- Made grass from peat more common
- Flowers spontaneously grow on humus under sun
- Sedges spontaneously grow on grass
- Rushes can spawn near water and sedges
- New near_unloaded API that supports custom
distance parameter, map bounds check, and
some optimizations.
- Add area automatic unload check support to ABM
API and add to applicable ABMs, replacing many
old manual checks.
Note that the explicit unload check is only strictly
necessary when something will happen due to
a node NOT being present in the area, e.g. something
igniting due to absent coolant, or soaking quantity
being reset due to missing sources. In simple cases
where the absence of a thing causes the ABM to do
nothing, then the standard check can work because
the default action is to do nothing anyway.
Witness checks include data about the node in
place at the time that the witness even occurred,
so players are not awarded credit if the node they
see there was changed again afterwards. A lot of
old witness code inserted the witness right
before the node was changed, since the node
change was done as a tail call, but this does not
work with delayed witnessing because the
delayed witness data would be tied to the old
node, not the replacement one.
Moving witness to after node setting should fix
a number of broken hints that should have been
delayed-witnessable, e.g. brick bonding.
This is a design compromise to knock out the
worst offender in ABM cost, by requiring a node
that must be created by player action instead
of ubiquitous naturally-occuring nodes that all
need to be checked.
Leaching is really meant to be more of a minor
gameplay element anyway, for either skyblock
purposes, or for people who are bored enough
that they want to take on a challenge like a
neutral eco footprint; most normal players just
gather the materials from mapgen and hardly
bother with leaching recipes anyway.
Some users may use filtering but not have the "clean transparent"
filter enabled in the Minetest engine config. Bake this filter
into all images to (1) avoid the consequences of this (i.e. black
halos), and (2) possibly speed up startup time (the filter will
converge immediately).
Lock more things behind prerequisite hints, even if
they're not absolutely strictly necessary to complete
in that order, if they would commonly be done in
that order. This reduces players being overwhelmed
by available hints very early in the game, and avoids
red herrings like "find lux" which can technically be
accomplished but yields no useful results until the
player can act on them.
For "applying" an item to a stack using right-click.
So far, replaces the old eggcorn planting recipe; to
be done include tool stone-tipping and adze
graveling.
Using the new recipe allows more inversion of control
/ dependency injection, so we don't have to override
on_place or on_rightclick in definitions anymore, and
stop having to recreate some of the base logic from
the crafting system, e.g. discovery, placement sounds.
These cause some issues, like the ability to soak
dirt under water for a short time to initialize the
soaking metadata, then remove the water flow,
then add it in and have leaching complete instantly
because the neighbor check prevented the soaking
ABM from firing to detect that the water was
removed.
In the course of investigating why ABMs are so slow
to begin with, it was discovered that having neighbor
checks can slow an ABM down by a factor of something
like 7x, so clearly the assumption that the neigbor check
being done in C++ as "efficient" was false. This means
that we may be better off just always firing the ABM and
letting Lua check only a couple of relevant nodes (e.g.
for water flows in the space above) instead for
performance.
The main performance concern was dirt leaching, since
dirt generates naturally in the world in bulk, but if the
single check for water above may be faster than checking
all 26 neighbors in C++ anyway, we might as well let the
soaking API run for it so that it can detect the water having
been removed and reset the counters.
- For inventory and wield images, this is already
possible via override.txt since 5.3.
- For special tiles, this will be possible in 5.4.
- This complicates things, and introduces warning
messages into mods built without awareness of
this feaure.
- As far as I know, no texture packs have actually
ever used this feature.
Just as surrounding sprouts with higher quality
soil causes them to mature faster, planting them
direcly in higher-quality soil gives them a oneshot
boost (since the soil quality is consumed
immediately).
When leaves decay, they accelerate checks for
decay of nearby leaves, so overall tree leaves
decay much faster, but without increasing load
at steady-state i.e. for stable trees.
Hints themselves have not been tided up
much, but this makes the project of fixing the
hints for each mod a little more manageable
and breaks up the hard-to-navigate single
monolithic hints file in the old guide mod.
The old guide mod has now been completely
retired. Hints are now a full-fledged API-layer
standard feature.
- Move hint handling down to API layer
- Simplify stat data; old nc_stats counting can
be moved out to a separate mod. We only
need whether the player has seen or not.
- Invert inventory tab responsibility.
- Merge witness system in from crafting.
TODO:
- Redistribute hint registration responsibility
to individual mods.
- Test external mod compat.
- Retire old nc_stats and nc_guide systems.
- Add a way to reset hints.
Hughes Ross has started to work on a PR for this
(https://github.com/minetest/minetest/pull/10140)
but it doesn't look like it will be ready until 5.4 at
least, and we will support pre-5.4 versions for
some time yet. The ability for TP artists to
override special_tiles is necessary to allow things
like flowing liquid textures to be customized in
texture packs.
Add a hack for these, similar to how we did the
inventory/wield image hacks.
Note that we are also forcing overrides for special
tiles, since there may be cases where we reuse a
base image without modifiers but TP artists may
still want an independent override.
By restricting the recipes we check based
on the name of the central object being
checked, we can do many fewer craft
checks per item and avoid expensive
checks.
Register a "rootmatch" property for all
recipes that represents a broader, quicker
test for recipe eligibility. False positives are
allowed but false negatives are not.
Since most recipes are eligible, we can
use this to build an index for fast lookups
of subsets of recipes to run and skip most
of the other ones.
Place as an empty stack node (soon to be
replaced by the server as a non-empty one
anyway) so laggy clients can right-click with
dirt earlier.
This should mitigate Kimapr's high-latency
mass tree farming woes...?
- Lenses no longer produce light from sun at all;
artificial light is always needed.
- Grass and trees survive, don't do dual-time check.
- Breeze sounds work in twilight.
- Sponge drying only requires twilight, now also can
happen under artificial light.
- Peat to grass happens under twilight.
- No day/night cycle, no sun/moon.
- Get rid of clouds too.
- Skybox is now 100% texture-packable.
- Natural light diminishes with depth.
Night-time no longer disrupts gameplay topside, but
skylights are no longer useful to an infinite depth and
artificial light is necessary for all deep mining.
