I say Remove Ic2 Rc and potentially BuildCraft. Ik You all Love Dat Filler but the Pneumatic craft Drone Can pretty much do the same thing even If its more Time consuming it looks a lot Cooler.
Yes. I would like to have a rule that if the used percentage of a mod is small enough, it should be dropped. Take Buildcraft. Say 90% of the server uses 1% of the mod (quarries), and 1% of the server use 70% of the mod. On average, less than 2% of the mod is touched... scrap it. (statistics pulled from ass, though I would not be surprised if they are accurate-ish) Now, I don't have access to server data... I think decisions like this should be based on facts, not guesses. A count of 'crafted mod block types in owned chunks' might be a good metric; 'crafted mod block counts in owned chunks' might be another. One problem that the proliferation of mods causes (other than bugs, stability, and performance I mean) is that it discourages large builds. OpenBase is awesome...ly laggy. Visiting OB is an exercise in frustration and crashing for many players. Many players avoid visiting others or traveling due to this, and that's exactly the opposite of what we need to have a healthy ecosystem. In addition, the difficulty of even launching the game the first time (most users do not have 64bit Java installed, and fewer still have the dedication and knowledge to install it just so they can play on SKCraft). A better long term solution to boredom is cooperative builds, not complexity. I think we need to bring back player towns and housing. Change the housing to be chunk based for simplicity and to enforce lawns and open air... first chunk for a player; the second chunk for the lawn, sidewalk, street, and underground infrastructure; and the third chunk for house on the other side of the street. The sharing of ideas, with respect to both technology and aesthetics, is vastly improved, and that leads to more fun for players and more long term value. New joiners get to explore what the server is capable of in a far better way. We don't have that now, and I feel the server is poorer for it.
I just love the Induction Smetler though... very usefull for treefarm -> Turbine setup. Mek could ofc be faster with factories, but clocking them fast enough also needs alot of power.... Though you have 10k rf/t with a turbine run on treefarms... PLEASE LET ME KEEP MY PRECIOUS BOILERS!
So you are saying we should place limitations on how and what people build, simply to accommodate people with older machines? I personally don't like to co-op, I enjoy chatting, trading, exchange of knowledge, and a bit of pvp in SMP and above all I enjoy seeing what others come up with. If I wanted to be limited in what or how I was going to build in terms of spacing, I'd apply for a Builder account on the World of Keralius server. Also I'm not sure how many bases you've been to in any of the previous versions most people don't build houses they just do the mods they like, spam torches maybe, then leave when they get bored. If you're going to nerd it up and pull block usages, you might as well factor in the behavioral patterns of the majority of the community most of whom have gone inactive I'd say about 3-4 months now—longer for the power players.
Nope, not opensource I don't think (small chance I could be wrong). I'm thinking of making a mod similar to ep2, but the concept will be slightly different. Stay tuned
Limits spur creativity. And having a player built town does not preclude you having a base out in the boonies; it never has, in any previous version of Alice. It provides a better way to share your creations with others, and allows players to explore in a far faster and more organic way the creativity of the player base. As far as performance goes, I think the modpack team has gone overboard adding the kitchen sink. Adding mods that nobody uses, or mods where we frequently use a single block. I think we could eliminate 2/3rds of the mods on the server and barely change the playstyle. When was the last time you used a crayon block? When was the last time you saw anyone use a crayon block? What percentage of the players even know what it is? And lest you pick apart my example and turn it into a strawman, I'm not saying specifically that OpenBlocks is bad and should be chopped... I'm saying that mods that mostly duplicate other mods, or that are barely used, are not worth the trouble to maintain, bug fix, load, and render. You have a far lower opinion of our players than I do. But I don't need to argue about it... we have the archive online, showing the great things players have made previous player towns on SKCraft. I think our history speaks for itself. My entire purpose for this post is to address one point: your comment that "The draw back to fewer mods is a shorter life of the pack." Complexity is an inefficient way to achieve longevity; it has high costs in processing power, modpack team work, and exclusion of potential players. Community projects (towns, shops, services) have a longer shelf life with fewer downsides to achieve a similar purpose.
go play monster. they have no frills. It is the small little extras that skcraft has always had that allows us to cater for more people than other modpacks like FTB. People who love to build can still have a fun time on our server due to the fact that we have a vast amount of blocks just for building, if we took away all the mods that a few people use we would lose our fellow players and lose the unique reputation that we as skcraft possess.
I agree with most of Myrddin's points, but I'd also like to point out that the learning curve for all of these mods is currently very steep. I tried to start playing 1.6 a while back, but once I got my starter tools and base set up I had no idea what to do so I just stopped playing on Alice. I know I could have gone and looked at wikis for hours, but when I play a game the point is to relax and have fun. Plus a lot of the mods in the pack are very poorly documented so even if I did feel like learning its uses, I couldn't. Maybe this is a complaint about minecraft mods in general, but less mods in the pack would certainly help. Sure I could have also just picked a couple mods to play around with, but then I feel like I'm missing out on all the cool stuff that others are getting. Anyway, do you guys need AliceFixes on 1.7 still?
I think you also have a far more simplistic view our community; Crayons where used in spawn back when we had an Enhanced Portals 2, and the blocks are still there—so everyone has had an opportunity to see them at work. Steve's Carts was removed because other mods provide similar functionality, preform better, or or simply have far less impact on staff. Even so there is already someone requesting it be added to the 1.7.10 pack. That is one person who will likely make use of that mod. I myself used it in 1.5 for a mob grinder, others did farms, and even fewer myself included used the mining cart (Best cart) Mariculutre has not even been suggested by a single person and it likely will not end up in the pack simply because it was underused. In addition until a recent discussion about Elo and RP3 Tubes was not even brought up for the pack simply because most people didn't even know what it was. Clearly you are uninformed about the internal workings of the mod pack team, and have either not observed or chosen to ignore the additions and removal of mods in the packs over the years. You may recall after about two weeks we had several periods of lag for about two or three days, that was caused by myself exploring the map looking for an alps forest biome. In that time I had the opportunity to find several chocolate quest structures, as well as bases people had started to make a number of people have made their bases in villages, nothing stunningly creative save for a few people who regularly build. Having taken a break and come back I had to fly around again to find buttons base and along the way I saw the same bases with little to no changes. Granted I didn't see many Flutter, Wolf, Neon sized boxes however the larger numbers have been boxes, or villages that have been "expanded." Also there is an elephant in the room which needs you to address it: In 1.6.4a the server had been up for roughly a month and people has begun to complain about lack of things to do. Gendustry is blamed as the cause, and by the middle of the second month logins had dropped from (these numbers are rough at best) 40-50~ to about 25-30 during peak hours, and by the third month it was more like 15-20. Complexity was removed by this mod, and there was no resource scarcity. 1.6.4b tried a different direction, and I can say more people teamed up in 6.4b, the only change was one could not idle and accumulate materials to sit in an AE quite so easily at first. It was Glitch80 who in 1.2.5 said 'the whole point of mods that add a means to accumulate large amounts of resources is to enable players to build more creative and complex structures.' To which I've later heard him say that this sadly is not the result instead it is who has the most rare materials. That's not even getting in to the players who simply build a pillar of machines, without any type of structure to achieve some asinine goal simply because "they can." Seeing as Reavox has added and committed most of the mods, with help from myself as well as the the initial commit being on the 16th of this month I'd say the work ha not been very difficult given the resources at the mod pack teams disposal. We are now in play testing, and waiting for mods like Thermal Expansion, and Thaumcraft just to list the two big ones, your point of "Challenge your creativity with limits, not freedom." Is an example of you falling on your own sword, players are not forced to move out into the boonies, nor are they being kept from co-oping, however the past 3~4 iterations of Alice speak volumes. I presume you take this defensive stance on player exclusion because you yourself have issues with Alice a number of mods have features that can be disabled client side to boost performance, now the player-base at large may not have the technical incantation to edit their own configs However; you are not the average player as indicated by posts you've made. Have you disabled these settings? If so why have you not offered some type of marital to enable other players to attempt to achieve the ability to play? When 32 bit users had issues efforts were made by Path and SK to enable them to play on the server. However 64x systems have become the standard and while I do feel for players with weaker systems as time passes older computers lose support, and that is a fact of life for computers.
im glad you are not the end all say all those 1% are important as well as ussaly people mix mods ussing the best mod for the job at the time and where they need so its not a matter of use its convenience and choise like i dont use ant ic2 while others could have a based based on it
So what if only 1% of the server use BuildCraft? One of the reasons I play on Alice is because of the huge amount of mods. I personally know that one of the reasons we keep BC is becuase of the API. Lots of mods use BC's API, and since TE can convert to MJ people are encouraged to use machines which use BuildCraft's power system without actually knowing they are. Ender IO is a good example, as it used the BuildCraft API, and although it was removed from the pack lots of people used Ender IO for storing RF, without knowing they were using BC's energy system. that was really badly written urgh
Can we have SGCraft once it updates from 1.7.2 to 1.7.10? http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/minecraft/mods/SGCraft/ (also see this http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/minecraft/mods/SGCraft/doc/Canon.html )
