Minecraft Forums

'Daytime Better Skies Cloudscapes'

Taster vid for Glimmar's Steampunk texture pack update v12. Not yet available!

If there's anything you'd like to ask about the vid, ask away and I'll do my best to answer...though I'm only infrequently online at the moment.


Thanks for watching.

Sorry for the occasional stutters, these are caused mainly by the sheer size of the layered Better Skies textures I made. I am pushing my now aging PC to it's limit (should a two year old computer be called 'old'? :D) by the number of extra animations and CTM in my texture pack.

I did find that deleting a number of redstone contraptions I'd made (whether animated or not) helped frame rates, so I'm left wondering what effect the MC 1.5 Redstone Update and Mojangs version of animated textures and HD had in terms of lag. Having said that, my Fraps normally doesn't like playing with Minecraft at the best of times.

It goes without saying that you will need a fairly powerful setup to use these new Better Skies textures and of course MC Patcher. I will provide some lower res textures that can be swapped over, and/or you could try running just one layer of clouds and see what effect that has.There are two particularly noticeable stutters around 'sunset' time. One is when the 'sunset clouds' overlay kicks in and the second, shortly after, is caused by the 'starfield' texture beginning it's fade in. This is not as noticeable ingame, but there's nothing I can really do about it. I hope that a future MC Patcher will better optimise transitions, though I'm well aware that I'm asking a great deal when my texture files are so huge.

My apologies to all who can't use these cloud textures when they're released, but one has to try to push things to the limit from time to time.


Music and Sound Sample Credits:

Gorgeous clouds, glim, I'd say those two weeks were well spent!

I'm keeping a tab open on the front page until the new update is out. Can't wait to try it out!

Quote from asikar

Great work as always Glimmar. though i won't be able to use the new cloud textures or even 32x with animated mobs. Oh well, the pack is as magnificent as always. Keep up the good work.

Ah! Thanks, mate. Glad you like! Yep, they're pretty memory intensive, but it might be possible to use them for the odd pic or two of your airships. They might make a nice background.

It is the turning point for me with regard to animations, ctm and the like. I think from now on I need to be more circumspect with regard to what I do with the pack. Up to this point I haven't noticed any limitations in the game, despite adding anim after anim, etc. However, from now on I think there has to be a very good reason for any new addition being animated.

I'm considering dropping animated ores at some point (they'll still be available as alts) and to move over to ctm variety instead, even perhaps dropping some animations from the Iron Gollum and automaton Villagers. As I upgrade some of the 32x animated textures to 64x, I may reduce as many frames of animation as I can to optimize things where possible. With having a reasonably powerful PC setup, I've so far been quite lazy with regard to what gets thrown in the pack.

I also need to show those not used to delving into a texture pack that it is relatively easy to switch off individual MC Patcher animations (in the 'anim' folder), simply by removing the animation's associated .properties file. And in the case of animated blocks and items in the 'textures' folder, either have an alternative 'single' frame texture or edit the associated '.text' file to play just the first frame of the animated strip.

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Well, having got the daytime cloudy skies work out of my system, I can turn back to the 1.6 update and start some preliminary work on the horses and such. I have some free time tonight, so I also intend trying to catch up on the backlog of posts here. My apologies for the lack of attention...circumstances really have been very much against my being online.

Quote from XSSheep

Gorgeous clouds, glim, I'd say those two weeks were well spent!

I'm keeping a tab open on the front page until the new update is out. Can't wait to try it out!

Ah! Thanks, mate.

You know as well as anyone what a sinkhole experimental work can be. Sometimes it works and other times you wonder why you put in so much effort. I'm well aware that many will find the cloud textures a complete drain on their systems and others will fair better. So I'm still wondering if I might have better spent the time working in areas that really needed some improvement. Can't help being caught up in 'what if' work, eh?

Many thanks for lookin' in...much appreciated.

Quote from SycloneSJS

Fantastic fluffiness of the cumulus kind there Glimmar my man awesome work indeed. I'm a real sucker for a good sky, i think me and Sheep both have skiesanitess.........a distressing condition when we get quite down and agitated if a pack doesn't have a beautiful Sky scape to gorp at!

Thanks for the visual medicine just what the doctor ordered, my brain now feels more like a energizer bunny that's been zapped by lighting, than a sloth in a tree covered in treacle

Good luck on the horses, not that you need it and I look forward to seeing your vision on those that neigh that eat gob fulls of hay

Haha! I love some of those analogies, especially the 'sloth in a tree covered in treacle'! Where'd that come from?

Lol! You might feel better after looking at my clouds, Syclone...I never want to paint another cloud again!...at least for a few weeks! I just need to sit in a darkened room until my 'skyinsanititess' thingy wears off!

Anyways, what might look good in a video, might not be quite so good in game...it'll no doubt be judged by all in due course, but I much appreciate the compliment and the visit, mate. After my forced absence, I definitely need to pop round and see all the wonderful things you've been up to. I'm just not much of a social butterfly these days...more of a social Tsetse Fly!

Quote from rosestorm90

Glimmar,

I have an idea as to what you could do to make the pack work for everyone regardless of their system set up in regards to the different animations. My idea would be that when you release your next update, release your normal version complete with all the animations and then a stripped down version that has no animations in it at all, and then create a separate zip file that contains the animation files so people can install the ones that they want.

Yes, that's one possibility, but I'd like to avoid having more than one version of the main pack for download to keep things simple...if possible...and simple for me that is, especially at the fraught time of major updates. Especially when I get round to updating the 32x pack.

If I can have just one pack for download, along with clear instructions in a readme file and in the 'download' section on how to disable any of the two different kinds of animations that exist in the pack (MC Patcher 'anim' files and animated MC 'texture' files), then I can avoid having to check through and upload 3 separate zip files for each pack every time I update. The same method/instruction for disabling any animation can be employed for all future updates of the pack.

My headache is getting stuck in and making sense of my 'Rosetta Stone' of an anim file. I knew my illogical way of naming animation strips and .properties files, in a vain attempt to make them slightly unique to the pack, would come back to haunt me later on.

Stopping any MC Patcher animation file (for animated paintings, mobs or guis) is dead easy...just remove it's associated '.properties' file and nothing untoward will happen, the animated texture will just cease to animate. It just needs me to make a clear list of all the weirdly named .properties files I've made, so everyone knows what animation they relate to. Please, some kind soul volunteer to do this for me!

Stopping Mojang's animated blocks and items in the 'textures' folder is not so elegantly simple. I can provide a separate zip folder containing single textures to replace the animation strip for any animated 'block' and 'item' in the pack, then the associated '.text' file for any chosen animated block can just be deleted, or I could provide a zip file in the pack containing edited '.text' files that just calls the first frame of any animated block or item (effectively freezing the animation), but I'm not sure if this would really save on computing power, ie. does Mojang's system still run through the animation of a block in the background, even though only the first frame of the animation strip is displayed in-game?

I'm obviously trying to take the simplest course of action, especially at this time where I'm trying to psych myself up to tackle 1.6 stuff. However, I'm very grateful for you thinking this through with me.

In any event, things seem to be pretty confusing for 1.6 snapshots, Mojang's new launcher and MC Patcher. The way Mojang can now update snapshots on the fly, makes it very difficult for everyone to know how to use MC Patcher. I'm fairly practiced in using my favourite patcher, but I'm purposefully steering clear for the moment and just using vanilla Minecraft to look at the new horses.

Quote from douras

Hello,
just to say : "this clock reminds me something !"

P.S: love your texture pack ! It's the best one !

Haha! Yes, one and the same! It's a very famous and beautiful clock face with literally thousands of photographs online.

Mmm. I'm also looking at that sandstone in the background as a potential ctm'd version for the sandstone block, that...and some 'grimier' versions I have photographed from Victorian civic buildings in my own area.

Glad you like the pack...many thanks for saying...and welcome to the forums here.

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Thanks, ksheep for the headsup re: the 'hardened clay' block. Any suggestions anyone for how it might be textured? I'm thinking along the lines of another variety of brick, especially for when I upscale the current two versions we have, which I want to ctm for variety. I still want the nether version of brick to be an old and weathered variety, even making the original brick slightly more weathered, though brighter, but how best to employ the hardened clay in a fantasy industrial steampunk setting. Should I go along similar lines to the stonebrick/cracked SB/mossy SB? What would be most useful? Any and all suggestions welcomed and considered.

Flip! I wanted to go back through and answer to more of the posts I missed, but I've already run out of time now! ...I shall continue tomorrow.