FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

It doesnt make any sense that clouds hit my towers around the 20th floor. Ive been up a few taller towers in my life and even on the 40th or 50th floor the clouds were well above.

Can i adjust the height or disable clouds entirely from lua? or do i need to patch?

You can kill the clouds in the Minetest.conf

judging from wikipedia and yahoo answers the consensus seems to be that the lowest clouds form at around 2000meters. that would put them several times higher than where they are in the game.

ill disable them until i find a way to set them at a more appropriate height.

That sounds about right.

from what i see in minetest.conf, you can disable 3d clouds, but i dont see an option to disable clouds entirely :-/

enable_clouds = false

Ooo that wasnt in the dev wiki lol thanks! :-)

Where I live, about 1 km above sea level, it is rather common to end up "in the clouds" due to normal changes in the weather. On very rare occasion, I've seen those clouds stretch down slightly further.

For the sake of the game, if one were to change the cloud height, it should be 1000 meters, and the scale of the cloud texture should be tweaked to keep them at the same apparent size (as seen from seal level).

Just wondering if any more thought ever happened with this.
I find clouds at 120 are rubbish and keep passing through my buildings (bet that doesn't happen often in VanessaE's house). However if you set them to a more sensible height (like 1500), they show within a small square and look stupid. Perhaps a simple scaling setting added to minetest.conf would help. Though I would also like an optional per-world setting, as some of my worlds benefit from low clouds...
Settings currently available (from https://github.com/minetest/minetest/blob/master/minetest.conf.example are
# Enable/disable clouds
#enable_clouds = true
#cloud_height = 120
#enable_3d_clouds = true
# Use a cloud animation for the main menu background
#menu_clouds = true

Clouds completely disappear from view at 2000m distance, this could perhaps be increased, perhaps doubled.

The default cloud height is scaled to the mini-scale of the world, which is roughly 1/10th of realistic since real-world cumulus base is around 1km. Biomes are roughly 250m across and the highest mountains in mgv5/mgv7 are 250m high, double the cloud height, which seems about right. Real world mountains extend well above cloud base.

I find the experience of climbing up through the clouds and looking down on them from quite a distance above exhilarating. In my mapgens i choose to have the highest mountains roughly twice the cloud height.

fog and clouds are approximately the same in reality, in minetest…

Maybe you can have a cloud not appear when they are in a closed space

I've taken some very careful measurements

Sam II is just under 2 blocks tall so he is therefore about 1.8m tall
Apple trees mostly have a trunk height of 3-4 metres

So far so good, but:

Voila are are a metre high! So are many other flowers that range from 25cm petal to petal to a whopping 1 metre! These flowers are monsters and completely out of proportion.

Apples... whoa... they're a whopping 50cm in diameter also! Dunno how we eat them all to be honest. One would be enough to feed the average person for several days I'd think.

Dirt floats. I think it must be imbibed with some kind of anti-gravity substances. You can make most materials float so it's almost universal.

Lava in the game always flows downwards. In real life the majority of lava flows upwards under pressure until it reaches the surface (i.e. magma) which then flows downwards under gravity.

The sun is square (well, unless you use a texture pack).

I can punch down apple trees with my bare hands. STRONG LIKE TARZAN.

I could go on and and and on and on. The game is so unrealistic it's laughable.


Then, looking

** URGENT UPDATE **

I just realised I've been looking at this completely wrong. I've looked at the minetest world and assumed that blocks are 1 metre tall and Sam II is about 1.8 metres tall. This anthropocentric view of the world is wrong. I should not have assumed that. So, let's assume that the scale of the flowers are correct and that an apple a more realistic 10cm. (I chose 10 because it's close enough to the size of most real apples and it's a nice round number). This makes Sam about 10.8cm tall (perhaps he's a smurf or a gnome or something... dunno) and blocks, about 20cmx20cmx20cm. We've been using the wrong scale! Aargh.

Dang. So now we need to rescale Sam now too? That will put the clouds at his belly button? Oh the travesty of it all! :P

Nyan cat is also completely non-realistic size!

Zeno wrote:I've taken some very careful measurements

Sam II is just under 2 blocks tall so he is therefore about 1.8m tall
Apple trees mostly have a trunk height of 3-4 metres

So far so good, but:

Voila are are a metre high! So are many other flowers that range from 25cm petal to petal to a whopping 1 metre! These flowers are monsters and completely out of proportion.

Apples... whoa... they're a whopping 50cm in diameter also! Dunno how we eat them all to be honest. One would be enough to feed the average person for several days I'd think.

Dirt floats. I think it must be imbibed with some kind of anti-gravity substances. You can make most materials float so it's almost universal.

Lava in the game always flows downwards. In real life the majority of lava flows upwards under pressure until it reaches the surface (i.e. magma) which then flows downwards under gravity.

The sun is square (well, unless you use a texture pack).

I can punch down apple trees with my bare hands. STRONG LIKE TARZAN.

I could go on and and and on and on. The game is so unrealistic it's laughable.


Then, looking

This is not true/.

Here is my analyzation.

The average leaves are about exactly one meter wide, and exactly cubical, so the game is infact realistic

Zeno wrote:Voila are are a metre high! So are many other flowers that range from 25cm petal to petal to a whopping 1 metre! These flowers are monsters and completely out of proportion.

The flowers have little in common with their textures. At least the old images where thus that I wouldn't have guessed that a "yellow dandelion" was that common flower everyone knows and not some obscure plant I've never seen. So just accept them as mutations of some kind. As long as they stick to their grass block and don't start to move around....
Bushes might easily grow to a height of 1 m and more.

The bench from my cottages mod has a comftable height of 45 cm and is 40 cm wide - a perfectly good place to sit on. Yet next to a table it does look as if it's a bench for your feet. Which comes from real tables and horizontal work areas beeing at a height of 60-70 cm - not at 1m as in Minetest. Yet beds and doors both look perfectly normal.

Very few houses come with walls that are 1 m thick, so there's always a need to enlarge the scale of a house. With moreblocks and its thin slabs, it's possible to get down to almost realistic scale in parts. The problem with tables and such remains.

Er...and then there's the weight problem. Did anyone get a handy bag for 1000nds of cubic meters of cobble, weighting no more than a sheet of paper and taking no more space than that?

Just my opinion. Its a game. It isn't like we are helping Google with their maps.

Don wrote:Just my opinion. Its a game. It isn't like we are helping Google with their maps.

as far as l know you can't help google maps, but you can do something for openstreetmap

Hybrid Dog wrote:

Don wrote:Just my opinion. Its a game. It isn't like we are helping Google with their maps.

as far as l know you can't help google maps, but you can do something for openstreetmap

You can't using minetest

Don wrote:

Hybrid Dog wrote:

Don wrote:Just my opinion. Its a game. It isn't like we are helping Google with their maps.

as far as l know you can't help google maps, but you can do something for openstreetmap

You can't using minetest

ln minetest it's possible to display a firefox window on webdesigner's laptop (the one with the toilet on its back) (of his/her/its computer mod) that you can use like using firefox on a laptop in real life.
You would need to use its keyboard, which is possible, see viewtopic.php?f=11&t=4877&start=50#p173161, and display a firefox window by using simple colours, like the paintings mod can show just self drawn pictures. You would need to run firefox in the background and calculate how it would look like when taking a screenshot of it and somehow play the sounds.
So you could visit the openstreetmap website and change the map l think.

Really all I would like is to have
1. clouds not displayed inside (presumably using the light level would be a quick hack for this, although might not work at night - perhaps this could be an option for world.mt,
2. clouds not only in a little square in the sky when they are high - it should be easy to scale them depending on the height - another great option for world.mt
NB I'd rather I could put it in world.mt rather than minetest.conf as I think it is much more world dependent than 'universe' dependent, but both would be good with world.mt overriding minetest.conf.

It would be very difficult to detect what is 'inside', for example how to distinguish a dense forest on a mountain from a building, we would want clouds passing through forests. If it were possible somehow the amount of processing might make it not worth doing.
One trick is to make clouds flat (if that's your preference) and make sure a building has a floor at cloud level, the clouds pass through the centre of a node layer, no good for stairwells but at least no clouds passing through rooms.
I might try to make the cloud area larger and not cut out at 2kn, these may be easy improvements.

In 0.4.12dev cloud area radius can now be set in .conf, for details see the issue at Github https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/2662
Add:
cloud_radius = 26
With standard cloud height values larger than 26 will start to cause clipping of the cloud area corners,