From what I can tell, Pocket Planes generate all at once really fast, rather than 'chunking' (possibly due to odd chunk behaviors), causing the game to freeze while it sorts itself out.
Right on the money. Minecraft's chunk generation system is great for an infinite world, but causes serious difficulties when generating bounded areas. I'd bet anything that the Outer Lands doesn't use standard chunking either.
The version of the pocket plane generation code that made it into 1.1.6 (which was never intended to be used!) is horribly unoptimized - I hadn't even made it run as a separate thread.
a wing of your house dedicated to THE GREAT AND TERRIBLE MEAT CLOUD would just be amazing.
Because the pocket planes have bounded tops, I've implemented the weather systems using clouds as actual blocks. With the right tool you can pick up and move them, so yes, your dreams of a meat-cloud wing may come to fruition.
Hah, whoops, looks like I left more of the pocket plane code in than I'd thought. There's so much more coming down the pipeline, though, including a magical weather system. With the right (wrong?) aspects, your pocket plane can quite literally rain fire, poison, chunks of flesh, or even taint. And that's not even getting into the lightning bolts which transform blocks into uncontrolled golems...
Did my eyes deceive me but did that golem just turn into a eldritch guardian?!
Hehehe... leaving a voidling golem without a core for too long will cause some interesting changes, yes. Usually they'll last 5-10 minutes before pupation, and you'll get some advance warning. Voidlings were intended to be a slightly unreliable medium-term fighting force - they last long enough that you can use them to prepare for a boss fight, they have better stats than any other golem, and they follow you into combat.
If you like their aesthetics or just want workers with great stats, adding a core does render them permanently safe.
I just uploaded a hotfix, 1.1.6, which should hopefully address some of the worst issues:
Fixed vortex attenuator crashing servers
Fixed teleological recombinator trying to fuse a node with itself
Removed accidental client-side wisp spawns
Golem animation powder must be thrown into the void one at a time. This is an inherent limitation in Minecraft - it only records a player's name if they throw the item with the Q key, not if they drop a stack.
Planar vortex can no longer be destroyed by explosions
1.1.5 has been released! You can see the full changelog in the original post, but some of the highlights include a new method of crafting, requested features such as togglable Spider Climb, and fixes for common bugs like the Alchemite crash.
This release does not include the ability to generate a pocket plane, but stay tuned for 1.2!
Given that there's still a lot of work to do on pocket plane generation, I'm planning on releasing everything *but* that in version 1.1.5 - currently going through bugtesting. This update will include many bugfixes as well as the new gadgets I've teased.
I'm back to working on 1.2 after real life decided to interfere for a few weeks. No new teasers yet, but the pocket plane mixing algorithm is producing much smoother terrain and should be ready Soontm.
That will make certain aspect difficult to do through...
That's true. I should have mentioned that the Recombinator defaults to using the "lowest" available aspect - the closest to primal - if possible. It would preferentially combine all Aqua and Terra before creating Herba and Limus.
A screenshot of the Teleological Recombinator in action:
The specifics of its operation have changed a bit since the last teaser. The Recombinator randomly selects an aspect from nearby nodes, checks whether it can be combined with any aspect in the node immediately beneath it, and if so it drains one point of vis from the victim node. One point of vis from the primary node is then transformed to the new compound aspect. (For example, if the node underneath the Recombinator contained Ordo and Perditio and it tried to drain a pure Ignis node, it might transform one point of Ordo into Potentia or one point of Perditio into Gelum.)
It no longer accepts essentia to bias its results - instead, if you're aiming for a specific aspect you'll have to be clever about which secondary nodes you feed to the primary. Think of it as a higher-stakes version of mana bean breeding!
More like a new body really, to abandon flesh and its weakness
Self-infusion is the furthest I'm planning to go down that road - anything more would be unbalanced. That being said, one of my early ideas for endgame gadgets involved crawling into a curative vat, turning on a special transmitter, and abandoning your own senses to remote-control a much larger golem (in fact, a reverse-engineered version of the eldritch construct). Maybe I'll take another look at that someday.
Unfortunately it looks like the 1.2 release is still at least a couple weeks out - things have gotten fairly interesting for me career-wise at this point. To help tide you over, here's a minor teaser.
Many novice thaumaturges wonder why you can't simply build a wand out of shards - after all, every advanced core design features one or more in its construction. More experienced sorts know that shards are incapable of absorbing additional magic and are only used to amplify the primary material's elemental characteristics. But the most elite thaumaturges, those who have successfully opened an aura node, wonder what would happen if a crystalline wand were directly exposed to the Void...
The crystalline wand has a few unique traits. It is capable of storing tremendous amounts of vis - 250 of each aspect - but has no ability to ever be recharged and will crumble when its energy is expended. Its relatively low cost (once the appropriate infrastructure is in place) makes it a good candidate for inclusion in the emergency equipment chests every prepared minecrafter should keep, and hopefully its initial stock of vis will last long enough for one to recover a more durable wand from one's corpse. It may also allow one to craft objects for which a traditional wand would be inadequate...
Whoa, quite a number of suggestions to read through!
Modular creatures and self-transformation: While I love the idea of modular creature mechanics (and in fact have been playing around with something similar in Unity), Minecraft's clunky modeling and animation systems unfortunately make that sort of thing impractical.
Traveling into raw Void: An interesting idea, but I'm not sure I could do that dimension justice. It seems more appealing fluff-wise as an outer infinity which can only be comprehended by funneling a tiny fragment through aura nodes, or coalescing it into a physical dimension via the pocket plane process. That being said, I can certainly imagine sending the thaumic equivalent of a space probe into the Void, and who knows what it might return with...
Pocket planes as transport hubs: Activating a pocket plane focus saves your current position in the overworld; exiting the pocket plane returns you to that spot. The plane was designed to be used as a personal base/retreat/storage depot for its creator and anyone he decides to give an attuned focus to, not a method of long-distance transport. Azanor said that he has intended to implement portals for some time now, so I'd rather not step on any toes there.
Mental Matrices: I like the concept, but most of the examples don't seem particularly useful. What do you think about an advanced version of Instilled Loyalty which allows you to plug a golem core into an animal? (Arbitrary AI tasks can be applied to any creature which uses Minecraft's newer AI system - which unfortunately excludes things like spiders, squid, slimes, etc.) Perhaps a sufficiently intelligent critter could accept multiple sets of instructions... I'll have to think about the best way to implement this.
one thing that I haven't seen stated very clear is how big those nodemensions will be. is it dependant on the vis in the node? or random? or unified in boxes? or spheres?
A pocket plane is always spherical. Its size is determined by the total vis of its parent node and ranges between 32 and 128 blocks in radius.
Jokes aside, what would you say is left to do on the 1.2 roadmap? I'm not the type to ask for ETAs, but I am curious about the process. What's the most difficult part of the pocket-planes, code-wise?
The trickiest part of the process was developing a way of properly blending all the different terrain generation types. If you have a node that just contains, say, Terra, that's easy enough - use Minecraft's noise octave generators to produce layers of dirt and stone, add caves and ore pockets, draw a planar boundary sphere around it - but Thaumcraft players love building their ubernodes, and those might have all six primals and a dozen compound aspects. How do you create a dimension simultaneously based on light, meat, trees, and ice?
Right now I'm working on smoothing out that sort of scenario and giving each aspect at least one unique block or creature. Next up is structure generation (imagine a ravine studded with "teeth" or rings of bookshelves orbiting a throbbing column of brain matter), and then a few bugfixes will round out the process.
(On a more experimental note - as Minecraft isn't really set up for this sort of thing - I'm playing around with dynamic block registration so that special blocks can be created at runtime using vanilla blocks as a template. For example, the Lux/Corpus/Arbor/Gelum dimension above might generate pockets of glowing ice, edible torches, or trees with luminescent leaves which have a chance of dropping meaty fruit. No promises yet, but I'm very excited about the possibility of implementing something along these lines)
0
Right on the money. Minecraft's chunk generation system is great for an infinite world, but causes serious difficulties when generating bounded areas. I'd bet anything that the Outer Lands doesn't use standard chunking either.
The version of the pocket plane generation code that made it into 1.1.6 (which was never intended to be used!) is horribly unoptimized - I hadn't even made it run as a separate thread.
5
Because the pocket planes have bounded tops, I've implemented the weather systems using clouds as actual blocks. With the right tool you can pick up and move them, so yes, your dreams of a meat-cloud wing may come to fruition.
4
Hah, whoops, looks like I left more of the pocket plane code in than I'd thought. There's so much more coming down the pipeline, though, including a magical weather system. With the right (wrong?) aspects, your pocket plane can quite literally rain fire, poison, chunks of flesh, or even taint. And that's not even getting into the lightning bolts which transform blocks into uncontrolled golems...
1
Hehehe... leaving a voidling golem without a core for too long will cause some interesting changes, yes. Usually they'll last 5-10 minutes before pupation, and you'll get some advance warning. Voidlings were intended to be a slightly unreliable medium-term fighting force - they last long enough that you can use them to prepare for a boss fight, they have better stats than any other golem, and they follow you into combat.
If you like their aesthetics or just want workers with great stats, adding a core does render them permanently safe.
4
I just uploaded a hotfix, 1.1.6, which should hopefully address some of the worst issues:
1
1.1.5 has been released! You can see the full changelog in the original post, but some of the highlights include a new method of crafting, requested features such as togglable Spider Climb, and fixes for common bugs like the Alchemite crash.
This release does not include the ability to generate a pocket plane, but stay tuned for 1.2!
6
Given that there's still a lot of work to do on pocket plane generation, I'm planning on releasing everything *but* that in version 1.1.5 - currently going through bugtesting. This update will include many bugfixes as well as the new gadgets I've teased.
3
I'm back to working on 1.2 after real life decided to interfere for a few weeks. No new teasers yet, but the pocket plane mixing algorithm is producing much smoother terrain and should be ready Soontm.
1
That's true. I should have mentioned that the Recombinator defaults to using the "lowest" available aspect - the closest to primal - if possible. It would preferentially combine all Aqua and Terra before creating Herba and Limus.
2
A screenshot of the Teleological Recombinator in action:
The specifics of its operation have changed a bit since the last teaser. The Recombinator randomly selects an aspect from nearby nodes, checks whether it can be combined with any aspect in the node immediately beneath it, and if so it drains one point of vis from the victim node. One point of vis from the primary node is then transformed to the new compound aspect. (For example, if the node underneath the Recombinator contained Ordo and Perditio and it tried to drain a pure Ignis node, it might transform one point of Ordo into Potentia or one point of Perditio into Gelum.)
It no longer accepts essentia to bias its results - instead, if you're aiming for a specific aspect you'll have to be clever about which secondary nodes you feed to the primary. Think of it as a higher-stakes version of mana bean breeding!
3
Self-infusion is the furthest I'm planning to go down that road - anything more would be unbalanced. That being said, one of my early ideas for endgame gadgets involved crawling into a curative vat, turning on a special transmitter, and abandoning your own senses to remote-control a much larger golem (in fact, a reverse-engineered version of the eldritch construct). Maybe I'll take another look at that someday.
3
Unfortunately it looks like the 1.2 release is still at least a couple weeks out - things have gotten fairly interesting for me career-wise at this point. To help tide you over, here's a minor teaser.
Many novice thaumaturges wonder why you can't simply build a wand out of shards - after all, every advanced core design features one or more in its construction. More experienced sorts know that shards are incapable of absorbing additional magic and are only used to amplify the primary material's elemental characteristics. But the most elite thaumaturges, those who have successfully opened an aura node, wonder what would happen if a crystalline wand were directly exposed to the Void...
The crystalline wand has a few unique traits. It is capable of storing tremendous amounts of vis - 250 of each aspect - but has no ability to ever be recharged and will crumble when its energy is expended. Its relatively low cost (once the appropriate infrastructure is in place) makes it a good candidate for inclusion in the emergency equipment chests every prepared minecrafter should keep, and hopefully its initial stock of vis will last long enough for one to recover a more durable wand from one's corpse. It may also allow one to craft objects for which a traditional wand would be inadequate...
4
Whoa, quite a number of suggestions to read through!
2
A pocket plane is always spherical. Its size is determined by the total vis of its parent node and ranges between 32 and 128 blocks in radius.
2
The trickiest part of the process was developing a way of properly blending all the different terrain generation types. If you have a node that just contains, say, Terra, that's easy enough - use Minecraft's noise octave generators to produce layers of dirt and stone, add caves and ore pockets, draw a planar boundary sphere around it - but Thaumcraft players love building their ubernodes, and those might have all six primals and a dozen compound aspects. How do you create a dimension simultaneously based on light, meat, trees, and ice?
Right now I'm working on smoothing out that sort of scenario and giving each aspect at least one unique block or creature. Next up is structure generation (imagine a ravine studded with "teeth" or rings of bookshelves orbiting a throbbing column of brain matter), and then a few bugfixes will round out the process.
(On a more experimental note - as Minecraft isn't really set up for this sort of thing - I'm playing around with dynamic block registration so that special blocks can be created at runtime using vanilla blocks as a template. For example, the Lux/Corpus/Arbor/Gelum dimension above might generate pockets of glowing ice, edible torches, or trees with luminescent leaves which have a chance of dropping meaty fruit. No promises yet, but I'm very excited about the possibility of implementing something along these lines)