Overall you stuff looks ok. I like your city gate. The city name is fitting ( I am german ^^ ). The tight packing of the buildings give a very good look. On the other side. The problem with them is that they look very wide compared to the height. You should try to add more vertical details like a trim. So you get more subpannels for a housefront instead of one huge rectangle. You could also try to build some houses "with the landscape" instead of building all on a flat area. Try to vary the city street level. Your town has very much potential and has already a nice feeling.
First off, I'm grateful you took your time to give me a reply, thanks a bunch :smile.gif:
Regarding the width, I'm not completely sure I understand what you mean, especially regarding subpanels?
All the buildings have a trim and center, some have a bit more than that. My guess is you mean that if I increase the height of the buildings, I can add more details to the walls. This is a good idea, but I think it'll only work on streets where there's generous space across the street, otherwise it'll all just get lost in view from ground-level.
I like the idea to vary the terrain and I've begun working on this. It'll be a small incremental rise so the city slopes upwards slowly, until it'll hit a mountain where the castle will be either built into or in front of.
Here's my newest project, which is currently WIP. It's an industrial age factory that's on what'll be the slummy outskirts of town. The left side and top is not done, I'm still thinking about what I should add there:
The back, with sewage pipes:
This is the plan being set in motion, with the town slowly sloping upwards the further in you get. Please keep in mind that this is early WIP and will change drasticly with softer corners and more variation:
Ugh, I hate double posting, but I'd like to show my updates.
The city has got a name now; Arnsberg. It's a German town, so I'm guessing Germans wont be impressed with that name, but it sounded sufficiently medieval for my tastes, so that's what it's called now :smile.gif:
This is the Arnsberg Guild, home of freedom fighters, adventurers and other freelancing people. The angle doesn't do the top floor justice I'm afraid, but I'm pretty satisfied with it when I walk on the ground:
The Guild interior:
Arnsberg now also has a bakery and sweets shop:
Interior:
Arnsberg Bank:
Interior. The backroom where the cashiers are has a vault and a staircase to the offices:
And the Arnsberg flag, blue/white/blue. Close to Argentinas, I know, but it seemed to fit nicely:
And the new additions from the top. Will add more details to the roof:
I've been working on sewerlines which are currently not that special, although they do have some secret entrances to buildings here and there. They're more or less just a 3x3 tunnel in cobbel with water in the middle and drains from the streets.
I still need suggestions for what buildings to add. I'm planning a school/library and maybe a temple. An industrial age factory as well. There will be a castle/palace at one point, which should compliment the rest of the city, but this is some of the last work I'll do along with the wall surrounding the city.
I hope people enjoy the updates. And as always I'd love comments, suggestions and especially criticism.
I like, I like! Not a fan of windows going all the way up to the roof, but as a whole it looks great.
The texture pack fits pretty well, especially with the iron(?)/obsidian kitchen floor.
As for the swamp biome, you can use NBTedit to change your seed. It'll mess up the areas you haven't explored yet, by making odd seams, but it should remove the swamp area, it did for me at least(Credit to InsanityBringer for pointing it out to me). Follow my signature link to see what happened and more info, it should be around the bottom of page 2.
On Topic : That's great! I didn't even know vines grew. Never read about them on the wiki...
Oh they grow alright. They're hard to use as decoration, unless you place them from the bottom.
Say you have a tower and want vines on it, and you place it near the top, they'll grow all the way down to the bottom, effectively covering up your tower from where you put it. It's pretty annoying. It also spreads sideways in some cases.
Very nice :smile.gif: I very much like the piston table, that's a stroke of genius.
You might want to consider changing the stone brick foundation to either something else, or vary the materials with stone and cobble. In the end though it might not make much difference, it's just that I'm looking at it and something feels off. It's taking too much attention away from the rest of the house.
I had a big problem with the swamp biomes as well, it completely ruined my project and pretty much kept me from playing the game altogether, since what's the point of spending months of work on building something, when Mojang updates and ruins it all?
Insanity Bringer helped me out with this though; On his advice I used NBTEdit and changed the seed on my server, removing the swamp biome completely. This does screw up the unexplored parts of the map though, meaning it'll create very strange seams. You can check out my issue here: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/751959-my-work-medievalpiratey-stuff/page__st__20
Beginning at post #29 you can see my swamp issue and later the effect it'll have on your map with the seams.
Basicly, it removed the swamp biome and didn't touch my present map or structures at all.
I really hope that one day we'll have a mod or editing program like MCedit that'll allow us to completely remove biomes or add new ones as we wish. I wouldn't mind having a swamp in a secluded corner somewhere, that would be fine, but smack in the middle of my city? No thanks!
I'll take this opportunity to psot some more pics.
This is the Alchemy and Oddities shop, placed next to the corner restaurant. It's my first try with netherbrick and it seems to fit in quite nicely. If or when I add a factory, it'll definately be made in this, to give it that dirty industrial brick look.
In the cellar of the shop, there is the alchemy lab:
Which have contraband plants growing in secret compartments(Completely unpractical by the way, since if you hit the plants there's a chance they'll drop out of reach):
Bowyer and Fletcher's house:
And a shooting range out back:
It's a bit generic, and I'll probably do a ton of similar buildings around the city to fill it up. By that point I'll update less and just show the overall size. Here's the city so far:
No need to copy stuff with MCEdit even! Install NBTEdit, load the file at ./minecraft/saves/<your world>/level.dat. there should be a seed or WorldSeed variable somewhere. Just enter a random number into that, and hope for the best! If that doesn't work, pick a different seed! If you need to explore far, though, be aware that ugly generation seams will occur, but this would happen even if you used the MCEdit route as well
I'll look into doing the "no swamp coloring" mod, though.
Holy **** I can't believe it actually worked. Not only did it remove the swamp, but it kept everything else intact, at least from what I can see. There's no discernible difference in the terrain and all I did was change the last 5 numbers in the seed through NBTedit. Wow.
Maybe the last numbers in the seed represent the latest changes, I don't know, but this is frickin' amazing, thank you, thank you, thank you so much! :biggrin.gif:
edit: It's like you said, when going beyond the previous seed border, weird seams occur, but I can live with that, it's pretty far away.
Funny how bad the swamp biomes still look, not counting the seam I mean.
Theoretically, I could just reload my backup, then explore some 5 minutes in all directions and do the same change, that would give me more standard terrain before uncanny valley occurs.
MCP is the Minecraft Coder Pack -- it contains utilities that decompile the game's source code so that a programmer can then amend it to make mods.
Thanks for the info. I'll bookmark the thread/site when I find it and keep an eye on it. Hopefully I can shanghai someone to help me! :biggrin.gif:
No need to copy stuff with MCEdit even! Install NBTEdit, load the file at ./minecraft/saves/<your world>/level.dat. there should be a seed or WorldSeed variable somewhere. Just enter a random number into that, and hope for the best! If that doesn't work, pick a different seed! If you need to explore far, though, be aware that ugly generation seams will occur, but this would happen even if you used the MCEdit route as well
I'll look into doing the "no swamp coloring" mod, though.
Frickin' golden, mate. I'll mess around with it tomorrow and see what happens. My guess is that I'll have to break up my server into two maps with the new and old stuff, since my old castles are on mountain tops and what have you.
The new stuff is all on flat terrain and MCedit will allow me to flatten an area to put the new project in. I started using it after I got utterly sick of filling up lakes with hundreds of dirtblocks. When I realized that I'd have to remove a small mountain I got disheartened and downloaded MCedit.
Sudden memories of filling in thousands of cobblestones just assaulted my brain.
It definately looks more like an outer wall than a castle, to begin with but it's a good start! :smile.gif:
Some tips, if you want them:
What's in a castle/courtyard:
Barracks, armory, stables, church or a wizards abode/home/tower, throne room, bedrooms, kitchen, archery range, smithy, small park, dungeon, torture room, gallery, swimming pool/baths(in roman citadels anyway), crypts/tombs, gallows and library. There are more things but you could make any and all of those if you wish.
Cobblestone works best when mixed with other materials, such as stonebrick or stone(smooth).
Add edges to your wall, so that turrets are wider than the wall itself(Doing this in stonebrick would look better)
Example:
Note how the turrets(the edges where archers position themselves to shoot) sticks out over the towers wall edges.
Add towers midway, to break the flat monotomy of the wall.
You could also make a pattern with supports or something else, that breaks the flat look.
This doesn't look all that pretty, it's just to give you an idea of what I mean.
Regarding the lava mote, you should consider lowering it by two or three blocks and adding a stone or stonebrick edge on both sides of the lava.
Regarding towers, if you want to make them round, you can use this link: http://www.plotz.co.uk/plotz.php
For example, if you set in a diameter of 11, you go down to the middle layer(6) of the ball and then you have your pattern for making a round tower. If you want a wider turret on top of it, just increase the diameter in plotz.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/751959-my-work-medievalpiratey-stuff/ <- follow link and go to post #17 to see an example of my ugly huge wall and the small changes I made to it, which in my opinion made a pretty big difference.
I haven't followed all of my own advice, that's because it's some of the first stuff I made, so I'll go and change it some more one day.
Do yourself a favor and DON'T make a wall as big as I did, it's a massive pain in the ass to make and it's not worth it to look at. It was more of a joke project than anything else.
I hope some of the tips are of use to you mate and good look with your project!
I honestly thought I just built an epic house. Now i will go back to wallowing in sadness that i can't build this nice.
*hugs*
Steal away mate, steal away. That's what I've done with some of my newer buildings :smile.gif: They're not carbon copies, but inspired by things I've seen here and there(also stated in my main post).
Once MCP updates it should be trivial to make a quickie client mod that removes this effect, heh.
If you're not concerned about the terrain off into the distance, you can change the seed using an NBT editor (and therefore biome layout) and hope that the next seed you pick doesn't throw you right into a swamp biome.
I'm guessing MCP is a program of sorts?
I have no idea what the abbreviations stand for :biggrin.gif: Your second advice was pretty good. I could make a new seed, copy all that I've made with MCedit, do a slight bit of landscaping and just paste it all in. That way, there'll be more explorable new content as well. Assuming the MCedit clipboard works across maps.
You can try fiddling with the textures. Replace the swamp biome grass color texture with the regular texture. You can use your texturepacks textures for this. Don't ask me how, but I'm sure it's possible, I've heard of people doing this because they hated the color transition between the biomes. Just post a question in the Modding section. It would suck to see somebody abandon such an awesome project...
Thanks.
Looking into this, but it seems that it's the biome itself that alters the texture. There's no swamp texture in any of my packs to replace or change. I'll poke around some more, but I'm not optimistic :sad.gif:
Basicly, don't be afraid to let it extend further than the edge of the house, and use stairs, not slabs to make it slant. For a house that size, you want to extend the end by two and just one for the sides, for a /\-shaped roof.
Consider adding a row of stairs to the first(second, for you illogical Americans) floor balcony. Don't be afraid to let things stick out a bit.
0
Thanks a bunch, I love to hear that it gives people ideas :biggrin.gif:
@Croat11
Hvala ljepo. There's only me though :smile.gif:
First off, I'm grateful you took your time to give me a reply, thanks a bunch :smile.gif:
Regarding the width, I'm not completely sure I understand what you mean, especially regarding subpanels?
All the buildings have a trim and center, some have a bit more than that. My guess is you mean that if I increase the height of the buildings, I can add more details to the walls. This is a good idea, but I think it'll only work on streets where there's generous space across the street, otherwise it'll all just get lost in view from ground-level.
I like the idea to vary the terrain and I've begun working on this. It'll be a small incremental rise so the city slopes upwards slowly, until it'll hit a mountain where the castle will be either built into or in front of.
Here's my newest project, which is currently WIP. It's an industrial age factory that's on what'll be the slummy outskirts of town. The left side and top is not done, I'm still thinking about what I should add there:
The back, with sewage pipes:
This is the plan being set in motion, with the town slowly sloping upwards the further in you get. Please keep in mind that this is early WIP and will change drasticly with softer corners and more variation:
0
The city has got a name now; Arnsberg. It's a German town, so I'm guessing Germans wont be impressed with that name, but it sounded sufficiently medieval for my tastes, so that's what it's called now :smile.gif:
This is the Arnsberg Guild, home of freedom fighters, adventurers and other freelancing people. The angle doesn't do the top floor justice I'm afraid, but I'm pretty satisfied with it when I walk on the ground:
The Guild interior:
Arnsberg now also has a bakery and sweets shop:
Interior:
Arnsberg Bank:
Interior. The backroom where the cashiers are has a vault and a staircase to the offices:
And the Arnsberg flag, blue/white/blue. Close to Argentinas, I know, but it seemed to fit nicely:
And the new additions from the top. Will add more details to the roof:
I've been working on sewerlines which are currently not that special, although they do have some secret entrances to buildings here and there. They're more or less just a 3x3 tunnel in cobbel with water in the middle and drains from the streets.
I still need suggestions for what buildings to add. I'm planning a school/library and maybe a temple. An industrial age factory as well. There will be a castle/palace at one point, which should compliment the rest of the city, but this is some of the last work I'll do along with the wall surrounding the city.
I hope people enjoy the updates. And as always I'd love comments, suggestions and especially criticism.
0
The texture pack fits pretty well, especially with the iron(?)/obsidian kitchen floor.
As for the swamp biome, you can use NBTedit to change your seed. It'll mess up the areas you haven't explored yet, by making odd seams, but it should remove the swamp area, it did for me at least(Credit to InsanityBringer for pointing it out to me). Follow my signature link to see what happened and more info, it should be around the bottom of page 2.
0
Oh they grow alright. They're hard to use as decoration, unless you place them from the bottom.
Say you have a tower and want vines on it, and you place it near the top, they'll grow all the way down to the bottom, effectively covering up your tower from where you put it. It's pretty annoying. It also spreads sideways in some cases.
0
You might want to consider changing the stone brick foundation to either something else, or vary the materials with stone and cobble. In the end though it might not make much difference, it's just that I'm looking at it and something feels off. It's taking too much attention away from the rest of the house.
It's DokuCraft, standard version I think(It comes in dark/normal/high).
0
Insanity Bringer helped me out with this though; On his advice I used NBTEdit and changed the seed on my server, removing the swamp biome completely. This does screw up the unexplored parts of the map though, meaning it'll create very strange seams. You can check out my issue here: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/751959-my-work-medievalpiratey-stuff/page__st__20
Beginning at post #29 you can see my swamp issue and later the effect it'll have on your map with the seams.
Basicly, it removed the swamp biome and didn't touch my present map or structures at all.
I really hope that one day we'll have a mod or editing program like MCedit that'll allow us to completely remove biomes or add new ones as we wish. I wouldn't mind having a swamp in a secluded corner somewhere, that would be fine, but smack in the middle of my city? No thanks!
0
Thank you very much, that's nice of you to say :smile.gif:
Texture pack is called SMP's Revival and you can find it here:
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/327307-16x19-pre4-smps-revival-1018-everything-but-the-dragon-is-done/
I'll take this opportunity to psot some more pics.
This is the Alchemy and Oddities shop, placed next to the corner restaurant. It's my first try with netherbrick and it seems to fit in quite nicely. If or when I add a factory, it'll definately be made in this, to give it that dirty industrial brick look.
In the cellar of the shop, there is the alchemy lab:
Which have contraband plants growing in secret compartments(Completely unpractical by the way, since if you hit the plants there's a chance they'll drop out of reach):
Bowyer and Fletcher's house:
And a shooting range out back:
It's a bit generic, and I'll probably do a ton of similar buildings around the city to fill it up. By that point I'll update less and just show the overall size. Here's the city so far:
0
0
0
Holy **** I can't believe it actually worked. Not only did it remove the swamp, but it kept everything else intact, at least from what I can see. There's no discernible difference in the terrain and all I did was change the last 5 numbers in the seed through NBTedit. Wow.
Maybe the last numbers in the seed represent the latest changes, I don't know, but this is frickin' amazing, thank you, thank you, thank you so much! :biggrin.gif:
edit: It's like you said, when going beyond the previous seed border, weird seams occur, but I can live with that, it's pretty far away.
Funny how bad the swamp biomes still look, not counting the seam I mean.
Theoretically, I could just reload my backup, then explore some 5 minutes in all directions and do the same change, that would give me more standard terrain before uncanny valley occurs.
0
Thanks for the info. I'll bookmark the thread/site when I find it and keep an eye on it. Hopefully I can shanghai someone to help me! :biggrin.gif:
Frickin' golden, mate. I'll mess around with it tomorrow and see what happens. My guess is that I'll have to break up my server into two maps with the new and old stuff, since my old castles are on mountain tops and what have you.
The new stuff is all on flat terrain and MCedit will allow me to flatten an area to put the new project in. I started using it after I got utterly sick of filling up lakes with hundreds of dirtblocks. When I realized that I'd have to remove a small mountain I got disheartened and downloaded MCedit.
Again, thanks a lot.
1
It definately looks more like an outer wall than a castle, to begin with but it's a good start! :smile.gif:
Some tips, if you want them:
What's in a castle/courtyard:
Barracks, armory, stables, church or a wizards abode/home/tower, throne room, bedrooms, kitchen, archery range, smithy, small park, dungeon, torture room, gallery, swimming pool/baths(in roman citadels anyway), crypts/tombs, gallows and library. There are more things but you could make any and all of those if you wish.
Cobblestone works best when mixed with other materials, such as stonebrick or stone(smooth).
Add edges to your wall, so that turrets are wider than the wall itself(Doing this in stonebrick would look better)
Example:
Note how the turrets(the edges where archers position themselves to shoot) sticks out over the towers wall edges.
Add towers midway, to break the flat monotomy of the wall.
You could also make a pattern with supports or something else, that breaks the flat look.
This doesn't look all that pretty, it's just to give you an idea of what I mean.
Regarding the lava mote, you should consider lowering it by two or three blocks and adding a stone or stonebrick edge on both sides of the lava.
Regarding towers, if you want to make them round, you can use this link:
http://www.plotz.co.uk/plotz.php
For example, if you set in a diameter of 11, you go down to the middle layer(6) of the ball and then you have your pattern for making a round tower. If you want a wider turret on top of it, just increase the diameter in plotz.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/751959-my-work-medievalpiratey-stuff/ <- follow link and go to post #17 to see an example of my ugly huge wall and the small changes I made to it, which in my opinion made a pretty big difference.
I haven't followed all of my own advice, that's because it's some of the first stuff I made, so I'll go and change it some more one day.
Do yourself a favor and DON'T make a wall as big as I did, it's a massive pain in the ass to make and it's not worth it to look at. It was more of a joke project than anything else.
I hope some of the tips are of use to you mate and good look with your project!
0
*hugs*
Steal away mate, steal away. That's what I've done with some of my newer buildings :smile.gif: They're not carbon copies, but inspired by things I've seen here and there(also stated in my main post).
I'm guessing MCP is a program of sorts?
I have no idea what the abbreviations stand for :biggrin.gif: Your second advice was pretty good. I could make a new seed, copy all that I've made with MCedit, do a slight bit of landscaping and just paste it all in. That way, there'll be more explorable new content as well. Assuming the MCedit clipboard works across maps.
I'm hoping for the first option though.
Thanks man, that's some solid advice there.
0
Thanks.
Looking into this, but it seems that it's the biome itself that alters the texture. There's no swamp texture in any of my packs to replace or change. I'll poke around some more, but I'm not optimistic :sad.gif:
0
Regarding the roof; http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/751959-my-work-medievalpiratey-stuff/
Check my thread for some inspiration or ideas.
Basicly, don't be afraid to let it extend further than the edge of the house, and use stairs, not slabs to make it slant. For a house that size, you want to extend the end by two and just one for the sides, for a /\-shaped roof.
Consider adding a row of stairs to the first(second, for you illogical Americans) floor balcony. Don't be afraid to let things stick out a bit.