FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

The main goal for this mod was to put integral trees (as in the novel by the same name) into Minetest, mostly because they look cool. However, it occurred to me that this was a good way to use some of that vast, untapped airspace without leaving too much shadow on the ground. So, I made them into explorable domains with dangers and rewards comparable to the underworld.

These integral trees are giant plants whose roots extend into a fourth physical dimension. Their roots can be found in the center of the visible body, and simultaneously buried in the ground below, without any tangible connection. They range in size from 300 meters to a kilometer tall. Seeing one in its entirety is quite a chore.

To get to a tree, you must first find one. (Not as easy as you might think, as they don't like to be crowded.) They're separated by about a kilometer from each other, hovering around 200 meters up. You could build a tower to reach them, or look for their roots, buried in the ground (and occasionally the air) nearby. Punch a root and you'll be teleported in the direction you punch, either to another root, about a kilometer away, or to the tree, if you punch upwards. How do you recognize the roots? Trust me, you'll know them if you see them.

Integral trees have peculiar wood, laced with minerals which can be extracted by cooking. They are an excellent source of iron and diamond. However, they're also usually infested with giant arthropods which fiercely defend them against any intruder. Bring axes and swords.

This mod requires the Mobs Redo package.

Code: MIT, textures: CC0 and GFDL

Mod dependencies: default, Mobs Redo

Download: Integral Trees at github

Screenshots


Crafting Recipes
[in progress]


Dedicated to Larry Niven, still one of my favorite authors.

Lovely shaped megastructure and excellent screenshot.

This looks very interesting. I'll have to give it a whirl.

That's awesome man!

Thanks for the kind words. I've made the code more memory efficient, and corrected some teleportation errors, after being buried alive. I also made sure that the root that spawns under each tree is in the air, so it's easier to find them. I wish the game would just paint their shadows, but you have to generate chunks before it pays attention to them.

Teleportation is still dangerous. The mapgen frequently over-generates by two meters, cutting off a piece of the roots underground -- sometimes in the direction I came from. It makes backtracking slightly more difficult, and I suspect I'll still end up buried alive at some point. I might be able to dig out without cheating, but eventually I'm certain to end up teleporting into a lava pool. That would be a nasty corpse run. On the other hand, I hesitate to make it any safer. Teleportation ought to be a little dangerous.

Welp, there goes my "world tree" mod idea :-P Very impressive :-D

Does the "bug nest" refer to all the caves inside, or am I not seeing something in the screenshot?

Edit: I just realized "there goes…" sounds too negative. But I had been thinking about writing a gigantic tree mod – and still am! Was just surprised that someone had a similar idea ;-)

By the way, to make it a bit more like the novel: what about a randomish cloud of leaves surrounding the ends?

It looks awesome

Martin_Devil wrote:It looks awesome

Thanks.

Ben wrote:Welp, there goes my "world tree" mod idea :-P

I'd love to see a world tree mod. I stuck to these because they're separated from the ground environment (which is actually more of a pain then I anticipated), trees are more complicated to construct, and I'm not sure I'd appreciate the big stump or extra shadows on my landscape. One idea that keeps tickling me is a world based on Hothouse, but that would definitely push out the regular environment.

Ben wrote:Does the "bug nest" refer to all the caves inside, or am I not seeing something in the screenshot?

The bugs are in there, they're just hard to spot, since they're usually in the dark, newly tunneled areas. At least they're hard to spot until they drop on you and eat your face. I may have to make them a little less dangerous. So far, I can't even make a beachhead in the tree I'm working on.

Ben wrote:By the way, to make it a bit more like the novel: what about a randomish cloud of leaves surrounding the ends?

I'd either have to increase the leaf decay radius a lot or add a bunch of random limbs. I already have the code needed in valleys_c, but it might spoil the streamlined shape they have now.

duane wrote:

Ben wrote:By the way, to make it a bit more like the novel: what about a randomish cloud of leaves surrounding the ends?

I'd either have to increase the leaf decay radius a lot or add a bunch of random limbs. I already have the code needed in valleys_c, but it might spoil the streamlined shape they have now.

I'd add a bunch of random limbs. In fact, I'd add a bunch of random limbs which are one node large and "free floating". You've already established that they have "roots in the fourth dimension", noone is going to mind free-floating tree crowns.

My main concern (though I have limited experience) with a massive amount of leaves is the ton of ABMs and the ton of semi-transparent textures. I've got a few ideas; if anyone's interested, I'll write more.

Ben wrote:

duane wrote:

Ben wrote:By the way, to make it a bit more like the novel: what about a randomish cloud of leaves surrounding the ends?

I'd either have to increase the leaf decay radius a lot or add a bunch of random limbs. I already have the code needed in valleys_c, but it might spoil the streamlined shape they have now.

I'd add a bunch of random limbs. In fact, I'd add a bunch of random limbs which are one node large and "free floating". You've already established that they have "roots in the fourth dimension", noone is going to mind free-floating tree crowns.

My main concern (though I have limited experience) with a massive amount of leaves is the ton of ABMs and the ton of semi-transparent textures. I've got a few ideas; if anyone's interested, I'll write more.

Opinions are good. Lets hear them.
duane might not like or use your ideas but hearing ideas is always good as long as they are presented in a respectful way. I have not seen you be disrespectful yet Ben so I am assuming that you have great ideas. Even if duane doesn't use your ideas there might be someone else that will use them.

Thanks, my main concern is that this may not be the thread to elaborate this, and that I'm prematurely solving non-problems. But here it is:

1. Don't use default leaves, but create a new, opaque block representing a single (or at most a few) leaves. It's a giant tree anyway. The new leaves should still propagate sunlight, though, but the graphics engine no longer needs to treat them as transparent.
2. At both ends of the tree, place new "branch tip" nodes in a regular pattern in a streamlined cloud. Think 3d kissing number. Except don't place each node at exactly the regular pattern, but each a few random nodes displaced. Should look random enough but provide good coverage.
3. Each branch tip node is the center of a regular sphere of leaves as above (we'll call this a "cluster"). Again, see the kissing number link from above. For a more ragged look, each branch tip has only 90% chance to be placed, and each leaf has a 90% chance to appear in the cluster.
4. When a branch tip is dug, all leaves in the cluster (i.e. within the small sphere) are replaced with new nodes which look the same, but decay after a time. This replaces the default leaf decay mechanism, and ensures that only a few nodes have ABMs.

That should mitigate a large number of decay ABMs, and a large number of transparent textures, at about the same net effect. If I'm not mistaken.

Ben wrote:Thanks, my main concern is that this may not be the thread to elaborate this, and that I'm prematurely solving non-problems. But here it is:

I like it! I threw some of those changes together, and I think it looks better. Of course, considering how much work it requires to see the whole of any of these things, it's probably wasted effort. I'm not sure that making the textures solid has any effect on my system, but it doesn't hurt anything either.

I spent over an hour exploring a tree. Those things are huge. It is very interesting.
Keep up the great work.

I finally found the time to try this out! Wow, these are huge! I really like the multiple colors of the "forests" around the ends. Though I must admit I flew up ;-)

Two things, though: there were big horizontal gaps in the trunk – I assume this is for development? And I found odd floating blobs of water inside, which seemed to defy gravity for some reason? At least they weren't touching the walls, that I could see.

(Oh, and I had a very recent checkout of Mobs Redo, which caused the integrites to crash for some reason. I had to revert quite a bit. You may want to check how changes in Mobs Redo will affect your code.)

Ben wrote:Two things, though: there were big horizontal gaps in the trunk – I assume this is for development?

No, that's a timing issue with the game engine. It happens when the mapgen wants to dust nodes with snow. I'm pushing a fix that will write over it. I was delaying, hoping to think of something more elegant, but nothing's occurred to me.

Ben wrote:And I found odd floating blobs of water inside, which seemed to defy gravity for some reason?

That's by design. Water in the Smoke Ring (in freefall) formed big blobs, so I put some weightless water in the trees for fun. It also prevents endless waterfalls when the bugs break into the chambers.

Ben wrote:(Oh, and I had a very recent checkout of Mobs Redo, which caused the integrites to crash for some reason. I had to revert quite a bit. You may want to check how changes in Mobs Redo will affect your code.)

I pushed a fix to that yesterday, after TenPlus1made the relevant functions available again. They used to be methods of every mob object, but he changed a lot of things in his latest revision. I had to fix my goblins fork as well. The main goblins code, of course, was unaffected as FreeLikeGnu keeps a copy of the older api in his code. There's something to be said for that.

I've also made a lot of tweaks to the bugs. They were still too nasty for my taste, and in the time it took for me to make any headway, they'd nearly hollowed out the section of tree I was working in. Hopefully, they'll work a little slower now.

I did manage to set up some living quarters before I broke down and dulled their fangs, but as you can see, it wasn't easy, and they still have an annoying habit of teleporting through barriers. (But that's a general mobs issue.)



I'm planning to add more variety inside the trees in the future. I want to put something edible in there, as well as some eye candy.

Bee, frozen in amber.



Then, of course, I couldn't resist...

Lol. Hard to type while laughing

Annoyed at all the hoops I have to jump through in order to farm next to a huge open window in my latest tree, I decided to add glowing dirt, soil, and wet soil, created from the extract of the glowing fungal wood. Now I don't have to worry about grow lights.

I made some long-neglected changes to improve memory efficiency. (That is, I'm allocating memory permanently, rather than triggering garbage collection every time a chunk is generated.) Let me know if this causes any problems.

That looks great :D

Ooooohhhh.... Now that is an interesting idea. As a calculus 2 student, this will be fun to mess with in my already meager spare time XD.

Pretty cool though. I will have to give it a whirl.

A configurable spawn height wouldn't be that bad. :)

Thanks for this awesome mod. I currently try to figure out how to let them spawn higher and will integrate the mod into my server. :)

Reminds me the world of "Below the root", a video game I used to play a loooooooooong time ago :)

It was a 2D world (vertical - horizontal) with huge trees you had to wander in.

The map : http://www.thegreatness.com/belowtheroo ... heroot.png

A page with some screenshots (8 bits power) : http://www.myabandonware.com/game/below-the-root-3e

Looks awesome, Naj :D

I have no time (and not enough skills) to work on that, but I think of a minetest game where everything is huge, trees, herbs, and so, like small people living in a giant world.

Awesome idea

Naj wrote:I have no time (and not enough skills) to work on that, but I think of a minetest game where everything is huge, trees, herbs, and so, like small people living in a giant world.

Fun Caves has giant trees. Feel free to copy what you need.

Thanks Duane. It could be a huge work to redesign every thing so players are as tall as a mouse. But it could be a good project.

i can do giants herbs. wold just be weird.