[CHALLENGE] (v4.3-ish 6/7/18) Refugee to Regent Kingdom Building Challenge

[TomeWyrm]

Oh holy crap... I might've figured out a way to fix my CoG/Chromaticraft issue seeing as how I apparently can't get it to work the way it says it should.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forum...eator-create-worldgen-structures-ingame-now-1
Just remove all the pylon structures via CoG in the standard ore pass, and use GenCreator to add 'em after.... crap no that won't work because CoG tries to run last. DRAT

=====

@1SDAN that is actually a pretty good idea, and something that might be able to be programmed into a comapnion mod (or added onto R2RUtilities, assuming Sensei has the time, and you know, it's actually possible), or maybe even Hunger Overhaul. I'm sure Jaded and Eyamaz would adore having another tool with which to torture their guniea pigs test subjects adoring fans and players.

 

[Senseidragon]

Another thing to peek into so we're not completely reinventing the wheel here, is Ancient Warfare. They offer NPCs that you kinda-sorta research and purchase. They will work for you, fishing, farming, guarding, whatever -- but you "pay" them in food. The more people you amass, the more needs to go into food production to keep them from going unhappy and lazing about till they're fed.

The whole siege-engine / castle warfare aspect of it is just bonus cheese.

If not actually using the mod, maybe try it out and see what ideas we might adapt for what we're trying to achieve?

And yes, I'm perfectly willing to code up stuff assuming it can be done without KingLemming-level skills. I'm nowhere near that level in modding yet. Too many corporate code-monkey habits to break myself out of first.

 

[TomeWyrm]

Wouldn't 1SDAN's idea basically involve a crafting event triggering an increase/decrease of hunger/saturation? Oh it's a bit more complicated... hmm... that might require a separate crafting handler and that would likely introduce very VERY odd bugs. All this obviously assumes that forge has the relevant event hooks and there are no public/private or "taint" issues like you can find in World of Warcraft's addon API.

Unfortunately I'm not a coder, so I have no actual idea how to implement. I just know that it sounds reasonable at first glance.

Edit: In a completely unrelated note. I think I've given up on Reika's mods for a similar but much lesser version of the reason I gave up on Eloraam.

Lack of updates.

I can't stand idly by while "Wait for the next version", "I fixed that but you won't get it for a while" and such. I'm sorry if it's more work, but bugfixes shouldn't be tied to feature updates. All that does is mean I'm either version-locked for long periods of time (something that Reika rails at all the time about his mods) and I've been sitting here with half my mods that touch buildcraft version locked because Reika's mods are sitting there making me unable to get into a world with a large number of my mods stuck at specific (non-latest) versions. Thereby locking Applied Energistics and thus AE2 Stuff and Thaumic Energistics; Buildcraft and thereby Forestry; Which unfortunately locks Binnies Mods, BD-Lib, Gendustry, Pressure Pipes, and Advanced Generators, and bizzarely NotEnoughResources (NoSuchFieldError: generateBogEarth); additionally ChiselFacades, Logistics Pipes (though that one is a dev build... so... eh); (for some reason I can't fathom); NEI Integration because feature loss because I can't use BuildcraftCompat with 6.2...

Some of these mods I can live without (such as Not Enough Resources. It's nice, but oh well. I don't yet have the custom ore generation done in my pack, and it works better for things like a typical COFH worldgen file, not CoG), others I honestly cannot let myself be feature locked in the past because of. In a choice between having a large portion of my gameplay locked behind one modder that seems to have begun a process of waiting for large feature pushes to update his mod with bugfixes, or playing around with a pack that actually updates and gets bugfixes in a (relatively) timely manner? I'm going to drop Reika's mods in a heartbeat. They're awesome, but they're not awesome enough to put up with that. Maybe I'll make a special limited pack just built around his mods in a mostly vanilla experience beyond that (probably a 20-50 mod pack... when you're used to 200+ that's tiny). Or maybe all the API's will finally bloody freeze during the 1.8 transition and I'll be able to play with a pack that doesn't break every two weeks because SomeOtherMod updated which broke my purple's code round with a snorkle in outer space error

 

[1SDAN]

Well, I was just thinking of it as an additional gamerule. Craft X item? Pay a couple of carrots/berries/other food item

 

[Senseidragon]

Well, I was just thinking of it as an additional gamerule. Craft X item? Pay a couple of carrots/berries/other food item

In concept, it's not really that difficult a task. In practice though, hooking into the crafting (and separately, the smelting) system isn't the issue. I believe you'll get a call for everything ever requested to be crafted or smelted in the game. Then you'll have to parse each of those crafting or smelting recipes to see if it matches what you want to "charge extra" for. This could very easily lead to complications for people not expressly aware of what the mod does, and could lead to a flurry of bug (not as funny as you'd think) reports to other mod authors asking why their Igneous Extruder also requires three carrots and a potato to craft.

I know it's a silly example, but it was made to show the point that you (the mod author) need to consider all the ramifications that your mod will bring to the minecraft experience, particularly as it relates to other mods. Could you imagine this being placed carelessly on a server where at least some portion of players has no awareness of (or interest in) the challenge? Without additional features to make sure the effects are limited only to players in this particular game mode, you could end up with a lot of confused or agitated players. Additionally, as systems become automated, it becomes very difficult to tell what "player" is actually crafting or smelting anything.

What sounds very simple at the outset can reveal additional considerations that could really throw a wrench into things later.

I'm still very positive on the whole idea, but it definitely needs some refinement.

 

[Senseidragon]

Wouldn't 1SDAN's idea basically involve a crafting event triggering an increase/decrease of hunger/saturation? Oh it's a bit more complicated... hmm... that might require a separate crafting handler and that would likely introduce very VERY odd bugs. All this obviously assumes that forge has the relevant event hooks and there are no public/private or "taint" issues like you can find in World of Warcraft's addon API.

Unfortunately I'm not a coder, so I have no actual idea how to implement. I just know that it sounds reasonable at first glance.

See my previous response in regards to this bit. I agree the basic part isn't complicated. It's the interactions that could be problematic.

Edit: In a completely unrelated note. I think I've given up on Reika's mods for a similar but much lesser version of the reason I gave up on Eloraam.

Lack of updates.

Methinks you had a frustrating experience. I've had oodles of those.

I understand completely, and while I don't disagree with your reasoning, I certainly don't think Reika comes anywhere remotely close to taking the title from Eloraam on support (or abandonment) of their respective mods.

I appreciate the contributions Eloraam made in the past, but I've moved on from her work, and should she return to the scene, I simply won't care.

Reika is constantly around. He may not update his mods frequently, but neither do others (like XCompWiz, or Azanor) -- not because there aren't bugs to fix necessarily, but to maintain some semblance of sanity on some really significant mods.

Things are going to break. Sometimes, it is bugs in your own code. These are unfortunate, and usually easily fixed. Other times, it is interactions with other combinations of mods. It can be incredibly frustrating to an author who's mod runs completely fine in a "clean" (no other mods) minecraft installation, only to find that when you include "that mod that lets unicorns fart laser beams" something crashes. A great majority of players aren't affected by this error, but some are. And there are dozens upon dozens of these wierd interactions that you will become aware of. Something that didn't even exist when you wrote the mod might become "a thing" that you hadn't anticipated, and it results in a bug.

You can get swamped by issues like this, and your unpaid time devoted to this hobby of yours can either be spent trying to put out meaningful, reasonably stable content "when it's ready", or you can chase the fantasy of fixing every bug as soon as it surfaces, no matter how few people it may affect.

We won't even touch on the people for whom the bug is actually because they have a misconfigured setup, lousy hardware, or some goon who thought he'd Minetweak something without thinking of the effects of changing/adding/removing a recipe might have on everything else.

I don't *like* the long period between updates, but from a programmer's perspective I *understand* them, and I can live with them. I spent nearly 30 years in the software business, and burnout will kill a great many things. Trust me, you don't want the authors of mods you like getting burned out and walking away. Even if they open-source their work, which many do (thank you all!) it doesn't solve the problem if one author steps away and another comes forward. You have to apply the brakes and maintain a little control on your releases, or the burnout will happen. Over and over. Azanor and XCompWiz were mentioned earlier, and they came to mind as good examples I think of people who try to strive for releases that are pretty darn stable, and their updates are nowhere near as frequent as you see with something like OpenBlocks or Botania. They are certainly also good mods, but the rapid release of updates will take a toll on its maintainers.

Or maybe all the API's will finally bloody freeze during the 1.8 transition and I'll be able to play with a pack that doesn't break every two weeks because SomeOtherMod updated which broke my purple's code round with a snorkle in outer space error

One can only hope -- but then 1.9 will come out and the cycle will start yet again.

TL;DR - I get your frustration, I agree and sympathize, but I try to explain why some authors might release less frequently than others.

Edit: clarification between Reika and Eloraam

 

[Senseidragon]

Sorry for the ambush wall of text above. I'm getting my morning coffee now, and should be much more agreeable for the remainder of the day!

 

[1SDAN]

Oh sorry, by gamerule I didn't mean command, I meant an optional challenge like that of R2R

 

[TomeWyrm]

Oh sorry, by gamerule I didn't mean command, I meant an optional challenge like that of R2R

It still becomes an issue of "what if some of my players don't know/want to play with this feature?
One of those mods (I want to say Refugee to Regent Utilities) which does the "make it harder" thing actually has whitelist functionality. So you have to opt IN to the features on a per-player basis. Which is a neat idea

===

TL;DR - I get your frustration, I agree and sympathize, but I try to explain why some authors might release less frequently than others.

Oh yeah, I perfectly understand why he releases so slowly. I just can't accept it in my "production" modded environment anymore. My big beef is features > stability/security. Not in my backyard it's not. NEVER AGAIN in my backyard will it be. When I first picked up his mods I thought with the frequent updates maybe I'd get a nice set of mods to make into the core of my pack. Then 1.7 hit, Chromaticraft became his baby, and now all his mods are being held up by the neccessary revision process for ChromatiCraft. While I do understand why this is the case, it's not something I can ever support. Bugfixes and stability are ALWAYS going to be more important to me than features. Features are good, new features are neat, but they're never worth the stability of my game experience. I know how difficult it is to work on multiple code branches at the same time, I realize that Reika has the screwiest setup ever so his CLI gets 3fps when running Git which means he can't write changelogs or version tag his own codebase in version control. I know and understand all these things, but I personally disagree with the way he is doing things. When your mod can cause my game to become literally unplayable when another mod updates, I no longer care about the shiny new jetpack you're working on... because my choice has become "wait for jetpack", "use code I know to be buggy", or "don't play the game" if I have a mod that I can't live without. RP2 taught me that lesson a long time ago. NO mod is worth that kind of choice. Because I've been presented with that choice repeatedly since 1.7, I've hit my own personal breaking point. There is no way to keep Reika's mods going without DragonAPI, which currently versionlocks my game. I will never versionlock my game for very long, a determination which is fluid and entirely subjective. Because Reikas mods rely so heavily upon worldgen and having a reasonably stable world within which to play (due to time investment), the choice becomes "Do I value RotaryCraft, Reactorcraft, Chromaticraft, LegacyCraft, and ElectriCraft more than I value my other ". The answer to that is "not on your life"

My dropping of his mods means I lose a lot of things I will sorely miss them but it also means I'll actually have an updated and actively bugfixed pack for a while without being effectively forced to sit on a stable instance with the knowledge that there are bugfixes and/or cool new features I can't use. I tried that for a while back in the 1.4.7 days. There's a reason the last FTB modpack I seriously played was Beta A until AgSkies came out. I might use DW20 as a source of config settings (no sense reinventing the wheel), but the only FTB packs I've actually played have been FTB Pyramid Insanity, Beta A, Agrarian Skies, Magic Farm, and Crash Landing. The rest of the time it's been a custom pack built off of a foundation of DW20 and/or Resonant Rise. Because in the Beta A days I discovered that modpacks are ****ing slow at updates (for some very good reasons, mind you), and I can't stand that style. I'm capable of building and (usually) fixing my own modpack, I'm not going to put up with that style of release. Monster has mods in its recommended version that are nearly a year out of date from the last update on them that was 1.6 compatible (which are Reikas mods, because he didn't hop on the 1.7 train for a long time, but still; I couldn't let any pack of mine sit there like that. Especially with things like Reikas mods, where every version bump makes sweeping changes that can easily cause information to become inaccurate. Keeping everyone on as close to the same page as possible is something important both for pack tech support, and the mod author's sanity)

One can only hope -- but then 1.9 will come out and the cycle will start yet again.

Oh definitely, I don't care about the 1.8 cycle yet, I just care that most authors are going to take a long time in the transition (for good reason) so while I'm waiting a few months for most of my favorite mods to update, there will be a code freeze on most of the mods that can break my instance by updating (things like BC and AE2). Stability for a while!

Sorry for the ambush wall of text above. I'm getting my morning coffee now, and should be much more agreeable for the remainder of the day!

Not a problem, I can write text walls too. I'm just glad someone is passionate when I see walls like that. I feel even better when I read them and I realize that not only is the author passionate about the subject, but is also using reason. It's not a rant, it's a passionate debate; and those are fun!

 

[1SDAN]

It still becomes an issue of "what if some of my players don't know/want to play with this feature?
One of those mods (I want to say Refugee to Regent Utilities) which does the "make it harder" thing actually has whitelist functionality. So you have to opt IN to the features on a per-player basis. Which is a neat idea

===


Oh yeah, I perfectly understand why he releases so slowly. I just can't accept it in my "production" modded environment anymore. My big beef is features > stability/security. Not in my backyard it's not. NEVER AGAIN in my backyard will it be. When I first picked up his mods I thought with the frequent updates maybe I'd get a nice set of mods to make into the core of my pack. Then 1.7 hit, Chromaticraft became his baby, and now all his mods are being held up by the neccessary revision process for ChromatiCraft. While I do understand why this is the case, it's not something I can ever support. Bugfixes and stability are ALWAYS going to be more important to me than features. Features are good, new features are neat, but they're never worth the stability of my game experience. I know how difficult it is to work on multiple code branches at the same time, I realize that Reika has the screwiest setup ever so his CLI gets 3fps when running Git which means he can't write changelogs or version tag his own codebase in version control. I know and understand all these things, but I personally disagree with the way he is doing things. When your mod can cause my game to become literally unplayable when another mod updates, I no longer care about the shiny new jetpack you're working on... because my choice has become "wait for jetpack", "use code I know to be buggy", or "don't play the game" if I have a mod that I can't live without. RP2 taught me that lesson a long time ago. NO mod is worth that kind of choice. Because I've been presented with that choice repeatedly since 1.7, I've hit my own personal breaking point. There is no way to keep Reika's mods going without DragonAPI, which currently versionlocks my game. I will never versionlock my game for very long, a determination which is fluid and entirely subjective. Because Reikas mods rely so heavily upon worldgen and having a reasonably stable world within which to play (due to time investment), the choice becomes "Do I value RotaryCraft, Reactorcraft, Chromaticraft, LegacyCraft, and ElectriCraft more than I value my other ". The answer to that is "not on your life"

My dropping of his mods means I lose a lot of things I will sorely miss them but it also means I'll actually have an updated and actively bugfixed pack for a while without being effectively forced to sit on a stable instance with the knowledge that there are bugfixes and/or cool new features I can't use. I tried that for a while back in the 1.4.7 days. There's a reason the last FTB modpack I seriously played was Beta A until AgSkies came out. I might use DW20 as a source of config settings (no sense reinventing the wheel), but the only FTB packs I've actually played have been FTB Pyramid Insanity, Beta A, Agrarian Skies, Magic Farm, and Crash Landing. The rest of the time it's been a custom pack built off of a foundation of DW20 and/or Resonant Rise. Because in the Beta A days I discovered that modpacks are ****ing slow at updates (for some very good reasons, mind you), and I can't stand that style. I'm capable of building and (usually) fixing my own modpack, I'm not going to put up with that style of release. Monster has mods in its recommended version that are nearly a year out of date from the last update on them that was 1.6 compatible (which are Reikas mods, because he didn't hop on the 1.7 train for a long time, but still; I couldn't let any pack of mine sit there like that. Especially with things like Reikas mods, where every version bump makes sweeping changes that can easily cause information to become inaccurate. Keeping everyone on as close to the same page as possible is something important both for pack tech support, and the mod author's sanity)

Oh definitely, I don't care about the 1.8 cycle yet, I just care that most authors are going to take a long time in the transition (for good reason) so while I'm waiting a few months for most of my favorite mods to update, there will be a code freeze on most of the mods that can break my instance by updating (things like BC and AE2). Stability for a while!


Not a problem, I can write text walls too. I'm just glad someone is passionate when I see walls like that. I feel even better when I read them and I realize that not only is the author passionate about the subject, but is also using reason. It's not a rant, it's a passionate debate; and those are fun!

Okay, I'll try to simplify that again:

I don't mean this as a mod, I am suggesting this as an additional and optional set of rules to Refugee to Regent

 

[TomeWyrm]

Okay, I'll try to simplify that again:

I don't mean this as a mod, I am suggesting this as an additional and optional set of rules to Refugee to Regent

Yep, we know. What I was saying is, much like the "don't go underground without a helmet" rule, it could be made into a small mod to enhance the experience, reduce the number of things you have to remember, and doesn't rely on the honor system.

What Sensei said is that while the concept is about as simple as I figured, the devil is in the details. In this case the mod interaction and player misinformation details.

 

[Senseidragon]

I agree on all points, and most definitely, stability should trump features. My first big confidence-crushing encounter with mods that I "couldn't live without" was RedPower 2. I couldn't imagine playing without it, and resisted for ages doing an upgrade until Eloraam put out her updates.

That was a mistake I don't plan on ever doing again. There is no mod I can't live without, though some would surely be missed. I would hate to lose NEI for example, but if I had to, I could switch to an alternative. I've recently stopped playing with Tinker's Construct if for no other reason than all my worlds started to look the same. I'd ALWAYS have TC all over the place, usually with Tinker's Tweaks installed right along with it. Playing without it has been refreshing for me.

Likewise, I've on-and-off experimented with completely removing Thermal Expansion (and Minefactory, and Nether Ores, and so on) for much the same reasons, but whereas Tinker's still hasn't made it back into my playlist, Thermal Expansion is back in.

I almost completely walked away from MineFactory Reloaded when Skyboy added those cursed mega-sacred-rubber-tree-trololololol-mother-ship things. Fortunately he was decent enough to provide a config to banish them from my game, so I'm okay with it again.

I'd really like to see Reika's mods featured in a meaningful way in a current pack, but I understand why that can be a challenge. The API mismatch with other mods is getting a bit old for me too. I thought it was fairly well isolated into DragonAPI, but that doesn't seem to be getting updated any faster than any other portion of his code either. He has his reasons though, and I'm cool with that. It'll just make it harder to include his work into projects.

I'm seeing a lot of great new ideas coming out in new mods these days, so maybe as some of the old guard throw in the towel and move on to other things, some of the next generation of talented people will pick up the slack and fill in those gaps. @McJty is doing some admirable work with his RFTools mod, even though I'm still struggling with getting the dimension builder to work the way I think it's supposed to. Another new (to me) mod I recently tried was Compact Machines, which was REALLY NEAT! I managed to build an entire AE2 subsystem inside a block...

...then I tried to move the block...

...pieces went flyine everywhere...

Ok, so maybe that mod needs a warning label, but it was still darn cool.

Personally, I need to brush up more on getting the multiplayer aspects of modding under my belt. My stuff generally works great in single-player, but I tend to forget something somewhere and I end up getting out of sync with the server. Not a good thing for a mod to do. I'll keep at it though, because I enjoy the process.

Who knows, maybe I'll figure out a way to craft a CustomNPCs spawn egg of a pre-made NPC if @Noppes doesn't implement it first.

Edit: Obligatory post-post grammar checking...

 

[Senseidragon]

Somebody needs to post an update on their challenge progress. We need more cool stuff to look at!

 

[TomeWyrm]

Oh, ouch. Yeah. Moving a full Compact Machine is like a rite of passage. I'm sure pretty much everyone that's played with the mod has done something like that. Incidentally I had the same experience as my catalyst for "Yeah, totally not doing this again". Redpower was an amazing mod, but no mod is worth that level of ick.

You might be able to make an item (trying to extend the spawn eggs probably wouldn't work well) that references the "clone" files and is consumable... or maybe even hooks into HQM and the like to allow access to certain NPC's as a quest trigger. Which probably means you could do repeatable quests for things like guards if you'd like, or even "repeatable" quests that are just short quest chains so it's not able to be infinite.

Wonder if you could make CustomNPC's require upkeep like Ancient Warfare... That would probably have to be a dedicated addon though... because that one feature would by necessity have to be tightly integrated with CustomNPCs

 

[TomeWyrm]

OH! There's a mod that could be repurposed to simulate upkeep... crap. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called. It's basically the predecessor to the idea of Agrarian Skies' lore. It was supposed to give modded minecraft a purpose by handing in stuff to a block repeatedly... it started out like "one wheat" or "ten logs" and escalated eventually to things like 1 million cobblestone, or a stack of diamond blocks. That mod might be configurable enough, if I could remember what the heck it was called... I might be delving through the archives of the MCF Modlist and NotEnoughMods. I'm 99% sure it wasn't HQM.

A similar concept could easily be used though, I'm sure a "food turnin box" wouldn't be that hard to implement... it'd be quite a bit of maintenance in the mid-game though before you gain the ability to automate the distribution of food to your citizens. Though it's not like a barrel on top of a hopper feeding into what is effectively an occasionally-active void chest is THAT hard, hehe.

 

[Senseidragon]

I was thinking an item would be appropriate and it would be an item with no associated recipe, so only HQM or a command block (or an op) could spawn one. You just spawn it with appropriate metadata to reference the cloned NPC you want, and you get the NPC.

Should have no impact on the CustomNPCs mod, but would depend on that being an available mod. I don't know if HQM would need some integration work to specify metadata for a reward item, it might. But a command block should be able to work for testing purposes to make sure things operate as intended.

Some of the videos by Accidental Games (Gamemode 4) have me looking at command blocks again. I think some of the features are 1.8 though, so may not get far.

 

[TomeWyrm]

Yeah, they added quite a few features into command blocks in 1.8

 

[tooncool64]

Hey guys. I'm working on a modpack for R2R. It will be pretty cool, even though its in early alpha. After I get it approved, it will be posted in the modpack creation section. I hope none of you guys object.
Cheers,

 

[Senseidragon]

No objections from me, everyone is free to build pack collections as they choose. Care to share what mods you're thinking of putting together?

How well your pack is actually accepted will strongly be influenced by how well the mods fit with the challenge and the relative popularity/usefulness/synergy of the mods provided. Reading back a couple of posts, you may note that mods with support issues or long-outstanding bugs aren't always as desirable as ones that have a history of playing well together and are actively supported.

Also be careful of just throwing mods together because they sound like they'd fit. I really liked (past tense intended) the MC+ set of mods because it added some nifty early game features. However, some of the things it did that weren't quite as obvious at the outset were things like removing the ability to craft sticks from planks. For some, this may be a non-issue, but for me it was odd and for other players on the server not interested in the challenge, it was downright annoying.

Likewise, as much as I liked the 3D Furnaces mod, and the mod does try to make a provision for converting it's 3D furnace into a "normal" furnace for compatability issues with recipes, I found that you can't automate this conversion with AE2. You can't make a pattern (that works, anyway) to convert the 3D furnace into a regular furnace. It just stalls indefinitely.

Things like this aren't obvious at first glance, and may actually take quite a bit of time to discover. I'm not sure if it was directly related, but when I went to remove the 3D furnaces mod from my world last night, the world corrupted and crashed. In the error log, it immediately showed the removal of the four 3D furnaces I had in the world, then *boom*. Every time I try to reload the world, same thing.

I know I can fix this issue and salvage my world, but not everyone will know how to do so, and issues like this should be avoided if you want happy users of your pack.

 

[Senseidragon]

@The Mobius Archives - I saw your new video today and already commented on it. I like how you added Better Rain. It works well, and sounded great. Those Transvector Interface things looked interesting, but how cost-efficient are they compared to just running pipes or conduits given their limited range? I'll have to check them out because they look interesting, it was just a question I had given that in the video you were literally only trying to go up one floor and already were hitting a range limit.

Something you may not have considered looking into, or maybe you have and put it out for a future episode; Botania has a lot of early-game accessible items you can build with just a little setup. The Sojourner's Sash, Horn of the Wild, and Magnetizing Ring are three items I showed my daughter how to build last night and she's zipping around quite pleased with herself today.

Edit: Spelling error. Figures.