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    posted a message on Some simple ideas for making mc terrain much more interesting

    One of the most common reasons people cited for Minecraft beta terrain being more 'interesting' than the release version was that the release version had "removed floating islands and overhangs." However these features have never been 'removed', they still generate perfectly well and commonly in Savannah M biomes. The problem is just that this biome is as rare as hen's teeth, giving the impression that these landmarks have been 'removed'. I think there's a few things Mojang could do to make the terrain way more interesting without totally overhauling the generator -


    -make Savannah M biomes more common

    -add Savanna M-like biomes to all other biomes (except plains of course)

    -make beaches wider and flatter (so that they actually look like beaches)

    -make plains look more like plains (remove all those ugly little ponds all over the place and flatten them somewhat)


    And before people cry out "but lagggg!"...is there any Mojang policy in place that Minecraft must be able to run on a toaster? If there is, they haven't been doing a very good job at it so far.

    Posted in: Suggestions
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    posted a message on Shaders?

    I'm not sure what you mean by "not effect" if you don't mean framerate...you'll have to get more specific. Like I said, any shaderpack will significantly lower framerate so if your fps is fine idk what you mean sorry. I do know the ones that ''least effect" performance are those which add the least shadows and water reflections; and I'm someone who usually always plays with shaders, so I'm fairly knowledgeable about them.

    Posted in: Mods Discussion
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    posted a message on Shaders?

    ANY minecraft shaderpack will kill, crush, and destroy your fps. If you really love shaders you have to either get used to the lower fps or get a better pc. However the ones I've found that make the least impact (probably because they change the vanilla shadows the least) are -


    -Chocopic lite

    -Conquest of the sun

    Posted in: Mods Discussion
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    posted a message on Realistic Terrain Generation (RTG) — Realistic Biomes, Huge Mountains, Custom Trees, Truly Flat Terrain, Breathtaking Landscapes

    Hi WhichOnesPink,


    Remember that bug I had a while back where RTG would render random "bald" chunks with no vegetation? At the time I remember we thought the most likely culprit was an incompatibility with Optifine. Well I can happily confirm that the last 2 updates seem to have fixed this issue - I have done 50,000+ block creative flyovers with RTG *and* Optifine, plus a bunch of other mods and I've seen no sign of this issue. Awesome! This remains one of my all time favourite mods. Keep up the fantastic work!

    Posted in: Minecraft Mods
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    posted a message on How can I install mods for older versions using the new launcher? (Version 1.1)

    Go to "Launch Options" at the top of the page and then +Add New. After that it's the same as before, install the correct version of Forge and select it.

    Posted in: Mods Discussion
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    posted a message on Vonafarth - RPG realism! v0.48.5

    Your pack does not show up in minecraft. Please fix! Looks promising though.

    Posted in: Resource Packs
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    posted a message on Realistic Terrain Generation (RTG) — Realistic Biomes, Huge Mountains, Custom Trees, Truly Flat Terrain, Breathtaking Landscapes
    Quote from TaigaBunny»



    Well I just tried and my modpack is pretty much completely unplayable sans Optifine even though I have a great PC (around 16 fps vs 40-120 fps with Optifine) but I will test it with just those four mods (rtg, climate control, ebxl, bop) and see how it goes.




    Ok so I tested with just 5 mods - RTG, CC, EBXL, BOP, Fastcraft. NO Optifine. I did a creative flyover of 10000 blocks and didn't notice any bald chunks. So I can say it *might* be related to Optifine. However I have to warn you I also did a creative flyover after removing Journeymap *before* removing Optifine and got no bald chunks, yet boom, the bug happened within the first few minutes of actual gameplay. This bald bug seems so random and doesn't seem to be triggered by anything I do arrrgh.

    For now I think I'll just roll back to V1.1.0. I'm a little worried because I know you said it has serious issues, but I never noticed this particular bug before I upgraded to 1.1.1.


    Also - please never ever "fix" the rivers running through mountain ranges! This is one of the most incredible features of RTG to me and I would never be upgrading if that got removed. The thing I like most about this mod is that it does not confuse "realistic" for "boring, predictable and mundane".

    Posted in: Minecraft Mods
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    posted a message on Sonic Ether's Unbelievable Shaders [compatible with Minecraft 1.12.2 via OptiFine]
    Quote from jcm2606»

    Reflective water in HL2 if I remember correctly were done using planar reflections; basically re-rendering the world a second time and using maths to "flip" it based on the surface normal (which direction the surface is facing). This was viable because HL2 was using a forward renderer, used a lot of simple rendering techniques, baked lighting, and overall was just easy to render, so they could afford it. SEUS, or any game that uses a deferred renderer for that matter, just cannot naively re-render the world a second time; I wish they could, but they can't. Even though it's been 15 years since then, the techniques we have now produce the same or at least similar quality, but cost much, much, much, much, MUCH more in frame time to render because the way things are done have changed dramatically since then.

    Back then most games used baked lighting; the developers use physically-accurate and computationally expensive methods of computing lighting such as photon mapping or ray-marching, write the results out to an image (called the light map) and package that with the game. Here you have all this gorgeous lighting that is physically accurate, but is 100% static and cannot change without having to do everything again (which for a large scene can take hours to re-render the light maps). Then when it comes time to render the scene, take the diffuse map (colour of the surface) and the light map and blend them together (naive way is just multiply them together) and voila, lit surface. Today's games use a mixture of this and dynamic shadow maps; they use this for large scene-wide lighting and baked global illumination, things which we cannot do in real-time currently (for every single game imaginable, yes we have SEUS' GI, but that isn't viable for other games and has it's own flaws and caveats), and they use dynamic shadow maps for actual shadows.

    Games nowadays are too expensive to render once, let alone twice, let alone more times. So we cannot just do re-render the scene again and call it a day. How do we do reflections? We use crude approximations (screen-space reflections) and fake the rest. SEUS, and any shader pack with reflections, use screen-space reflections to reflect things on-screen; we use a bit of maths to shoot a "bullet" into the scene, record where it lands, then reflect the "bullet" off and record where it lands again, do a bit of maths on that to refine our sample, then use that as the reflection. At least that's the gist of it. This gives us a dynamic reflection without having to re-render the scene, because everything is already there ready to sample on-screen. The problem is what we're sampling is on-screen, so we cannot reflect things off-screen; this is why with SEUS when you're looking at something, it's reflected; look away a bit, maybe move the camera so whatever we're reflecting is now off-screen up a bit, and the reflection disappears. Now you can't just go from a reflection to nothing, that'll look really weird, so SEUS and other packs actually substitute what SHOULD be there for the sky, to at least give SOMETHING to reflect. For the most part the sky's code is using the pixel's position, so using some maths we can approximate what the sky would be should it be reflected.

    There are other ways of doing the re-rendering; Epic have recently added planar reflections to Unreal Engine 4.12, it works by using some maths and logic to only render what logically should be rendered by measuring the distance from the plane itself to whatever is being reflected; only things within a certain distance are reflected, and how many things are reflected impacts performance. Additionally, if I remember correctly, they also skip dynamic lighting for the reflected objects and just fall back onto "global" lighting coming from a skylight in the scene or whatever.

    Even though the end product with SEUS and HL2 LOOK identical, it doesn't mean they ARE done identically. Both use very different methods of achieving the same thing, and hence both impact performance VERY differently.



    Thanks for the detailed and informative reply! I actually just replayed HL2 (had not played it for yonks) skeptical that such an ancient game would have dynamic shading. Even as a non expert I could instantly tell that most of it is all pre-baked and the Source engine simply flips objects to create the "reflections" haha - but like I said, my brother doesn't play Minecraft, he thinks I'm a weirdo for getting exited over 100 fps for "that bad graphics game" lol.


    I would disagree that the reflections in HL2 and SEUS look identical though. The SEUS reflections actually look as if they are bouncing off the water, the HL2 reflections look like they are sitting underneath the water and to me look very frozen, dead and "fake" compared to the SEUS ones. I certainly prefer the look of SEUS, can't say I prefer the hardware requirements, but I guess you get what you pay for.

    Posted in: Minecraft Mods
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    posted a message on Please read THIS before making a suggestion. (v2.0)

    Well an example of one that does not leave a clear explanation would be this: a recent thread about adding new food items the first reply the person got was:


    "What's the point of this?" . Quote/Unquote


    One sign of immaturity is not being secure within oneself, and having to get it artificially by building oneself up in comparison to others.


    A comment such as "What's the point of this?" adds zero to the discussion. Does is help the person make more valuable suggestions in the future? No. Does it explain why a suggestion is poor? No? Does it help the person who wrote it feel superior to another for a minute? I guess so.


    "the point of it" was someone else trying to rub it in that another's suggestion wasn't great so they could feel cool or whatever.


    fyi I did not support this particular suggestion either.

    Posted in: Suggestions
  • 2

    posted a message on Please read THIS before making a suggestion. (v2.0)
    Quote from MOREgaming590»


    I often think that too, but I then understand the other people's negative criticism when I find myself not liking another suggestion. If a suggestion is bad, then people saying it's bad looks mean, but it's not, it's just honest. There's not really much other way of expressing whether you support or not, just seeing the words 'No Support' make me sad just by looking at them, but most of the time it's deserved.
    And removing the suggestions forum is a terrible idea. What would people do without being able to share their ideas to people about Minecraft? Any decent ... wait I forgot what I was going to say.
    People don't 'put others down', they give honest feedback and most of the time tell them why the suggestion is bad, if it is bad. IF it's a good suggestion then it can become a great suggestion, all because of feedback. It's not just 'yes, good idea, I support' or 'nope, terrible idea, no support, go die', it's more detailed.




    There is a way to be honest without being mean. Simply STATE your reasoning as to why the suggestion would not be not appropriate for vanilla minecraft, tell us WHY it would not fit, lay off the snarky comments that anyone with half a brain can tell are designed to put the OP down and make them feel insecure and inflate the commenter's ego and serve so other purpose in the discussion.


    I am sorry but most of what I see here is not debate but rather snark. I am NOT suggesting here we need be all kittens and rainbows and agree with every suggestion. No I do not see stuff like "go die" but I do see stuff like "Seriously? omg, that is this last thing we need" and " get a grip, suggestion X is just never gonna be supported" and "no just no" and "here we go again" none of which are rational statements and none of which will help those who make bad suggestions make better ones. More than likely they just leave the person perplexed as to why people didn't like their suggestion. In many cases the person obviously put a lot of effort into thinking up their suggestion, it's just that it doesn't add anything existing features don't already give, or it would cause unbalanced gameplay or it wouldn't fit with MC's theme.

    I think this forum should ideally have a suggestions forum, but if people are not able to do so in an 80 years out of date manner which just bashes down everything that is not official and traditional and popular than I think it would be better to have no suggestions forum at all.

    Posted in: Suggestions
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