Hmm...

Hmm...
...
...
Hmm... I may or may not have the time or the patience to get this map done. My interest is waning a bit, and I am on a time crunch with an unspecified deadline... I might have to work on other projects for the time being. A program I'm writing right now will be my main interest for now. (Plus some videos... eventually...

Two years...

This Sunday (June 23rd) will mark two years since I've purchased Minecraft (Roughly a week or two before Beta 1.7).

I'm trying to think of what I could do to mark that occasion... I do not have my first world anymore, mainly since that computer has since died...

Hmm...

I'll figure something out, but I'm open to suggestions.

New Concepts

First off, special thanks to @Anistuffs for helping me hammer out the storyline for my map.

And now back to the irregularly scheduled update...

The original idea was to use the classical elements as a framework, something to draw inspiration from for equipment, mobs, and areas. (For example, I had the idea to have equipment that didn't quite work right based on elements, boots with respiration for example. "You can breathe through your feet!")

But looking on this page on the classical elements, which led to this page on ancient Chinese elements, I thought, "Hey, perhaps I could use these instead of the typical trope! That'd be unique, right?"

It provides a framework for the areas that the player will go through, and since Chinese elements describe processes instead of pieces of a whole, it will be like the player is going through a journey through the realm of my map.

Element	Season	Area
Wood	Spring	Forest
Fire	Summer	Desert
Earth		Mountains
Metal	Fall	Village
Water	Winter	Swamp
???	???	???

Just a thought as I actually start building this thing...

Update

Using this concept instead of bottles o' enchanting from here on out.

That is all.

Fantasy Map -- Building a Story

I think I have the main mechanic figured out for my map; as I said last post, I'll be using books to change the "spells" that the player has access to at any given moment. At the moment, I'm thinking of having books being the main theme of the storyline as well, but I need to give it a bit more thought.

I plan to divide the books into three categories

Story

These books will be vital to the storyline... somehow...

At the moment, I'm thinking of having old books that have to be translated to display part of the story. I intend to retain the magic/medieval theme, but with an emphasis on books and a library of lost spells. (I'll continue to work on it...)

Sorcery

These books will be used to enchant weaponry, items, and other equipment, but not by using levels. I intend to use villager trading (does changing the lore/name of an item influence if it will trade or not?) to create items with enchants similar to what Anistuffs suggested in his blogpost a while back. I'd likely use the "enchanting" as a way for the player to get better weaponry, armor, and consumables.

Spells

Using the Bottle o' Enchanting as a "wand" of sorts, and by switching spells using a similar mechanic as I described in the last post, this will allow the player to alter his abilities to match the environment, or to influence the environment to match his abilities.

• Environment (These are similar to the "Teleport" ideas from a few posts back)
• "Flood Room" - Floods the room.
• "Shatter World" - Turn one large floating island into many.
• "Mirror" - Swaps the X and Z Coordinates (Left becomes Right and vis-versa).
• "Temporal Shift" - Move forwards or backwards in time.
• "Shift Gravity" - Up is now down.
• ...
• Ability (Potion effects, but without the potions)
• "Mind Trick" - This video.
• "Power Bounce" - A very brief, but more powerful jump.
• "Gill (?)" - Allows player to breath underwater. (might be better as an enchanted consumable)
• "Focused Search" - Night vision, show points of interest, but reduce strength.
• ...

Leave me some feedback, and hopefully I'll have the first few areas figured out sooner rather than later.

Fantasy Map Concept?

Edit: Forgot to add a bit of inspiration: I won't do a Myst style map like this, but the idea got me thinking...
I've been thinking about mechanics for my fantasy map, and I feel like I have a lot of ideas, but not many ways to use it...

Most of the ideas are teleportation between different versions of the same area or player buffs (potion effects without potions? if that makes any sense), but if I'm only able to have one spell at any given moment (using the bottles o' enchanting trick that Sethbling came up with a while back), then how can the player switch between them?

A central hub perhaps?

Using a hopper key/sorting system, I can have the player choose a "spell" for certain areas. Each spell would be in the form of a book, and the player would toss the book onto an enchanting table (with a hopper underneath) to select a spell.

Something like:

1. Player enters a room (teleports to the central spell hub)
2. Player grabs a spell book from the ender chest and tosses it onto the enchanting table
3. The book gets sorted to tell which spell book it is (and the spells would be restricted by area as well, no point in having a "Flood Room" spell in a volcano... usually)
4. The book is then returned to the player, who then places the book back into the ender chest.

This will allow many different abilities to be unlocked and used by the player, allowing certain areas to be only accessible at different points of the map.

NBT Filter

I'm currently working on helping @Texelelf with a filter... or I at least offered my assistance. He is working on a filter to allow editing of NBT data within MCEdit, and because of version differences, he is making it Windows only for the time being. I'm going to try to port it to Linux and Mac... the major problem? trying to figure out the different pieces of the code and how to change them from a Windows GUI to a Linux and Mac GUI...

As it is now, the preliminary version that Texelelf has let me fiddle with shows the NBT data in a pop-up window as a tree, which in and of itself is mind boggling to me (I'm easily impressed with programs :P) but it relies on the win32api, win32gui, win32con, and winerror libraries that come pre-packaged with MCEdit. Linux and Mac obviously cannot use these libraries, so I need to use different libraries, preferably pre-packaged with MCEdit, that accomplish roughly the same tasks.

If Texelelf and I understand correctly, Linux would use the ALBOW library and Mac would use Appkit library as GUI libraries that are included in MCEdit (ALBOW is actually one of the core libraries that MCEdit uses to display stuff in the window... it has turned to vaporware though, much like a lot of Pygame GUI libraries...). If I can, I think it might be beneficial to figure out another alternative, but using the built-in libraries in MCEdit would be prefered...

I can already tell that this is going to be a challenging project... and one that I hope I have the time and patience to work on... this filter is going to be too awesome to keep Windows only!

EDIT:
Another thing I've been thinking of... one of Sethbling's latest filters, the statuemaker filter, requires a png library that you place into the filters folder... could the same be done with TkInter or wxPython? Hmm...

Idea Dump -- Fantasy Map

I *think* that I will do a fantasy themed map as my first adventure map... partially because I feel that it will be easier than a sci-fi map, but I digress...

There will be a handful of major mechanics that I will use in the map...

Teleportation!

Yes, it's not a unique idea... Basically, it is a combination of either this firework detector (by HappyPear) or this experience detector (by Sethbling) with this map's core mechanic (by Bigre). So, how would I use the teleportation mechanic?

• Between two major points in an area
• Between two different areas
• Good/Evil
• Above/Below
• Normal/Mirrored (swap x/z coords)
• Past/Present/Future
• Dry/Flooded
• ...
• Changes in one area affect the other
• ...

Elements!

Again, not *too* unique... but having the different main areas based on the classical elements (Air, Water, Earth, Fire) as well as the different mobs, equipment, etc. based on the elements would be an interesting challenge.

• Use books to enchant powerful tools (an earth book to create a sword with earth-based enchants?)
• Use the fireworks/bottles o' enchanting from above to use elemental based "spells"
• Anistuffs gave some good ideas for elemental potions, mobs, weapons, and armor on his blog.
• ...

I'll update this as I get feedback and more ideas...

Testing, Testing...

*Ahem*
This blog likely will be quieter than Anistuff's blog... just minus the crickets... I've made sure to get a bug zapper for the blog.

All funny quips aside, this blog will likely just be filled with my ramblings (hence the name of the blog) and I will likely ramble about things that are either too big to ramble about on twitter or that are too complex (or if I'm too lazy) to ramble about on Youtube. Updates will be infrequent, long, and likely edited multiple times (is that a thing? (EDIT: It is!)). Comments are encouraged, but they must add to the discussion and be appropriate or I will delete them. Overall, just don't be a jerk to me and others, and I won't see any problems.

Anyways, time to start a long-winded ride through my mind... I'll warn you now, this'll likely lead to some R30.exe has stopped working moments... but hey, nothing too different from usual, right?

--R30