I have to say, the colours looks really odd. I am seeing black and White walls with some bright colours in the middle.
Yeah, that's sorta the point. This world is the heart of the Grayscale corruption, and this boss fight is the last chance to stop it before it overruns the overworld. As the first (and now last) outpost of the explorers and scientists of the Pinnacle, this place is the Grayscale's target not only because it represents a resistance to the corruption, but because it is where the portal to the overworld is located - and above all, the Grayscale wants to grow, to take over, to destroy... (oooo spooky spooky)
(and yes, this does mean that I'm using the "scientists causing the end of the world by messing around with stuff they don't understand" plot device...)
Progress update on the Pinnacle boss area (which I have named "Grayscale" - thanks Fang)...
The four innermost towers have been built! Also one of the second ring of towers. Each successive ring is narrower and shorter than the one inside of it.
I also came up with the idea to make some of the towers partially "corrupted" by the "grayscale" - basically, the block palette for parts of the tower is different (by which I mean, it's stone bricks and stuff). Maybe I'll put in some tendrils of grayscale wrapping around the towers and corrupting them...
So, I decided the boss would be a bow-wielding skeleton, because all of the towers lack stairs, and I also want to maybe knock the player off of tall things occasionally. Punch bow. Also it'll occasionally teleport next to the player; since it's a skeleton, the player shouldn't have to worry as much about being ambushed and cornered by a melee enemy. Long follow range, too. One of its "attacks" will be to summon TNT on its position (and at the same time be given resistance V briefly), so as the player runs around the terrain should grow harder to traverse.
Here's a potential list of things the boss can do:
Teleport near to the player (will probably happen between each other action), followed by a short, timed pause in actions
Summon TNT at its position (medium/high chance)
Summon reinforcements/minions - probably randomly distributed across the arena (high chance):
Skeletons with bows (medium chance)
Zombies with powerful gear (low chance)
Melee skeletons (high chance)
Creepers - more terrain changes! (medium chance)
Summon high-explosion-power fireballs from the sky (medium chance)
Summon special mobs, probably near the player (medium/low chance) - maybe only after a certain amount of health, or maybe once after a certain amount of health it becomes more common. Examples:
"Hyper" - a creeper that grows more powerful the longer it's alive, for example:
Spawns as a regular creeper; after 30 seconds it becomes...
Charged creeper; after 30 seconds it becomes...
Invincible charged creeper (thanks Heliceo); after 30 seconds...
Starts spawning normal creepers near it, on regular intervals (10 seconds? Maybe 5?)
"Dual" - a skeleton that can switch between a bow and a sword, depending on the player's proximity
"Mother" - a spider that summons silverfish at its location every 15 seconds
And others as I come up with them. Don't worry, by the way; these mobs will put in appearances throughout the map.
Create fake duplicates of itself that look like it, but have very little health and don't do as much damage (low chance, but maybe increases as boss fight goes on)
I'm not sure if the duplicates should be able to do the same moves as the boss... perhaps they'll have a more limited "allowed moves" list, but I want to give heavy incentive to kill these guys quickly
Also, an attack related to the lore of the map - create a "Grayscale spore cloud" (using particles) that gives nearby players negative potion effects
I figured I'd post a picture. Y'know, just 'cause I felt like it...
This is the initial stage of construction of the boss arena of "Pinnacle". There will eventually be a bunch of towers and stuff around the area.
By the way, does anyone remember that discussion that we had a while ago about boss fights? This boss fight is going to be the sort of fight I was thinking about then. Basically, the boss will have different sorts of randomized "moves" or attacks that it can do. For example, it'll probably summon fireballs from the sky, maybe teleport around... stuff like that.
@Infinity Does anyone know of a vine filter or some other way to easily add vines or blocks in a vine-like manner for 1.8?
So I use the stalactite filter for mcedit, but I have no idea where I got it from. I just know its called stalactite py...
(Also I don't know if it will work with actual vines, I just use it for leaves.)
That could be the one that I made... if anyone wants it (or the WorldEdit craftscript that I made for the same purpose), I'd be happy to provide it. And I have no idea if it works for vines, but I could probably make a modification to it...
It is.
MtG (at its peak) may have had more players than HS, but HS is currently more 'popular' meaning mainstream.
I found a source citing a player base of 12 million for MtG back in 2011. The source also says that number was double what it was in 2008, and the increase in size of the game showed no signs of decelerating. Meanwhile, Hearthstone (according to Wikipedia) had about 20 million registered users back in September 2014. Extrapolating from the numbers for Magic, factoring in the fact that Hearthstone has probably grown, and acknowledging the fact that not all of Hearthstone's registered users actually play the game... I'd say they're approximately equal.
Random loot is like RNG, it makes games lots better, but needs to be kept within bounds. Imagine a game like Hearthstone without RNG. It would be really boring. Or what is the charm of roguelikes? Are roguelikes unbalanced all the time?
The real problem with random loot is that a.) it's way too easy to do poorly, and b.) it's way too hard to do well. It probably takes more effort to do good random loot than it takes to hand-place the same amount of loot. It's not even an issue of being able to save time; if using (for example) Kamyu's random loot tool saves you a significant amount of time and effort, you're using it on too many loot chests, so you've either got too many loot chests, or you're using Kamyu's tool on too large a section of the map.
Roguelikes take a lot of effort to do right. You basically need to do a lot of fine-tuned tweaking and careful balancing. This is analogous to going through every loot chest that you filled randomly, and changing everything by hand, at which point you may as well have placed the loot by hand to begin with. There's a reason for making a randomized game like a roguelike, and that reason is pretty much exclusively for replay value. CTM maps have next to no replay value; you can't randomize enough of the game to make it like a roguelike.
(Also: Hearthstone without RNG is basically Magic: the Gathering, which IMO is a far superior game for the exact reason that it has less randomness.)
Tasch, throw me a PM concerning the Skype group name, and I'll send a petition. A finished CTM map worths more than two open projects that might not be published, I say go for finishing the first before moving on.
A... petition? Just add one of us on Skype (my Skype name is taschneide), and we'll add you to the group.
Wasn't this project supposed to promote the idea that people didn't actually claim areas and instead worked together to finish areas?
Personally, I feel like the reason the map has slowed down is because we now have people working on areas by themselves, turning this map into basically another Pantheon/Titan's Revolt style collab, which was something that, with the creation of this project, was something we wanted to avoid (at least from what I remember).
Now, I understand some people may not like other people working on their stuff, but when people currently working on the map say that other people can't join because people have "claimed" areas is something that just urks me. If we want these kinds of projects to continue, we shouldn't be working on a "first come first serve" basis, but instead on a more open mind-set, as well as presenting more opportunities to a variety of map makers who may be new or may be fairly old and want something fresh to work on.
So to Rexxefa and others who are late to the party and want to help, feel free to jump on the server. If you're looking to help, Pink wool may be a good place to start (although Caecillius did point out that the I4 teleport room needs some work). I have personally been working on it by myself, but progress has definitely been slow and I'd love to see what others have to contribute.
In addition, I'd like to point out that you may work on other people's areas, but please get the original area-maker's permission first. I'm not contradicting myself, only saying that its important to respect the ideas of others, which means that you probably shouldn't completely scrap someone's area because "you don't like it".
TL;DR don't tell people they can't work on the map because people "claimed areas", thats not what this project was started for.
Also on a side note, more directed towards AlHexahedron (I hope thats right), hi, I'm a lurker.
So we kinda discussed this in the Skype group chat (which by the way you should look into, AlHexahedron)... I think we're going to try something a little different for the next map. I had an idea about what we could do for it, but first I want to know people's opinion on something else. Basically, I didn't want to start a new map until the current one is done, but apparently some people feel differently. It would be easy to install a multi-world plugin on the server, and have multiple maps going simultaneously. The question is... Should we start the next map before the first one is done? If so, when? Now? Or, because (as Kaladun pointed out) it's about finals week, later?
Now, about our next map: The first one was linear-branching because that's what it seemed like the majority wanted, but having created (most of) one of those I think it would be worthwhile to try open-world. A brief tale about my mapping history seems like a good idea now, for reasons that you'll see...
My first planned map was ambitious. Very ambitious. About 2 years ago, Vechs was talking about making Fallen Kingdom, an urban map. Being new to the whole mapping thing, I decided to be unoriginal and make an open-world island city map. After making a tiny fraction of the map (like, the first wool or two, and not even the base of the main city) I decided that it was too much work for one person, and I abandoned the project... See where I'm going with this?
The plans for my map had a big island with several nested levels of city. First, there were the outer walls, with the outer city inside it. Then the middle walls, and the mid-city, and then the central keep with its own walls were right in the middle. Difficulty would scale up with each layer closer to the center. There would be landmarks for each wool, and the wools could be in towers or tunnels, castles or caves. Think of something like From Flames with a clearer difficulty progression.
Now, on to the issue of collaboration and claiming areas... I feel like an open-world map would help immensely with this, but we still need to work out some way of placing wools without having people say "MINE" and lock out everyone else. I honestly have nearly no ideas here. I suppose we could just make it clear by saying something like "don't start anything without letting people help"... or at least, "don't do anything you wouldn't hate to see done differently". Maybe we should couple that with "don't completely delete anything that someone else has started without consulting them", or "make sure you understand what the person before you was doing here before you add onto/modify it".
So... what do you think? Should we start a new map? Should we start it before the last one is done? Should we start it now or wait until after finals are done? Should we try open-world rather than linear-branching-intersections? Should I dredge up some of my old notes from my first map? Should we try to enforce a more cooperative method (as opposed to just collaborative)? How do we do this? I only own the server, not the entire project; I need you people.
Most of the map is done, and all the areas are claimed... But, maybe there are a few things that can use an outside hand, like the I4 teleport room, maybe. Yes sadly you are a bit late to the party.
I'd just like to point out that very little work is being done on the community map at the moment. I feel like the project is dying, and I'm incredibly sad because it's almost done. Once the map is finished, though, we'll probably start a new one.
eh. the block 36 thing is just frustrating me. I'm good at redstone that I can see at least.
The problem with turning mob griefing off is that I'd have that for one area. I'm sure someone would exploit it or something. I wanted to make a start zone out of diamonds you see, but for there to be no way of obtaining them until near the end of the map. i'd also limit sand as well so TNT can't be a thing.
How does this thread work exactly? Is it like owned by one all knowing person? Kinda like vechs' thread a while ago?
I think block 36 got removed from the game in 1.8. I know that a lot of those "technical blocks" can't be obtained or placed any more...
If you want to make a zone out of diamonds, but not have them be accessible until the end of the map, then you have to either disable mobgriefing and make it impossible to get TNT (I think they're separate things, so you have to do both) or constantly delete diamond item entities (like, delete them before the player can pick them up).
Hello there, I'm Tasch. It's pronounced "Tash", by the way. I'm from the east coast of the US, and am about halfway through my freshman year of college. I got Minecraft as a birthday present about 3 and a half years ago (actually now that I think about it, it was *exactly* 3 and a half years ago to the day). It took me a little while to really get into Minecraft, but in the summer of 2012, I built myself a gaming computer and started making videos of my playthrough of the Super Hostile series. It wasn't long before I decided "hey, I want to make stuff like this". I've been here ever since, and have yet to release a CTM map. (Okay, I made one minimap and two "Race for Wool" maps, but beyond that, nothing I've even worked on has been released.)
Recent developments in my life: I began work on a full-sized, subterranean semi-open-world CTM map entitled "Thanatos". I went away to college, forcing me to put a halt to my (still incomplete, but very-nearly-done) LP of Ragecraft II. I started working on a smaller "sketch" map that I'm calling "Pinnacle". (Fun fact: Pinnacle is approximately the size Thanatos was originally supposed to be.) 2 weeks ago, I started organizing a community mapping project, after a whole bunch of discussion in the thread regarding "oh noes is this genre of map dying", in an effort to revitalize the community. The map is currently relatively close to being done, but it seems like either I'm not on when everyone else is, or work on the map has slowed down a whole lot. This makes me sad. C'mon, guys. Don't let this map sit around in a nearly-finished state. I want to see this succeed.
Yeah, that works. I think it was because the first time, it was on Dropbox (and probably not made public/shared), and the second time you hosted it on Imgur. Anyway, picture looks very... threatening? I'd be careful using bedrock as a building block, though; it's a pretty ugly block to use as the base color of an area.
And to top it all off, they have pictures of their upcoming map:
Whoaaaaaaa. Been a long time since I saw you. Hey, remember that area you made for that collaborative CTM map nearly 2 years ago? Y'know, the "sequel to another collaborative CTM" map? Yeah, Titan's Revolt still hasn't been released. But that doesn't mean you should take back your area and use it in your own map, please don't do that like *cough cough* certain other people did.
Oh and that picture is broken. Plz fix, I want to see what it looks like
0
Yeah, that's sorta the point. This world is the heart of the Grayscale corruption, and this boss fight is the last chance to stop it before it overruns the overworld. As the first (and now last) outpost of the explorers and scientists of the Pinnacle, this place is the Grayscale's target not only because it represents a resistance to the corruption, but because it is where the portal to the overworld is located - and above all, the Grayscale wants to grow, to take over, to destroy... (oooo spooky spooky)
(and yes, this does mean that I'm using the "scientists causing the end of the world by messing around with stuff they don't understand" plot device...)
4
So, I'm interested in what people's opinions are on the boss fight structure I outlined in my last post... Got any suggestions?
0
The four innermost towers have been built! Also one of the second ring of towers. Each successive ring is narrower and shorter than the one inside of it.
So, I decided the boss would be a bow-wielding skeleton, because all of the towers lack stairs, and I also want to maybe knock the player off of tall things occasionally. Punch bow. Also it'll occasionally teleport next to the player; since it's a skeleton, the player shouldn't have to worry as much about being ambushed and cornered by a melee enemy. Long follow range, too. One of its "attacks" will be to summon TNT on its position (and at the same time be given resistance V briefly), so as the player runs around the terrain should grow harder to traverse.
Here's a potential list of things the boss can do:
0
This is the initial stage of construction of the boss arena of "Pinnacle". There will eventually be a bunch of towers and stuff around the area.
By the way, does anyone remember that discussion that we had a while ago about boss fights? This boss fight is going to be the sort of fight I was thinking about then. Basically, the boss will have different sorts of randomized "moves" or attacks that it can do. For example, it'll probably summon fireballs from the sky, maybe teleport around... stuff like that.
0
That could be the one that I made... if anyone wants it (or the WorldEdit craftscript that I made for the same purpose), I'd be happy to provide it. And I have no idea if it works for vines, but I could probably make a modification to it...
0
I found a source citing a player base of 12 million for MtG back in 2011. The source also says that number was double what it was in 2008, and the increase in size of the game showed no signs of decelerating. Meanwhile, Hearthstone (according to Wikipedia) had about 20 million registered users back in September 2014. Extrapolating from the numbers for Magic, factoring in the fact that Hearthstone has probably grown, and acknowledging the fact that not all of Hearthstone's registered users actually play the game... I'd say they're approximately equal.
0
The real problem with random loot is that a.) it's way too easy to do poorly, and b.) it's way too hard to do well. It probably takes more effort to do good random loot than it takes to hand-place the same amount of loot. It's not even an issue of being able to save time; if using (for example) Kamyu's random loot tool saves you a significant amount of time and effort, you're using it on too many loot chests, so you've either got too many loot chests, or you're using Kamyu's tool on too large a section of the map.
Roguelikes take a lot of effort to do right. You basically need to do a lot of fine-tuned tweaking and careful balancing. This is analogous to going through every loot chest that you filled randomly, and changing everything by hand, at which point you may as well have placed the loot by hand to begin with. There's a reason for making a randomized game like a roguelike, and that reason is pretty much exclusively for replay value. CTM maps have next to no replay value; you can't randomize enough of the game to make it like a roguelike.
(Also: Hearthstone without RNG is basically Magic: the Gathering, which IMO is a far superior game for the exact reason that it has less randomness.)
0
A... petition? Just add one of us on Skype (my Skype name is taschneide), and we'll add you to the group.
0
So we kinda discussed this in the Skype group chat (which by the way you should look into, AlHexahedron)... I think we're going to try something a little different for the next map. I had an idea about what we could do for it, but first I want to know people's opinion on something else. Basically, I didn't want to start a new map until the current one is done, but apparently some people feel differently. It would be easy to install a multi-world plugin on the server, and have multiple maps going simultaneously. The question is... Should we start the next map before the first one is done? If so, when? Now? Or, because (as Kaladun pointed out) it's about finals week, later?
Now, about our next map: The first one was linear-branching because that's what it seemed like the majority wanted, but having created (most of) one of those I think it would be worthwhile to try open-world. A brief tale about my mapping history seems like a good idea now, for reasons that you'll see...
My first planned map was ambitious. Very ambitious. About 2 years ago, Vechs was talking about making Fallen Kingdom, an urban map. Being new to the whole mapping thing, I decided to be unoriginal and make an open-world island city map. After making a tiny fraction of the map (like, the first wool or two, and not even the base of the main city) I decided that it was too much work for one person, and I abandoned the project... See where I'm going with this?
The plans for my map had a big island with several nested levels of city. First, there were the outer walls, with the outer city inside it. Then the middle walls, and the mid-city, and then the central keep with its own walls were right in the middle. Difficulty would scale up with each layer closer to the center. There would be landmarks for each wool, and the wools could be in towers or tunnels, castles or caves. Think of something like From Flames with a clearer difficulty progression.
Now, on to the issue of collaboration and claiming areas... I feel like an open-world map would help immensely with this, but we still need to work out some way of placing wools without having people say "MINE" and lock out everyone else. I honestly have nearly no ideas here. I suppose we could just make it clear by saying something like "don't start anything without letting people help"... or at least, "don't do anything you wouldn't hate to see done differently". Maybe we should couple that with "don't completely delete anything that someone else has started without consulting them", or "make sure you understand what the person before you was doing here before you add onto/modify it".
So... what do you think? Should we start a new map? Should we start it before the last one is done? Should we start it now or wait until after finals are done? Should we try open-world rather than linear-branching-intersections? Should I dredge up some of my old notes from my first map? Should we try to enforce a more cooperative method (as opposed to just collaborative)? How do we do this? I only own the server, not the entire project; I need you people.
0
I'd just like to point out that very little work is being done on the community map at the moment. I feel like the project is dying, and I'm incredibly sad because it's almost done. Once the map is finished, though, we'll probably start a new one.
0
I think block 36 got removed from the game in 1.8. I know that a lot of those "technical blocks" can't be obtained or placed any more...
If you want to make a zone out of diamonds, but not have them be accessible until the end of the map, then you have to either disable mobgriefing and make it impossible to get TNT (I think they're separate things, so you have to do both) or constantly delete diamond item entities (like, delete them before the player can pick them up).
0
...is there any reason why they aren't working on black wool? Do they just think that I'm in the middle of something? Because I'm not, really.
0
Hello there, I'm Tasch. It's pronounced "Tash", by the way. I'm from the east coast of the US, and am about halfway through my freshman year of college. I got Minecraft as a birthday present about 3 and a half years ago (actually now that I think about it, it was *exactly* 3 and a half years ago to the day). It took me a little while to really get into Minecraft, but in the summer of 2012, I built myself a gaming computer and started making videos of my playthrough of the Super Hostile series. It wasn't long before I decided "hey, I want to make stuff like this". I've been here ever since, and have yet to release a CTM map. (Okay, I made one minimap and two "Race for Wool" maps, but beyond that, nothing I've even worked on has been released.)
Recent developments in my life: I began work on a full-sized, subterranean semi-open-world CTM map entitled "Thanatos". I went away to college, forcing me to put a halt to my (still incomplete, but very-nearly-done) LP of Ragecraft II. I started working on a smaller "sketch" map that I'm calling "Pinnacle". (Fun fact: Pinnacle is approximately the size Thanatos was originally supposed to be.) 2 weeks ago, I started organizing a community mapping project, after a whole bunch of discussion in the thread regarding "oh noes is this genre of map dying", in an effort to revitalize the community. The map is currently relatively close to being done, but it seems like either I'm not on when everyone else is, or work on the map has slowed down a whole lot. This makes me sad.
But yeah, I'm Tasch. Hi there. How are you today?
0
Yeah, that works. I think it was because the first time, it was on Dropbox (and probably not made public/shared), and the second time you hosted it on Imgur. Anyway, picture looks very... threatening? I'd be careful using bedrock as a building block, though; it's a pretty ugly block to use as the base color of an area.
0
Whoaaaaaaa. Been a long time since I saw you. Hey, remember that area you made for that collaborative CTM map nearly 2 years ago? Y'know, the "sequel to another collaborative CTM" map? Yeah, Titan's Revolt still hasn't been released. But that doesn't mean you should take back your area and use it in your own map, please don't do that like *cough cough* certain other people did.
Oh and that picture is broken. Plz fix, I want to see what it looks like