-The latest article from Bioxx about the next update.-
Ok, so now that global celebrations for the day of my birth are over with, I've decided its about time for a State of the Mod. This will be a bit lengthy so click the article to get the full story.
My extreme bouts of laziness aside, we've actually gotten a fair amount of work completed. Thanks to Emris_Morath, while we were polishing Build 78 with the many patches, he was maintaining the 79 branch and doing an extremely large chunk of the 1.7 porting process(renaming stuff) for us. As a result, when work was permanently switched to 79 we were mostly done with the port.
As for new content in 79, I can announce that rock-specific gravel has been added finally as well as a layer of gravel throughout most of the world as part of the soil generation. Along with this comes drainage maps which ultimately just determine how much gravel there is in the soil layer vs dirt. This is important because another new map -the soil pH map- is used for crops along with the drainage (which is calculated by scanning beneath the soil for gravel which means that players can affect this). The two of these combine with other things to create a much more sophisticated crop management mechanic.
Now before I go into this next mechanic, I want to point out that any of this is subject to change as we are still in the experimentation phase with this.
The entire point of the above mechanic is to influence the next mechanic: food taste. Each and every food item will have tastes associated with it based upon the 5 flavors which the human tongue can detect which are Sweetness, Sourness, Saltiness, Bitterness, and Savoriness. Each player will have his or her own unique preferred tastes which are determined by your username and the world seed. This means that creating a meal which contains Steak, Potatoes, Cheese, and Blueberries O.o may be perfect for you but may not be for someone else because the combined flavor profile doesn't closely match their own.
But this is alright, as the worst that would happen for them is that the food wouldn't be as useful for satiating their hunger. On the flip side, the more closely that the flavor profile matches your palate than the more effective the food is at providing filling and nutrition. I see this as a psychological effect and it ranges from 80% effectiveness for bad meals up to a 130% bonus if the flavor profile is exact.
I should also point out that figuring out your own or another person's taste palate will be based off of your skill rank in cooking with each rank providing more exact information. More on Skill Ranks later.
Now we come full circle back to the crop growth mechanic change that I mentioned earlier. The various attributes of the soil such as soil type(granite/rhyolite/etc) of the topsoil that you worked with the hoe as well as the soil beneath that, the soil ph, and the drainage of the farm plot all come together to affect the resulting flavor profile of each crop in different ways. This now means that tomatoes grown in one place wont exactly match the tomatoes grown elsewhere, unless you want them to.
Because of these new features, each tomato plant harvested could potentially provide tomatoes with different flavor profiles and you would expect them to be unable to stack because of the NBTTags that are on each of these items. However what we've decided to do is when you attempt to stack a food it will convert the entire stack to the default flavor profile for the food(which may not be a bad thing) or it will keep the flavor profile as long as the profile is the same for each item entering the stack.
At this point, I've gone far more into these mechanics than I'd originally intended but that's ok since it's been a while since I've done one of these. Some of you may be thinking that this makes food incredibly complicated, and to a degree it does, but choosing to ignore all this new taste stuff is still perfectly acceptable since there is only a maximum of 20% loss in the effectiveness of food due to the new changes. This 20% is less of a penalty to me than it is a re-balancing of food in general.
The last bit that I am going to discuss in relation to food are the new meals that will be coming. More specifically Soups, Stews, Salads, Sandwiches, and Casseroles. I'm not going to be going into specifics for these as that is probably another 5 or 6 paragraphs so I'll just list some quick info:
- Soups allow you to stretch your limited resources by adding a liquid base to a small amount of each ingredient thereby giving you filling but with a lack of major nutritional value.
- Stews take longer to cook and must be done more delicately but use a larger amount of ingredients and less liquid to create a nourishing meal.
- Salads are the easiest and fastest meal to make and will be roughly equivalent to the meals that exist already in TFC. The main problem with them will be that they decay faster than the other meals which makes them poor for traveling etc.
- Sandwiches will require bread slices and a few non-grain fillers. The main bonus of sandwiches will be that they provide bonus filling, can be eaten completely in a single use(they'll probably provide around 9oz of filling before the bonus), and can potentially provide all 5 food groups of nutrition.
- Casseroles will allow for the largest amount of food to be cooked at a time and can use up to 6 ingredients. But they will need to be cooked in an oven and take time to prepare.
Now I get to the promised Skill Ranks. One of the things that I really wanted to do when starting 79 is to polish some of the new UIs as they were put in place rather quickly and without much thought. Those of you who follow me on twitter (and if you don't you should) will have already seen this image
pic.twitter.com/uRWj4xKnAG. As you can see, gone are the ugly, vague numbers- now replaced with pretty skill bars and ranks. Ranks include Novice, Adept, Expert, and Master. Some (but not all) skills will be tied directly to the ranks, for example cooking will give you more informative information on the taste profiles of food. Others such as smithing will continue to work as they have, based upon a formula which uses the raw skill numbers. In these cases, the rank is still useful as it gives a pretty good idea of how much your skill is affecting the objects that you create.
Now to wrap up the rest of the new. So far, we have new sound effects for several animals as well as ambient sounds such as frogs, crickets, birds, etc. I completely rewrote the way in which barrels function so that they can be used for solid storage of items as well as compatibility for forge liquids. Kitty did quite a bit of work to add forge ore dictionary back to TFC after its incredibly long hiatus. She also added in a much requested file with extensive options for adjusting numbers in TFC that never before existed (I'm sure that server owners will be thrilled).
I'm sure that I've missed a few things and there is without a doubt more to come before all is said and done, but I wanted to reach out and let you guys know that we're still working and making progress, especially to our recent wave of new fans who may not be used to our development pace. Be sure to let us know what you think and follow us on Twitter for the occasional sneak peak!
@TFC_Bioxx and
@TFC_Dunk
Source:
state-of-the-mod-792014-r51