[Game] Minefall

[Astrobe]

December 2023: "Dig Into Yourself" release.

An unintended update happened yesterday. If you see in the crafting guide that you can craft gold lumps from glowstone, you have up-to-date version.

Highlights:

• World-breaking changes. Your existing worlds will be broken by this release, you'll have to start a new one. I know, I know, I threw away a couple of worlds with hundreds of hours in them. But compatibility would have held back improvement. Because one of the major changes is
• New biome map. More simple, more consistent. Notably, the cold "basalt" biome has morphed into the
• New Basalt layer at -100 meters. Below it is the
• Abyss layer at -300 meters. It is accessible by digging further down or more efficiently, "cave hopping" as I like to call it. Nether portals are therefore gone.
• Improved help. I tried to remove the big wall of text and to place as much info in tooltips as possible. Also, the first player entering a new world gets help messages periodically to help him/her getting started. These messages assume they did follow the hint of using 12341234 as the seed for the world.
• New "gift" feature: a specific feature granted by the game base on the character's name, and not revealed to the players. Possible gifts are: "fisher" (more fishnet durability), "ranger" (more mese wand durability) or "lift" (better upwards lift with levitation).
• Reworked focus and talents. Notably, the less interesting "air" focus now is the only way to remove melding and get aberrant tree saplings.
• Various new effects.
• Uses MT 5.8's mod-controlled fog for weather.

Dynamic shadows support, which was introduced in the previous version, is still here but not recommended.MT 5.8 has annoying shadow flickering on my rig. Moreover, after disabling them, I found out that they introduce a lot of visual "noise", perhaps because of the peculiar tree foliage MF uses.

[Astrobe]

New release: "Show No Mercy".

For more info, see the ContendDB thread

I had to leave out the rationale behind certain changes, though, due to CDB's 2000 characters comment limit. Feel free to ask.

What's next:

• I would like to support cooperation between players, without breaking the economy of the game.
• Particle effects for missiles.
• Have the world evolve by itself even more.
• Provide more things to do underground.

[Astrobe]

New release: "Looking At Nothing".

This release adds particle effects for missiles, includes most of the Default Remastered texture pack, adds a HUD warning when the player is being targeted by a mob (crosshair turns red), adds erosion in the form of unsupported stone blocks having a tiny chance to fall.

For more info, see the [url=https://content.minetest.net/threads/3510/]ContentDB update thread[url]

What's next:

• Multiplayer improvements will be on hold until there's a demand for it (so, what's not next, actually)
• Let players create glowing biomes in caverns and make it worth the effort (hopefully the recently released XNether mod will provide the things I need)
• This release uses automatic_face_movement to improve the behavior of hostile mobs and NPCs, but the old, heavily edited MobsRedo code I use sometimes fights with it because it is based on yaw+velocity scheme; moving to a pure velocity vector scheme will hopefully eliminate those glitches and be more efficient.

[Astrobe]

New release: "Fear Of The Dark"

This release introduces giant glowing mushrooms, toilets, a new wand, a useful Focus Wand function for the early game, and a gold lamp.

Farming has been simplified: no more right-click of the shovel, just mix seeds and dirt to obtain blocks from which the crop will grow. Like previously, the block will turn back to normal dirt when harvested. The shovel is technically not needed anymore for farming, but you'd rather use it unless you're quite patient or poor.

Mushrooms now always turn to dirt the log they grow on when spreading, and therefore become inactive. This is effectively a nerf as mushroom spread is no more exponential but linear.

The drops from lootboxes have been adjusted to better match what players need in the early game.

Abyss ruins now feature a specific bookshelf as loot, just like basalt layer ruins have their own bookshelf. Abyss dungeon's unique block (which changed a couple of times already...) now mimic any "wall-like" block (stone brick and block, including limestone, desert stone, obsidian, basalt and abyssite variants).

The erosion mechanism, which makes unsupported "heavy" blocks eventually fall down has been extended to cobble-like blocks, in particular those usually used to make roofs (slate and terracotta cobble). It also applies to wall-like blocks (which could, if you're unlucky, block a critical path) , but not to player-made aggregate and adobe blocks. Erosion is also now inhibited by protection.

What's next

I want a piece of armor that can act as a Void Chest. At some point players acquire expensive stuff, and an "insurance" is to put occasionally useful stuff in a Void Chest that you carry with you - but the chest itself will likely be lost if something unexpected happens. Armor pieces don't drop on death.

We are almost there with mobs' navigation. The latest changes however introduced minor glitches, to be fixed.

I want to switch the Net to a normal click item, not a right click, simply to see it actually move when one tries to catch something, all while preventing click spamming like currently.

Perhaps add yet another spider to caves, for the sake of diversity. Also, deserts are a bit too lonely; I'd like some sort of sandworm there.

[Astrobe]

New release: Rime of the Ancient Mariner
(this is a reference to the Iron Maiden song inspired from the poem of the same name)

• Adds MTG's boat, but mana-powered
• Adds Void chestplate armor piece (wearable armor)
• Adds a rock crab mob: appears in underground caverns, explodes on death.
• Penalty for dying has been reduced from 5/10 to 1 RP, starting RP have been reduced from 30 to 20. This makes the game more forgiving for beginners (and easier of other players to invite new players in the game, on servers). The cost of /recall command has been reduced to 1 RP for consistency.
• Buffs swords: shorter cooldown. Swords were almost as slow as the hammer.
• Greater armor pieces are now craftable and repairable, but wear out fast. This change comes from a discussion about durability in the game Minefall is inspired from.
• Gliders are now speed limited to 10 m/s, with a shaking effect when on overspeed. Players can use mana to extend the flight time.
• Levitation cost with flyer talent has been nerfed from 1 mana/s to 2. This talent was already useful in a lot of situations; the introduction of boats and the glider change made it even more useful, hence this nerf.
• The "uplift" effect of levitation is now a gift. This uplift is a small upward force that let players to break falls; a "gift" is a hidden, random trait assigned to characters. The uplift was making the game a bit too safe.
• The fish/butterfly net is now operated with a left click, and finally animated.
• Grey Mese instead of orange to teleport to secondary waypoint, orange crystal (instead of green) to pick dungeon beacons, red mese cystal to reset them. With the Greater armor change, players need less red Mese so it was given another use to increase its value; grey Mese is now dedicated to (tele)transport; orange lost its second use to grey, so it was reassigned to travel network building.
• New tree lives model (taken from the optimized version of bushy leaves).
• Weather effects: various shapes replaced by a simple 1-pixel texture.
• volumetric lighting integrated in weather effects (stronger in wet conditions).
• Various recipe adjustments to take into account the estimated value of the ingredients.
• New paper lamp.
• Removed obsolete blocks and items.

What's next:
Introduce a particle effect multiplier as a game setting. Currently particle quantities are tuned for my machine, which is getting old; other users probably can afford more.
Godrays were tuned with 5.9, 5.10 offers more control over the effect, so maybe additional tuning.
Mob glitches are mostly solved, one glitch happening when 2 close mobs chase a player remains to be solved.
I'm not entirely satisfied with the glider's physics and the way the mana boost works, so maybe more tweaking.
Change references to "Minetest" to "Luanti".
More furniture.

[LMD]

Introduce a particle effect multiplier as a game setting. Currently particle quantities are tuned for my machine, which is getting old; other users probably can afford more.

Note that particles recently (5.9.0+) got an order-of-magnitude performance improvement for basically everyone so you should be able to afford many more particles (ideally try it and see though).

[Astrobe]

New release: "A Light Unseen".

This release reworks weather effects. It integrates with 5.10's new feature that let mods control the bloom effect, which I used to try to give a sense of the current humidity, as the bloom effect tends to blurry things. As usual, I tried to keep it barely noticeable rather than "in your face". This affects volumetric lighting ("godrays") as well: e.g. one rarely/barely see it in deserts, and more often in swamps.
A new game parameter (actually, the very first I introduced myself) allows players to increase the number of rain/snow particles. Please note that for servers, it will affect all clients. When tuning it, keep in mind that the game varies the density of the rain depending on if it is a light shower or a thunderstorm. Side note: rain effects are problematic because it is difficult to figure out if a player is indoor or outdoor. The base number is deliberately low because the intent is to suggest rain with particles and other effects (sound, bloom). a x10 multiplier shouldn't affect FPS on relatively old machines; x100 should be doable on newer ones (thanks to 5.10 improvements), but it starts to look a bit ugly at some point.
I have reverted the previous change with regard to raindrop texture (single pixel), because they don't look good when one increases the number of particles.

The accuracy of missiles/projectiles has been increased by turning on the "physical" entity property, which lets us get the collision data provide by the engine, which is also more efficient than probing around for nodes and entities. A side effect is that missiles may collide sometimes.

Aberrant trees no longer spawn fancy things like rock trees with ores; they are now restricted to trees made of wood, with one exception for something which is sort-of a rock but is created by living things. The problem with those fancy trees is that they provide large quantities of uncommon blocks, which in multiplayer could crash markets (for instance). In singleplayer, those trees also present a risk that makes one think twice before growing one.

Most rock cobble blocks get the "columnar" property, which originally was intended to protect trees. In Minefall, these blocks are uncommon and easy to dig, so in multiplayer you'd rather protect them. The columnar property makes it cheaper to protect e.g. a whole because protecting the top nodes only is good enough. In solo play, this only affects the way players dig dungeon ruins for those blocks.

What's next:

The missile change introduced new minor glitches in mobs' behavior, so improving the mobs' behavior is still on the table.

I'm still looking for new furniture to add.

It seems to me that midnight is very dark now, which doesn't fit with our very big moon. Maybe use two sine curves for the light curve, but it's difficult to get it right.