I'm fearing that this will not be the case, but since Microsoft will soon own Mojang, I doubt we'll see a fix for this until the transaction pulls through next year.
In celebration of 1.8's release, I took it upon myself to update the skin I had been using and make it as new, improved, and shiny as I could possibly muster. Rather than take my previous skin, change a few things, and sling it into a converter, I decided to undergo the daunting (but fun) task of doing it completely from scratch. As you can imagine, the base colors for layer 1 were lain in an astonishingly short amount of time, with layer 2 taking a bit longer due to my indecisiveness. This was done about a week ago.
The reason I'm creating this thread is because of one small problem; no matter how many different methods of it I attempt, my shading always looks indescribably terrible. Don't get me wrong, I did shade my pre-1.8 skin, but it was done under the guidelines of a tutorial, one that was rather dissatisfying. For this one, I'd like to do it as realistically as possible. That being said, I'm more proficient in the realm of pencils, not pixels, and have no idea how you'd go about representing light (And the curvature of it around an object) on a skin.
I have looked around, but none of the Skin tutorials I followed gave a satisfactory result. (I should point out that I'm not using an image editor to construct the texture, rather a wonderful program called MCSkin3D. In other words, I can't just paste a template over the thing and even if I could, I would feel bad for having stolen someone else's work. Plus, there'd be the obstacle of it looking out-of-place due to it ignoring layers.) I've also looked at tutorials concerning things other than Minecraft Skins, but those yielded no results due to them being intended for use with larger resolutions (not 64X64). I'm also---in no sense of the word---a "Good" or even so much as "Decent" or "Mediocre" artist ("Abysmal", even, is too polite.), so anybody who's so much as slightly experienced in this field will probably be of some help.
Speaking of "Help":
I'm including said skin (Drinking game: take a swig of a beverage of choice for every instance of the word "Skin" in this post.) as an attachment, so you'll have a better idea of what's on top of what and where the shadows should be.
I'm imagining the light source in the upper-right (Left, when you're looking at it head on.), though Pillow Shading would also probably work.
One last clarification: I'm requesting pointers, not for you to complete the skin yourself. While that would be monumentally kind and unnecessary, as well as also solving the problem, I would prefer to do everything myself. (Well, mostly myself, seeing as how I'll be following the tips posted here.)
Well, at least we can verify that this only affects some people's systems. What we need to do now is pinpoint exactly what on their systems is making it run like it is. I, for one, blame my 7-years-out-of-date processor (Though that's probably wrong.)
I didn't mention this in my previous post, but VBO's were enabled, making no difference whatsoever.
Oh good! I'm glad to see that I (A don't have to make a new thread for this and (B am not the only one suffering from this problem.
I've kept the same graphical options as 1.7 (Minus the Anisitropic Filtering, of course), yet I'm getting less than half the FPS, accompanied by the addition of numerous, random crashes. It also takes about 30 seconds to load a chunk in, paling in comparison to the minuscule 2 it took beforehand.
I wouldn't mind it so much, were the game not completely unplayable because of it; it causes blocks to break an entire 4 seconds after the animation has finished, makes combat impossible, and renders open heart surgery less risky than ocean traversal.
I guess that I'll just have to expect the opposite when the dev team announces performance improvements, from hereon.
I have that happen to me multiple times. I spawn In, looks to be a decent spawn, move a few blocks over a hill blocking my vision, find out its a small little Island with a giant Hill.
At least you actually get a hill! The most I've seen is a rose, 128 blocks of sand with a single patch of tallgrass, and a block of gravel.
Some of these (namely the ice, sand, and jungle caves, paying special attention to the jungle) are absolutely beautiful. The Snow hills seem to make a lot more sense, but there will be patches where the snow has fallen off, leaving dirt exposed.
I'm really unsure about completely removing the sand from the lake, seeing as how it serves as a method of getting glass when not near a river or ocean, maybe you should replace the cobblestone at the bottom with sand? That being said, I do like the replacement of border sand with grass and adding assorted foliage.
The one thing I don't like (I don't know how to feel about the caverns and nether additions) is replacing the dungeons, if that had been proposed as an additional structure that had a chance to generate alongside the standard dungeons, I would approve, but I feel that they work as they are: Small, cramped rooms that pit you against a wave of constantly spawning mobs.
Whenever I start a new world, I usually walk around and try to find a suitable area to build on, before deleting the world when no such area presents itself. I repeat this as many times as necessary until I finally find one and spend about 13 hours building in it before forgetting about it entirely (at least, until the next major update is released) then delete it and start fresh a few weeks later.
I really need to just commit myself to a "no delete" rule whereby I have to stay in a world if I generate it. (Unless I spawn on an island in the middle of an endless seascape.)
I have been trying to find a mod or topic pertaining to colored torches/light since the introduction of The Adventure Update, I really hope Mojang sees how many people would like this and devise a non-intensive, bloating, method to implement it.
Oh, and even though colored glass is already a reality, I would love to have cyan space sand and other colors for my (Alarmingly frequent) bizarre underground installations.
This completely blows all the worlds I've generated today (Approximately 23, still looking for one that I find satisfactory) out of the water.
Good find!
There are ALWAYS three strongholds in every MC world and USUALLY you spawn inside the circle defined by those three locations.
I've only seen one or two worlds, in the old world generated worlds, where spawn was outside that circle and in all cases all three strongholds were under ocean.
EDIT: Also, (I could be wrong.) the size of that triangle doesn't change when you use LargeBiomes instead of default to generate the world.
That is, when you choose LargeBiomes the biomes get twice as large in each horizontal dimension, therefore four times bigger, but the coordinates of the strongholds don't change.
Oh, I thought Jens removed the stronghold restriction. Was it re-implemented in another update? Anyway, it also turns out I was underestimating the scale of the map, seeing as how they all spawned 900-ish blocks away.
However, since I misjudged the scale, that means that the Mega taiga(s) are even larger than I thought.
Edit: Turns out this post propelled my rank to "Gold Miner". I feel (Slightly) accomplished!
Short answer, yes.
I just made the map for -5026742213838715952 using Amidst v3.4 and the world generator of MC 1.7.2 and got a map with a spawn point in a mega taiga that is about 2k by 2k in size.
I've actually seen maps with much larger groupings of taiga type biomes.
I just mapped it out in the same program (Thank you for mentioning it, by the way!) and found that there are 2 mega mega taigas incredibly close to each other. If the program is to be trusted, there are also three separate strongholds that are abnormally close to the spawn...
After a batch of dis-satisfactory worlds, I happened to generate one that plopped me into a Mega Taiga! Having never seen a Mega Taiga before, I have no clue how large they're supposed to be but this one is unfathomably enormous (Miles long).
Here's the seed: -5026742213838715952
Again, I know they're called "Mega" Taigas, but I don't think that this is what Mojang meant when the prefix was added.
Also of note: The world I'm describing was not generated with the "large biomes" option, it's completely normal aside from the fact that it seems to be completely devoid of other biomes.
0
0
The reason I'm creating this thread is because of one small problem; no matter how many different methods of it I attempt, my shading always looks indescribably terrible. Don't get me wrong, I did shade my pre-1.8 skin, but it was done under the guidelines of a tutorial, one that was rather dissatisfying. For this one, I'd like to do it as realistically as possible. That being said, I'm more proficient in the realm of pencils, not pixels, and have no idea how you'd go about representing light (And the curvature of it around an object) on a skin.
I have looked around, but none of the Skin tutorials I followed gave a satisfactory result. (I should point out that I'm not using an image editor to construct the texture, rather a wonderful program called MCSkin3D. In other words, I can't just paste a template over the thing and even if I could, I would feel bad for having stolen someone else's work. Plus, there'd be the obstacle of it looking out-of-place due to it ignoring layers.) I've also looked at tutorials concerning things other than Minecraft Skins, but those yielded no results due to them being intended for use with larger resolutions (not 64X64). I'm also---in no sense of the word---a "Good" or even so much as "Decent" or "Mediocre" artist ("Abysmal", even, is too polite.), so anybody who's so much as slightly experienced in this field will probably be of some help.
Speaking of "Help":
I'm including said skin (Drinking game: take a swig of a beverage of choice for every instance of the word "Skin" in this post.) as an attachment, so you'll have a better idea of what's on top of what and where the shadows should be.
I'm imagining the light source in the upper-right (Left, when you're looking at it head on.), though Pillow Shading would also probably work.
One last clarification: I'm requesting pointers, not for you to complete the skin yourself. While that would be monumentally kind and unnecessary, as well as also solving the problem, I would prefer to do everything myself. (Well, mostly myself, seeing as how I'll be following the tips posted here.)
1
I didn't mention this in my previous post, but VBO's were enabled, making no difference whatsoever.
2
I've kept the same graphical options as 1.7 (Minus the Anisitropic Filtering, of course), yet I'm getting less than half the FPS, accompanied by the addition of numerous, random crashes. It also takes about 30 seconds to load a chunk in, paling in comparison to the minuscule 2 it took beforehand.
I wouldn't mind it so much, were the game not completely unplayable because of it; it causes blocks to break an entire 4 seconds after the animation has finished, makes combat impossible, and renders open heart surgery less risky than ocean traversal.
I guess that I'll just have to expect the opposite when the dev team announces performance improvements, from hereon.
0
At least you actually get a hill! The most I've seen is a rose, 128 blocks of sand with a single patch of tallgrass, and a block of gravel.
Completely flat as well.
0
I'm really unsure about completely removing the sand from the lake, seeing as how it serves as a method of getting glass when not near a river or ocean, maybe you should replace the cobblestone at the bottom with sand? That being said, I do like the replacement of border sand with grass and adding assorted foliage.
The one thing I don't like (I don't know how to feel about the caverns and nether additions) is replacing the dungeons, if that had been proposed as an additional structure that had a chance to generate alongside the standard dungeons, I would approve, but I feel that they work as they are: Small, cramped rooms that pit you against a wave of constantly spawning mobs.
0
I really need to just commit myself to a "no delete" rule whereby I have to stay in a world if I generate it. (Unless I spawn on an island in the middle of an endless seascape.)
0
Oh, and even though colored glass is already a reality, I would love to have cyan space sand and other colors for my (Alarmingly frequent) bizarre underground installations.
0
Although I could also wait for the 1.8.0 version if and when that comes out...
0
Good find!
0
Oh, I thought Jens removed the stronghold restriction. Was it re-implemented in another update? Anyway, it also turns out I was underestimating the scale of the map, seeing as how they all spawned 900-ish blocks away.
However, since I misjudged the scale, that means that the Mega taiga(s) are even larger than I thought.
Edit: Turns out this post propelled my rank to "Gold Miner". I feel (Slightly) accomplished!
0
I just mapped it out in the same program (Thank you for mentioning it, by the way!) and found that there are 2 mega mega taigas incredibly close to each other. If the program is to be trusted, there are also three separate strongholds that are abnormally close to the spawn...
0
Here's the seed: -5026742213838715952
Again, I know they're called "Mega" Taigas, but I don't think that this is what Mojang meant when the prefix was added.
Also of note: The world I'm describing was not generated with the "large biomes" option, it's completely normal aside from the fact that it seems to be completely devoid of other biomes.
Let me know if you find an end...
0
0