Rendering engine in general is being overhauled. Which will be in a future release, I'd take a general stab at possibly 1.6/1.7? It's a big project to do, as the engine itself is also heavily CPU based. Everyone has seen it basically as a tacked onto engine, which has really suffered for lag. Going from way back in the Alpha/Beta builds into the actual releases, it's pretty well noted when it becomes intense.
If there were more at the time actually working on individual parts, there wouldn't need possibly as heavily an overhaul? I'm not sure really.. but I believe Grumm was with a group, doing the whole engine over? It was from the PAX panel so you'll have to look into it, just there's a lot planned obviously. I'm in favor of a more balanced or GPU intensive, to just where it's so heavily CPU dependent. Which is what's being worked on, I believe which should help lead into a new lighting engine.
I'm still thankful to Notch for making this game, otherwise people would be doing something else.
also how can i "still" be negative about something i have never posted about previously and in fact am in favor of
some people :-P
Ok, well if i... no WE misinterpreting something (because everyone who replied to your post were saying the same thing) why not try to re-explain yourself and be more careful with how you word things. Otherwise it just looks like a half assed attempt to cover something you actually meant...
also
"why are we still = why are you still"... get it? -_^
I heard it from the watchtower thread (popular around May). The thread was liked by over 96%, had about 200 people voting yes, and somebody said that it would be good, but Mojang would never implement it because it was less than 98% and 1,000 votes. Somebody than said it could be if the thread was advertised. I'll find the link, and the two people seemed like they wern't lying.
I heard it from the watchtower thread (popular around May). The thread was liked by over 96%, had about 200 people voting yes, and somebody said that it would be good, but Mojang would never implement it because it was less than 98% and 1,000 votes. Somebody than said it could be if the thread was advertised. I'll find the link, and the two people seemed like they wern't lying.
It's bull. Mojang implements what they want when they want. They don't care how much support something has.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Mostly moved on. May check back a few times a year.
It's bull. Mojang implements what they want when they want. They don't care how much support something has.
I actually didn't really believe it, just wanted to see if the people here knew if that was a real tweet. Oh well, eventually I think this will be implemented.
well in that case, let's hope that mojang would also think colored glass would be cool enough to want to implement. -_^
I'm sure they think it's cool enough, but I don't know if they'd want to bother coding the colored light. I know the colored glass itself is at least probable with the terrain.png issues out of the way. We've just got to worry about Mojang's short attention span for it to actually get done.
I actually didn't really believe it, just wanted to see if the people here knew if that was a real tweet. Oh well, eventually I think this will be implemented.
Supporters do actually help the idea noticed via tweets, but beyond that it's subject to Mojang's whims.
Mojang doesn't have to add colored lights for now. They could just add colored sand and glass in 1.5 then colored light in later updates. Colored glass has so much potential uses even without colored light.
Mojang doesn't have to add colored lights for now. They could just add colored sand and glass in 1.5 then colored light in later updates. Colored glass has so much potential uses even without colored light.
Yes I agree. The main point of this topic is essentially colored glass; hense the name Colored Glass!
Colored light is something I would like to see eventually but I understand the difficulties of it's implementation right now and am willing to wait for it. I am not nessesarily set on colored sand either, it was just my solution to the crafting possibilities. There are other suggestions that I listed in the OP that I feel are just as fitting or better than my suggestion. You should check them out
i havent misinterpreted anything, i have no need to re explain myself as it was perfectly clear in the 1st post, I dont understand what is hard to grasp here lol
what you quoted means 2 completely different things so no it doesnt = that, at all.
i only got a notification about yours so unaware of others. now looking over at the replies it seems the other guy perfectly understood what i was saying and would seem to take a pop at you in the process lol
that is the only other reply to me, so what is this "everyone who replied to me said the same thing" so not only did you not understand the 1st post you are now lying and suggesting i do something which you are clearly not doing yourself lol
anyway i suggest re reading the 2 posts and then your replies before you make any rash reply to this and make yourself look even more foolish
uh, excuse me???...why are you so hostile?
I was trying to be nice and give you a chance to rephrase or explain your comment in the event that I may have misinterpreted your meaning and I'm sorry if you took that the wrong way; but once you belittle me and call me a lire, I wont stand for it.
The OP does realize that the current "colored lighting" in Minecraft (blue light from the moon, orange from torches, etc) is all read from a texture file that is just a gradient that goes from black-blue-yellow-red? The current engine doesn't really support any RGB blending algorithms, it is just a quick and dirty trick of applying a transparent gradient over a blocks texture. It is why mods like RedPower2 cannot get colored lighting to work in game (for RP2's case, the lumar lamps). The videos you have linked are rather misleading as well, take the two videos by Theoneandonlyflexo, that was all done before Notch implemented the current lighting system that switched over to the transparent texture overlay method (some of the videos later on are newer, but they are not stable at all and show a lot of performance issues, basically if you look at the videos after the lighting engine changed, what he was able to do drastically worsened), what Nocte is showing off in his video isn't anything new since that is more or less using the same system already in place.
The next thing I got to point is your talk about about being able to reduce texture size with colored sand by comparing it to biomes. "Much like how the biomes change the color of grass and leaves, both can wool and sand. Thus all blocks or future blocks that are craft able from sand or wool could be done in the same way; being colored entirely in code and decreasing the textures needed for the blocks." Biomes add a texture overlay similar to current lighting, from a gradient texture file. Blocks like wool, which come in a variety of colors, actually have separate textures for each color variation. Forcing a change on wool blocks to follow a system of gradient overlays like biome colors is a poor idea that would cause a lot of issues with texture artists and adventure map makers since that would mean that wool blocks couldn't be reused for different purposes (I've seen texture packs that change wool blocks into dotted lines for a map, etc).
The other reason this is still a really bad idea is that separate textures isn't that bad a thing, since most block textures are on the same sheet, what is bad is that you are adding extra meta data to a block. Wool is already the most memory intensive block since it has meta data to determine several colors, you add that for sand and then glass and you start having issues of having too many blocks with high amounts of stored data. This inflates the size of save files, increases time to load chunks, etc. While it is fine for Mods to have data intensive blocks, since they are optional, the Mojang development team has to keep in mind performance for low end users.
Your point on adding color lighting to the game not causing an increase in lag is something I find funny as well since Minecraft, as it stands, suffers from major issues with lighting updates. The main reason why the reworked lighting engine by Dinnerbone hasn't been released was that chunks loading in were taking upwards of five minutes to load and the Nether has been excessively laggy for several updates now because of lighting updates from fire and lava. Currently having a redstone system that blinks the glowstone lamps on and off can quickly bring a machine running a SSP game or even a decent server running a SMP game to its knees, often resulting in a crash. So yeah, lighting updates in Minecraft cause excessive lag, adding in extra variables for colored lighting would make that problem worse.
Your point on Dinnerbone's tweet on the engine fix supporting fancy lighting controls, as he put it, is not in regards to colored lighting at all. Demonstrations in the form of pictures after that tweet show what he meant was that light is now directional and does not bleed through walls (as well as blocks like the furnace emitting light from only one face).
For colored lighting to be actually implemented, it would require the lighting engine to be completely rewritten from scratch, and seeing that the current engine is still filled with problems that they are trying to patch out, even with substantially rewriting parts of current system to (unsuccessfully so far) fix those issues. A complete rewrite would from the ground up would probably be a year long project (the current patching has taken four months so far and the rendering rewrite has taken a year even with someone doing dedicated work for it). Yeah it is possible that color lighting could be done, but the time it would take to add a very small feature (because honestly, lets say they did all that work to get it implemented, they would then have to add several new items into the game to even get any good use out of it themselves).
So, for your last two points:
1) No, colored lighting isn't being done in vanilla like you think it is, and no, no mods on the current system have done colored lighting. A few have played around with it without success and no mods have been released that have been able to pull it off.
2) Colored glass is easy to do, it is a colored transparency, not sure why this is such an exciting thing. If Dinnerbone and Jeb added it, it wouldn't mean colored lighting was on the way.
3) If I am not mistaken, theoneandonlyflexo abandoned modding seven months ago and none of his source code was released... so I am not sure why this is even a thing. Going through his videos for content pertaining to the current light system, there is a lot of stuttering, nothing is stable and it just seems like simple lightmap manipulations, not what you are looking for.
Also, you guys may want to ease up, seems like you are ticking off the Mojang team with the constant tweets about this thread.
If what Jeb and Dinnerbone keeps repeating to people is anything to listen to (badgering a request over and over to them makes them more and more likely to ignore it out right, hell they even had to bring this up at PAX) and Dinnerbone who is in charge of the lighting system just reaffirmed today that it is not possible, I think it is time to give it a rest.
---
I'm also kind of unsure why Mojang has to add colored glass at all, those who followed their PAX conference would know that they are more or less not bothering with content that is already being handled by mods. Their goal right now is to improve current areas of the game (The Nether, The End, fleshing out the world) and get the API out, they more or less admitted that the majority of future content will be left up to mod developers. I also really can't blame them for not wanting to add content that is covered by several different mods since anytime they add a feature similar to an already established mod, they end up catching a lot of flak from this community.
---
Had some more time to reread some of this thread (71 pages is a tad much, especially with the majority of the posts equates to "WHY ISN'T THIS IN THE GAME YET?!?") and the attitude towards the developers is surprisingly hostile and disrestpectful at times. Sure I will admit that I have a lot of issues with how the game was programmed and I wish that Notch had more of a practiced, standardized coding experience (instead of being self taught.. He admitted himself in his blog that he has been told upfront by major companies that the way he codes is irregular and it makes having him work in a team an issue since it isn't clear what he is doing to others, and he agrees with that assement), but to read things like calling Dinnerbone's a coward (for example:
also the lighting system is being re written anyways so I think instead of just pathetically fixing it with their tail behind their legs they might as well make it actually better.
).
The other major thing I am noticing is this thread is very much an echo chamber, everyone keeps repeating false information/little understanding on how MC handles light, ideas on implementation that really don't work if you look at the engine and no one is even bothering to play devil's advocate and dare give good reasons on why this is probably not going to happen.. I mean, every time someone mentions a tweet from Dinnerbone regarding changes to the lighting engine, it seems like everyone jumps up and goes "OH! He must be secretly adding in colored lighting, I don't care if that would be an extreme overhaul impossible to pull off in the time frame hes been coding this AND working on other features, wait you are telling me that colored lighting would require a drastic change to things, no I'm going to ignore that and say that it isn't that big a deal to implement".
Optimism is good and all, but it seems like this thread has taken that to an extreme approach and is covering their eyes and ears to reasonable expectations and feasible outcomes. What is probably going to happen is the lighting engine will ship with 1.5, there will be no colored lighting, people will begin to be upset, people will begin badgering Dinnerbone and Jeb about this again, Dinnerbone will again say no as he has quoted even himself on telling people from this specific thread no over and over (and pointing out that no one here is listening, see the tweet quoted above), then people will get hurt feelings, feel betrayed and begin to complain and rage.
Everyone really just needs to settle the hell down, Dinnerbone has said he has seen this thread multiple times, he has given his answer, from his own words he has said no, and from his own words he has said he specifically doesn't do things people badger him to implement (see PAX and his own twitter, I'll maybe dig up the exact quote later). The best case scenario for the people in favor of this is shutting up, posting "I support" in this thread isn't going to help, Mojang doesn't work on a petition system. If Dinnerbone decides to do colored lighting, he will do it on his own time and not by the pushing of a lot of people who have little understanding of the issues going on with the lighting engine, I mean hell, the poor guy is already ripping his hair out just trying to get the current bugs squashed, leave the poor guy alone.
--
I just want to say, I am not trying to bash on the OP or this thread, it is just really boggling my mind reading through it, from poor information, to unrealistic expectations, and I just thought I should throw out some reasons on why people shouldn't be getting their hopes so high and I don't want to see another major war erupt if this doesn't happen.
There is a huge technical issue with colored glass. Minecraft (like most 3D games) uses a Z buffer to sort what gets shown and what gets hidden behind other objects. This works fine for solid pixels, but once you introduce transparency you have a problem, because the transparent pixels must show whatever pixel is behind them. Most developers solve this by drawing all solid pixels first, then coming back and drawing the transparent pixels on top. This works ok for 90% of circumstances where you only have 1 layer of transparent pixel in front of solid pixels. But minecraft is not the 90% because you know people would want to be able to stack colored glass and look through a rainbow. When you have many layers of transparent pixels, sorting which one to draw in what order becomes important and hard. You have to sort because adding transparent colors ( alpha compositing for technical nerds ) is order dependent. If you draw red above green you get a different color than if you drew green above red. I've implemented a rudimentary 3D engine in java that could do perfect transparency in a Z buffer, but it slows to under 5FPS as soon as you get a significant number of transparent pixels on the screen because I have to place all transparent pixels in a list and then sort that list every frame, and sorting is a painful process.
TL;DR: Colored glass with transparency either looks bad or runs slow. or both.
This is very interesting. The topic just received 5 more dislikes in the pole within the past 8 hours (went from13 to 18 dislikes in less than a day) and the past 3 posters have been insisting very similar negative critiques of the topic. Though I appreciate the critiques and suggestions since I don't consider my and other contributor’s understandings and proposals that has been shared in this topic to be perfect, I can't help but speculate that this is a bit fishy...
I find it hard to believe that 5 people with very similar negative opinions on the suggestion commented and voted one after the other.
So what I hope is going on, is that these posts are ults or representatives from Mojang. This would indicate that the purpose of this thread; empowering Minecraft fans and their feedback to have an impact among the community and Mojang, was successful. I think that would be very exciting news. But if not, and if these comments are indeed legitimate, I am also very open to discuss the criticisms listed.
However I am afraid of the potential that these comments may be insincere and a troll attempt either by someone or a group of people out of spite or connected to the argument between Eversorgod and I. (which wouldn't be too far-fetched considering his history with arguments on the forums.)
So before I begin to comment on these critiques in the defense for colored glass and the community, I must first be sure of these comments' legitimacies. I don’t mean any disrespect, EnzerDeLeo since I found your arguments very compelling and something that will help answer many questions we all had such as, "WHY ISN'T THIS IN THE GAME YET?!?"... In light of the recent events on the thread, I have my reasons to suspect is all.
They need to rewrite that old ultra broken lightning system and add this amazing idea.
SUPPORT
Hope Majong will be integrated this in an further Version !
So at 800 yes votes and 98.42% voting yes it's close to it.
If there were more at the time actually working on individual parts, there wouldn't need possibly as heavily an overhaul? I'm not sure really.. but I believe Grumm was with a group, doing the whole engine over? It was from the PAX panel so you'll have to look into it, just there's a lot planned obviously. I'm in favor of a more balanced or GPU intensive, to just where it's so heavily CPU dependent. Which is what's being worked on, I believe which should help lead into a new lighting engine.
I'm still thankful to Notch for making this game, otherwise people would be doing something else.
Ok, well if i... no WE misinterpreting something (because everyone who replied to your post were saying the same thing) why not try to re-explain yourself and be more careful with how you word things. Otherwise it just looks like a half assed attempt to cover something you actually meant...
also
"why are we still = why are you still"... get it? -_^
~Epic Space Milk Muffin
I heard it from the watchtower thread (popular around May). The thread was liked by over 96%, had about 200 people voting yes, and somebody said that it would be good, but Mojang would never implement it because it was less than 98% and 1,000 votes. Somebody than said it could be if the thread was advertised. I'll find the link, and the two people seemed like they wern't lying.
EDIT: Here is the page it starts on, page 11: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/998057-watchtowers-in-ocean-biomes-liked-by-over-90-now-with-shematic/page__st__200
It ends on 13. They say something about jeb's twitter saying this.
Mostly moved on. May check back a few times a year.
~Epic Space Milk Muffin
I actually didn't really believe it, just wanted to see if the people here knew if that was a real tweet. Oh well, eventually I think this will be implemented.
Supporters do actually help the idea noticed via tweets, but beyond that it's subject to Mojang's whims.
Mostly moved on. May check back a few times a year.
Yes I agree. The main point of this topic is essentially colored glass; hense the name Colored Glass!
Colored light is something I would like to see eventually but I understand the difficulties of it's implementation right now and am willing to wait for it. I am not nessesarily set on colored sand either, it was just my solution to the crafting possibilities. There are other suggestions that I listed in the OP that I feel are just as fitting or better than my suggestion. You should check them out
uh, excuse me???...why are you so hostile?
I was trying to be nice and give you a chance to rephrase or explain your comment in the event that I may have misinterpreted your meaning and I'm sorry if you took that the wrong way; but once you belittle me and call me a lire, I wont stand for it.
Please leave my thread.
~Epic Space Milk Muffin
The next thing I got to point is your talk about about being able to reduce texture size with colored sand by comparing it to biomes. "Much like how the biomes change the color of grass and leaves, both can wool and sand. Thus all blocks or future blocks that are craft able from sand or wool could be done in the same way; being colored entirely in code and decreasing the textures needed for the blocks." Biomes add a texture overlay similar to current lighting, from a gradient texture file. Blocks like wool, which come in a variety of colors, actually have separate textures for each color variation. Forcing a change on wool blocks to follow a system of gradient overlays like biome colors is a poor idea that would cause a lot of issues with texture artists and adventure map makers since that would mean that wool blocks couldn't be reused for different purposes (I've seen texture packs that change wool blocks into dotted lines for a map, etc).
The other reason this is still a really bad idea is that separate textures isn't that bad a thing, since most block textures are on the same sheet, what is bad is that you are adding extra meta data to a block. Wool is already the most memory intensive block since it has meta data to determine several colors, you add that for sand and then glass and you start having issues of having too many blocks with high amounts of stored data. This inflates the size of save files, increases time to load chunks, etc. While it is fine for Mods to have data intensive blocks, since they are optional, the Mojang development team has to keep in mind performance for low end users.
Your point on adding color lighting to the game not causing an increase in lag is something I find funny as well since Minecraft, as it stands, suffers from major issues with lighting updates. The main reason why the reworked lighting engine by Dinnerbone hasn't been released was that chunks loading in were taking upwards of five minutes to load and the Nether has been excessively laggy for several updates now because of lighting updates from fire and lava. Currently having a redstone system that blinks the glowstone lamps on and off can quickly bring a machine running a SSP game or even a decent server running a SMP game to its knees, often resulting in a crash. So yeah, lighting updates in Minecraft cause excessive lag, adding in extra variables for colored lighting would make that problem worse.
Your point on Dinnerbone's tweet on the engine fix supporting fancy lighting controls, as he put it, is not in regards to colored lighting at all. Demonstrations in the form of pictures after that tweet show what he meant was that light is now directional and does not bleed through walls (as well as blocks like the furnace emitting light from only one face).
For colored lighting to be actually implemented, it would require the lighting engine to be completely rewritten from scratch, and seeing that the current engine is still filled with problems that they are trying to patch out, even with substantially rewriting parts of current system to (unsuccessfully so far) fix those issues. A complete rewrite would from the ground up would probably be a year long project (the current patching has taken four months so far and the rendering rewrite has taken a year even with someone doing dedicated work for it). Yeah it is possible that color lighting could be done, but the time it would take to add a very small feature (because honestly, lets say they did all that work to get it implemented, they would then have to add several new items into the game to even get any good use out of it themselves).
So, for your last two points:
1) No, colored lighting isn't being done in vanilla like you think it is, and no, no mods on the current system have done colored lighting. A few have played around with it without success and no mods have been released that have been able to pull it off.
2) Colored glass is easy to do, it is a colored transparency, not sure why this is such an exciting thing. If Dinnerbone and Jeb added it, it wouldn't mean colored lighting was on the way.
3) If I am not mistaken, theoneandonlyflexo abandoned modding seven months ago and none of his source code was released... so I am not sure why this is even a thing. Going through his videos for content pertaining to the current light system, there is a lot of stuttering, nothing is stable and it just seems like simple lightmap manipulations, not what you are looking for.
Also, you guys may want to ease up, seems like you are ticking off the Mojang team with the constant tweets about this thread.
https://twitter.com/...219652471980032
If what Jeb and Dinnerbone keeps repeating to people is anything to listen to (badgering a request over and over to them makes them more and more likely to ignore it out right, hell they even had to bring this up at PAX) and Dinnerbone who is in charge of the lighting system just reaffirmed today that it is not possible, I think it is time to give it a rest.
---
I'm also kind of unsure why Mojang has to add colored glass at all, those who followed their PAX conference would know that they are more or less not bothering with content that is already being handled by mods. Their goal right now is to improve current areas of the game (The Nether, The End, fleshing out the world) and get the API out, they more or less admitted that the majority of future content will be left up to mod developers. I also really can't blame them for not wanting to add content that is covered by several different mods since anytime they add a feature similar to an already established mod, they end up catching a lot of flak from this community.
---
Had some more time to reread some of this thread (71 pages is a tad much, especially with the majority of the posts equates to "WHY ISN'T THIS IN THE GAME YET?!?") and the attitude towards the developers is surprisingly hostile and disrestpectful at times. Sure I will admit that I have a lot of issues with how the game was programmed and I wish that Notch had more of a practiced, standardized coding experience (instead of being self taught.. He admitted himself in his blog that he has been told upfront by major companies that the way he codes is irregular and it makes having him work in a team an issue since it isn't clear what he is doing to others, and he agrees with that assement), but to read things like calling Dinnerbone's a coward (for example:).
The other major thing I am noticing is this thread is very much an echo chamber, everyone keeps repeating false information/little understanding on how MC handles light, ideas on implementation that really don't work if you look at the engine and no one is even bothering to play devil's advocate and dare give good reasons on why this is probably not going to happen.. I mean, every time someone mentions a tweet from Dinnerbone regarding changes to the lighting engine, it seems like everyone jumps up and goes "OH! He must be secretly adding in colored lighting, I don't care if that would be an extreme overhaul impossible to pull off in the time frame hes been coding this AND working on other features, wait you are telling me that colored lighting would require a drastic change to things, no I'm going to ignore that and say that it isn't that big a deal to implement".
Optimism is good and all, but it seems like this thread has taken that to an extreme approach and is covering their eyes and ears to reasonable expectations and feasible outcomes. What is probably going to happen is the lighting engine will ship with 1.5, there will be no colored lighting, people will begin to be upset, people will begin badgering Dinnerbone and Jeb about this again, Dinnerbone will again say no as he has quoted even himself on telling people from this specific thread no over and over (and pointing out that no one here is listening, see the tweet quoted above), then people will get hurt feelings, feel betrayed and begin to complain and rage.
Everyone really just needs to settle the hell down, Dinnerbone has said he has seen this thread multiple times, he has given his answer, from his own words he has said no, and from his own words he has said he specifically doesn't do things people badger him to implement (see PAX and his own twitter, I'll maybe dig up the exact quote later). The best case scenario for the people in favor of this is shutting up, posting "I support" in this thread isn't going to help, Mojang doesn't work on a petition system. If Dinnerbone decides to do colored lighting, he will do it on his own time and not by the pushing of a lot of people who have little understanding of the issues going on with the lighting engine, I mean hell, the poor guy is already ripping his hair out just trying to get the current bugs squashed, leave the poor guy alone.
--
I just want to say, I am not trying to bash on the OP or this thread, it is just really boggling my mind reading through it, from poor information, to unrealistic expectations, and I just thought I should throw out some reasons on why people shouldn't be getting their hopes so high and I don't want to see another major war erupt if this doesn't happen.
TL;DR: Colored glass with transparency either looks bad or runs slow. or both.
I find it hard to believe that 5 people with very similar negative opinions on the suggestion commented and voted one after the other.
So what I hope is going on, is that these posts are ults or representatives from Mojang. This would indicate that the purpose of this thread; empowering Minecraft fans and their feedback to have an impact among the community and Mojang, was successful. I think that would be very exciting news. But if not, and if these comments are indeed legitimate, I am also very open to discuss the criticisms listed.
However I am afraid of the potential that these comments may be insincere and a troll attempt either by someone or a group of people out of spite or connected to the argument between Eversorgod and I. (which wouldn't be too far-fetched considering his history with arguments on the forums.)
So before I begin to comment on these critiques in the defense for colored glass and the community, I must first be sure of these comments' legitimacies. I don’t mean any disrespect, EnzerDeLeo since I found your arguments very compelling and something that will help answer many questions we all had such as, "WHY ISN'T THIS IN THE GAME YET?!?"... In light of the recent events on the thread, I have my reasons to suspect is all.
~Epic Space Milk Muffin