You can tell that the creator of this game has an artist's eye. This is the only game that really interests me other than Minetest Game.
Pros:
Attention to detail is off the charts
Everything is designed from the ground up to create a cohesive feel.
not as grindy as Exile or Node Core
Trees look beautiful
Mobs have very natural movement compared to other mob mods.
Weather done really well
Everything fits together very well
Ruins look really nice
Cons:
Some of the sounds are really good, but there are some really bad ones that break immersion (e.g. walking through grass).
Not a fan of the texture style (more cartoony texture pack) but that's just my personal preference. That said everything works together well to give a consistent look and feel. If you'd like to see textures I favor look at those in Vintage Story (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpQGRtEg05g)
I would like more variety in leaf colors
Needs more gameplay
Needs modders to help make more content
Summary, I hope a team of developers and artists help Sumanian Voice complete this game. Let Sumanian Voice be the visionary who makes all the decisions, but this will take a lot of work, and it truly deserves a team effort because it is so promising. I prefer it to Voxel Libre & Mineclonia, and the other games, many of which have large teams of devs working on them.
Thanks for the review! The colorised textures do look very good. I'll add that in an upcoming release. I really should go around and fix all the placeholders up too honestly (the leaves are all the same texture with different color palette at the moment but that's planned to change).
For the textures in general I get what you mean. I'm terrified though of setting a precedent that things should look gritty and realistic.. Not just because it's more difficult to make textures for but also because of the clashing with simple geometry (which is less of an issue as I develop more graphics features like grass etc but minetest has its limits and I'm approaching them fast unfortunately heh ;^^). It's tempting though I'll give you that. When done right it looks great. Higher resolution would help make items prettier too.
Even though working alone has its occasional downsides - like not working on it for 6 months at a time - I'm still very proud of having single handedly (except for a few APIs) created ~42000 lines of code, 500 textures, 120 sounds and 40 models :D Makes the design and decision making process and licensing very easy too :)
Awesome. You might want to actually convert the colors of the leaf textures at some point rather than using colorize. I thought mapgen was slower once I made the change, but it could have been my imagination. I do know that lots of mobs can cause performance issues. I had to create a mob limiter mod and changed the mobs redo setting remove_far_mobs from false to true and that greatly improved myserver performance. You should be proud of AOM. It's very impressive.
If they added your mesh options to the plantlike draw type in the engine would it improve performance? (Or added "leaflike" drawytype with different mesh options?)
If the rotation could be randomised it would speed things up a lot, but meshes are actually way faster than allfaces / allfaces_optional + fancy. The only reason they're a little slower than opaque is because there is just more geometry to render than not having them. The main slow down is having to rotate them on creation, checking for leaf decay, and drawing transparency. Static node meshes are pretty fast.
Oh and for reference, allfaces is up to 12 tris, 6 visible, mesh is always 6 tris although they take up more transparency draw space, but there are substantially less of them than if using allfaces. You could probably get that down to 3-4 tris per mesh if you're ok with jagged edges that cut off pixels (not as much of an issue with high res textures I suppose).
You can tell that the creator of this game has an artist's eye. This is the only game that really interests me other than Minetest Game.
Pros:
Cons:
Summary, I hope a team of developers and artists help Sumanian Voice complete this game. Let Sumanian Voice be the visionary who makes all the decisions, but this will take a lot of work, and it truly deserves a team effort because it is so promising. I prefer it to Voxel Libre & Mineclonia, and the other games, many of which have large teams of devs working on them.
Here's what I would do with the leaf textures:
https://content.minetest.net/uploads/4f03378861.png
https://content.minetest.net/uploads/370a39402a.png
To get these colors I modified E:\games\minetest-5.8.0-win64\games\pmb_core\mods\pmb_nodes\pmb_wood\init.lua
Thanks for the review! The colorised textures do look very good. I'll add that in an upcoming release. I really should go around and fix all the placeholders up too honestly (the leaves are all the same texture with different color palette at the moment but that's planned to change).
For the textures in general I get what you mean. I'm terrified though of setting a precedent that things should look gritty and realistic.. Not just because it's more difficult to make textures for but also because of the clashing with simple geometry (which is less of an issue as I develop more graphics features like grass etc but minetest has its limits and I'm approaching them fast unfortunately heh ;^^). It's tempting though I'll give you that. When done right it looks great. Higher resolution would help make items prettier too.
Even though working alone has its occasional downsides - like not working on it for 6 months at a time - I'm still very proud of having single handedly (except for a few APIs) created ~42000 lines of code, 500 textures, 120 sounds and 40 models :D Makes the design and decision making process and licensing very easy too :)
It might be finished in 2040 :p
Awesome. You might want to actually convert the colors of the leaf textures at some point rather than using colorize. I thought mapgen was slower once I made the change, but it could have been my imagination. I do know that lots of mobs can cause performance issues. I had to create a mob limiter mod and changed the mobs redo setting remove_far_mobs from false to true and that greatly improved myserver performance. You should be proud of AOM. It's very impressive.
If they added your mesh options to the plantlike draw type in the engine would it improve performance? (Or added "leaflike" drawytype with different mesh options?)
I think right now the options are as follows: Summary of param2 Values:
If the rotation could be randomised it would speed things up a lot, but meshes are actually way faster than
allfaces/allfaces_optional + fancy. The only reason they're a little slower than opaque is because there is just more geometry to render than not having them. The main slow down is having to rotate them on creation, checking for leaf decay, and drawing transparency. Static node meshes are pretty fast.Oh and for reference,
allfacesis up to 12 tris, 6 visible, mesh is always 6 tris although they take up more transparency draw space, but there are substantially less of them than if usingallfaces. You could probably get that down to 3-4 tris per mesh if you're ok with jagged edges that cut off pixels (not as much of an issue with high res textures I suppose).