step 1 - add pathfinding
step 2 - make the game harder (as it should be) by making all mobs outpace the player
step 3 - allow mobs to invade bases to encourage proper defense
this is how you make the game fun again
Modding Minecraft Alpha to make the game enjoyable again
good pathfinding is a step in the right direction but i always wanted to see actually intelligent enemies in minecraft, ex. zombies sneaking up on the player from behind, creepers waiting for the player around corners, skeletons taking high ground, waiting for backup instead of attacking the player alone, avoid going through chokepoints, etc...
you could even go as far as making the mobs learn from the player and adapt to their tricks
forcing the player to think about their actions is definietly the right way to make it more difficult as opposed to just making mobs beefy or giving them special attacks (think spiders trapping you in their web), which feels sluggish and annoying
also mobs breaking your stuff aside from wooden doors and glass blocks makes the building part more limited and unfun
Lots of improvements
AI can now swim up and down, I increased the speed at which we swim up for testing purposes (but I might keep it faster for the zombie)
Some issues remain, like the zombie getting stuck under a a leaf block at 2 block height while his next waypoint was going up diagonally
Ignore the music.
i love this shit
>they can swim up and down water
>creepers blow up path obstructions
>not shown, skeletons scale with difficulty
>new difficulty, Expert mode
Alternative pathfinding experiment, should bring more performance. Tested with 100 zombies.
Parkour is still iffy but I think it might be acceptable
Next I need to work on allowing spiders to climb walls, then I will do a full demo with all 4 primary mobs (zombie, skeleton, creeper, spider)
A few ideas:
White Eyes
Not that herobrine shit but maybe it can be
Only shows up in screenshots on rare occasions in the form of full bright white pixels either in dark corners or at the edge of the fog/render distance
When you're out and about, your doors would rarely randomly open/close (depending on if they were open or closed when you left).
Torches could be randomly placed in places that the player did not explore (newly generated chunks would be too obvious), or in plain sight (torches being placed in a segment of a lit up base that had some darkness
Torches could maybe also randomly break. It could be mistaken for a creeper so it could be explainable
(LINK WARNING: 150 MEGABYTE VIDEO)
LET ME KNOW HOW I CAN RECORD LONG VIDEOS ON WINDOWS WITHOUT THEM BECOMING SO LARGE
https://histora.online/uploads/Base_defense.mp4?code=cyberixnetwork
not sure when I'll consider it done ( or stable ), but right now it seems to be playing well in terms of performance and gameplay.
Considering naming the mod "Survival Unleashed" given it aims to enhance the Survival experience for experienced Minecraft players (or those just wanting to check out the sweet changes to the AI)
NEW CHANGES:
Entities can climb ladders (not seen here, also does not apply to the half-ladder trick... for now)
Spiders can pathfind and easily scale tall walls (Castle sieges become trivial for them!)
Attacked creepers can maintain their fuse regardless of distance (expect destruction upclose, deal with them from afar)
Deeper explanation as to how everything works
The 1.2.1 AI pathfinder has been completely backported to Alpha in favor of my homemade system. This brings an inherent improvement in performance, efficiency, and overall reliability over the previous system.
I had to do quite a lot in order to make it suit my needs, however. Vanilla 1.2.1's pathfinder lacks swimming, parkour, and long-distance movement.
I am taking heavy advantage of path segmentation and caching in order to allow entities to follow light from hundreds of blocks away along with an overall increased vision range. In addition, the pathfinder will attempt to terminate early if it's confident that it will not return a complete path. The pathfinder also will always return a partial path regardless of success, allowing inherent movement towards a target ALWAYS.
The maximum pathfinding range is currently set to 350 (arbitrary number, don't know why we'd need more range) and the master vision range is set to 64. Normally, such a pathfinding range would cause horrible amounts of lag (https://bugs.mojang.com/browse/MC/issues/MC-17630), but path segmentation solves this by calculating only what is currently needed.
The only issues I experience as a result of this come from entities supposedly scaling mountains weirdly and entities not wanting to try pathfinding up complex areas. for example, they're completely unable to find a correct path to me up a 128y lavacast and will prefer to stick at the bottom closest to my X and Z coordinates.
For the sake of performance, I am not going to obsess over this problem. Feel free to make all sorts of uniquely safe bases.
That's perfectly fine. The real danger will come when you need to go out for resources.
I am simultaneously developing this mod as I play on a singleplayer world. I get to see the exact results of the mod in realtime.
I haven't been so motivated to build a awesome looking base in such a while. It's definitely refreshing.
In regards to white eyes anon, it isn't bad. this would add onto the inherent spookiness of Alpha without delving into "cheesy cliche haunted ARG" territory. all of these things should happen rarely, and they wouldn't be a experience that can be taken for granted. Players will encounter them when they're least expecting it, and probably wouldn't even think about it when it happens
Sometimes they'll explode if you block them off and sometimes they won't, which makes this screenshot even more exhilarating.
Creepers are dangerous now and its fun. It's difficult to combat them in close corners because they won't immediately defuse if you get out of their range, so juggling them gets quickly superseded by bow and arrow.
If creepers can't get to their goal or are being obstructed by something, they'll explode. Knocking them off their path or slowing them down can also cause them to explode. They're unpredictable.
I like to use that to my advantage in caves by pouring water buckets or erecting a wall so they can explode and expose some ore or take out a group of monsters with them.
UPDATE:
Colored lighting is almost complete! It is not so performant with ambient occlusion on (I'm doing extra calculations for better looks), so I'll introduce Terrarias lighting type option setup as an option to disable colored lights to have AO with out colors.
Entities are colored and so are your view model. Next I need to color particles and it'll be complete.
entirely new approach to lighting. notch lighting has been kicked out and now we can have this
Full RGB demo with no performance hit. it's better than all versions of real minecraft. we are not re-rendering at all while every single version of minecraft has to re-render chunks for every single lighting update. haha losers
fun with ai
Huge optimizations are being made. Can't wait to show you what I've been working on for the past month