After adding some more elements into the area, it looks alot better now, Thanks for the support guys! I Think I'll just make some final refine to the area before its done. (I have to make the buildings different from each other, and make the "trees" better, And the vine has freakin overgrown...) Anyways, I think it actually looks fine for my first-time map making, take a look guys!
You have a great future as a map maker ahead of you.
I think it's ok to hide spawners, but not a lot. Most of the time mappers make spawners visible so players do not have to go through the tedious task of looking through walls to find a way to prevent mobs from spawning.
In my opinion hiding spawners is fine, but they should be hidden in such a way that you can see the particle effects if you pay attention.
Making maps in 1.6.2 isn't ideal anymore and even though worldedit isn't updated you can still use a local server. Just set up a bukkit server and install the plugins you want and if you don't know how to do that there are some really simple tutorials and I think Chipmunk46 has a prebuilt server he distributes but you would have to ask him for permission. You don't need to portforward either just run the server on your desktop and type in "localhost" into direct connect.
Also if you don't already use mcedit it gets easier as you continue to use it even though it feels strange at first. Also mcedit filters that you can download from certain people are amazing
There's a forge based version of WorldEdit that's up to date to 1.8.9, just so everyone is aware.
My question is, how do you all make cool custom spawners? And maps in general?
In addition to MCEdit and MCstacker, both of which are excellent, but also might as well be called the CTM industry standards, I also recommend taking a look at Worldpainter in combination With World-Machine, which can used together make some absolutely incredible terrain very quickly. They aren't very good for linear branching cavern heavy maps though admittedly. I would also recommend looking at WorldEdit, which I find to be easier to work with than MCEdit when making structures, although it's not as good for terrain.
Oh hey look, my (really) old maps are in there! Well one of them is. Unfortunately, it's the one that absolutely sucked. Seriously, Skies of Anger was such an untested, unbalanced mess of a map. My other one from back then, Caves of Evil was playable and actually sort of fun even if it's ugly and basically a Kaizo Caverns knock-off, but I see now that the old download link is broken, I'm not sure when that happened. Here's a new link if you want to add it, although I think that this may be the version where there is literally no brown wool.
I'm actually sort of tempted to go back through rebalance it and update for 1.8, if only for the sake of my own nostalgia.
@dax It looks really awesome. Will Atlas stay that colour though? Just wondering because he blends in a bit too much with the island right now, and initially I mistook him for some weird stone formations rather than a sculpture. Maybe use sandstone, or one of the three other stones, or even clay? I don't know what the lore is, so whatever you think is best!
Otherwise I really like that area. Will the player see it from the ground, or will they only see it from atop the island itself?
I will definitely be experimenting with different materials in the near future. At the very least I'll mix in some cracked and mossy stone bricks here and there so he doesn't look quite so drab. Edit: Oh, and also, yes players will get to see it from the ground, they'll have to climb down it actually.
This is gorgeous- it reminds me of this cover of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Mind elaborating on how you created this? It's super cool and I think these techniques could have a lot of applications.
Thank you! Here's a quick summary of my methodology:
1. I created a base mesh in the .obj format. For this I ended up using Sculptris because it's free and I found Clay 3D modeling to be far more intuitive than traditional polygonal modeling. Blender works for this too though, and it actually has clay model features, they're just harder to get the hang of than Sculptris. The model I created was pretty rough actually, but this is Minecraft so it's okay.
2. I used Blender's bone/armature feature to pose the model I created into an Atlas pose and exported the result as another *.obj.
3. Finally, I used Binvox to convert the model to a schematic. This program is not at all intuitive or easy to use but once I figured it out it got the job done.
This is the quick version and it glosses over most of the details. Most of these things have tutorials, ect. available on youtube, but if anyone decides to try something similar and gets stuck, they can feel free to message me with questions.
This is really neat! and a super clever way of doing criticism, thank you for the time your took to make this. I agree with you that there should be a lake and I will at least give eroding the head a shot. However, I think you may have misenterpreted some other things that you saw, that's partially my fault because the lower half of my picture isn't very well lit, so I drank a night vision potion and took some more shots from different angles in order to illuminate you (heh heh).
He does in fact have two feet, he's just kneeling in a sort of atlas pose.
and the island is actually very cone shaped, the tree shape you described is caused by the dark outline of his arms and hands.
Again, thank you for the time you took to give me feedback.
So what started as an experiment in using 3d modeling techniques to create large naturally shaped statues eventually evolved into my map's spawn and also caused me to completely rework the lore of most of my map (which was very wip anyways). This is entire process is very slow going (especially with school and whatnot, I seldom have time to map) but I'm happy with the progress I'm making. Anyways, please tell me what you think. (Note: If you open the image in a new tab you can zoom way in and see much more detail, it's super high res).
(I should really make my own thread in the In Progress Map Forum one of these days)
Crap. I had the CTM Community page opened in another tab and accidentally posted in the wrong place, I feel dumb. Oops. Is there a way to delete posts?
Since I'm here, I'd just like to say that I'm a big fan of your work Wiggy.
So I've been studying the behavior of the new end gateways for the past few days or so for sake of using them for teleportation in my map. I've basically figured out the rules they follow when determining where to place the player.
The tile entity data of the block specifies an exit coordinate with an X, Y and Z value, it would appear however that the Y value is mostly irrelevant. In natural generation this coordinate is about 1,000 blocks away from the portal and the main end island, but using editors it can be anything you want.
Unfortunately, the portals don't just move the players to this coordinate and call it a day, but instead use it to place the player using a few simple rules:
The coordinates in the tileentity specify the center of an 11x11 (X and Z) box that goes to the top and bottom of the world.
Upon entering the gateway the player will be teleported on top of the highest (greatest Y value) solid block (non-transparent, so this includes glass, but not leaves it would seem, does someone know why this is?) that can be found within this box. If there is a single transparent block on top of a solid one players will be placed on top of it, but otherwise transparent blocks are treated like air. This means that in certain specific situations the player could end up on the inside of glass blocks after teleporting.
Unfortunately, the player being placed on the very highest block to be found makes end gateways unusable to teleport into caves, buildings, or anywhere else that isn't open air.
If there are multiple highest blocks the player will be placed on the "least positive" block, which is to say the block with lowest X or Z value. In practical terms this means that on a flat plane the the player will be teleported to north-western corner of the box. If there is more than one "least positive" block than the player will be teleported to the more westerly of the two (the one with the lower X value).
Finally, if not one block is found within the box that the player can be teleported to (which is to say it's either all glass and other "transparent" blocks, or it is totally void space) they will be brought to the exact coordinate specified as the exit, this is the only time the Y exit coordinate is used.
I know all of this may be a little confusing, so if anyone has questions or needs clarification just let me know. In light of these discoveries I may be updating my end gateway filter in the near future to make ensuring that the player ends up in the right place easier. I will probably also post some example photos for clarification.
On another note I updated the filter so that you can set the exit using a 1 x 1 x 1 selection box, and the run the filter again to create the portals (also, just so everyone knows, the filter will off-set whatever location you set by 5 on the X and Z so that the location you set should be where you end up as long as your exit area is flat, I may make an option to turn this on and off later). Link:
So I created a simple filter that makes creating custom portals using the new end gateways much easier. It's very relevant to CTM mappers so I thought I'd post it here.
You just set the coords that you want your player to teleported to in the boxes and you're good to go! The filter will fill up the entire selection box with portals so keep it fairly small or all the particles may lag out the game.
Obviously, this currently only works in the 1.9 weekly snapshot release, but in theory it will still work once 1.9 officially comes out.
If any of you encounter any bugs, or see a way I can improve my code, please don't hesitate to tell me!
not bad! It just looks like you add a noise filter, which doesn't work too well. I suggest using a combiner with a perlin noise set to detail to add more natural noise after the erosion. Also terracing would work well for mesa terrain. Other than that good work!
Thanks for the feedback, I'll keep working on it. I'm also thinking that maybe the finalized terrain should be a bit smaller since as of right now it takes up nearly the entirety of the map height starting from sea level and it doesn't make much sense for a mesa to be as tall as the highest peaks of my tallest mountains.
3
I'm alive, if anyone here actually remembers me.
It's not prettified yet, but I've been messing around with dungeon layouts. Bonus points if you know what this is based off of.
P.S. Any thoughts on interior decoration? I have a couple Ideas, but throw some at me if anything comes to mind.
3
You have a great future as a map maker ahead of you.
2
In my opinion hiding spawners is fine, but they should be hidden in such a way that you can see the particle effects if you pay attention.
0
There's a forge based version of WorldEdit that's up to date to 1.8.9, just so everyone is aware.
http://minecraft.curseforge.com/projects/worldedit
0
In addition to MCEdit and MCstacker, both of which are excellent, but also might as well be called the CTM industry standards, I also recommend taking a look at Worldpainter in combination With World-Machine, which can used together make some absolutely incredible terrain very quickly. They aren't very good for linear branching cavern heavy maps though admittedly. I would also recommend looking at WorldEdit, which I find to be easier to work with than MCEdit when making structures, although it's not as good for terrain.
1
Oh hey look, my (really) old maps are in there! Well one of them is. Unfortunately, it's the one that absolutely sucked. Seriously, Skies of Anger was such an untested, unbalanced mess of a map. My other one from back then, Caves of Evil was playable and actually sort of fun even if it's ugly and basically a Kaizo Caverns knock-off, but I see now that the old download link is broken, I'm not sure when that happened. Here's a new link if you want to add it, although I think that this may be the version where there is literally no brown wool.
I'm actually sort of tempted to go back through rebalance it and update for 1.8, if only for the sake of my own nostalgia.
Edit: Fixed the link in the thread too.
4
I will definitely be experimenting with different materials in the near future. At the very least I'll mix in some cracked and mossy stone bricks here and there so he doesn't look quite so drab. Edit: Oh, and also, yes players will get to see it from the ground, they'll have to climb down it actually.
Thank you!
Here's a quick summary of my methodology:
1. I created a base mesh in the .obj format. For this I ended up using Sculptris because it's free and I found Clay 3D modeling to be far more intuitive than traditional polygonal modeling. Blender works for this too though, and it actually has clay model features, they're just harder to get the hang of than Sculptris. The model I created was pretty rough actually, but this is Minecraft so it's okay.
2. I used Blender's bone/armature feature to pose the model I created into an Atlas pose and exported the result as another *.obj.
3. Finally, I used Binvox to convert the model to a schematic. This program is not at all intuitive or easy to use but once I figured it out it got the job done.
This is the quick version and it glosses over most of the details. Most of these things have tutorials, ect. available on youtube, but if anyone decides to try something similar and gets stuck, they can feel free to message me with questions.
0
This is really neat! and a super clever way of doing criticism, thank you for the time your took to make this. I agree with you that there should be a lake and I will at least give eroding the head a shot. However, I think you may have misenterpreted some other things that you saw, that's partially my fault because the lower half of my picture isn't very well lit, so I drank a night vision potion and took some more shots from different angles in order to illuminate you (heh heh).
He does in fact have two feet, he's just kneeling in a sort of atlas pose.
and the island is actually very cone shaped, the tree shape you described is caused by the dark outline of his arms and hands.
Again, thank you for the time you took to give me feedback.
4
So what started as an experiment in using 3d modeling techniques to create large naturally shaped statues eventually evolved into my map's spawn and also caused me to completely rework the lore of most of my map (which was very wip anyways). This is entire process is very slow going (especially with school and whatnot, I seldom have time to map) but I'm happy with the progress I'm making. Anyways, please tell me what you think. (Note: If you open the image in a new tab you can zoom way in and see much more detail, it's super high res).
(I should really make my own thread in the In Progress Map Forum one of these days)
Edit: Put the image inside a spoiler box.
0
Crap. I had the CTM Community page opened in another tab and accidentally posted in the wrong place, I feel dumb. Oops. Is there a way to delete posts?
Since I'm here, I'd just like to say that I'm a big fan of your work Wiggy.
12
Hey everyone, I'm still hard at work on my map.
So I made this, but I'm struggling to come up with something to put on top of it. Any ideas?
10
So I've been studying the behavior of the new end gateways for the past few days or so for sake of using them for teleportation in my map. I've basically figured out the rules they follow when determining where to place the player.
The tile entity data of the block specifies an exit coordinate with an X, Y and Z value, it would appear however that the Y value is mostly irrelevant. In natural generation this coordinate is about 1,000 blocks away from the portal and the main end island, but using editors it can be anything you want.
Unfortunately, the portals don't just move the players to this coordinate and call it a day, but instead use it to place the player using a few simple rules:
The coordinates in the tileentity specify the center of an 11x11 (X and Z) box that goes to the top and bottom of the world.
Upon entering the gateway the player will be teleported on top of the highest (greatest Y value) solid block (non-transparent, so this includes glass, but not leaves it would seem, does someone know why this is?) that can be found within this box. If there is a single transparent block on top of a solid one players will be placed on top of it, but otherwise transparent blocks are treated like air. This means that in certain specific situations the player could end up on the inside of glass blocks after teleporting.
Unfortunately, the player being placed on the very highest block to be found makes end gateways unusable to teleport into caves, buildings, or anywhere else that isn't open air.
If there are multiple highest blocks the player will be placed on the "least positive" block, which is to say the block with lowest X or Z value. In practical terms this means that on a flat plane the the player will be teleported to north-western corner of the box. If there is more than one "least positive" block than the player will be teleported to the more westerly of the two (the one with the lower X value).
Finally, if not one block is found within the box that the player can be teleported to (which is to say it's either all glass and other "transparent" blocks, or it is totally void space) they will be brought to the exact coordinate specified as the exit, this is the only time the Y exit coordinate is used.
I know all of this may be a little confusing, so if anyone has questions or needs clarification just let me know. In light of these discoveries I may be updating my end gateway filter in the near future to make ensuring that the player ends up in the right place easier. I will probably also post some example photos for clarification.
On another note I updated the filter so that you can set the exit using a 1 x 1 x 1 selection box, and the run the filter again to create the portals (also, just so everyone knows, the filter will off-set whatever location you set by 5 on the X and Z so that the location you set should be where you end up as long as your exit area is flat, I may make an option to turn this on and off later). Link:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/3gabin335u4gh1f/EndGateway.py
3
So I created a simple filter that makes creating custom portals using the new end gateways much easier. It's very relevant to CTM mappers so I thought I'd post it here.
You just set the coords that you want your player to teleported to in the boxes and you're good to go! The filter will fill up the entire selection box with portals so keep it fairly small or all the particles may lag out the game.
Obviously, this currently only works in the 1.9 weekly snapshot release, but in theory it will still work once 1.9 officially comes out.
If any of you encounter any bugs, or see a way I can improve my code, please don't hesitate to tell me!
Download:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/3gabin335u4gh1f/EndGateway.py
Pastebin Mirror:
http://pastebin.com/LqJWf6z2
0
It basically means, "this mob rides around on top of this mob" with the mob at the top of the list being highest up next one being next down ect.
0
Thanks for the feedback, I'll keep working on it. I'm also thinking that maybe the finalized terrain should be a bit smaller since as of right now it takes up nearly the entirety of the map height starting from sea level and it doesn't make much sense for a mesa to be as tall as the highest peaks of my tallest mountains.