FlowerChild's Dev Diary (Week of September 17th)

[utakataJ6]

@ The Phoenixian:

Hello. It's Spanish Train.
"For it is said that the souls of the dead fill that train ten thousand deep!"

As far as wild speculation goes, I'd go out on a limb and and SoulSteam power, or something like that. Or at least those Companion Carts. I can't wait to dig into it all!

[devak]

maybe we need to go 88mph in a minecart to reach Home?

[FlowerChild]

Well, after much thought, I've decided to undertake a bold new course of action. Yes, I realize that's rather out of character for me ;)

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there's a hell of a lot of untapped potential in the villager mechanics, and with a number of small(ish) changes to the way they work, they could really become something special.

As a result, I'm ditching the concept of "hardcore trade" (at least in isolation), and going more for a full reworking of how villagers behave, which we can tentatively refer to as "hardcore villagers". With the design I have now, which is rather extensive, I suspect it will take me around a week of development time to fully realize, and its the kinda thing I'd like to release all at once rather than in bits and pieces over several releases.

So, what I'm planning on doing right now is putting together one last small release to tie up some loose ends, then I'll move onto working on the above. I'd strongly advise against building any villager traps or what have you until I complete all that, as these changes will likely break existing ones completely. Such traps will still certainly be possible in the future, but they will likely function in very different, and much more interesting ways. I'll put up one of my usual design-change warning threads in a moment to make sure people are aware of this.

Trust me though, it'll be very much worth it. It's rare that I like an idea for a single feature so much that I'm willing to spend an entire week developing it ;)

[Foxy Boxes]

Will Hardcore villagers be effecting zombie sieges also, or is it going to purely be a hardcore villager reboot?

[SterlingRed]

Hardcore priests! Coming to a village near you!


I'm very interested in seeing how this turns out!

[Ribky]

I very much can't wait to rebuild my villager farms, as much as I love them. They are ugly door laden contraptions, built high above the surface, and the upcoming change is a welcome challenge to figure out.

[FlowerChild]

I very much can't wait to rebuild my villager farms, as much as I love them. They are ugly door laden contraptions, built high above the surface, and the upcoming change is a welcome challenge to figure out.

Yeah, that's definitely one of the things I'll be addressing. The whole door thing is retarded and feels like a massive exploit which basically ruins something that could have been super cool.

That's why I'm making an exception here and violating my policy of trying not to break existing builds. The amount of potential fun that will result far outweighs the breakage.

[Sarudak]

Are we going full on simcity? If so I'm gonna have to be real careful about saving up before my powerplant goes boom! ;)

[FlowerChild]

Are we going full on simcity? If so I'm gonna have to be real careful about saving up before my powerplant goes boom! ;)

It's been awhile man :)

[casinodoug]

should we also have the same worry for our iron golem farms?

[Biohazard91X]

Just as I finish my current villager farm :') Ah well, I'm sure your way will be more fun and rewarding!

[Sarudak]

It's been awhile man :)

What? I'm reformed! That was just a joke!

[FlowerChild]

should we also have the same worry for our iron golem farms?

Well, the villager habitation requirements are going to change drastically, but I'm unlikely to touch the golem spawn requirements, so it will largely depend on the design on your golem farm.

But yes, in all likelihood they will break as well given the dependence on villagers, and at least require some reworking to get going again.

[MoRmEnGiL]

Can we call this reasonable villagers instead of hardcore villagers? Because seriously, whatever you do with them will surely make more sense that the nonsense mechanics they have now ;p

On the other hand.. Hardcore priests.. hmmm makes me think of hardcore nuns.. Where is that damn gimp suit, I swear one day I'll convince one of them to put it on.


What do you mean gimp suits do not look like nun's clothing? Pff.

[orlandu84]

Trust me though, it'll be very much worth it. It's rare that I like an idea for a single feature so much that I'm willing to spend an entire week developing it ;)

As a Minecraft and BTW novice, the above both scares and excites me!

In all seriousness anything that makes villagers and villages more dynamic would be a welcome change. Once I had completed my iron golem farm, I basically forgot about villagers. Now, I did build an actual village for my villagers separate from said iron golem farm - complete with a tower and a stone wall. But I don't do anything with that village. I just look down upon them from my castle and think, "Useless serfs; I built those house and what do I get from them? Nothing." So, any change that would make my little village more important or interesting would be welcome.

[risingphoenix]

Just throwing in my 2 wooden pennies here on the name, but I would say hardcore villagers is definitely more in keeping with the dark tongue incheek humor of the mod, andthe recent spate of "hardcore" mechanics, even if it a more reasonable system than the one currently in place

[milkmandan]

Thousands of generations of incest......

Isn't that what's caused their current state of near mindlessness? If ignorance is bliss they must be damn near orgasmic at all times.

+1 for fixing villagers. hell, +1 for "fixing" villagers.

[Donzaffi]

Thousands of generations of incest......

Isn't that what's caused their current state of near mindlessness? If ignorance is bliss they must be damn near orgasmic at all times.

+1 for fixing villagers. hell, +1 for "fixing" villagers.

Don't know what bothers me more, the no gender thing or this. Perhabs there mindlessness comes from booth ?
BTW feels more and more like that what minecraft wanted to be.

Its like:
Some years later. Jeb passes the minecraft development to FC ^^

[Battlecat]

I support any changes to villager behavior because honestly, the current approach is frustrating and leads to very irritating and ugly builds. The mechanism they use to identify a house is particularly flawed since it greatly reduces the potential diversity of construction styles. I look forward to seeing what you came up with.

[kazerima]

I look forwards to the changes to villager behavior, as actual housing feels much more in the spirit of things than massive door-complexes.

[Cuchonchuir]

Just have to add about infinite spawning bug: when the feature was new, I ended up accidentally creating an infinite breeding group in a 1x1 area . . . There were literally hundreds in there, and it was so bad I had an FPS of about one frame every four seconds. I had to pour lava in there to kill them all.

Back to dev diary; thanks for keeping up with this, and really looking forward to "hardcore villagers". It makes me want to recreate my awesome village in a previous world - I had an insane asylum, police station, shanty town, and middle class area. :D

[PhongGamer]

I'm not sure if this would be of any interest to you, FlowerChild, but I have been expanding a village for quite a while now. I have been using BTW in the process, though not as much as I had originally intended. Anyway, it's documented in a Let's Play/Build series. There aren't any villager factories or anything like that, though there had been a period where I had some bizarre population expansion. I believe that the population is at around 90 villagers providing plenty of entertainment and crappy trades for me. If you would like a test environment, I'd be more than happy to set up a world download for you. Rather than throwing my channel or video links in here, I can post some pictures if that would help.

Given that this will likely have an impact on my primary video series, I am very, very interested in seeing the modifications you make to villager behavior. :) If the rest of the mod is indicative of what you'll be changing, then I'm sure it's going to make village life much more interesting. Like others have mentioned, the vanilla criteria for housing can be rather annoying and presents some limitations, so when I learned that you're going to be making some changes, I was quite happy.

[FlowerChild]

I appreciate the offer man, but it's cool. Part of the process of me developing and balancing these changes will be building up a village from scratch, probably not even using the one I already have setup in my own world.

So yeah, while I can appreciate your villager megaopolis, it won't be very useful to me in making these changes ;)

[tedium]

i'm almost drooling in anticipation. i suspect i'll need a bib before the week is out. FC, you are seriously one of the few people that if I had you friended on facebook, you could spout all the drivel "went to the shops, brought some oranges" updates and not have me troll before defriending. i have no idea what you have in store for us, but i'm excited because i know it's going to be better than what we have now.

[SgtChuckle]

Yes! I've wanted this so bad ever since Testificates were first added... Although I appreciate the way that you openly said at first in the OP about how there weren't really any super tangible products of your work so far. It makes a huge difference that you don't constantly feel the need to feed us content unlike a certain dev-team.