What makes it different now? If you add it. Its like every other pack out there. If you say you are different because you dont include content giving mods.... you might just play vanilla. This is still a modded community. If I cant automate my hole base with complex contraptions. I lose interest really fast. Thats why Vanilla+ was a dead server from the start and this one wont be much of a difference.
I do not think it is like other modpacks, I just think people are going to get bored before falling in love with it. A bit more tweaking and some sort of "hook" is needed. That, and I personally hate not having nei. Hell, I install nei and waili when I connect to vanilla servers.
Quite often actually. Mainly to talk to the server owners or head admins. But yes I play vanilla. I feel most people need to have a good understanding of vanilla mechanics before they can be good at modded minecraft.
And to learn that you should still put your automated setup in a nice house instead of a crappy looking 9x9. Having played a lot of vanilla and in modded maybe since a year, I am still adjusting to the fact that most players just rush through a questbook and forget that building is still an aspect of MC. And when it comes to modded, well most people know how to fight the Gaia Guardian and consider it Botania Endgame, but still can't come up with more interesting ideas how to actually use all those flowers to automate stuff. Sorry for the rant.
A decent and reasonable review with good advice. About tinkers... It's always been problematic in CM many times in the past, with worst cases causing frequent chunk corruption and extremely overpowered +200 damage swords that were easy to get. With v4 I nerfed the hell out of it with the Iguana's Tinker's Tweaks mod and highly custom configs to keep the mod balanced rather than stupidly overpowered as well as adding new features to it like being able to "level up" your tools and experience (not as in XP/enchanting but as in the more you use the tools the more efficient you get at using them). The new 1.7.10 version of Tinker's seems stable enough to not crash and corrupt the world and I've gotten to a point where Tinker's works reasonably well for once. Unfortunately there is no add-on for Tinker's that adds compatibility for smelting SimpleOres stuff afaik. If you're aware of any way of integrating new ores into Tinker's it'll please let me know. About content... Vanilla doesn't have much content at all from a hard core modpack player's perspective, but you'll be very surprised how long Vanilla players play for after you would usually quit. This isn't because there's more stuff to do that's hidden, but because people have a different mind set of playing. There is intentionally no required end-goal to finish the game in Vanilla, there are no quests, there is not much content, but what people do with it is incredible. I get people frequently asking me to add complex mods like Thaumcraft, Ars Magica, IndustrialCraft 2 and all that other stuff. Tbh, it simply doesn't fit the theme of CraftMine. It's meant to be "pick up and play", with "no wiki needed". I have actually done A/B tests and added them kind of things in but overall the reaction wasn't positive as a significant amount of players got confused and just worked around them mods. But that doesn't mean that I don't plan on adding more content - your advice on adding a simple magic mod that is pretty unheard of sounds fantastic and I will be looking into that for next update! Next update will also add more content into existing mods in the pack and I am continuously looking for new content. I am going to be using the feedback provided in this and the previous page to help improve the amount of content whilst still keeping the pack unique rather than just having your standard "Buildcraft, Thaumcraft, Industrialcraft, Ars Magica, NEI, Computercraft" mix with just a few things that make the pack stand out. In the "CraftMine Lab" The lab is what we call our development and testing area that's usually on a separate branch to our main development. Here, we experiment with crazy ideas and new stuff. Currently in the lab we are experimenting with new movement mechanics (such as being able to dodge arrows, wall jump, etc...) and mod interconnection. Mod interconnection is an experiment where we integrate everything in CM together, so everything feels like it's made for each other and feels more like it works as a whole rather than independent mods. While this doesn't necessarily add new content, the idea behind it is that it will heavily encourage people who tend to "work through" CM to play it as intended, sub-consciously. --- If you have any other ideas that could potentially get people hooked, I would love to hear them. While retention rates in CM are already reasonably high, they aren't as high for those with the standard modpack player's mind set.[DOUBLEPOST=1466414301,1466413676][/DOUBLEPOST] The difference is that Vanilla+ got released and development quickly slowed down from there. Difference is people weren't able to give much feedback into Vanilla+ during its development. Difference is Vanilla+ was made by FTB and instantly got popular mainly because of its install figures and big name. CM's the opposite. And while automation in CM may not be as great as a fully fledged kitchen sink modpack, it still can do a fair bit. You can build a home on a boat and sail it across the ocean, using furnaces and stuff whilst it's moving. You can make a cool automated crafting and storage system accessible anywhere in your base. You can use all the usual redstone components you would expect in a modpack and try a whole new kind of defence mechanism with custom golems and turrets, secret blocks, fans that push players & blocks, traps and more only in CM. We used to have a really cool pistons feature too where you could craft a piston that pushes up to 12 blocks away or something, but it eventually got removed in v4 because unfortunately it was too buggy to add. I might look into adding it again if it's fixed now.
Tinkers responds well to IMC. (This lets you add stuff to tinkers without mod/mine tweaker. HERE for a list of Tinkers IMC HERE for an easy mod to send them if not built into the pack already
Thanks for the tip. It looks complex and I'm a bit busy at the moment, but I'll look into it for the next update (CMv4.2). Currently I'm doing backend upgrades including some experiments on a remade Spoucy (info on page 3 of this thread) which if successful, could potentially allow you to add any mods you want to CM server-side - this means if you have a CraftMine server and want to add mods like Thaumcraft for example that I don't want to add by default, you can add it on the server and Spoucy will sync up the client with your server's changes on join. This is currently in early stages but the theory's going well.
what how is that a thing so theoretically i could make a pack with just spoucy in and have it send and sync the mods to the client?
Exactly! It won't just be mods though, it also does configs, models, blocks, items, etc... Client-side only mods can also be pushed from the server to client. I did some experiments with sending full mods from server to client and it worked fantastically - just a bit buggy, however that's expected from a prototype. As of yesterday night I can confirm that it is practically possible to make your own modpack based on a future CraftMine release just by adding any additional mods you want on your CM server, including your own custom content without needing coding knowledge. How it's done is explained in my reply to tyler489 below. Not necessarily... like everything in CraftMine, a lot of careful consideration, planning and thought is done with various collaborative tests before it makes it into a stable version of the pack. I am aware that sending what's equivalent of a generic modpack from the server to the client will be really heavy network-wise, which is why I will be using a mix of different initiation types and caching to minimise network load as much as possible. RAM and CPU load will likely be unnoticeable. Depending on the content the server will send, it will either send it in real-time during player join, or send it following a client prefetch request. Client prefetch request was pretty interesting. It'll allow Forge mods to be installed on a client from the server before client initialisation. This means you can have complex stuff on CM like Thaumcraft just by having it installed on the server, at the cost of a slightly longer first-time client loading time (as it has to download the mod from the server before it can even start loading). Spoiler: How did we do it? We first tried making it work as a client-side Forge mod that hooked into CustomMainMenu, where when you clicked on a "Join server" button on the menu, it would sync the mods from the server to the client, skipping the download of any mods already on the client if both the server's and the client's version match via their MD5 checksums. While this did work great, it required a full client restart when done as you cannot reinitialise Forge for specific mods or changes. Considering CM is pretty fast at loading it's not too big of a deal but I'd rather not double the loading times. So then we tried making the mod work standalone, where it would run and synchronise with the server before client load - thus skipping the need for doubled loading times. This surprisingly worked well but being a prototype there are some bugs that need to be fixed (specifically, the client freezing when checking the cache). I tried it out with a local server and successfully managed to install a stripped down test version of CM onto a previously blank Forge 1.7.10 + Spoucy client all from the server! Real-time Spoucy synchronisation will allow for basic functionality to be sent from server to client only when the client needs to render it whilst the player is playing on the server. It'll allow server owners to push custom content like items, blocks, models and textures without any coding knowledge required, much like you could do with Spoutcraft's "Content Packs" years ago. Spoiler: How did we do it? Unlike the prefetch request which needs to (re)initialise the game, this can work through the means of simple config synchronisation and possibly texture reloading. [DOUBLEPOST=1467621577][/DOUBLEPOST] I can confirm that this is no longer just theoretical as of last night as I've done some experiments with some prototypes and it worked surprisingly well.
Hey johnfg12, sorry for the slow reply. I have already answered a similar question you asked me in a PM. Spoucy will be an exclusive feature for CraftMine and features in Spoucy will progressively roll out to CM in future updates seamlessly.
This is actually essentially a mod that will gunk up many people's filesystems, does it delete old mods? does it reload forge every time it tried connecting to a new server to make sure that the mods are loaded? how do you prevent someone from inserting malicious code somehow? I wouldn't trust an auto-downloader unless i knew that these three things are being done to allow for it to work
i personally love a modpack that has things like tech, magic, decoration, and all 3 of those combined, with extras for funpokes and what not. the tech keeps me busy trying to get more efficient, aesthetics allow me to make a nice looking base, magic gives me things to do, and can enhance my gameplay experience (add ars magica 2, i beg of you) and fun pokes, like random things (mod)
Oh gimmie a break - you could say the same about the Technic Launcher (especially the older version that used the "Server packs" zip system). As I said before it doesn't reload Forge everytime you try joining to a new server, that would double loading times and is completely un-necessary. This component works prior to the game launch to prevent the need to reload Forge. Of course it deletes old mods, otherwise you'll have conflicts and the game crashing on launch if the server owner updates a mod. Malicious code? In Java without Administrator/root permissions? No serious or dangerous malicious code can be ran without those kinds of permissions, which it won't have as you're not launching CM with admin/root permissions in the first place. At worst you could write a malicious code that sends your Minecraft username or PC name to an attacker's server (as demo'ed here) but even that wouldn't put anyone at risk and is useless for the attacker.[DOUBLEPOST=1469120633][/DOUBLEPOST] We already have basic tech in CM (especially non-mainstream stuff so you've got new, unfamiliar stuff to play around with) and tonnes of aesthetical content. There's also a lot of random additions and a huge overhaul to tonnes of gameplay mechanics, including many easter eggs.
