Inactive Books

[Cervator]

Yep, I agree with that concern. And it'll be very hard to fill any world with appropriate books. That might be something that could be done over time with an online tie-in - from other players who have written books in their worlds about their adventures in game mode X.

DF style games tend to develop good stories anyway, and people post about them on forums and talk to friends about them. Be fun to be able to do that in-game, maybe semi-generated from events as they happen then tweaked by a player.

Maybe "active" bookshelves (that have books with actual content) can have a slight glowing effect to them or something.

 

[Immortius]

There's actually nothing stopping people creating new mods and putting their prefabs, sounds, textures, shaders and materials in those right now. Just need to add a new mod directory, add a mod.txt with the requisite information and have the right directory structure:

\materials
\mesh
\prefabs
\shaders
\sounds
\textures

At the moment all mods are automatically applied at runtime.

Also, can't bookcases dynamically load a different texture depending on how many books are in them? Look at how Biohax handled the buff icons now, I'm quite sure there is some inspiration there to save ID's. Just make 1 texture file containing all bookcase layouts and load the one that corresponds.

The way that block rendering works is sort of like this except all possible texture for blocks are combined into a single texture, with each part of the block picking one to use. Then all the blocks are stitched together into a single chunk mesh. So the block id is effectively the mechanism through which the texturing is determined. The alternative is to not render a bookcase through a block at all, but instead let the entity render it - this would save a lot of ids (you'ld still want an invisible block for the bookcase, but that would just be one id per rotation), but at a rendering performance cost if lots of things are done this way and additional information would need to be replicated to clients in multiplayer games. But worth considering, and you can do things with blocks rendered this way you couldn't normally (like have them spin around and jazz).