[SUGGESTION] More decor and some decor changes
MorzanTLD opened this issue ยท 4 comments
This mod has been my lifeblood since the incident. I have some suggestions for some cosmetics based on some struggles and ideas I had while I have been attempting to design a base using only thaumcraft related stuff and vanilla. I'm sorry if the tone comes off as strange or demanding as I am not used to making request posts or any posts.
The border of the starfield glass blocks, while pretty limits my ability to make a pretty starfield wall, ceiling, floor, or flat out a room of pretty starfield. If possible have the block remove the border on the sides that have an adjacent block of the same type. Ideally, this would also be overridden if you hold shift when placing the block.
I would adore the ability to have an arcane stone and amber with the border removed as tiling is sometimes undesirable.
A glowing variant of amber, like in one of the old tc4 mods would be easy to implement and greatly useful as I often use amber with lighting behind it. Perhaps, if you make it with nitor it would also have the nitor slightly visible inside it.
Expanding on the nitor being visible, maybe we could have nitor in a jar or simply trapped in a glass block?
With the other light source, having floating candles would be really useful as sometimes finding a good spot or surface to place candles down is hard and a floating variant would help.
I don't know what the rest of the thaumcraft community thought about the silverwood planks texture but I thought that they look god awful and nigh impossible to use in a build. It would look much better if it flowed better by not having a border. This could even be added as an alternate block. I'm not sure whether this suggestion goes against the guidelines or not.
I found it incredibly strange that you added special warded versions of the greatwood, silverwood and thaumium doors and trapdoors. It would make sense that mundane versions of these doors and trapdoors and would have excellent aesthetic applications. Furthermore, maybe we could have voidmetal variants of these as well?
It might be nice to have a way to manufacture ambient grass?
Finally, I quite dislike the current wooden tables added by vanilla thaumcraft as they don't look great if they aren't on their own, perhaps you could add a variant that looks like the old thaumcraft tables?
Thank you for your time. I would attempt to implement or help to implement these if I currently had the ability. Again I apologise if any of this seemed demanding or if I misunderstood what you intended with this mod; essentially continuing tc6.
So here's my thoughts as part of today's suggestion backlog update (tm):
- Facade tubes and maybe glass tubes that show the essentia inside are potential things
- Amber and arcane stone can probably actually just get CTM from a resource pack. Take a look at silverwood planks and such for an example, it involves having a .mcmeta file with some CTM metadata.
- I can think about a mundane sky starfield glass, but I'd have to check if it would play nicely with other mods, especially those that use shaders for some sky effects
Thanks for your feedback/ideas, I'll cover each part in turn with my thoughts on them. Also, as fair warning, currently the mod isn't really being developed with new content due to real-life providing the usual obstructions that it does, but at the very least we can keep these ideas in mind.
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For Starfield Glass and it's border, do you have CTM (ConnectedTexturesMod) installed? If you don't, make sure it is, since that makes the border wrap around connected pieces of glass (it was really designed around that mod). Aside from that, if you meant that you want the glass borders removed arbitrarily then there might be a way to do that too.
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As for amber/arcane stone seamless tiling, those are a block without CTM support or anything of the sort sadly. While there is probably a way to override the default textures with tileable ones, I'm not a very good artist so I don't know if I would be competent enough to make such textures actually look nice.
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Glowing Amber was from Automagy, another addon lost to time. I suppose it would be good to add, but it's always a bit dodgy just directly copying an idea from another mod, alive or otherwise, so I would personally be a tad reluctant to add it. Other light source blocks might work however, your Nitor in a Jar idea might work for instance.
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With Floating Candles, that presents another potentially dodgy situation like with Glowing Amber, since that was a part of the old and, again, dead addon Thaumic Exploration, which was supposed (key word here) to be eventually ported to the TC6 versions of Thaumic Tinkerer. It's a shame, because I would like a lot of these features to be properly ported, but it's tricky to know how to treat such ideas since you can make people quite... unhappy by taking ideas from other mods, even ones that are entirely dead (just look at people wanting to port Witchery to 1.12+ for example).
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Silverwood Planks. Again, make sure CTM is installed, that makes the borders not appear around individual blocks, instead neatly forming around full floors/walls.
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As for non-warded fancy doors, that might be worth considering, although how it would work mechanically would need to be properly thought out (how to indicate the difference between warded and non-warded doors, whether there should be different textures to show this difference, how research progression would work, etc). As for Void Metal doors, again: I am not an amazing artist, so while I'm not against adding them my art skills may very well disagree with that sentiment.
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An Alchemy recipe for Ambient Grass could work perhaps, although personally I'd want to put it alongside some other decorative or utility recipes just so it doesn't feel too simple for an entire research page.
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I'd have to look at the differences between tables from older and newer versions of the mod, do the necessary art porting, and then a simple recipe to convert new tables to old tables and vice-versa could be added. So not a bad idea, but the thing holding it back is development being very slow due to me being at work and Codex being busy with his own real-life stuff.
No worries about being overly demanding or whatnot, this feedback has been nicely organized and it's always good to see how people think the mod could be improved in simple ways. I also understand the feeling of having lots of ideas but having no way to implement them, it is a very frustrating position to be in. Personally I'd recommend writing down any miscellaneous ideas you have neatly somewhere, since doing that at least makes you feel like you've done something. I wouldn't recommend doing that with Thaumcraft addon ideas though, as take it from me: it's a vortex you don't want to get stuck in.
- For Starfield Glass and it's border, do you have CTM (ConnectedTexturesMod) installed?
- Silverwood Planks. Again, make sure CTM is installed, that makes the borders not appear around individual blocks, instead neatly forming around full floors/walls.
God, I forgot that was a thing and I didn't think about that mod I've even seen the connected version of Silverwood planks in-game before. Regardless it doesn't (seem to) support arbitrary tiling and would like to see it happen, but yes it is much better. I wonder if that could have been added by the connected textures mod.
- As for amber/arcane stone seamless tiling, those are a block without CTM support or anything of the sort sadly. While there is probably a way to override the default textures with tileable ones, I'm not a very good artist so I don't know if I would be competent enough to make such textures actually look nice.
With amber and arcane stone, I don't think it would be that difficult to remove the borders from the texture, especially amber. This sounds like something I could try out as I am looking to try and develop some mod development skills and I'm not experienced at art.
- With Floating Candles, that presents another potentially dodgy situation like with Glowing Amber, since that was a part of the old and, again, dead addon Thaumic Exploration, which was supposed (keyword here) to be eventually ported to the TC6 versions of Thaumic Tinkerer.
Ah, it's a shame how things are with porting things from other mods at least thaumic tinkerer seems to be getting very infrequent updates so it seems possible. Worst case scenario I could use it as additional motivation to make my own mod and take any aggression that may come from ---stealing--- UH... porting other people's work.
I also understand the feeling of having lots of ideas but having no way to implement them, it is a very frustrating position to be in.
At this point, I'm used to it. I've been wanting to make Minecraft mods for years and have barely been making progress on learning though I'm trying to change that.
Personally I'd recommend writing down any miscellaneous ideas you have neatly somewhere, since doing that at least makes you feel like you've done something. I wouldn't recommend doing that with Thaumcraft addon ideas though, as take it from me: it's a vortex you don't want to get stuck in.
It's too late! I've been writing down ideas for absolutely bloated mods and the one for thaumcraft is just the most recent one!
I've already come up with a few more cosmetic ideas:
- Some form of pipe cover would be great if possible as pipes that go through walls/floors/ceilings look awkward, perhaps compatibility with forge multipart would work? I don't know how much work would even be involved to do this.
- Void metal bars like iron bars. because it might look nice I guess? Maybe someone else could make the texture
- some kind warded jar that can pipe from below or a device that does the same?
- I don't know why crusted stone has a higher resolution texture but it looks awful and it even looks worse when next to other blocks. Having it be relatively isolated next to lower resolution blocks looks bad. maybe increase the size of the crusted stone patches?
- mundane banner essentia patterns would be great but seem like they might fit better in a separate mod. Additionally, you could go the other way and have normal banner patterns apply to thaumcraft banners or just have them be a flat overlay/reskin of normal banners with normal banner functionality.
- Given the name 'starfield glass' it makes sense we would have starfield glass of a normal starry sky
- Mycelium alchemy recipe along with ambient grass? Maybe with sapling conversion and cocoa bean creation?
- Quark Compatability in the form of vertical slabs and the bark blocks of Greatwood and Silverwood logs. Sadly quark also does not add aspects to some of their items like tallow (pig fat) and cave crystals
For arbitrary removal of borders in things like Starfield Glass, that would probably require a custom CTM system without using the specific mod to do so, so while possible it probably wouldn't be high on the list of things to do, and that's on top of the already slow development due to stuff in real life.
With making Amber/Arcane Stone CTM textures, it'd likely be harder than you think, because I've had to do similar stuff before with Thaumcraft's textures and it's far too easy to make it look really ugly. If anything a new texture would probably need to be made, but I am not a good pixel artist in the slightest. You're welcome to take a shot at it if you want to though.
I wouldn't hedge your bets on Thaumic Tinkerer, its development is very slow, as is the case with most TC6 addons, which is probably due in big part to how Thaumcraft isn't being developed anymore. A shame, but not much can be done about it sadly.
Finally, regarding your Thaumcraft ideas of your own:
- We did have the idea for a Facade Tube that could take on the appearance of blocks placed into it, but we never got around to adding it.
- Void Metal bars could work as a decoration option, but that would probably also require adding metal bars for Brass and Thaumium too. But again, a decent texture artist would probably be needed to make it worthwhile.
- What do you mean 'a warded jar that can pipe from below'? I mean the Thaumcraft essentia piping system is a nightmare to understand, so I'd wonder if adding more complexity to it would help at all.
- The somewhat janky crusted stone texture is a leftover from TC5, since I'm not competent enough to make a nicer looking one.
- The fact that Thaumcraft has its own banners on top of vanilla ones is just a mess really, probably since it's a leftover from older TC versions, so it's probably something that should've been rethought from the ground up (like just adding special vanilla banner patterns for aspect icons).
- I suppose there could be a mundane sky version of mundane glass, like how OpenBlocks had that one block that showed the sky texture through it. However, starfield glass was mainly meant to do rift-related effects only, mainly so it was consistent with itself.
- There's some other addons that do new alchemy recipes, like Thaumic Wonders, so you might wanna check those first before thinking of your own alchemy recipes, just to make sure.
- And full quark support would be nice, although it'd mostly just be tedium with supporting decoration blocks or adding aspects to everything.