FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Thanks for catching these (my copy of Minetest isn't up-to-date). Fixed all three, in git.

Does the fact that you didn't correct my fixes mean that i did it right? I that's the case then wowsers! I'm sure you remember me telling you that i am a Lua noob, and "noob" is a mild description of it ;-)

Yup, pretty much :) I did "correct" one of them by uncommenting one of those lines in bushes though (better to choose a valid default than to go with 0 - paranoia).

Ah, good to know. I keep learning daily! ;-)

A few updates went in today to fix some bugs that happen with the latest -dev builds of Minetest (due mostly to changes in how the plantlike draw type is handled, as well among other things). Mostly focusing on plants that seemed to "float" in mid-air.

do those auto-generate only on a new map? or it can use my already created map aswell?

For the most part, plantlife only generates on newly explored areas of a map (regardless of the map's overall age), except for one or two items in the modpack such as mushrooms, which will spring up in old areas also.

VanessaE wrote:For the most part, plantlife only generates on newly explored areas of a map (regardless of the map's overall age), except for one or two items in the modpack such as mushrooms, which will spring up in old areas also.

Thank you really much! God bless u!

Maybe it is just me, but can anyone confirm that the bushes from bushes_classic are being generated? I can't seem to find them unless I spawn them myself.

They always seemed to work for me? However I deliberately made them rare.

Update: the bushes from the bushes_classic mod have been turned into mesh nodes. Better appearance, probably a bit more accurate to the spirit of the original textures, but in 3d ;-)

EDIT: did the baskets (full and empty), too.

Hi, First of all, I really love this mod!

I have a little problem with hay. Sometimes when hay generates at some places, it "overwrites" nodes that I already placed there before. E.g. I've placed a wooden bench under a tree and after some days there was only half of the bench left with hay instead of the left side of the bench. Somehow it got generated there. Now I can't even remove the other side of the bench, I can't aim at it anymore with the pickaxe!
The same happened with the barbeque node, now there's a haystack instead of the BBQ I've put there some weeks ago. Unfortunately the "meat" of the BBQ node still floats in the air with no apparent way to remove it.

So I guess that makes two bugs in one:
1) hay generation shouldn't interfere with other nodes
2) if it does, remove the node properly and not only half of it

I hope you can fix this soon, thanks!

EDIT: I've added some screenshots :)

The half benches and floating meat is a side effect of Home Decor using two nodes for the bench and grill objects. Those and most other two-node objects will be made into single-object mesh nodes soon, which will solve that issue. For now, use worldedit to delete them.

That said, to my knowledge, there is no "hay" in plantlife modpack, and certainly no after-mapgen nodes that would spawn without checking for air/buildable_to. You've got some other mod supplying that.

Here the snippet of the code in plantlife/dryplants/init.lua that defines dryplants:hay and decays dryplants:grass to dryplants:hay over time:



I have no idea what other mod could interfere.

Wow, I'd completely forgotten about that. However, since it is directly overwriting the ABM-triggered node position with a replacement, this can't be the source of the problem.

I don't see anywhere in the code where hay is added by itself (outside of the above drying ABM), and only one place where dryplants:grass is being added to the map, but that is during map generation time (dryplants/meadowvariation.lua), and air-checking is enabled there (this is the default).

Seeing this crash with latest git:


at commit 581aee0570d2270e58848bfc9d3fd7f0cbe7e501

Odd crash. get_node_light() must somehow be returning nil for the grow target. Fix committed.

Yep, crash is gone.
Thank you, VanessaE.

Small update: mushrooms now use a nice meshnode instead of plantlike drawtype, model by jp/kilbith (with changes by me).

Scheiker wrote:Maybe it is just me, but can anyone confirm that the bushes from bushes_classic are being generated? I can't seem to find them unless I spawn them myself.

Nvm, I don't know what it was but after doing a rebuild of my GNU/LInux installation I can now see the bushes in places where I know I had looked before. Could of been a bad lua version or something, but at least it works now :)

Significant update: bas080 has rewritten his vines mod and submitted it to plantlife. Said rewrite, which seems to perform better, has been merged in. :-)

Scheiker wrote:

Scheiker wrote:Maybe it is just me, but can anyone confirm that the bushes from bushes_classic are being generated? I can't seem to find them unless I spawn them myself.

Nvm, I don't know what it was but after doing a rebuild of my GNU/LInux installation I can now see the bushes in places where I know I had looked before. Could of been a bad lua version or something, but at least it works now :)

Bushes don't take part of mapgen. They are generated after, in an ABM (Active Block Modifier). So it's normal that you can't see any bush at first. But if you play a long time on the same place, you will see the bushes appearing slowly.

...and fixed a crash bug in git, due to a copy&paste error.

A new function was just added to Minetest master branch to condense the sort of surface-under-air search that my mod does into a single API call, which plants_lib now uses if available. If it's not available, the old search loop will be used (e.g. on 0.4.12 stable and older). So, speed improvements thanks to engine improvements. :-)

Also on the other side of the coin, I've added an on-shutdown hook to force plants_lib to play-out the rest of its mapgen log at shutdown. If you were busy spanking the mapgen, expect a few tens of seconds extra for the game to exit. This is to prevent those latent mapblocks from ending up unpopulated. If the mapgen was idle at the time of shutdown, then the log will be empty and of course nothing of consequence happens - this will be the usual state for most people I guess.

This latter change has no effect on normal gameplay -- only on the amount of time it takes a server to shut down.

Another small update: Instead of running at a max speed of one mapblock populate event per server step (usually 0.1 seconds), plants_lib will now try to play back as many such events as it can per step. It'll only start such a sequence if the server's step interval is less than 0.2 seconds (twice the usual time), and will only run that sequence for up 0.2 more seconds before releasing control back to the server.

This will result in less time spent populating the map, but shouldn't cause a significant increase in lag. Total increase in throughput depends on the speed of the machine and how much time the mod already took in each server step interval - a slower machine won't see a change, a fast machine might see a 3 or 4x increase. On my box, about twice as many events are played out per step as before, so around 2x.

Doesn't mean the code is any faster (maybe insignificantly so), it just uses a lot more CPU than before, and gets the job done in correspondingly less time. ;-)

EDIT: if you got the above update, get this morning's fix. I fixed a brain-o that caused the code to just spin at 100% CPU for no reason.

EDIT: fixed another glitch in the new code. If the map seemed to "pop into view" mostly-populated before, it won't now, because it was basically monopolizing the CPU. Now it works like it was supposed to in the first place. The above 2x/3x/4x commentary still applies.

The new baskets are fine, but...they kind of broke one of my houses :-)

A floor out of baskets did work well in the past. The baskets had a greyish upper part. Now...it does look slightly...odd :)


The entire house as such does not look too bad, even with the new baskets:


(Attachments added only so that I can link the images without having to use one of the non-working image hosters)

Sucks to be you for building something out of baskets ;-)

Facedir added in git, so the floor nodes can be flipped over with the screwdriver to show a flat side.

VanessaE wrote:Sucks to be you for building something out of baskets ;-)

They proved to be decorative and stable enough :) It's just with the changes that i started to stumble on that upper floor! Imagine having to walk on such a floor...

Thanks for the facedir update :-)

Update : there is now sunflowers (made by kaeza) in Plantlife. They're sparingly spread over the lands.

Nice sunflowers! I hope to encounter some in the game eventually.