myewphi

Got the basic block for the ranch fence done!!! best part about finishing it is the hardest part is setting up the connected block template (the thing that tells the block which state it should use based on surrounding blocks) but now that its done it can easily be reused for ANY other fence that follows the same logic, even if it uses a different model!

Of course for other model styles ill still have to make models for each variant which can take time, but for other wood types of the ranch set ill even get to skip that step! All ill have to do to get this setup for other wood types is just make a copy of the item using this one as a parent and change the texture file then done, bam, easy peasy!!!!

I tacked some custom behavior onto the hammer (the normal block cycle behavior didnt work with cycling blockstates) to make it so that you can manually change the blockstate of your fences! Essentially you can take control of what directions ur fence is trying to connect in situations where the automatic connections arent doing quite what you want them too. Primary and Secondary clicks will even cycle in opposite directions so if you accidentally misclick you wont need to go through the whooole cycle and can instead just cycle back with the opposite click.

I might add functionality to crouch primary/crouch secondary too? Perhaps crouch primary will cycle the number of connections, for instance if you have a fence that has one connection facing east it might cycle to one with two connections facing east and north, and if you have two connections facing east and north then itll cycle to three connections facing east and north and west? Secondary crouch would ideally return its connections to what they would normally be based on the surrounding blocks, except idk if i can actually pull that off as ive already attempting to add that functionality and couldnt find a way that would scale well,,,, Always room for improvement i suppose!

I doooo have very vague ideas of maybe possibly implementing diagonal connections? Would exponentially increase the number of states tho which sounds scary,,,, Currently fences have every possible combination of connection/no connection on 4 sides but with diagonals that would be 8 sides unless i added in some extra rules like "no diagonal connections adjacent to normal connections" so like if you have a connection going north then you cant have a diagonal connection going north east,,, but even with that caveat thats still just barely over doubling the number of blockstates which would just be ughhhhhh. could still be worth it but for now im ready to move on from fences so another idea for a future fence improvement lol

havent been super focused today so have only managed like an hour or two of work today but even then ive made surprisingly little progress on the fence today lol

at first I wanted to work with hytales built in rotation system which can be useful for simple blocks with rotation like logs or chairs but with connected blocks like tables and fences its just not very nice to work with. unfortunately as far as im aware theres no way to make custom rotations, as in I cant add in any kind of placement awareness for setting a blockstate based on where the player is in relation to the block,,, which makes me very sad but i suppose thats life when trying to mod a game in early early early alpha

instead im going to manually make models and blockstate for every possible way a fence can connect to another fence but there is one other small issue,,, how do I want fences to connect to blocks? there are lots of times when you might want a fence to line up smoothly with a flat wall but unfortunately there isnt a way to tell connected block sets to connect to say "any full/solid block" or anything. there appears to be a way to make them connect to blocks with certain type tags but that would then require me to manually add EVERY block id want fences to connect to,,,,,,,,,

im thinking instead of tryna figure out a way to set a fences connection state manually somehow? like youd have automatic connection with other fences by default but then if you want a specific fence to work in a specific way you can hammer it to manually cycle it through all of its connection states instead? considering the number of states itll be a lil labor intensive but what it lacks in qol it makes up for in control i feel

first in game look of the fence! next up is the tedious work of making all the connected models and making sure they all connect up right lol.

In Myewphi's Tale i think i want to have ingots require multiple ore to create, for example like it costs 4 iron ore to create 1 iron ingot. Heres my reasoning:

Glittering Caves

I think mining is most fun when youre actually mining the ore rather than searching for it. If each ingot requires multiple ore, then i can get away with making ores more plentiful, perhaps even introducing some large ore vein structures uncommonly underground. This would have the negative effect of devaluing each piece of ore you find, but at the end of the day Number Go Up is a hell of a drug and seeing Big Number at the end of ur mining session in terms of how much ore youve found will muddy the waters around how accomplished you feel after a mining session even with singular pieces of ore becoming less valuable.

Loot

Similar to the above reasoning that i would also be able to more freely include ore rewards in loot more frequently. It wouldnt have to just be boring "oh theres some ore in this chest" situations either, i could introduce some shiny trinkets and baubles that could either be displayed as collectors items or melted down into ore. Same for weapons and gear of course which could also be melted down. In this case ore could almost be viewed kind of like nuggets from minecraft.

Balancing

Late in the project if i decide i want to tweak the rarity/usefulness of ingots, it could be a huge hassle to go and modify every recipe that uses iron ingots or go through and make sweeping changes to ore generation. With multiple ore equaling 1 ingot, balancing could be as simple as going from 4:1 ratio of ore to ingots to 5:1

TLDR

multiple ore per ingot. exact ratio uncertain at this time, will probably start with 4:1 and then balance from there?

Of all the unpainted textures ive done for Myewphi's Tale, this is the one that stayed the closest to a vanilla texture with it being pretty blatantly pixelled over from the village door. I just really like the village door, its peak simple wooden door vibe!!!