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CraftMine pack - would you play it?

Discussion in 'Community Talk' started by Paint_Ninja, Jan 11, 2016.

  1. Paint_Ninja

    Paint_Ninja New Member

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    One of the main goals of CraftMine since it first started 5 years ago (as of today!), was to make the game either run the same as or better than Vanilla. CraftMine is heavily optimised from many levels which I cannot go into detail here as it would be too long and complicated.

    Ever since the first build of CraftMine, I have been investigating how to improve performance and studying new methods and how certain aspects of the game works in order to help improve my understanding of why some aspects of the game are slow. To go into slightly more detail, my first public attempt of a major performance improvement I included in CraftMine was called "CM SPEEDY". What this did was applied some specialised lossless recompression to all of the textures within the pack - including those embedded in mods - so that the file sizes were lower and so that more textures could fit into the VRAM (which is especially beneficial on integrated graphics). The performance improvement caused by that at the time was so great that I was able to double the texture resolution to 32x for all textures and still get slightly better performance than Vanilla, with the 32x textures being developed in-house and designed to keep the same look as Vanilla without learning slightly cartoony like Faithful 32x does.

    Obviously years later a lot more significant advancements have been made since then. For example, nowadays in CM every single mod is optimised individually through various methods before being published to the pack, including methods such as recompilation with newer Java versions, preloading, multi-core chunk loading and rendering, per-mod server-client packet sending interval optimisation and much more. As of v4, I worked on codename "Rapido+" which was so successful that I was able to enable shaders and 64x textures for the first time by default on the Standard edition of the pack whilst still achieving better performance than Vanilla and previous CM versions.

    The amount of mods does not affect CraftMine's performance in this case, because of the way the game is optimised from so many different levels with so many different advanced optimisation techniques developed overtime with years of studying, testing and experience.

    By the way, there are currently plans to develop an exclusive mod for CraftMine called "Swift" in the far future (when CM is based on MC1.8.9 or 1.9) which will automatically adjust all settings within the pack to tailor the machine it's ran on, possibly eliminating the need to manually switch editions.
     
    Last edited: Mar 3, 2016
  2. Paint_Ninja

    Paint_Ninja New Member

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    Just because CraftMine didn't start out as a forum thread for a specific community doesn't mean that CraftMine isn't designed with server communities in mind. Who said I wouldn't be allowing the pack to be tailored to the MYM community or that you can't suggest improvements to the pack? ;)

    As for stability, CMv4 was in development for about 8 months I think off of the top of my head... That kinda gives you a good idea of how much the pack is planned and tested. Infact, everything we do to CM we discuss with our community first where possible before implementing something new, and we test it with our community before publishing it as stable. We even have a system in place that will automatically send us anonymous crash reports whenever the game crashes, so even if people don't report bugs and issues, we'll fix them.
     
  3. coolgi3000

    coolgi3000 Logician of the gods

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    It seems like a very interesting modpack... but I'm just too addicted to magic mods and the apparent lack of much if any magic is kinda a deal-breaker at least for me. If it weren't for that I would definitely play it! I can understand some of the decision to leave magic out of it tho, a lot of magic mods can be pretty laggy, which isn't good for a (fast) pack like this.
     
  4. Paint_Ninja

    Paint_Ninja New Member

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    CMv4.1 got released yesterday with full backwards-compatibility with older worlds made with CMv4.0. As always, I will continue providing updates to the pack and take requests into consideration during development.

    CMv4.1 doesn't add a whole lot of new features, but it does add some nonetheless and fixes a hell of a lot of minor bugs and has lots of quality of life improvements all around.

    - A lot of new HD textures to make much more things look nicer when playing, and to reduce the amount of glaring 16x textures in a HD world.
    - Updated lots of mods and modified some for exclusive content, improves performance and fixes a lot of bugs (especially some rare crashes and issues with project red wiring and lighting - hence why the MadnessFM stage at spawn hasn't got any animated lighting until now)
    - New recording feature: Press R to tell people you're recording, and P to toggle pausing or resuming recording. Hold P to ask others to pause recording. This feature helps reduce the amount of time spent editing recorded videos with multiple players thanks to the overlay, and the amount of time having to cut out parts where people ask if you're recording, as well as making it look cool for others to know you're recording and to allowing others to ask you to stop or pause recording for a moment without needing you to cut it out
    - A whole new CraftForge base, allowing for a much more stable and reliable experience and compatibility with newer mods built for the newer recommended Forge 1.7.10 build.
    - Upgraded Optifine with many new backend improvements
    - Support for MassiveCore and Factions on CMv4.1 servers with a special jar on request

    Overall, the pack is still very similar to v4.0 but has had a lot of backend improvements and a few new features which makes this version of CM the most stable version we've ever released, as well as allowing for a lot of new opportunities server-side which used to be too glitchy or simply incompatible in the past.
     
  5. Paint_Ninja

    Paint_Ninja New Member

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    The new CMv4 forums are finally here and are fully-featured, fast and beautiful. For the latest news and updates on CM, along with everything related to the pack from development blogs, builds, events, mod requests, help and much more, come and visit it here. :)
     
  6. johnfg10

    johnfg10 Well-Known Member

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    nice site :)
     
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  7. SirStudMuffin

    SirStudMuffin Well-Known Member

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    Why dont we have this pack yet?
     
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  8. chugga_fan

    chugga_fan ME 4M storage cell of knowledge, all the time

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    admins take a while to add/test things before they implement, due to time constraints and other things, give it time
     
  9. johnfg10

    johnfg10 Well-Known Member

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    btw u should add
    this pack contains fastcraft, by Player.
    Fastcraft enhances Minecraft with increased performance. Bug reports being made directly to Mod Authors should state Fastcraft is enabled.
    :)
     
  10. King_Cronus

    King_Cronus Well-Known Member

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    Agreed agreed
     
  11. johnfg10

    johnfg10 Well-Known Member

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    just so player doesnt find out and shout at u :p also u will have to start using github for it to be on MyM but they will help u with that
     
  12. metalim

    metalim Well-Known Member

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    Wow. It is truly amazing how smooth it runs on my mid-end machine with fancy shaders and lighting effects. Good job on optimizing things.

    Now, to notes:
    +/- I could live without NEI, as that other mod (CraftGuide?) provides some of NEI features, plus more features that NEI does not have. However it is uncomfortable at first, as it has no clear visual distinction between input and output recipes, so one has to use checkboxes.
    - Tooltip showing name of the thing I'm looking at is missing, and I couldn't find a way to turn it on. How do you enable it in this pack? Looking at 3 types of ore and not knowing what are they or how to break them...
    - No auto-healing? Makes pack more of hardcore level.
    - Different types of same ores generate in the world. Many coals, many tins, many cobbles, even many types of useless andesite.
    - Night are dark. Pitch black. I haven't seen a pack with pitch black nights that is warmly accepted.
    - Torches are very dim. Probably because of lighting effects.
    + On a compensation: held torches provide light.
    + Of course, visuals and sound effects are great.
     
    Last edited: Apr 11, 2016
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  13. Paint_Ninja

    Paint_Ninja New Member

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    Thanks! When I started working on v4 I basically wanted to turn all my dream goals for the pack into reality.

    One of them was a beautiful, atmospheric world with stunning visuals and sounds that rivalled any other pack running at the same performance, with some sound effects created by professional sound designer Laurent Lozano, as well as myself and some members of the CM community worldwide. To make this possible, I had to perform a ton of optimisation to absolutely everything (some of my methods are described above) so that I had the breathing room. A lot of A/B testing was done and it took an incredibly long time to make it, but I am proud with this achievement.

    This is intentional. During internal testing, we found that when WAILA was installed and enabled, people new to the pack completed it quicker than those without WAILIA installed, as they didn't discover as much and didn't give themselves as many objectives during gameplay. The idea here basically is to give people more objectives and curiosity whilst playing, as you'll be going "I wonder what that ore can do" or "That wood looks cool, let's break a block and see what it's made of!" rather than just being able to look at it and then search it up on a wiki and basically cheat.

    That's unintentional and sounds like an unreported bug. Auto-healing seems to work fine on CraftMine servers so I'll need to look into why it doesn't on the singleplayer internal server. Thanks for reporting! :)

    You should mine them, they're not what you think. ;) We use a special kind of underlay for ores so that we can provide different types of rocks and for the ores to be the same. If you mine a coal ore from a marble underground biome, you should get a normal coal ore and smelt it into normal coal at the very least.
     
  14. SirStudMuffin

    SirStudMuffin Well-Known Member

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    Hopefully with the clean up of 4 extra servers now thanks to infinity we may just get this
     
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  15. Paint_Ninja

    Paint_Ninja New Member

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    The idea here is actually to help reduce eye strain and increase the amount of gameplay mechanics. I know it sounds ironic considering that by making stuff really dark helps reduce eye strain, but it actually works if done right. Quite often I see videos of vanilla Minecraft or other modpacks and at some points in the video it's literally pitch black for me with the HUD being fully lit, because my screen brightness is too low. Turn it up and even the person recording is straining their eyes trying to see in the dark, causing increased fatigue for some players.

    Increased fatigue means people play for less time, and I want people to be able to enjoy CM as much as possible. By making some areas completely black, it adds realism that more closely resembles real life whilst also encouraging people to craft and bring torches with them in order to see rather than tiring themselves out straining their eyes, and in turn it also increases the amount of stuff people do in the game as there's more gameplay objectives.

    This feature can be optionally turned off however it will also turn off torchlight and the enhanced rendering and lighting engines, which may mean worse visuals (however as of v4.1 I have reduced the visual differences with colours, so I'm gradually closing the gap!). To turn it off, switch to the Light edition of the pack.

    If I find more people are getting annoyed by or do not enjoy this feature, I will remove it or make it off by default without affecting torchlight and the rendering and lighting engines, but so far I have received very few complaints about this.[DOUBLEPOST=1460976684][/DOUBLEPOST]
    I am offering the MYM Staff full support with testing, implementation and anything else they may need in order to get CM available to the MYM community. I am willing to offer them a server files zip, which they literally just download onto the server, unzip and run the jar to get the server running, as well as a full managed setup for them and automatic upgrades server-side. On top of that, as the author of the pack I know it inside and out - especially the back-end. I believe that with me being a tester I will be able to identify and solve any issues they may have reasonably quickly.

    Another benefit of CM is that it's heavily forwards- and backwards-compatible. You can upgrade from CMv4.0 to v4.1 and everything will still work flawlessly: the world saves, plugins, everything really. The only times when this might not be true is due to the nature of Forge mods of when we upgrade to a newer MC base, or a mod developer intentionally changes block/item name identifiers. Although, we have a special in-house solution for the latter, so even if we can't upgrade them, we can at least remove them automatically from the world in order to maintain compatibility and the players can just remake the item/block that now has the new and changed name identifier.
     
    Last edited: Apr 18, 2016
  16. BookerTheGeek

    BookerTheGeek Patron Tier 3

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    Hm.... I suppose I can look at this.

    Give me 10 bullet points, 5 great things about this pack you love, and 5 things that don't work the way you want them to yet.
     
  17. Paint_Ninja

    Paint_Ninja New Member

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    I'm not great at summarising, but I'll give it a go...

    What makes CraftMine great
    - Fully backwards- and forwards- compatible as much as possible. Once your server is setup, it's incredibly easy to manage the backend as you're not forced to do world resets, plugin updates, etc... (more details on this thread at posts #55 and #44)
    - A beautiful, atmospheric world with stunning visuals and sounds that rivals any other pack running at the same performance. (more details on this thread at posts #53 and #44)
    - A huge amount of small but game changing gameplay mechanics are implemented, increasing time played, things to do, reducing eye fatigue and more. As long as you don't treat CraftMine like your ordinary "modpack" where you work through all of the mods and try to complete everything, you have weeks or possibly even months worth of unique gameplay per player. (more details on this thread at posts #55, #53, #44, #35, #31 and #1)
    - Heavily tailored and optimised for every kind of PC, with three separate cross-compatible editions allowing for all these mods and impressive visuals to run well no matter what kind of computer you've got. Even our "Light" edition of the pack tailored for low-powered PCs still looks better than Vanilla! (more details on this thread at posts #41 and #38)
    - Community-orientated development and focus. CM is developed openly to the community and cares a lot about the community's opinions and feedback. Also, I personally join and help out people on the official CM server often and help further build trust and kindness. This has helped people worldwide - especially younger players suffering from bullying, social anxiety, etc... in real life - as there is a strong sense of belonging and support in a safe environment. (for more details, please ask me - although I'm not sharing any personal details of course. Some additional details on this thread at posts #42, #21)

    What needs work
    Please note I have also explained why for each point, which is why this bit looks long. I don't like saying negative things about anything without an explanation.

    - Marketing and recognition. Unfortunately, the pack isn't well recognised despite having overwhelmingly positive feedback from a very large percentage of new and old players. I'm not really great at marketing and it would be great if there was someone who wanted to work with me on that.
    - Swift. I did try to add an exclusive feature called "Swift" to CMv4 but due to the complexity of the mod and deadlines, we failed to get it out on time. Swift removes the need for some users to have to manually switch editions to get a properly tailored experience for their PC, by switching editions seamlessly in real-time during game play.
    - Recorded and live audio streams ingame. CM, since the first version has came with an amazing feature that allows for recorded audio or live streams to play localised in-game using special blocks and items. This allows for special live events with real music - even if not downloaded on the client. In v4, this feature is fairly unstable is very fussy with the input and encoder used for the audio. There are also some server-side crashes in some visualizers (such as lasers that are in-sync with the music) that need to be fixed.
    - Spoucy. Similar story to Swift really, we ran out of time and it was more complex than we expected. Spoucy brings Spoutcraft-like behaviour to CM, allowing additional client-side functionality to be added by servers (such as new custom models, items, blocks, etc...) on logon.
    - Global custom menu system. CMv4 is the first version of CM to only have a custom menu design on the main menu. It would be great if the design could be expanded to all menus in the game like prior major versions did.
     
    Last edited: May 3, 2016
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  18. johnfg10

    johnfg10 Well-Known Member

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    Its simply not that easy with larger servers
     
  19. SirStudMuffin

    SirStudMuffin Well-Known Member

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    I think it would be a cool edition to mym
     
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  20. johnfg10

    johnfg10 Well-Known Member

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    I agree
     
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