What it means to be a boatman ...

[pencilcheck]

Hey everyone,

I'm excited to share my progress on locomotive blocks. Locomotive blocks are blocks that could move by itself with infinite energy source, and could be controlled by a player.

Have you ever thought about crossing the river on a dark, moonless night?

Think again ...

https://github.com/pencilcheck/Terasology

If you are interested in trying it out, clone my branch from the url above, build it by running
`$ ./gradlew run` (if you are on mac or linux)

Create a new world and enable "Train locomotive" mod

Now open console and type
`/spawnPrefab "locomotive:train"`

Activate the block by pressing 'e' while selecting the block

Jump on the block and off it goes ...

.....

Oh and just in case you gone off chasing after your locomotive block, you can stop it by deactivate the block

You can try it on river too, if you are brave enough . It's amazing how much Kinematic bodies could do with so little code

 

[Esereja]

Nice we were missing those and you are really fast learner. Good work.

now, can we make that multible blocks together compine and create similar entity. that would be awesome.(one could build ships, trains and stuff)

tought propaply we need to wait till that blueprint(PAG) part of code gets ready.

what do you think of idea of building objects out of blocks?

 

[Skaldarnar]

Actually PAG won't help us much as it uses just BlockCollectin to place blocks in the world (and they are just normal blocks, no special entities). I think you should have a look at the existing entity system (ES) and some example implementations, such as the DoorSystem.

Building objects out of scaled and rotated blocks would be the best to keep the overall feeling conistent I think. Furthermore, if we go with the creative crafting system one could craft new objects directly! (Okay, we have to handle all the problems that come with this freedom, but hey, we can do it! )

Blueprints are basicaly meant to carry information about some crafting recipes or building structures, so it would be feasible to use them for building new entities. All of this needs a lot of work, but with good coordination I think we make good progress quite fast

 

[pencilcheck]

Yes. PAG is a completely different thing. PAG aims to use rules to generate procedural structures as part of the static world.

What we want is here is to generate dynamic structures in real time, so since the blocks go out of places and has to be somewhat interactive, they made out of special entities that is not restricted to the placement of the blocks relative to the world. That results in a different block management system, and we have to really think through on how to place and stack the physic blocks

 

[Cervator]

Okay, finally had a chance to see the video - sweet! Didn't realize you could actually stand on the locomotive block and move with it, awesome

I put this and some other stuff on our FB tonight. Nicely done, pencilcheck

 

[Cervator]

Pulled!

 

[Cervator]

Now also with the tracks from metouto - although they aren't magically hooked into anything yet. Should be a good little block for pencilcheck to play with until we can get a fancy shape out of A'nW

Pen - want to go ahead and create a proper Incubator thread for this overall feature?

Edit: Picture. You can see how a full block solution is tricky, with transparency down to the next full block down, but kinda works

 

[pencilcheck]

Sure, I will find a time to put up a incubator thread.

That tracks you posted certainly looks really cool.