The inclusion of coloured 'concrete' blocks doesn't make a case for itself properly. There are numerous mods that add colourful and even recolourable blocks. There is no texture on the concrete. The bakery uses the concrete but wool is used in others and seems like a better generic substitute. The concrete is just there, probably because the author thought they would be useful to themselves and others at some point.
This review was also prompted after prior experience and noticing it in the recently updated section. The recent version is noted by the author as adding protection checks for placement. A previous version of this review stated that the protection checks were removed, but I double-checked today against the author's comment and noticed they were actually added. Perhaps the version was replaced or I had the wrong download; anyway it's good now. Going beyond protection checks, The mod never did seem appropriate for multiplayer anyway, as placing the schematics requires no privilege, so could easily mess people up even faster than standard building speed. I would add a privilege setting to the mod so server owners can nominate a privilege. The default could be interact to keep existing functionality, but it could be tied to a higher privileges like creative.
This mod includes WorldEdit format schematics for several builds, presumably the author's work. The builds are standard block game fare, nothing particularly exciting or realistic. People with a few hours' experience in any block game could put similar builds together. There is a decent selection of buildings that would be expected in a town: Towers and houses, shops, a hospital, a restaurant and so on.
The building spawner items are named in an orderly scheme but have random choice of capitalisation and use of underscores. The dimensions of the building are noted. The art for the spawner items is basic representative of the concept sometimes. However the same icons are reused many times, so you have no real idea what a spawner is just by looking at your hotbar.
The main issue I have with this project is that it's marketed as a helpful mod. However, the value proposition is the schematics themselves and having nifty items to hold them. The actual placing is just as hard as having your own copy of the schematics installed in your world directory and using worldedit's //load to place them yourself. The author's only tweak compared to doing that is to offset the placement position slightly.
This mod dissapoints me with what it could be. It could include previews and help when placing the schematic, so you don't place it over the top of something else accidentally. It could give you handy tools to rotate and flip the preview along axes. These are the sorts of tools we know are possible in Minetest with mods like Edit. It could give you an easy tool to save your own schematics, and probably even have custom images for them. Instead it's just a pack of builds and the most rudimentary tool conceivable to spawn them with.
The streetbuilder mod lets you set up a number of points designated as a road, configure the parameters like what nodes and dimensions to use, and goes and builds it for you. That chat command interface is quite workable for anyone used to using advanced commands like, say, WorldEdit. Keeping the README file handy is handy.
The street will build out in one fell swoop when you are ready for it to. It can cut through terrain, which is handy but potentially dangerous at the same time (and irreversible). It can also place bridge piers underneath it. The mod applies a spline curve easing between the points of the road, which is quite helpful and much better than a simple straight line. It will also emerge (load) any unloaded areas on the road while it is building, so you can trust it with making long distance roads and highways. Doing those longer roads may cause the server to lag for some time as it's not done as a background job or spaced out over time in chunks.
My main complaints with the mod are mostly with pushing the limits. It generally behaves quite well.
I can't seem to build a path without a border node, only one with air cut out of the sides. This is particularly bad for 1-node-wide lanes.
The pier nodes always seem to be placed at least 3 nodes under the street, even when it's above solid ground. This is debatable, but should probably be configurable.
The setting for the pier node uses the word "piersnode". I'll forgive the author for being not a native speaker (as best I know).
Setting a new pier node and re-building the road will only replace the old piers up to 3 nodes deep. Of course, this could cause problems with e.g. stone piers, but that is an adversarial case. In general you want to replace the old pier node.
The controls can be a little confusing, as you're not told you need to hold Sneak to get off the bike, and might try punching the bike. Lag doesn't help with this, as the server has to acknowledge your keypress. Jump will cause you to wheelie. There is also a feature where a long fall (approx >6 m) will cause you to "stack" the bike and fall off it.
The bike can't travel up a full metre of height difference at once, and it travels faster on paved surfaces. Thus, it encourages the building of sloped and paved roads, and corners that aren't too sharp, but not overbuilding on roads for the sake of roads at the same time. I find it creates a much nicer built environment than making roads for car mods.
The physics model is decent at best. Turning sharp corners can be difficult, so you need to slow. The bike's brakes are not very good, except for dismounting which apparently instantly stops it. Wheelie-ing will improve the turning radius which doesn't make much sense but is helpful for turning street corners. Also you can wheelie when stopped..
The bike is best used on a nearby server in your region or singleplayer. You can really suffer in multiplayer if there is a high ping to the server, e.g. Australia to Germany. Also if the server struggles to load the blocks fast enough - though it's a pretty poor server in that cae. In case of lag, it can actually work out slower than walking. This is basically a limitation of Minetest as it stands.
The artwork works fine within the limitations of usual Minetest, i.e. no knees. It is skinsdb compatible. The recolouring feature is nice. Some people may find the helmet a bit unnecessary, depending on their bike culture.
The bike can also be stolen easily. Put it back in your inventory when done riding! Maybe I'll make a bike lock mod one day...
No, it would probably just take a long time to brute force the hash used, especially since it's not a standard hardware-accelerated hash like SHA256. That's probably not great for a chat command that runs synchronously, but it could start an async worker. It would of course be better to record the original text seed, but that's not possible without changing the main menu's code.
Useless
To a computer. For a human, if the seed is a word it's easier to remember. Anyway it was just me trying to come up with a potential use.
Not if it's disabled
Debug menu disabled? Disabled by what? I'm looking through the settings, I can't see any place to disable it. In-game it's under F5 on my PC, and a button on my phone.
The seed is already display in the game's F5 debug menu. I would have liked some kind of extra on top of this, maybe an algorithm to try to reverse the seed hashing that's applied when you start the world with a string seed. I can almost see a use case if the chat command were locked behind the server priv and the server software was modded to lie about/omit the seed info that gets sent to clients. Still, not particularly useful as it is.
Edit: Apparently some games/mods can hide the debug menu with HUD flags. This is useful for those cases, I suppose.
WiTT is great for encouraging people not to use F5 to show node names as much.
This version manages to improve on the previous mod, but it is still imperfect. It doesn't draw lava or water sources, just shows their name. It also doesn't seem to handle nodes with alternative drawtypes like plantlike, meshes, liquids or nodeboxes.
PandoraBox has a fork/patch on top of the Basic Trains Japanese Wagon which can feed you oxygen while onboard, so it's all possible. It's probably better to leave it to another mod anyway; AdvTrains usually assumes an environment with earth gravity and an atmosphere.
AdvTrains Livery Tools fulfills the brief for just about every discussion put forward so far about livery features for AdvTrains, and does so in such an intuitively designed, user-friendly way. Marnack has achieved here what many have discussed but not actually gone and done.
Before Livery Tools, the best we had was doxygen_spammer's Multi-component liveries (part of doxy's Minitram). That involved the use of the external dependency on Bike Mod, and an arduous process of memorising and recalling a few "special" numbers on the Bike Painter to apply special painting functions. No more! With Livery Tools, it's all laid out in an intuitive formspec with so many presets to help you along and an instant preview.
Livery Tools is survival-friendly, with a crafting recipe provided for Minetest Game (the only really support game for AdvTrains) to craft its core item, the Livery Designer Tool. The Designer Tool has four tabs:
The Current Livery tab is a simple preview/descriptive formspec
The editor tab is the main tab you will be using. One simply selects a template, basically a set of shaped layers, and then what paint to apply to all of those layers. There are preset colour names plus a great colour selector dialogue. here you can also get template information or save the livery to apply it again to another wagon.
The Saved Livery tab lets you quickly apply the same livery you just made to more wagons.
Predefined Liveries is great to apply liveries that the mod author or others have made, which is great for inspiration. One of the really great features stands out here, which is the ability to apply liveries from 3rd-party packs to your wagons.
Livery Tools brings us the ability for in-depth customisation for those who want it, plus the ability to make templates to inspire. It's a creative breakthrough, and I can' t recommend it enough.
Should this review maybe have been posted under "Komodo" instead? Not faulting the review at all. I'm refraining from posting any reviews as "AdvT. Supplemental" myself as I'm not sure about the integrity of doing so.
Based on previous work for InterCity/Nightline carriages originally made for LinuxForks Moretrains, Marnack presents us with a whole new world of customisation in this mod which is the first to have support for his AdvTrains Livery Tools mod. Unlike most carriages, which at most offer the ability to change a single colour, this set is customisable in-depth.
Classic Coaches also comes with a great set of features that are better than many AdvTrains mods: Door animations, crafting recipes, livery customisation and internationalisation support.
I recommend Classic Coaches to anyone who wants a quality set of diesel/electric locomotive-hauled passenger carriages that stands well on its own, and enthusiasts who want to customise their rolling stock. Players could create customisations on this solid foundation to add company logos to their rolling stock easily and use them in a variety of colour options.
I can't recommend Classic Coaches in a few niche scenarios. First, drawing these coaches is more computionally expensive than using flat textures due to the number of overlayed and colorised textures present on each wagon, so maybe avoid them if you are playing on a potato, or a tightly constrained server (the server must calculate the texture strings to apply when a carriage pops into viewing range of a player). You can use the mod without AdvTrains Livery Tools if you want.
It can be hard to discern when to grant certain advtrains-related privileges, especially given the lack of protection checks for privileged users, who can then go on to abuse them. The interlocking privilege by default will let players modify TCB information in any area of the world, even ones they can't build in. This, for example, could let the wrong people remove interlocking from a section and cause a denial of service or crash.
This mod will restrict TCBs and some signals (compatibility not guaranteed) to make it only possible to modify them if the user has permission to modify the area. This does mean you may need to operate your server in a different way than you currently do. It may not be suitable in 100% of cases either. For instance, say you have a public railway network and deputies, helpers and so on who are meant to be able to help troubleshoot issues like stuck trains. Those deputies need to be given protected area access to key parts ofthe railway infrastructure so they can do their duties.
Don't worry about locking admins or high-level railway staff out of signals either. The mod at time of review also does not obey the protection_bypass privilege (this is not something the engine does by default, kind of annoyingly), however it does grant access to anyone with the train_admin privilege (which also grants access to place, destroy and drive all trains as defined in the core modpack of AdvTrains.)
Lastly, this mod should hopefully be made obsolete, but the author is quite right in his current comment that it is just not timely to get changes into AdvTrains at the time of writing.
While the presentation is kind of a wall of text, in-game presents the best place that this information could be provided. While the AdvTrains train catalogue tries to do its best at providing information on all train content that is available, it is subject to becoming out of date as well. With this mod installed, the information is generated from the actual data of the train as it was registered with AdvTrains, making it impossible for it to be out of date.
A great feature that is included is a 3D preview of what each wagon looks like that can be orbited with the mouse/touch controls. Finally, you can find out what the bottom of every train looks like. I know you want to.
This is billed as still a Work in Progress, but there are only some minor improvements I would make: some headings, since variation of the text size helps navigability, and maybe some kind of split between more basic and more advanced information sections. Also the use of proper item names instead of itemstrings and give the speeds in the internally-used m/s (this is the unit technically already used without being named; technically a node per second is only a m/s by convention, but anyway..) as well as km/h and maybe mi/h (mph) if we want to be generous.
Without this mod, rotating the camera around to see better from inside a train can be very annoying, as the game feels like it is fighting you quite often. With it installed, you get to rotate the view while driving or a passenger.
Even better, the mod sets the position of the camera properly. Now rotating your view around won't orbit your camera in a big arc around a central point, instead you get what you would intuitively expect: the view rotates while you stay fixed in your seating position.
Further, this mod properly enables wagons have front and rear driver's seats, something that didn't make sense when you had to stick the player's view close to the centre of the wagon to let them look well enough out both sides and still be able to escape by right-clicking the wagon's hitbox.
Of course one day maybe we can hope that we won't need this mod, because it only exists due to a deficiency in the game engine. But it's very good to use right now.
Excess baggage left in the game hinders it: the airlock and the engineer's toolbox should both have been scrapped/commented out. The airlock I found particularly bad because I accidentally played with damage disabled, and so I went around exploring and got stuck. I think you can force damage on, which would be much better. The engineer's tools had me thinking there was a second puzzle after the first repair puzzle, but all I had to do was find the exit. I don't want to spoil its location for anyone reading.. but it would have been way easier to find if doors would easily indicate to you whether they have enough power to open. As the game exists, you need to re-check doors regularly to know if you can access them now, due to power and security restrictions.
The importance of sound can hardly be understated. I know the Jam was a great opportunity for Nathan to practice his asset creation skills, but it's pretty rough to have made high resolution textures with stable diffusion only to have zero walking or door sounds. Sounds really take a game from something happening on a computer screen (visual) to a much better experience (audio-visual). Things like the computer boot time would be more intuitive if a sound played in the interval between right-click and boot finishing. I think the Jam's wording discouraged asset re-use but personally I re-used the Minetest Game sounds and was very happy to have them compared to no sound in my entry.
Lastly, I watched Nathan's post-Jam review video/livestream before writing. He was dismissive of the accessibility issue with red text - which is not a problem with colourblindess, because it's not about hue, but it's an issue with simple colour contrast. There are accessibility guidelines about colour contrast for good reasons.
A lot of the time spent on this game, SSS for short, definitely went on the development of original assets. Those are good and at times you somewhat forget you are playing a block game. The game's story is a solid middle score, not bad, not great. Its puzzles are not satisfying and the game leans too heavily into its randomisation features. Nathan (game's author) probably also should have cut some content rather than leaving it in the submission, because a half-baked feature is often worse than not having it.
The game has persistence issues. In SSS, the items you find around the ship are decided randomly and also do not persist permanently. The ship's power status can also be reset by logging in. This leads to a very poor sense of direction and guidance, as if you are never quite sure how to follow a chain of logic to complete the game. It is also possible to accidentally skip loads of content, such as speedrunning the route to the end after (game event that is a spoiler) instead of waiting; or by getting lucky and collecting many ID cards at once, then proceeding to an area with a 2-3 security level gap from your last important door.
The game leans too heavily into randomisation. The loot randomisation has many nonsense results, such as finding officer ID cards in the Cadets' quarters or my personal favourite, a brownie in one of the captain's filing cabinets. I know the game development had limited time, but I think statically placing the objects would have worked better in the Jam Time; that way they could be placed logically.
Digging downwards isn't that helpful if you know that the geology goes in biomes yes. I'm not sure how to address this without adding to the wall of text. The instructions need an overhaul to more step-by-step instead of the information dump at the start, and there might be an instruction trigger for going too deep "Your mission doesn't require deep excavation" and a reminder when your inventory is getting full or your charger is empty to return to base.
Thanks for bug (1), I hadn't spotted that one before nor other reviewers. Almost everyone seems to have hit (2) annoyingly enough it's quite common to spam click apparently..
Insane Protestor greets you with a big load of content warning tags when you view it on ContentDB, and fair enough. It's an edgy kind of a game, but not really particularly so when you get down to it. You're first presented with a happy upbeat soundtrack, which plays throughout and provides a kind of sinister juxtaposition to the violence and destruction of the actual game. It definitely has a story, with pictures and all, though who you are ends up mattering little in the violence and destruction that follows.
Insane protestor seems to revolve around one core gameplay goal: fill the destruct-o-meter. Unfortunately, doing this won't actually achieve anything. Nor will dying cause a lose condition: you will just respawn in your apartment, destruct-o-meter still rising. You will soon end up pursuing other goals like trying to explore the city. That there's an item dupe if you reload the game doesn't matter so when victory is nonexistent anyway (perhaps there's a message in that fact). The city is somewhat lacklustre, but at least it has been filled with a good number of assets from a lot of mods. Thanks to Insane Protester I know know xdecor has a good toilet model, for instance, or there's a fire extinguisher mod.
Even disregarding the lack of a win condition, the game is just not smooth either. Buildings are mazes, and your speed sends you careening down every stairwell to take fall damage. There are many ways to crash the game by right-clicking nodes or the intro formspec. The combat is unsatifying because both weapons are bad: the pipe bomb always seems to damage you no matter how far you throw it, and the throwable firebomb doesn't seem to actually deal any damage.
Lacking good architecture, good code, good story beyond the introduction and good gameplay elements means I can only recommend Protest as a 5 minute thing you play just to be edgy for a bit and to see what stuff there is out there for Minetest in various mods.
Thanks! Yes, I tried to make good use of the Minetest features I know, like the sliding doors which were inspired by scifinodes and the charger which had to be "in-world" and not just a formspec. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
You've hit the jackhammer crash bug which is unfortunately common. It's on the list to defnitely fix after the Jam even though I don't know if I'll develop the game further.
Thanks for appreciating the texturing effort, it was great learning anyway. Earth somehow turned out really good :)
Mapgen had to get cut due to time constraints, I started late in the Jam. I had it planned that the highlands (moon rock biome) would have rougher terrain than the basalt mare, and the whole thing would be dotted with craters. But it was the night (& morning Australian time) and I was rushing just to get a 'minimum viable' out the door, so default terrain it had to be. As it is, I got the biome definitions wrong. Moon ice should have stayed as an ore in the highlands biome rather than being its own biome too, I just had the strange idea I had 4 quadrants on the Voronoi so I needed 4 biomes or something.. (ideally the ice would live inside craters in colder or southerly biomes).
I had planned the game as a story-driven game in the first place, driving a moon buggy, discovering secret moon bases and research projects, but that all got cut due to time constraints. I knew that 'collect stuff' would work well enough to get an actual game out, and justified the "plot" around it. As Zughy discovered, you can get the instructions again if you reload the world, or did that not trigger properly for you?
Thanks for the hint about world-aligned textures, I'll probably put that in after the Jam.
..also did you finish the game? Your review seems to omit any mention of whether you got to/liked the ending...
Yes it was good to learn about the moon's geology as I made the project. Sadly there was no time to actually incorporate secrets, so the 'secret', if there is any, is the material analysis, which in the game's story takes place after the game actually ends..
I'm aware of the crash as it happened to me several times in development. I'm not sure how I can avoid it outside of filling the code with nil checks, but if I can fix it I might learn a fair bit about Minetest.
The stack limit was introduce to make the jackhammer's battery last about as long as your inventory, but thinking back a 50 limit (the amount needed to be collected) would make more sense, and then just decreasing the inventory size down to just the hotbar or so. Default behaviour of 99 would have made more sense and been less tedious.
The wall of text nature of probably could have been reduced if I'd had time by introducing (a) a datapad with the instruction written on (b) step-by-step instructions and (c) phased instructions.
You got confused about the reference to clicking being about the jackhammer.. it's actually a reference to how only the button texture side of the airlock doors works. The jackhammer definitely needs continuous action though.
As for controls: To preserve realism I want to keep the gravity, but I think an idealised mapgen would have some slab height nodes so you can just would up most slopes. That would reduce the need to jump greatly.
As for the mood, I think it relates to the almost complete lack of saturation in most the textures, including how the sky is black instead of blue like the earth's and has no clouds. The moon is stark like that. Maybe the secret of the moon, if it actually existed, would be the monsters..
I agree it's very unfinished, actually the project was a huge learning process about just how long proper game development takes..
This mod contains items that are known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. Thankfully, this does not affect Minetest players.
Edit: It now does affect Minetest players, beware!
I use systemd on Debian because I don't mind using it, but I support other people's choice of not using it. In the same way I support people choosing not to use basic_materials.
Also you should hardly be surpised to find systemd comments on Minetest, it's heavily Linux user skewed.
I have to spool wires onto plastic spools, and then retrieve my empty spools from the crafting grid. In older technic, you would just put the ingots in a line and it would spool them. Now I arbitrarily need plastic in order to make stuff.
It excuses lazy mod authors from having to make their own actually interesting and original system of recipes.
It seems like everybody is afraid of rocking the boat by not conforming to Basic Materials for their crafting recipes. If you make a recipe that conflicts with Basic Materials, people will get annoyed that they have to change their recipe.
Artistic inconsistency: Oil extract, gear wheel are super high res for no apparent reason.
I've been on servers where the technic recipes for protected chests don't use padlocks. This points to the underlying problems with adoption of basic_materials, which lead to comments like 'if only more things adopted proper use of basic_materials, basic_materials wouldn't be as bad' and 'update to the latest version of technic/moreblocks/foomodxyz which uses basic_materials properly, despite those mods working just fine before Basic Materials came along.
It is opinionated about the way to make stuff like cement and concrete, so if your opinion disagrees you have to (a) have to confuse your players with more than one kind of concrete (b) break game balance by allowing both kinds in all your recipes (c) fork basic_materials, defeating the purpose of it being standardised.
So far as I understand the history, Basic materials was thrown together by VanessaE as a library to hold intermediate crafting items for her various mods like homedecor. It's since been adopted as a de facto standard by various other mods to the point it feels like you need to try to avoid it if you don't want it, rather than wanting it and downloading it by choice. I suspect there are so few reviews for this mod precisely because so many people have it installed automatically as a dependency through ContentDB without asking specifically for it.
Basic Materials fits in an annoying spot in all kinds of mod soups, whereas I really feel like the only game it properly belongs is Dreambuilder. The mod soup problem only gets worse with the fact that this mod is getting ported to other games now, because what's the point of playing a different game if it's all just Basic Materials?
Things I like about Basic Materials:
There is only a limited number of very basic materials,
Leave a few of these around the streets and let people go through publicly designated trash; or keep one in your house. My only complaint is that it doesn't have pipeworks support, but the pipeworks mod has its own trash can for that purpose.
Just like overhead wires, cable troughs (the name in the mod is 'wirebox' but this is the real world term) should be available in more shapes and with junctions. The author could copy ideas from mesecons wire or even advtrains track.
The ballast is conceptually good, as is ballastless trackbed, but I would like to see the standard ballast texture used as a basis for the other types, which currently look like a blend of gravel and stone instead. However the defnitions of ballast are clearly wrong as they don't fall like gravel or sound like gravel. If the author intends for the ballast not to fall, which is a good anti-griefer measure, there should be nodes provided similar to the LinuxForks 'gravel on stonebrick' set of nodes.
There a number of 'useless' nodes present: The mast truss and the cylinder mast. I would expect these to be useful perhaps for future semaphores or colour light signals, and not just for the current set of signs. If the intent is for Overhead Line Equipment poles to have signs placed on them, it would also look better if the signs would not float. It's possible to cheat a bit and use what display_modpack does where it registers a separate 'sign on a fence' node where placing a sign onto a fence will create a new special node to avoid the floating problem.
The inclusion of a 'ghost trains' sign also gives it a personalised touch to advtrains (advbugs)
I hope to see a fuller set of active semaphore and colour light signals in future, within the limitations of advtrains of course such as lack of distant signalling support; and for the author to work out the rough edges mentioned above. Then I could definitely recommend the mod.
The standard ballast texture, if it could be made to tile better
The idea of grades of ballast and the stained ballast node
An attempt at modular overhead line equipment
The mast truss
The idea of cable troughs
However I find the art a bit inconsistent and there are a few assets for signs that may have been copywronged from railsigns.uk, despite being attributed (the author should recall that in the absence of a licence statement, copyright remains all rights reserved). I also think the author missed a big opportunity to use display_modpack for the plethora of 'Stop \<color> of \<x> cars' signs - simply allow writing two numbers in a formspec attached to the sign. Then only one sign node definition is needed per colour. A consistent font or small set of fonts and texture resolutions should also be used instead of a mix of pixel and smooth fonts. Some signs also have a very tiny size in the world, which makes them illegible from more than about half a metre away, yet they still have the same size selection box. Others have a very high resolution which causes a big framerate drop whenever they are wielded in-hand; a separate in-inventory image can address this.
The overhead line equipment, or as it's referred to in-game "OLE" without explanation: I like the idea of modularity in height and flexibility of track spacing. However, the lack of any wire at 30 and 45 degrees to match the track is a bit dissapointing, even if it would take a lot more to implement. Also, this is not actually the first attempt at OLE for Advtrains - MBB actually made a more basic system back in 2017. Although the britsignals OLE is more complicated and a bit thinner on the wires (which is usaully more desirable), the MBB mod actually manages to get a better colour contrast including darker cables and has a separate messenger/return wire .
While still obviously a work in progress, this game suffices as a demonstration of how to apply digital logic principles with mesecons and a demonstration of several digistuff components. It does not introduce digital logic principles to someone without that background, but is good as a kind of recipe book for people with some experience already. Perhaps in future it can also introduce the basics.
The text is sparse, or sometimes missing, and you will only get out as much as you put into interacting with each exhibit. I was able to understand the interface to some of the latches, for example, without understanding their internals, but further study and interaction would lead to a better understanding.
Better care should be taken to guide the flow and mark prerequisites in some places. I did not understand the I/O expander when I visited the magnetic swipe card exhibit, so marking a prerequisite of I/O expanders for the swipe card, or removing the use of I/O expanders from the swipe card exhibit would be more helpful.
In terms of performance, the exhibits are mostly tolerant to quick switch flipping and the use of clocks that are off by default helps performance too. I was able to get the I/O expander direct connect exhibit stuck with one pin on though.
I was a bit confused to see the use of 1's complement representation in the display decoders. Perhaps it is easier to build than 2's complement for a display decoder, but 2's complement is vastly superior for arithmetic. Also the sign bit would usually go on the left of all the place value bits in my mind.
The exercises are still also definitely a work in progress, with the second one having several 'wrong' ways to solve it. A good series of exercises can be hard to put together but a well-put-together one would certainly add a lot of value.
Advtrains is the kind of mod that has twofold appeal: From the perspective of people who will never learn its ins-and-outs, and from those who will learn all about the mod and enjoy its richness. It's the definitive method of public transport for Minetest - even the boats and buses of linetrack are based on this core, and teleports can't compare. The way all trains are always operating, even through unloaded areas, is just the beginning of its rich features.
The track system is first class among railway mods for block games, with 30 degree increments, slopes, 45 degree slopes, diamond crossings. No limitations on placement. It's still not 'realistic' but it leaves minecart tracks looking janky.
The signalling and interlocking system has profound depth, though at cost of complexity and being notoriously hard to learn. If you're a lover of signals, this goes beyond OpenTTD or Factorio. Save yourself some trouble and ask other players for help learning.
The trains can also carry your cargo. Moving stuff by train is great fun, better than any other way I can think of. Challenge yourself to build a realistic freight railway, and then sit back and enjoy automatic operation.
Don't like driving? Need to run a timetable? Want something even more elaborate? Start with basic ATC tracks and station/stop rails, and later discover how automation and full control is always available through Advtrains' Lua environment "LuaATC" for anything the train can do.
I have to admit Advtrains' faults: It's hard to learn, it can lag your server badly (the more trains the merrier.. er.. laggier) and one misstep with LuaATC can crash the server. The selection of trains is growing but still not that broad across people/goods, city/country, nationality. It's not super survival friendly. Waiting around at a station for a train to come is probably even less fun in a video game than real life. But I just can't name anything that gives you this much control of computer game trains!
I'd tread very carefully before adding representations of Aboriginal Australian people to Minetest, that could just end in all kinds of cultural insensitivity.
This mod offers the option of a single-use teleport potion or an infinite-use pad. 4 diamonds (+some other materials) are used to craft teleport potions and 4 of those + some other materials makes the pad. Honestly haven't used single teleport potions before; you could contrive such a scenario though: perhaps you're making a minigame and want to require a diamond target to reach before entering another area? The destination coordinates can be set freely. The cost of 2 teleport pads for two-way travel isn't cheap enough to be available in the early game but you will eventually unlock pretty much free travel.
Recommended for teleport hubs on servers at spawn locations to create a hub-and-spoke teleport network. Also recommended if you want to play survival and unlock teleportation eventually, while also keeping a cost to convenience of keeping multiple pads in your network at once.
Not recommended if using multiple dimensions/planets as that might make it too easy to bypass the proper methods for travelling to other locations. If you think teleportation should always have a cost, you could also remove the pads and have only teleport potions in the mod.
I've never liked travelnet. It's way overpowered and the recipe is way too easy for the utility it provides. Despite this, it is widely used on 'survival' servers. It really only belongs on creative mode or 'survival-lite' type servers i.e. where while resources are technically limited, they become abundant very quickly. This mod fork is associated strongly with the Pandorabox server, which falls into the survival-lite category because of the amount of public teleports and the ease of setting up a teleporting quarry ship and mining dense ore veins on the moon. If that kind of context doesn't appeal to you then I don't believe this mod falls in line with your true survival philosophy either.
The texture is awful, even in a variety of colours. You may have nostalgia for it, but I don't. A 'fancy' option is requested against the source repository and stuck due to merge conflict. This is an admission that the texture needs work, but also a kowtow to the old textures by not replacing them.
This fork prevents an old bug where you can fall if there's nothing below the travelnet.
The setup of a public travelnet is easy - there's still some confusion though. The setup formspec will tell you 'don't change the network name if you don't know what it does', then never proceed to explain it to anyone. How do you set up a private one? It's done by prefixing the name of the station with a (P). This is not explained. I only know it because I asked other players. The README should have tell you. The README's incomplete and the only other doc is the API spec. Clearly the devs care more about other devs than end users.
This mod is ancient (2013) and we deserve better. For survival I would much rather recommend teleport potion, which is somewhat more expensive and is only one-way single-destination. For running a server, I would rather recommend warps or funnily enough, another mod used on Pandorabox, telemosaic.
Moretrains is some of the best work for AdvTrains, second only to Marnack's DlxTrains. It preceded that mod and was definitely the best at the time, and it is continuing strong.
Moretrains is a mixed bag with many individual mods with different themes. Pick and choose which ones you want; there's a good variety of eras, lightweight carts or mainline stock, and a mix of freight and passengers. It isn't a modpack for metro/subway trains though.
Unlike some other train mods, moretrains is survival-friendly. It uses some of the standard components like basic trains like wheels and driver's cabins. However, it is also strongly tied to Minetest Game at the moment (but most stuff for advtrains is :()
This particular package is a fork of rubberduck's original work (forum thread) maintained by people over at LinuxForks server, where I should disclose for integrity I do often play and know the people well. It hasn't been on the ContentDB until now because we wanted to make sure we weren't stepping on rubberduck's toes by moving too quickly to publish this fork.
What's new in this fork?
Marnack has done a great job with the addition of the Nightline sleeper & compartment wagons.
The logging wagons will display different types of logs depending on what you put in them
The gondolas will display the top face texture of whatever block goes in them.
So definitely download here or through the source link rather than the forums. Enjoy!
I don't know enough about DAWs to comment on REAPER. My experience is limited to Musescore and Audacity :) I capitalised REAPER because that's how it appears on the product page, maybe I gave the wrong impression that it was an exclamation. Well, if it can make something that sounds great in about an hour, either it's really good or you're really good at making synth tracks despite it :)
The inclusion of coloured 'concrete' blocks doesn't make a case for itself properly. There are numerous mods that add colourful and even recolourable blocks. There is no texture on the concrete. The bakery uses the concrete but wool is used in others and seems like a better generic substitute. The concrete is just there, probably because the author thought they would be useful to themselves and others at some point.
This review was also prompted after prior experience and noticing it in the recently updated section. The recent version is noted by the author as adding protection checks for placement. A previous version of this review stated that the protection checks were removed, but I double-checked today against the author's comment and noticed they were actually added. Perhaps the version was replaced or I had the wrong download; anyway it's good now. Going beyond protection checks, The mod never did seem appropriate for multiplayer anyway, as placing the schematics requires no privilege, so could easily mess people up even faster than standard building speed. I would add a privilege setting to the mod so server owners can nominate a privilege. The default could be interact to keep existing functionality, but it could be tied to a higher privileges like creative.
This mod includes WorldEdit format schematics for several builds, presumably the author's work. The builds are standard block game fare, nothing particularly exciting or realistic. People with a few hours' experience in any block game could put similar builds together. There is a decent selection of buildings that would be expected in a town: Towers and houses, shops, a hospital, a restaurant and so on.
The building spawner items are named in an orderly scheme but have random choice of capitalisation and use of underscores. The dimensions of the building are noted. The art for the spawner items is basic representative of the concept sometimes. However the same icons are reused many times, so you have no real idea what a spawner is just by looking at your hotbar.
The main issue I have with this project is that it's marketed as a helpful mod. However, the value proposition is the schematics themselves and having nifty items to hold them. The actual placing is just as hard as having your own copy of the schematics installed in your world directory and using worldedit's
//load
to place them yourself. The author's only tweak compared to doing that is to offset the placement position slightly.This mod dissapoints me with what it could be. It could include previews and help when placing the schematic, so you don't place it over the top of something else accidentally. It could give you handy tools to rotate and flip the preview along axes. These are the sorts of tools we know are possible in Minetest with mods like Edit. It could give you an easy tool to save your own schematics, and probably even have custom images for them. Instead it's just a pack of builds and the most rudimentary tool conceivable to spawn them with.
Review concludes in a comment
The streetbuilder mod lets you set up a number of points designated as a road, configure the parameters like what nodes and dimensions to use, and goes and builds it for you. That chat command interface is quite workable for anyone used to using advanced commands like, say, WorldEdit. Keeping the README file handy is handy.
The street will build out in one fell swoop when you are ready for it to. It can cut through terrain, which is handy but potentially dangerous at the same time (and irreversible). It can also place bridge piers underneath it. The mod applies a spline curve easing between the points of the road, which is quite helpful and much better than a simple straight line. It will also emerge (load) any unloaded areas on the road while it is building, so you can trust it with making long distance roads and highways. Doing those longer roads may cause the server to lag for some time as it's not done as a background job or spaced out over time in chunks.
My main complaints with the mod are mostly with pushing the limits. It generally behaves quite well.
The controls can be a little confusing, as you're not told you need to hold Sneak to get off the bike, and might try punching the bike. Lag doesn't help with this, as the server has to acknowledge your keypress. Jump will cause you to wheelie. There is also a feature where a long fall (approx >6 m) will cause you to "stack" the bike and fall off it.
The bike can't travel up a full metre of height difference at once, and it travels faster on paved surfaces. Thus, it encourages the building of sloped and paved roads, and corners that aren't too sharp, but not overbuilding on roads for the sake of roads at the same time. I find it creates a much nicer built environment than making roads for car mods.
The physics model is decent at best. Turning sharp corners can be difficult, so you need to slow. The bike's brakes are not very good, except for dismounting which apparently instantly stops it. Wheelie-ing will improve the turning radius which doesn't make much sense but is helpful for turning street corners. Also you can wheelie when stopped..
The bike is best used on a nearby server in your region or singleplayer. You can really suffer in multiplayer if there is a high ping to the server, e.g. Australia to Germany. Also if the server struggles to load the blocks fast enough - though it's a pretty poor server in that cae. In case of lag, it can actually work out slower than walking. This is basically a limitation of Minetest as it stands.
The artwork works fine within the limitations of usual Minetest, i.e. no knees. It is skinsdb compatible. The recolouring feature is nice. Some people may find the helmet a bit unnecessary, depending on their bike culture.
The bike can also be stolen easily. Put it back in your inventory when done riding! Maybe I'll make a bike lock mod one day...
No, it would probably just take a long time to brute force the hash used, especially since it's not a standard hardware-accelerated hash like SHA256. That's probably not great for a chat command that runs synchronously, but it could start an async worker. It would of course be better to record the original text seed, but that's not possible without changing the main menu's code.
To a computer. For a human, if the seed is a word it's easier to remember. Anyway it was just me trying to come up with a potential use.
Debug menu disabled? Disabled by what? I'm looking through the settings, I can't see any place to disable it. In-game it's under F5 on my PC, and a button on my phone.
The seed is already display in the game's F5 debug menu. I would have liked some kind of extra on top of this, maybe an algorithm to try to reverse the seed hashing that's applied when you start the world with a string seed. I can almost see a use case if the chat command were locked behind the server priv and the server software was modded to lie about/omit the seed info that gets sent to clients. Still, not particularly useful as it is.
Edit: Apparently some games/mods can hide the debug menu with HUD flags. This is useful for those cases, I suppose.
WiTT is great for encouraging people not to use F5 to show node names as much.
This version manages to improve on the previous mod, but it is still imperfect. It doesn't draw lava or water sources, just shows their name. It also doesn't seem to handle nodes with alternative drawtypes like plantlike, meshes, liquids or nodeboxes.
PandoraBox has a fork/patch on top of the Basic Trains Japanese Wagon which can feed you oxygen while onboard, so it's all possible. It's probably better to leave it to another mod anyway; AdvTrains usually assumes an environment with earth gravity and an atmosphere.
AdvTrains Livery Tools fulfills the brief for just about every discussion put forward so far about livery features for AdvTrains, and does so in such an intuitively designed, user-friendly way. Marnack has achieved here what many have discussed but not actually gone and done.
Before Livery Tools, the best we had was doxygen_spammer's Multi-component liveries (part of doxy's Minitram). That involved the use of the external dependency on Bike Mod, and an arduous process of memorising and recalling a few "special" numbers on the Bike Painter to apply special painting functions. No more! With Livery Tools, it's all laid out in an intuitive formspec with so many presets to help you along and an instant preview.
Livery Tools is survival-friendly, with a crafting recipe provided for Minetest Game (the only really support game for AdvTrains) to craft its core item, the Livery Designer Tool. The Designer Tool has four tabs:
Livery Tools brings us the ability for in-depth customisation for those who want it, plus the ability to make templates to inspire. It's a creative breakthrough, and I can' t recommend it enough.
Should this review maybe have been posted under "Komodo" instead? Not faulting the review at all. I'm refraining from posting any reviews as "AdvT. Supplemental" myself as I'm not sure about the integrity of doing so.
Based on previous work for InterCity/Nightline carriages originally made for LinuxForks Moretrains, Marnack presents us with a whole new world of customisation in this mod which is the first to have support for his AdvTrains Livery Tools mod. Unlike most carriages, which at most offer the ability to change a single colour, this set is customisable in-depth.
Classic Coaches also comes with a great set of features that are better than many AdvTrains mods: Door animations, crafting recipes, livery customisation and internationalisation support.
I recommend Classic Coaches to anyone who wants a quality set of diesel/electric locomotive-hauled passenger carriages that stands well on its own, and enthusiasts who want to customise their rolling stock. Players could create customisations on this solid foundation to add company logos to their rolling stock easily and use them in a variety of colour options.
I can't recommend Classic Coaches in a few niche scenarios. First, drawing these coaches is more computionally expensive than using flat textures due to the number of overlayed and colorised textures present on each wagon, so maybe avoid them if you are playing on a potato, or a tightly constrained server (the server must calculate the texture strings to apply when a carriage pops into viewing range of a player). You can use the mod without AdvTrains Livery Tools if you want.
It can be hard to discern when to grant certain advtrains-related privileges, especially given the lack of protection checks for privileged users, who can then go on to abuse them. The interlocking privilege by default will let players modify TCB information in any area of the world, even ones they can't build in. This, for example, could let the wrong people remove interlocking from a section and cause a denial of service or crash.
This mod will restrict TCBs and some signals (compatibility not guaranteed) to make it only possible to modify them if the user has permission to modify the area. This does mean you may need to operate your server in a different way than you currently do. It may not be suitable in 100% of cases either. For instance, say you have a public railway network and deputies, helpers and so on who are meant to be able to help troubleshoot issues like stuck trains. Those deputies need to be given protected area access to key parts ofthe railway infrastructure so they can do their duties.
Don't worry about locking admins or high-level railway staff out of signals either. The mod at time of review also does not obey the protection_bypass privilege (this is not something the engine does by default, kind of annoyingly), however it does grant access to anyone with the train_admin privilege (which also grants access to place, destroy and drive all trains as defined in the core modpack of AdvTrains.)
Lastly, this mod should hopefully be made obsolete, but the author is quite right in his current comment that it is just not timely to get changes into AdvTrains at the time of writing.
While the presentation is kind of a wall of text, in-game presents the best place that this information could be provided. While the AdvTrains train catalogue tries to do its best at providing information on all train content that is available, it is subject to becoming out of date as well. With this mod installed, the information is generated from the actual data of the train as it was registered with AdvTrains, making it impossible for it to be out of date.
A great feature that is included is a 3D preview of what each wagon looks like that can be orbited with the mouse/touch controls. Finally, you can find out what the bottom of every train looks like. I know you want to.
This is billed as still a Work in Progress, but there are only some minor improvements I would make: some headings, since variation of the text size helps navigability, and maybe some kind of split between more basic and more advanced information sections. Also the use of proper item names instead of itemstrings and give the speeds in the internally-used m/s (this is the unit technically already used without being named; technically a node per second is only a m/s by convention, but anyway..) as well as km/h and maybe mi/h (mph) if we want to be generous.
Without this mod, rotating the camera around to see better from inside a train can be very annoying, as the game feels like it is fighting you quite often. With it installed, you get to rotate the view while driving or a passenger.
Even better, the mod sets the position of the camera properly. Now rotating your view around won't orbit your camera in a big arc around a central point, instead you get what you would intuitively expect: the view rotates while you stay fixed in your seating position.
Further, this mod properly enables wagons have front and rear driver's seats, something that didn't make sense when you had to stick the player's view close to the centre of the wagon to let them look well enough out both sides and still be able to escape by right-clicking the wagon's hitbox.
Of course one day maybe we can hope that we won't need this mod, because it only exists due to a deficiency in the game engine. But it's very good to use right now.
Excess baggage left in the game hinders it: the airlock and the engineer's toolbox should both have been scrapped/commented out. The airlock I found particularly bad because I accidentally played with damage disabled, and so I went around exploring and got stuck. I think you can force damage on, which would be much better. The engineer's tools had me thinking there was a second puzzle after the first repair puzzle, but all I had to do was find the exit. I don't want to spoil its location for anyone reading.. but it would have been way easier to find if doors would easily indicate to you whether they have enough power to open. As the game exists, you need to re-check doors regularly to know if you can access them now, due to power and security restrictions.
The importance of sound can hardly be understated. I know the Jam was a great opportunity for Nathan to practice his asset creation skills, but it's pretty rough to have made high resolution textures with stable diffusion only to have zero walking or door sounds. Sounds really take a game from something happening on a computer screen (visual) to a much better experience (audio-visual). Things like the computer boot time would be more intuitive if a sound played in the interval between right-click and boot finishing. I think the Jam's wording discouraged asset re-use but personally I re-used the Minetest Game sounds and was very happy to have them compared to no sound in my entry.
Lastly, I watched Nathan's post-Jam review video/livestream before writing. He was dismissive of the accessibility issue with red text - which is not a problem with colourblindess, because it's not about hue, but it's an issue with simple colour contrast. There are accessibility guidelines about colour contrast for good reasons.
A lot of the time spent on this game, SSS for short, definitely went on the development of original assets. Those are good and at times you somewhat forget you are playing a block game. The game's story is a solid middle score, not bad, not great. Its puzzles are not satisfying and the game leans too heavily into its randomisation features. Nathan (game's author) probably also should have cut some content rather than leaving it in the submission, because a half-baked feature is often worse than not having it.
The game has persistence issues. In SSS, the items you find around the ship are decided randomly and also do not persist permanently. The ship's power status can also be reset by logging in. This leads to a very poor sense of direction and guidance, as if you are never quite sure how to follow a chain of logic to complete the game. It is also possible to accidentally skip loads of content, such as speedrunning the route to the end after (game event that is a spoiler) instead of waiting; or by getting lucky and collecting many ID cards at once, then proceeding to an area with a 2-3 security level gap from your last important door.
The game leans too heavily into randomisation. The loot randomisation has many nonsense results, such as finding officer ID cards in the Cadets' quarters or my personal favourite, a brownie in one of the captain's filing cabinets. I know the game development had limited time, but I think statically placing the objects would have worked better in the Jam Time; that way they could be placed logically.
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Digging downwards isn't that helpful if you know that the geology goes in biomes yes. I'm not sure how to address this without adding to the wall of text. The instructions need an overhaul to more step-by-step instead of the information dump at the start, and there might be an instruction trigger for going too deep "Your mission doesn't require deep excavation" and a reminder when your inventory is getting full or your charger is empty to return to base.
Thanks for bug (1), I hadn't spotted that one before nor other reviewers. Almost everyone seems to have hit (2) annoyingly enough it's quite common to spam click apparently..
Insane Protestor greets you with a big load of content warning tags when you view it on ContentDB, and fair enough. It's an edgy kind of a game, but not really particularly so when you get down to it. You're first presented with a happy upbeat soundtrack, which plays throughout and provides a kind of sinister juxtaposition to the violence and destruction of the actual game. It definitely has a story, with pictures and all, though who you are ends up mattering little in the violence and destruction that follows.
Insane protestor seems to revolve around one core gameplay goal: fill the destruct-o-meter. Unfortunately, doing this won't actually achieve anything. Nor will dying cause a lose condition: you will just respawn in your apartment, destruct-o-meter still rising. You will soon end up pursuing other goals like trying to explore the city. That there's an item dupe if you reload the game doesn't matter so when victory is nonexistent anyway (perhaps there's a message in that fact). The city is somewhat lacklustre, but at least it has been filled with a good number of assets from a lot of mods. Thanks to Insane Protester I know know xdecor has a good toilet model, for instance, or there's a fire extinguisher mod.
Even disregarding the lack of a win condition, the game is just not smooth either. Buildings are mazes, and your speed sends you careening down every stairwell to take fall damage. There are many ways to crash the game by right-clicking nodes or the intro formspec. The combat is unsatifying because both weapons are bad: the pipe bomb always seems to damage you no matter how far you throw it, and the throwable firebomb doesn't seem to actually deal any damage.
Lacking good architecture, good code, good story beyond the introduction and good gameplay elements means I can only recommend Protest as a 5 minute thing you play just to be edgy for a bit and to see what stuff there is out there for Minetest in various mods.
Thanks! Yes, I tried to make good use of the Minetest features I know, like the sliding doors which were inspired by scifinodes and the charger which had to be "in-world" and not just a formspec. I'm glad you enjoyed it.
You've hit the jackhammer crash bug which is unfortunately common. It's on the list to defnitely fix after the Jam even though I don't know if I'll develop the game further.
Thanks for appreciating the texturing effort, it was great learning anyway. Earth somehow turned out really good :)
Mapgen had to get cut due to time constraints, I started late in the Jam. I had it planned that the highlands (moon rock biome) would have rougher terrain than the basalt mare, and the whole thing would be dotted with craters. But it was the night (& morning Australian time) and I was rushing just to get a 'minimum viable' out the door, so default terrain it had to be. As it is, I got the biome definitions wrong. Moon ice should have stayed as an ore in the highlands biome rather than being its own biome too, I just had the strange idea I had 4 quadrants on the Voronoi so I needed 4 biomes or something.. (ideally the ice would live inside craters in colder or southerly biomes).
I had planned the game as a story-driven game in the first place, driving a moon buggy, discovering secret moon bases and research projects, but that all got cut due to time constraints. I knew that 'collect stuff' would work well enough to get an actual game out, and justified the "plot" around it. As Zughy discovered, you can get the instructions again if you reload the world, or did that not trigger properly for you?
Thanks for the hint about world-aligned textures, I'll probably put that in after the Jam.
..also did you finish the game? Your review seems to omit any mention of whether you got to/liked the ending...
Yes it was good to learn about the moon's geology as I made the project. Sadly there was no time to actually incorporate secrets, so the 'secret', if there is any, is the material analysis, which in the game's story takes place after the game actually ends..
I'm aware of the crash as it happened to me several times in development. I'm not sure how I can avoid it outside of filling the code with nil checks, but if I can fix it I might learn a fair bit about Minetest.
The stack limit was introduce to make the jackhammer's battery last about as long as your inventory, but thinking back a 50 limit (the amount needed to be collected) would make more sense, and then just decreasing the inventory size down to just the hotbar or so. Default behaviour of 99 would have made more sense and been less tedious.
The wall of text nature of probably could have been reduced if I'd had time by introducing (a) a datapad with the instruction written on (b) step-by-step instructions and (c) phased instructions.
You got confused about the reference to clicking being about the jackhammer.. it's actually a reference to how only the button texture side of the airlock doors works. The jackhammer definitely needs continuous action though.
As for controls: To preserve realism I want to keep the gravity, but I think an idealised mapgen would have some slab height nodes so you can just would up most slopes. That would reduce the need to jump greatly.
As for the mood, I think it relates to the almost complete lack of saturation in most the textures, including how the sky is black instead of blue like the earth's and has no clouds. The moon is stark like that. Maybe the secret of the moon, if it actually existed, would be the monsters..
I agree it's very unfinished, actually the project was a huge learning process about just how long proper game development takes..
This mod contains items that are known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. Thankfully, this does not affect Minetest players.
Edit: It now does affect Minetest players, beware!
I use systemd on Debian because I don't mind using it, but I support other people's choice of not using it. In the same way I support people choosing not to use basic_materials.
Also you should hardly be surpised to find systemd comments on Minetest, it's heavily Linux user skewed.
Just thought I would let passers-by know :)
Things I dislike about Basic Materials
So far as I understand the history, Basic materials was thrown together by VanessaE as a library to hold intermediate crafting items for her various mods like homedecor. It's since been adopted as a de facto standard by various other mods to the point it feels like you need to try to avoid it if you don't want it, rather than wanting it and downloading it by choice. I suspect there are so few reviews for this mod precisely because so many people have it installed automatically as a dependency through ContentDB without asking specifically for it.
Basic Materials fits in an annoying spot in all kinds of mod soups, whereas I really feel like the only game it properly belongs is Dreambuilder. The mod soup problem only gets worse with the fact that this mod is getting ported to other games now, because what's the point of playing a different game if it's all just Basic Materials?
Things I like about Basic Materials:
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Basic materials no longer hard depends on MTG
Leave a few of these around the streets and let people go through publicly designated trash; or keep one in your house. My only complaint is that it doesn't have pipeworks support, but the pipeworks mod has its own trash can for that purpose.
No, you have to craft them out of 9 of the crop that you have gathered.
Just like overhead wires, cable troughs (the name in the mod is 'wirebox' but this is the real world term) should be available in more shapes and with junctions. The author could copy ideas from mesecons wire or even advtrains track.
The ballast is conceptually good, as is ballastless trackbed, but I would like to see the standard ballast texture used as a basis for the other types, which currently look like a blend of gravel and stone instead. However the defnitions of ballast are clearly wrong as they don't fall like gravel or sound like gravel. If the author intends for the ballast not to fall, which is a good anti-griefer measure, there should be nodes provided similar to the LinuxForks 'gravel on stonebrick' set of nodes.
There a number of 'useless' nodes present: The mast truss and the cylinder mast. I would expect these to be useful perhaps for future semaphores or colour light signals, and not just for the current set of signs. If the intent is for Overhead Line Equipment poles to have signs placed on them, it would also look better if the signs would not float. It's possible to cheat a bit and use what display_modpack does where it registers a separate 'sign on a fence' node where placing a sign onto a fence will create a new special node to avoid the floating problem.
The inclusion of a 'ghost trains' sign also gives it a personalised touch to advtrains (advbugs)
I hope to see a fuller set of active semaphore and colour light signals in future, within the limitations of advtrains of course such as lack of distant signalling support; and for the author to work out the rough edges mentioned above. Then I could definitely recommend the mod.
First a list of things I quite appreciate:
However I find the art a bit inconsistent and there are a few assets for signs that may have been copywronged from railsigns.uk, despite being attributed (the author should recall that in the absence of a licence statement, copyright remains all rights reserved). I also think the author missed a big opportunity to use display_modpack for the plethora of 'Stop \<color> of \<x> cars' signs - simply allow writing two numbers in a formspec attached to the sign. Then only one sign node definition is needed per colour. A consistent font or small set of fonts and texture resolutions should also be used instead of a mix of pixel and smooth fonts. Some signs also have a very tiny size in the world, which makes them illegible from more than about half a metre away, yet they still have the same size selection box. Others have a very high resolution which causes a big framerate drop whenever they are wielded in-hand; a separate in-inventory image can address this.
The overhead line equipment, or as it's referred to in-game "OLE" without explanation: I like the idea of modularity in height and flexibility of track spacing. However, the lack of any wire at 30 and 45 degrees to match the track is a bit dissapointing, even if it would take a lot more to implement. Also, this is not actually the first attempt at OLE for Advtrains - MBB actually made a more basic system back in 2017. Although the britsignals OLE is more complicated and a bit thinner on the wires (which is usaully more desirable), the MBB mod actually manages to get a better colour contrast including darker cables and has a separate messenger/return wire .
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While still obviously a work in progress, this game suffices as a demonstration of how to apply digital logic principles with mesecons and a demonstration of several digistuff components. It does not introduce digital logic principles to someone without that background, but is good as a kind of recipe book for people with some experience already. Perhaps in future it can also introduce the basics.
The text is sparse, or sometimes missing, and you will only get out as much as you put into interacting with each exhibit. I was able to understand the interface to some of the latches, for example, without understanding their internals, but further study and interaction would lead to a better understanding.
Better care should be taken to guide the flow and mark prerequisites in some places. I did not understand the I/O expander when I visited the magnetic swipe card exhibit, so marking a prerequisite of I/O expanders for the swipe card, or removing the use of I/O expanders from the swipe card exhibit would be more helpful.
In terms of performance, the exhibits are mostly tolerant to quick switch flipping and the use of clocks that are off by default helps performance too. I was able to get the I/O expander direct connect exhibit stuck with one pin on though.
I was a bit confused to see the use of 1's complement representation in the display decoders. Perhaps it is easier to build than 2's complement for a display decoder, but 2's complement is vastly superior for arithmetic. Also the sign bit would usually go on the left of all the place value bits in my mind.
The exercises are still also definitely a work in progress, with the second one having several 'wrong' ways to solve it. A good series of exercises can be hard to put together but a well-put-together one would certainly add a lot of value.
Advtrains is the kind of mod that has twofold appeal: From the perspective of people who will never learn its ins-and-outs, and from those who will learn all about the mod and enjoy its richness. It's the definitive method of public transport for Minetest - even the boats and buses of linetrack are based on this core, and teleports can't compare. The way all trains are always operating, even through unloaded areas, is just the beginning of its rich features.
The track system is first class among railway mods for block games, with 30 degree increments, slopes, 45 degree slopes, diamond crossings. No limitations on placement. It's still not 'realistic' but it leaves minecart tracks looking janky.
The signalling and interlocking system has profound depth, though at cost of complexity and being notoriously hard to learn. If you're a lover of signals, this goes beyond OpenTTD or Factorio. Save yourself some trouble and ask other players for help learning.
The trains can also carry your cargo. Moving stuff by train is great fun, better than any other way I can think of. Challenge yourself to build a realistic freight railway, and then sit back and enjoy automatic operation.
Don't like driving? Need to run a timetable? Want something even more elaborate? Start with basic ATC tracks and station/stop rails, and later discover how automation and full control is always available through Advtrains' Lua environment "LuaATC" for anything the train can do.
I have to admit Advtrains' faults: It's hard to learn, it can lag your server badly (the more trains the merrier.. er.. laggier) and one misstep with LuaATC can crash the server. The selection of trains is growing but still not that broad across people/goods, city/country, nationality. It's not super survival friendly. Waiting around at a station for a train to come is probably even less fun in a video game than real life. But I just can't name anything that gives you this much control of computer game trains!
I'd tread very carefully before adding representations of Aboriginal Australian people to Minetest, that could just end in all kinds of cultural insensitivity.
This mod offers the option of a single-use teleport potion or an infinite-use pad. 4 diamonds (+some other materials) are used to craft teleport potions and 4 of those + some other materials makes the pad. Honestly haven't used single teleport potions before; you could contrive such a scenario though: perhaps you're making a minigame and want to require a diamond target to reach before entering another area? The destination coordinates can be set freely. The cost of 2 teleport pads for two-way travel isn't cheap enough to be available in the early game but you will eventually unlock pretty much free travel.
Recommended for teleport hubs on servers at spawn locations to create a hub-and-spoke teleport network. Also recommended if you want to play survival and unlock teleportation eventually, while also keeping a cost to convenience of keeping multiple pads in your network at once.
Not recommended if using multiple dimensions/planets as that might make it too easy to bypass the proper methods for travelling to other locations. If you think teleportation should always have a cost, you could also remove the pads and have only teleport potions in the mod.
Marked unhelpful because it doesn't explain why I would want this mod or give examples of its usefulness.
I've never liked travelnet. It's way overpowered and the recipe is way too easy for the utility it provides. Despite this, it is widely used on 'survival' servers. It really only belongs on creative mode or 'survival-lite' type servers i.e. where while resources are technically limited, they become abundant very quickly. This mod fork is associated strongly with the Pandorabox server, which falls into the survival-lite category because of the amount of public teleports and the ease of setting up a teleporting quarry ship and mining dense ore veins on the moon. If that kind of context doesn't appeal to you then I don't believe this mod falls in line with your true survival philosophy either.
The texture is awful, even in a variety of colours. You may have nostalgia for it, but I don't. A 'fancy' option is requested against the source repository and stuck due to merge conflict. This is an admission that the texture needs work, but also a kowtow to the old textures by not replacing them.
This fork prevents an old bug where you can fall if there's nothing below the travelnet.
The setup of a public travelnet is easy - there's still some confusion though. The setup formspec will tell you 'don't change the network name if you don't know what it does', then never proceed to explain it to anyone. How do you set up a private one? It's done by prefixing the name of the station with a (P). This is not explained. I only know it because I asked other players. The README should have tell you. The README's incomplete and the only other doc is the API spec. Clearly the devs care more about other devs than end users.
This mod is ancient (2013) and we deserve better. For survival I would much rather recommend teleport potion, which is somewhat more expensive and is only one-way single-destination. For running a server, I would rather recommend warps or funnily enough, another mod used on Pandorabox, telemosaic.
Moretrains is some of the best work for AdvTrains, second only to Marnack's DlxTrains. It preceded that mod and was definitely the best at the time, and it is continuing strong.
Moretrains is a mixed bag with many individual mods with different themes. Pick and choose which ones you want; there's a good variety of eras, lightweight carts or mainline stock, and a mix of freight and passengers. It isn't a modpack for metro/subway trains though.
Unlike some other train mods, moretrains is survival-friendly. It uses some of the standard components like basic trains like wheels and driver's cabins. However, it is also strongly tied to Minetest Game at the moment (but most stuff for advtrains is :()
This particular package is a fork of rubberduck's original work (forum thread) maintained by people over at LinuxForks server, where I should disclose for integrity I do often play and know the people well. It hasn't been on the ContentDB until now because we wanted to make sure we weren't stepping on rubberduck's toes by moving too quickly to publish this fork.
What's new in this fork?
So definitely download here or through the source link rather than the forums. Enjoy!
I don't know enough about DAWs to comment on REAPER. My experience is limited to Musescore and Audacity :) I capitalised REAPER because that's how it appears on the product page, maybe I gave the wrong impression that it was an exclamation. Well, if it can make something that sounds great in about an hour, either it's really good or you're really good at making synth tracks despite it :)