I think it would be nice to add half-slab blocks for Dirt, Grass, Sand, and other COMMON material blocks.
Currently the only half-slab blocks available are for a few crafted Wood and Stone-type materials. Since it's proven that half-slabs work as building material, I don't understand why there are not more slab types for most materials/building blocks in general.
Having a few half-slab block types for Dirt or Grass will allow for much smoother landscaping and path-making. I also don't see why Terracotta, Concrete, and Glass do not feature slab variants.
I'm not suggesting that the game naturally generate Grass slabs all over the place... but if there was some way to craft or place them, it would really enhance a player's building ability.
There has GOT to be somebody else who has wanted more slabs besides me...
There has GOT to be somebody else who has wanted more slabs besides me...
Nope, nobody. A quick search would reveal this quite clearly...
On a more serious note, I'm 75% almost-sure that Mojang is intending to add a system that removes material (cobblestone, stone, stone variants, dirt, grass, wood, etc) as a defining point of what a block is. The "silliness" of spending 20 minutes to add in 10 new pressure plates and 10 new trapdoors will be a thing of the past, as you would only need to define a "trapdoor" and it will suddenly have access to all the known materials in the game. As I'm sure deep down in the code they still have to adhere to the limiting numbers (256 or maybe 4096, the former vanilla and modded block ID limits), separating out shape and material means that the number of used IDs goes way, way down with no reasonable expectation of using most of them up even if every combination were accepted.
Currently in Minecraft, we have the full block, slab, stair, fence, wall, gate, trapdoor, door (upper and lower?), soul sand/path blocks/farmland, carpet, and (snow) layer. Assuming that none of those end up "sharing" a shape, that's still just 15 different blocks rather than the nearly 256 we were facing. I doubt we could band together and come up with an additional 240 different shapes to add to the game that might put us back in the "oops, we're running out of room!" problem we had. I honestly doubt we could even do the same for the different materials. If Mojang went ahead and fixed the block ID limit to match the 4096 that is a part of Modded Minecraft, we'd have no hope of ever filling up even a 5th of that capacity and certainly not any time soon.
My guess is that they're aiming more for Carpenters Blocks (shapes of a blocky nature) than for ArchitectureCraft (shapes that can include curves, spheres, and rounded edges), but because these mod implementations have been fairly lag-intensive they're probably trying to look into how to reduce/eliminate that part. This is probably where much of the Technically Updated stuff comes into play, rather than simply doing all of that for upgraded oceans.
(sic) I'm sure deep down in the code they still have to adhere to the limiting numbers (256 or maybe 4096, the former vanilla and modded block ID limits), separating out shape and material means that the number of used IDs goes way, way down with no reasonable expectation of using most of them up even if every combination were accepted.(sic)
I hadn't thought of that - so does this mean certain blocks may have to be REMOVED from the game in the future in order to add new ones? (Assuming the system isn't re-worked). That's kind of scary for people who have spent a lot of time building things... lol
I hadn't thought of that - so does this mean certain blocks may have to be REMOVED from the game in the future in order to add new ones?
Not at all, though in the past Mojang would elect to not add new blocks if it came down to a choice between preserving the existing palette versus removing old blocks to make room for new ones. There was a relatively simple fix that was implemented by Forge (and base mod authors like TheMasterCaver) to literally increase the ID limit from vanilla's 256 up to 4096, but given how blocks were being defined this would have only kicked the problem later down the road.
Mojang instead elected to radically redesign the way block/item data was stored, which happened to also include a reorganization of the command system (they effectively all used the same data structure.) This had the effect of "breaking all of Minecraft", and between this and the content stuff from Update Aquatic they've been slowly working to recover what they can. This means a "real fix" so that they never have to revisit this issue.
Didn't they already confirm the adding of more half slabs and stairs for 1.14?
Sure did, but Dinnerbone never actually described how they'll be added. So, technically, it could be just 1 stair and 1 slab...but coupled with an ability to apply any texture to it (aka Carpenters Blocks). The mod implementations of this relied on tile entities and thus would generate more lag relative to the usage density, but because of the restructuring of how blocks are defined Mojang could've found a fix to this that reduces or even eliminates the associated lag...ergo, giving us the ability to "essentially" add a ton of new blocks without "actually" adding a ton of new blocks.
I think it would be nice to add half-slab blocks for Dirt, Grass, Sand, and other COMMON material blocks.
Currently the only half-slab blocks available are for a few crafted Wood and Stone-type materials. Since it's proven that half-slabs work as building material, I don't understand why there are not more slab types for most materials/building blocks in general.
Having a few half-slab block types for Dirt or Grass will allow for much smoother landscaping and path-making. I also don't see why Terracotta, Concrete, and Glass do not feature slab variants.
I'm not suggesting that the game naturally generate Grass slabs all over the place... but if there was some way to craft or place them, it would really enhance a player's building ability.
There has GOT to be somebody else who has wanted more slabs besides me...
Nope, nobody. A quick search would reveal this quite clearly...
On a more serious note, I'm 75% almost-sure that Mojang is intending to add a system that removes material (cobblestone, stone, stone variants, dirt, grass, wood, etc) as a defining point of what a block is. The "silliness" of spending 20 minutes to add in 10 new pressure plates and 10 new trapdoors will be a thing of the past, as you would only need to define a "trapdoor" and it will suddenly have access to all the known materials in the game. As I'm sure deep down in the code they still have to adhere to the limiting numbers (256 or maybe 4096, the former vanilla and modded block ID limits), separating out shape and material means that the number of used IDs goes way, way down with no reasonable expectation of using most of them up even if every combination were accepted.
Currently in Minecraft, we have the full block, slab, stair, fence, wall, gate, trapdoor, door (upper and lower?), soul sand/path blocks/farmland, carpet, and (snow) layer. Assuming that none of those end up "sharing" a shape, that's still just 15 different blocks rather than the nearly 256 we were facing. I doubt we could band together and come up with an additional 240 different shapes to add to the game that might put us back in the "oops, we're running out of room!" problem we had. I honestly doubt we could even do the same for the different materials. If Mojang went ahead and fixed the block ID limit to match the 4096 that is a part of Modded Minecraft, we'd have no hope of ever filling up even a 5th of that capacity and certainly not any time soon.
My guess is that they're aiming more for Carpenters Blocks (shapes of a blocky nature) than for ArchitectureCraft (shapes that can include curves, spheres, and rounded edges), but because these mod implementations have been fairly lag-intensive they're probably trying to look into how to reduce/eliminate that part. This is probably where much of the Technically Updated stuff comes into play, rather than simply doing all of that for upgraded oceans.
I hadn't thought of that - so does this mean certain blocks may have to be REMOVED from the game in the future in order to add new ones? (Assuming the system isn't re-worked). That's kind of scary for people who have spent a lot of time building things... lol
Didn't they already confirm the adding of more half slabs and stairs for 1.14?
Not at all, though in the past Mojang would elect to not add new blocks if it came down to a choice between preserving the existing palette versus removing old blocks to make room for new ones. There was a relatively simple fix that was implemented by Forge (and base mod authors like TheMasterCaver) to literally increase the ID limit from vanilla's 256 up to 4096, but given how blocks were being defined this would have only kicked the problem later down the road.
Mojang instead elected to radically redesign the way block/item data was stored, which happened to also include a reorganization of the command system (they effectively all used the same data structure.) This had the effect of "breaking all of Minecraft", and between this and the content stuff from Update Aquatic they've been slowly working to recover what they can. This means a "real fix" so that they never have to revisit this issue.
Sure did, but Dinnerbone never actually described how they'll be added. So, technically, it could be just 1 stair and 1 slab...but coupled with an ability to apply any texture to it (aka Carpenters Blocks). The mod implementations of this relied on tile entities and thus would generate more lag relative to the usage density, but because of the restructuring of how blocks are defined Mojang could've found a fix to this that reduces or even eliminates the associated lag...ergo, giving us the ability to "essentially" add a ton of new blocks without "actually" adding a ton of new blocks.