, and build the Gold tools' behavior on the way we set that up. But it would be okay to avoid the new ores and stick with the Minecraft version, although the Gold doesn't really fit inside the normal progression (it's soft and non-durable but fast).
I'd kind of like to see tools that you can't lose, even if you get killed by mobs or take a bath in lava. Perhaps "no inventory loss on death" could be an option you could select for our mod.
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
lol XD
Actually, if we wanted to avoid NPCs altogether, we could make a tiny hut that spawns near our spawn point, where you could buy all the seeds and other items, and maybe even animals.
Or we could make do with just Traveling Salesman Won for all buy/sell behavior.
But I think we'll be shooting for NPCs eventually anyway.
... You know, I think maybe we ought to make a multi-part mod. That way players can pick which parts they want to try:
1. The Farming
Crops, seasons, and cooking.
2. The NPCs
The town and all its inhabitants, the ability to talk with them, and all the shops working normally. If you have Farming but not NPCs, you get to buy stuff from a vending machine or shack or the like instead.
Though I still like the traveling salesman idea. Gives me fond memories of Dragon Warrior IV.
3. Stamina/Fatigue
The system that makes swinging a tool tire you out, and allows a hot spring to revitalize you. Also, different types of food help restore some of your stamina and/or take the edge off fatigue.
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
Thanks for initiative...
Fernando P.
Too complicated and no girl in Minecraft would look 'cute'
Get the farming down first, then work on NPCs :biggrin.gif:
- Cookies to whomever gets the reference
NO!!! XD
NPCs are not that complicated :smile.gif: It's just tedious. Anyway they are human, so we don't even need to BOTHER trying to make models, just the AI.
I'm thinking, that with the mod, once you make a new world and spawn, you would be in the town. It would be generated at spawn. Then, there is a huge area where the farm is, where the player can build his/her house and start doing the usual Harvest Moon thing.
So right now, I guess Yoshi and I should talk to each other. Treece, I guess you should talk to our "boss" and get the ideas sorted out. XD Let's have fun doing this and not get too stressed out, ok guys?
Also, could we settle on just using Stamina? In the later games, like Grand Bazaar and Tales of Two Towns, they use only stamina, and not Fatigue. I would think that's a better thing to do.
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I get your meaning. We could check for those mods and make the items in their mod compatible with the recipes we make, it's not impossible.
Actually, it's possible to make them plant all around you, and take up 1 seed bag in the process. However, according to what I've played very recently(Grand Bazaar) and what I saw(Tale of Two Towns), seed bags only plant into one block of tilled soil each. that's quite different from the older games, aren't they? XD like Friends of Mineral Town.
I don't think you should, since it's in 3 dimensional diagonally, it would look very weird in minecraft.
Ok, I'll start working on the seed bags. They will work like the older games, placing 3x3 around you.
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Hope you don't mind. I've been involved in plenty of aspiring projects with great ideas and such, only to find out that people were not as devoted as they seemed to be.
Not to mention spare time they have.
If you are serious about this, at least make a private forum so that we can mingle more and know exactly who's working and who's just a spectator.
Also, use the 'Hunger' bar in Minecraft as Stamina.
- Cookies to whomever gets the reference
I'ma continue with my analysis/thesis about Harvest Moon in Minecraft.
Note that this is Harvest Moon IN Minecraft, meaning we are bringing Harvest Moon features INTO Minecraft, not creating a new game that has both Minecraft and Harvest Moon properties.
There is a difference which definitely affect and can restrict how we want to implement stuff. We definitely should take advantage of what Minecraft already have implemented so that it'd make our lives easier as well as it feels natural, instead adding new stuff so that it becomes more complex.
There are already 4 'bars' in Minecraft (Health, Armour, Hunger and EXP). Adding another would just be a bit redundant.
Also, I will be mostly going on the notion that NPCs and Villages will not be implemented or not quite done as that would be the most basic and worst scenario.
Anyways, still on the subject of farming, I'll cover three things
- Seeds
- Crops
- Shipping/Currency
-Seeds-
Frankly, how do we get seeds?
This may be same as asking how do we get livestock. Do we go the old Harvest Moon way and buy them (which I'll cover later) or do the Rune Factory way and brush them like your life depended on it.
As for seeds, in Harvest Moon, we bought them from a shop. Assuming NPC and villages will not be included or will be delayed, there must be a way to initially get seeds.
And then how do we get more seeds? I think all Harvest Moon games does not give you a seed unless you use a sickle or use a seed maker. But they are too redundant as they don't give you more than one. I mean, if I grow a turnip, I chuck it in the seed maker and then I'll still have a seed for 1 turnip.
The current Minecraft farming system is something more like Rune Factory 3's farming system, that is, it yields a seed or two on a harvest, and/or you can create seeds from the products. I think wheat always drop two seeds, one you use to replace the wheat you've and other to increase products.
For a Harvest Moon themed mod, I don't like the Minecraft's way of giving you seeds. I liked to manage money by buying seeds and planting them and watch them grow. It's basically like planting your own money growing tree (in some sense, it is, though crops). That was fun. Minecraft's way seem a bit of 'since giving you one seed will get you nowhere, I'll give you two'
There are two ways to go around this.
1. Create NPC that sells seeds.
This will require fair few things. You need to code a NPC, and then a trade system, and then the currency to trade with, then a trading box and probably other lines of coding that I do not know about.
2. Use my idea of a modified version of shipping bin (see Shipping/Currency Section)
-Crops-
Second probably so simple but not so obvious question: What do we do after we grown the crops?
Here's the thing. In Harvest Moon, we have a shipping bin (or sell them directly to the shop depending on the game). Once again, I'm going to go with the notion that NPCs and villages are non-existent or not done yet. Crops, without their main reason of making profit, becomes only tool for eating and cooking, which is pretty much the same thing.
After we harvest literally hundreds of crops, what do we do if there are no NPCs or Villages?
Ship them
-Shipping/Currency-
Though one of the most subtle elements in Harvest Moon's farming, money plays a major role as it governs your actions. Money governs what you will buy, how many you will buy, what you will plant, what you will get after you've planted and how fast they will grow, what you can cook, etc.
It surprisingly influences a lot of Harvest Moon's action and yet it's merely numbers on your screen.
Speaking of numbers, if we are going to have a currency, how will we know how much we have?
Secondly, I hope you'd take consideration of my idea for a shipping bin.
It is based off the Equivalent Exchange Mod (EEM).
What if we can exchange crops into ores? Like the EEM, we could exchange crops for ores. I wouldn't mine trading 100 turnips for some clay and still feel legit that I got clay. And with that clay, I can finally build that cottage I've always wanted to build because of lack of clay.
And likewise, we could probably trade in cobblestone for seeds? Something like 64 cobble for 1 bag of strawberry seeds.
To make exchange easier, we can have a value on each item. Cobble can equal 1 point and such which you can spend on buying other like seeds, though points should be separated into two so that you can't just buy diamond with cobble stone.
This is where the Shipping Bin comes in.
We get something like Cobble stone, turn them into points. We check the points, put them in to the shipping bin and get seeds.
For example, say I have 128 cobble stone. I convert them into 128 points in the Shipping Bin and then convert those point to buy, say, a bag of strawberry seeds. I plant those strawberries which I harvest and turn them into say, iron.
Instead of just going Blocks -> Ore, we could force the player to go Block -> Seed -> Crop -> Ore.
This would minimize interaction with NPCs and/or give the player an option to just farm. It also links Minecraft's properties with Harvest Moon properties.
Tell me what you guys think.
- Cookies to whomever gets the reference
I know. That's why, if you read above, I kept mentioning about finding another place to have discussions. And also, I have already done up the seed planting item. Right now, it plants melon seeds. The way it works is that the tilled soil that you right click with the seed bag will be planted with the seeds, as well as in any of the eight blocks surrounding the right clicked area, if they are tilled.
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hmm, good ideas, but I suggest we don't do things the equivalent exchange way. This would take a while to make, so we don't have to rush through. Therefore, we could still go on with using NPCs. Also, the house should have specific "rules" as to what materials are used and what has to be inside. This will help to form up the whole house which harvest moon uses.
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Lot to talk about. Let's get going:
0. Cynicism
Treece, the cynicism is understandable. I'm frankly amazed that I've gotten this level of response; most of my ideas don't seem to go over this well. If by chance the interest in this mod fades away, I'd hope to have in my hands a half-finished mod that I can either take to new coders or finish myself (neither is likely, but at least the door would be open).
But at the moment, I'm looking forward with cautious optimism.
I'm thinking let's wait a bit before creating our own forum. (By the way, is that something we can do around here? or do you mean on another site? or what?) When we feel a greater need to get organized, we can shift to a more private setting.
I do think that the coders ought to be communicating via PM to make sure they're on the same page and not overlapping too much. That's their lookout, though if they have a problem they can't solve on their own, they can always come to me.
1. Spawn Point
Think about what happens when you faint / get killed. You should teleport to one of only two spots: Your house, or the clinic. Other code should happen too, but those are the two places you should go.
Therefore, the town has to be placed relative to that specific spawn point (whichever of the two makes better sense). We might even choose the House respawn for the no-NPC mod, and the Clinic respawn for the NPC version.
2. Old Maps
The NPC version will create a town upon map creation. If the map already exists, it cannot create a town on existing chunks (would be very troublesome for adventure maps or the Super Hostile series!).
Three options:
The first and last options will not cause unexpected problems in custom maps and old saves. The middle option maintains interest in exploration, and can allow you to get the village placed randomly a ways away from your home. The last option allows better player control.
I'm not sure which would be best, but those are the options.
3. Stamina, Fatigue, Hunger
I think you're right: Having this affect the Hunger bar is way easier than coding in a whole new system. So let's call it this way: If the tools don't currently affect the Hunger bar, then in our mod, they should. After using tools for a while, you have to eat.
If the hunger bar goes completely empty, you pass out and wake up at the Clinic, where the doctor reprimands you and sends (teleports) you home. You get a full hunger bar, and possibly 3 pieces of food, but you've lost the day you were on, the day after that, and half of the current day (it's noon when you can start doing things again).
The non-NPC version would just avoid the middle code about the Doctor's visit, and the spawn point would be set at your home instead of the Clinic.
There's gotta be some way to avoid "death". And the Doctor's dialog should change based on the last type of damage done to you (fall, fire, drowning, etc.), so that he can say, e.g., "Lucky John the Fisherman saw you, or you could've drowned out there!" Also, you never lose items by getting knocked out.
4. Speech
I hope one of the coders (Yoshi, CGuangJun, or TrickyDonut) has "dialog boxes" on their to-do list. We're going to need a way to put words on the screen and pause the game while the player is reading them.
Also, it would be nice to be able to put a character portrait above the speech (to the left side), which'd help with the "Harvest Moon" feel; and for potential mates, a little heart in the bottom right-hand corner, which progresses from tiny gray/black heart through a purple heart and the rest of the rainbow to giant red heart; except for the gray/black heart, all hearts will beat/throb, if that's possible.
5. NPCs
I don't think the girl Minecraft chars I've seen are inherently uncute; and using character portraits when they talk will definitely help matters. (Also, this will partly depend on resolution, and we could make an HD texture pack with much more detailed NPCs.)
NPCs being complicated, that's true enough; and I do think we should save them till we've got the non-NPC mod up and running and debugged and all that. We should be able to make sure that we've got a working mod without any NPCs at all.
We'll have to combat lag once we're dealing with NPCs. But that's a thought for the future.
6. Money / Barter
I'm not hot on the idea of trading crops for ores, but I can see that a lot of other people (not just on this thread) like it, so let's make it an optional mechanic.
Instead of giving you a shipping box right off the bat, what say that you have to make one?
This allows you to exchange goods for money. (One thought I had was that the shipping box itself would keep track of the money, and display it if you opened it; but on the other hand, if you can make more than one shipping box, that might get complicated. And I still think having a specific Coin item (or rather, three such items) would be best.)
Then, once you'd mined a bit, you could make an ore-buying box (automatic drill? duplicator? order-by-mail box? something more plausible?):
...these emoticons have no Redstone Dust? Really? Anyway, that's what the Gunpowder is supposed to be. And then you could exchange Coins for Ores/Gems... maybe even items that aren't, such as Clay (which is now more plentiful, so this might not be an issue), Sugarcane, Saplings, etc.
Other boxes you could make: a seed vendor (perhaps something like an ATM?), a town-creator box (for use in old maps)... maybe a mail-order bride box? (I'm just throwing out ideas. But you might give presents to the box until you see it's very happy with you, and then you can give it one final special item to get just the Wife NPC out of it, for an NPC-lite mod in which you can still have a frontier wife. Who does things (not sure what...), and doesn't just sit around looking pretty or walking randomly into lava pits.)
7. Seeds, Harvest Moon style
I was kinda hoping for the ability to avoid waste... but really, with the Minecraft watering method, waste isn't going to happen, is it? Heck, if the crops work like other crops, you could probably walk right through them on sneak and harvest just fine.
And the 3x3 planting thing is pretty charming, I will admit. Not to mention a time saver.
It occurs to me: Minecraft already has a regrowing mechanic in place, used with Sugarcane and Cacti. We could put that to use with the regrowable crops.
Say, e.g. with Corn, that the bottom part doesn't have any corn on it. The next part up, if it's the highest, has no corn, or just a Babycorn (tomatoes would have Green Tomato, etc.). And the third part would have 2 Corn and make the middle part have 1 Corn. If you chop the top part only, it grows back faster (since it doesn't have to regen the middle part), but if you chop the middle too, you get that third Corn.
8. New Seeds
Okay, here's where we get an option: Do we want plants to grow wild?
You explore around a bit, find some wild strawberries, bring them home and cultivate your own little patch?
I do kinda like that idea. Also, it prevents the "Where do I get seeds?" problem of the non-NPC version... at the cost of (1) random spawns that you might not be able to find easily (but which reward exploration, which is good) and (2) more items in the world, potentially creating more lag.
Actually, if we allowed wild spawns, it'd be nice to be able to turn that option off via the Options menu. In particular, you might be able to then "cleanse" a save file of our mod's objects before dropping the mod (for whatever reason), rather than have to lose your save. Because if you couldn't turn the option off, then exploring would always create new plants as you created new chunks while trying to cleanse the old.
Anyway: If we do have wild spawns, then absolutely you should get extra seeds from harvesting fully grown plants. I suggest this ratio:
The possibilities are 2/3, 2/9, and 1/9 of the time respectively.
For regrowing plants, the seeds either drop when you (1) destroy the bottom part while the plant is full-grown, or (2) destroy the second part while the plant is full-grown. The first option would require you to make the plant regrow from scratch in order to get a seed; the second would allow a natural mechanic for multiple seeds (since you wouldn't be destroying the whole plant to get that new seed). In fact, if we went with the second version, we could make the plant thus just drop one seed, and never more; the ratio for seeds would thus differ between single-growth and multi-growth plants.
If you really wanted to curtail the player's ability to regrow plants, you could require a certain substance (like fertilizer) to be placed on the plant prior to harvesting in order for it to drop multiple seeds... but I don't favor this option.
It always kinda bugged me that in Harvest Moon, you were always buying things, and never able to make a self-sufficient farm. (Same with animals: Why should making my cow pregnant and losing its productivity for the length of the pregnancy cost almost the same amount as buying a soon-to-be-productive full-grown cow??) With Minecraft, the very nature of Minecraft, that would be even worse. In the real world, if you know what you're doing, you turn part of your crops into seed for next year; that should happen here too. Find or buy your initial stock, then re-use what you've got.
9. Spices
This actually made me reconsider my position on spices, like two minutes ago. Instead of having to constantly buy or constantly find spices, what say you bring home a particular spice plant, and plant it in your "Spice Garden" (that acts like a chest of sorts)? Then you get infinite spice out of that plant, with the basic assumption that you continually regrow it. Won't work for the minerals (salt, sugar), but ought to work fine for the herbs.
Whoa. Long post. Sorry 'bout that. Hope I covered everything pertinent at present.
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
From the point of view of a player who's repeatedly changed mod builds and has been very nervous about using old saves with new mods... I wonder how easily we could make a cleansing option for our mod?
It would have to kill all the mod-specific plants. Would have to kill the mod-specific blocks, or change them to vanilla Minecraft blocks. Would have to purge your inventory of mod-specific items, purge all chests of mod-specific items, and kill all the NPCs.
Alt: It purges the world, but leaves items in your inventory (but not in chests), thus allowing you to start from scratch if you like. Which'd make it slightly more versatile.
I've no idea how difficult this would be to do. But it would certainly be very heartening to know that you could just press a button, confirm the PURGE option, and take the mod entire out of your save file.
My YouTube channel is currently on hiatus, but I hope to get back to it at some point. Content is fairly random, but can be enjoyable, and is mostly game footage (mostly random Minecraft clips) from my nephews and me. Most popular MC vid so far is the one Vechs laughed at on Twitter!
Woah, that's a huge post, dude. XD Hmm, I don't really fancy doing the crops to ores idea. Also, I've pretty much done up the seed planting mechanism. Right now I just need to have the crop blocks(Yoshi, if you're doing this make it start looking like seeds in the soil) themselves as well as textures. I could actually test, but I would need some other things to be done first. Right now sowing the seeds from the seed bag will produce melon plants. I doubt we can use the melons Minecraft gave. They don't start like seeds, and grows too fast. And also, we should prevent it from being used with bonemeal.
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