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Warr1024

Moderator Forums GitHub Donate 30 packages 1 collections 13 reviews 90 comments Statistics

Maintained Packages

This user is also a maintainer of the following packages

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  Nodecore Paint
  Kimapr

  Paint anything on node surfaces

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  NodeCore Skyhell
  Kimapr

  The ultimate skyblock challenge

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  WinterCore
  Winter94

  A stark and detailed texture pack for NodeCore

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  WinterCore -Detailed-
  Winter94

  Custom 32x32 Nodecore textures by Wintersknight

Reviews

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  Warr1024 2023-12-23 03:50 UTC

  Blursed Engine Abuse

  What if, instead of a mad scientist as the villain of a game, you had one as the developer?

  Looking at the scope and design goals of this project, it feels like it really should have the "Joke / April Fools" tag. Looking at the actual execution, it becomes obvious that it really should not.

  The Boom game, in particular, seems to be a complete software-rendered 3D game implemented in typescript, transpiled into Lua, and rendering to [png: texture modifiers; the fact that it actually runs at all on my laptop from 2012 is amazing. Bit's Battle demonstrates that it's not just pure tech demos that run in this environment, but games with actual gameplay and progression, albeit only a rudimentary amount as implemented so far.

  To enjoy this "game" to the fullest, it helps for a player to understand the spectrum of games that have been created in Minetest, and understand how much this is abusing the game engine to make it possible. It feels like something in the same spirit as arbitrary code execution in NES games. Rather than being "immersed" in the experience, it sort of demands that you remember that this is all running inside Minetest. There's not a ton of depth and it won't keep you occupied for hours (especially if it crashes MT in a few minutes; I don't know where the "B" in "BOOM" comes from, but I know where the "OOM" does) but it's a spectacle worth witnessing.

  mineos by jordan4ibanez 0 comments

  Helpful 3 Unhelpful
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  Warr1024 2023-12-23 02:47 UTC

  Well-executed, with good variety, for a short game

  This is a very balanced and well-executed game. It has a well-written story, variety of gameplay elements and areas, fits the theme, and seems to suffer from no major bugs or breakages.

  The main annoyance I ran into, that made it hard to complete the game without resorting to cheating, is how unforgiving the parkour sections are, especially considering the level of movement jank in Minetest. It was hard to get my momentum correct client-side but lock in server-side, even with the short network path for singleplayer. Something like allowing you to set restart checkpoints by standing perfectly still for a few seconds would have been more fair, without sacrificing the challenge for people who want to speed through.

  The projectile combat also felt a little sluggish, though this may just have been my bias coming from other games with faster-moving projectiles; given the movement speed of the enemies, it didn't feel unfair or anything. I didn't have enough health supplies for the boss fight, but apparently the only consequence for dying is injury to my pride, so you can still make it through even if you didn't plan well enough.

  I didn't find the plot twist all that surprising, but the evolving gameplay supplied enough intrigue to keep me interested through it, and the story was at least not a distraction, and gave the gameplay a sense of structure and meaning.

  Players should expect to need some patience for the parkour elements (especially with MT's imprecision) but the momentum-locking mechanic makes those still worth experiencing, and the game overall is enjoyable in a single sitting, and for replay value you can speed-run it.

  The Velvet Crystal by regulus 0 comments

  Helpful 4 Unhelpful
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  Warr1024 2023-12-23 01:50 UTC

  Great concept, lots of potential, but questionable playability

  I've been toying with the idea of a "video game without the video" for a while now, and it's great to see somebody actually attempt it. I love the ambition of the concept. It might just be a bit much to try to make it work as a sandbox game during a game jam timeframe.

  Unfortunately, while a human has potentially dozens of senses (sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, balance, body position, temperature, passage of time, etc) on a computer you mostly just get sight and sound, and losing sight is harder to compensate. Without a sense of balance or body position, it's hard to tell when I'm looking at the horizon, or when I just fell down a hole, or about how far. Without touch, I can't tell if the crunchy-sounding stuff I'm touching is sand, gravel, or dirt. The use of "synesthesia particles" is a pretty good way to translate at least some of the missing senses into the unused visual medium, but it really needs to expand to cover more senses. In particular, when I'm working without a sense of sight (reaching deep into a machine to find a broken part) I rely on touch, not just to sense obstacles, but feeling textures, shapes, temperatures. More missing senses need to be recreated in some way to know what it means when I poke something and it sounds like a drum.

  I'm not sure I can recommend this to a player yet. It was a bit intriguing wandering around and getting lost in a cave but now I think I'm stuck. It definitely feels like a project whose development I want to get involved in, suggesting, experimenting with, or contributing some ways to recreate the missing senses ... but for those not developerly inclined, it's one I'd watch for future updates rather than expecting much right now. I'm definitely looking forward to when it reaches the tipping point where I can change my neutral review to a positive one.

  Also, the "no sense of sight" game being one of the few to actually feature a gameplay video was entertaining.

  Veil of the Unknown by StarNinjas 3 comments

  Helpful 3 Unhelpful
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  Warr1024 2023-12-22 20:07 UTC

  Classic Tomb Raider in 4.5D, incredible concept, tolerable jank

  A mix of maze exploration, gentle parkour, and puzzle solving gameplay in a world with free travel across more dimensions than you thought you were getting when you opened the box. On top of the 3 spatial dimensions, not only do you need to travel across time to navigate the citadel, but you need to change the past and create alternate timelines.

  The gameplay is well executed, given how ambitious the idea was and the tight timeline. It's rough around the edges and there are minor bugs galore, but the core seems to be intact, and the gameplay is well thought out and reasonably balanced. The setting, storytelling, and atmosphere all work together well, and the plot twist fits the jam's "unexpected" theme, as does the surprising depth of mechanics.

  To navigate the extra depth and complexity of the game, players will need to bring a measure of patience and keen perception. The deceptively small size of the game world in 3 dimensions hides a maze of surprisingly intricate maze of paths across time and possibility. Expect to spend a lot of time looking for subtly hidden treasures, and trying to fit an image of the citadel superimposed across a handful of different eras in your mind.

  Things that aren't obvious bugs but I'd still like to see include reducing immersion breaks (diagetic guidance, and the entire inventory screen is unnecessary), a bit richer in-world sound (footsteps! maybe voice acting...?) and some accessibility improvements (fixes for HUD/GUI and font scaling settings, translations).

  I'm excited to hopefully see more developer attention on this game in the future, to clear away annoyances and distractions and add the shine and polish it deserves, and hopefully the community will rise to the occasion with play testing, bug reports, and pull requests.

  Citadel by Irevol 1 comments

  Helpful 3 Unhelpful
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  Warr1024 2022-10-18 15:10 UTC

  Must-have for a "darkcore" world.

  When I first saw this mod, I was uncertain about its value, since generally NodeCore encourages players to be methodical about lighting, and the light sources in this mod fill a very narrow niche once the player has unlocked Optics.

  However, playing on Kimapr's "darkest NodeCore" server running Nodeternal Darkness, this mod is an extremely valuable addition to that world, and balances excellently with the darkness. Players tend to build their settlements at some distance apart, and avoid building networks of lighted areas to connect to each other, to defend against griefers and thieves. Portable light sources, relatively unimportant in Vanilla NodeCore, are the principal way for players to travel between settlements and avoid getting lost or falling in pits. Torches are a suitable emergency light source for getting started at the very beginning of the game, but the longer-lasting light sources make pre-optic living more tolerable, and the powerful Luxlamp is a reliable workhorse for long-distance travel and exploration.

  On Vanilla, as well, while these tools don't play as vital of a role or take center stage in gameplay, they also do not really significantly unbalance the game, and can make things like finding lost tools dropped into a dark cave a little less painful, for players not looking for such unforgiving consequences for carelessness.

  NodeCore Luminous Tools by Winter94 0 comments

  Helpful 3 Unhelpful
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  Warr1024 2022-10-18 14:36 UTC

  Majorly improved performance of my game/server

  I maintain NodeCore, a very complex game spanning over 20k lines of code. For some time (apparently years), a serious performance issue had been slowly building up on my NodeCore server, causing bad lag spikes, and my players and I were having no luck figuring out the cause. Minetest's built-in profiler was no help, and I had tapped out its extremely limited abilities a long time ago.

  After being pointed to the JIT Profiler, and figuring out how to use it and interpret the results (read the description carefully), it helped solve the performance problem very quickly (a raycast happening too early in a sequence of checks), and also identified other performance issues that I hadn't even detected yet (uncached privilege checks, dynamic lighting checks, and more).

  I highly recommend all modders who care about quality use this tool and test performance of all their packages. It is a little complex to run but very much worth it.

  (more in comments)

  LuaJIT Profiler by jwmhjwmh 2 comments

  Helpful 5 Unhelpful
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  Warr1024 2021-12-06 14:54 UTC

  Fun, Engaging Addition

  I run this mod on a family private server (where the gameplay is less "hardcore" than vanilla) and it's a nice and very natural-feeling extension of gameplay. It changes the gameplay balance, especially making ongoing lode supplies much cheaper, but compensates nicely by adding an engaging snake feeding and caretaking system.

  Criticisms:

  UPDATE: I'm revising my criticism, because, at least since the addition of Forms to the game, it is highly feasible to catch a snake and trap it in an enclosure that ensures it stays safe and healthy indefinitely, as long as the player remembers to keep it fed, which is not an error-prone process. Leaving design of such an enclosure as the player's responsibility is consistent with the challenge level of NodeCore.

  Suggestions:

  • In addition to less self-trapping behavior, richer pathfinding interactions might be nice, like certain kinds of nodes it avoids (igniters, radioactives, metals?)
  • Reproduction/renewal mechanics, such as laying eggs if fed certain high-value resources. It would be nice to be able to keep dormant eggs in storage until needed, and then incubate them somehow to hatch them, esp. as mitigation for snake fragility. (There's a "skyblock recipe" that allows making one from nothing, but a more natural way to expand a stock of them once you have one would be nice)

  NodeCore Snakes by Kimapr 1 comments

  Helpful 4 Unhelpful
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  Warr1024 2021-08-21 12:25 UTC

  Surreal mapgen compatible with multiple games

  I tested this out with NodeCore, and while the resulting worlds it created are probably mostlly unplayable, it was fun to see some surreal results. There were worlds that were extremely radioactive, some that rapidly caught fire, some that were covered in dungeon stone, and some where pumwater was seeping out of every crevice. There were a lot of wet cement beaches, and trees made out of doors, and grassy fields transformed into a cornucopia of different ores and stones.

  The method used to determine which nodes can substitute or be substituted uses a heuristic, so it works with every game ... but it's obvious it was only tested on a couple of games so far, as it misses a number of things; I'm pretty sure that liquids were not intended to be substituted for non-liquids, but not all liquids use the liquid drawtypes. The shuffle is also uniform-random, and ignores the relative rarity of some things (which is at least partly the point of the randomizer) but making extremely rare things become extremely common may cause some performance issues. Fine-tuning the heuristic with some more cross-game testing may help, and in extreme cases, maybe just white/black-listing certain problem cases that slip past the heuristic.

  One feature that I'd love to see would be different randomization "zones" with different shuffles, maybe of configurable size...

  There is a minor bug wherein tree leaves can be mostly substituted but occasionally some unsubstituted leaves are found at mapchunk boundaries. This is due to a limitation in how the engine works that would probably be difficult to fix without creating other issues.

  N.B. make sure the mod is enabled before first creating the world, or else the first areas that generate will not be randomized. If you make a mistake on first startup, you can reset the world but keep the same seed by quitting, deleting map.sqlite, and restarting.

  Randomizer by NO11 0 comments

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  Warr1024 2021-08-19 03:19 UTC

  High-Flying Fun

  I am not familiar with the aforementioned Slimesling mod this is adapting, but found it fun, interesting, and well balanced.

  As far as a practical form of transportation goes, I haven't exactly figured that out yet, but in theory, one could setup a series of stations for "refueling" by crafting more replacement mudslings to continue a long journey. Getting the trajectory right, and not having problems with hitting an unloaded mapblock boundary, might be challenges. It would be interesting to see someone make something interesting like a travel network based on this.

  Mudsling by Avicennia_g 0 comments

  Helpful 2 Unhelpful
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  Warr1024 2021-07-08 01:55 UTC

  Fun and Beautiful

  As far as the tutorial content is concerned, I got pretty much what I expected. I really enjoyed the scavenger hunt mini-game though. The castle was well-made and had lots of fun nooks and crannies to discover.

  Although the tutorial says it's not MTG-specific, it does focus mainly on MTG-likes, especially around the crafting and smelting systems. It is still a good starting point for things like general movement, liquid mechanics, digging/building common to the majority of major games for this platform, so still a good choice for players who haven't yet found a game they want to invest time in.

  Tutorial by Wuzzy 1 comments

  Helpful 7 Unhelpful
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  Warr1024 2021-07-01 12:39 UTC

  Dark and Moody

  This is my current favorite; it's a slightly different stylistic direction from the original WinterCore (also very good) but I consider it an upgrade. The blue fire is bold and striking. The smoother look of the optics in particular is very pleasant.

  WinterCore -Dark- by Winter94 0 comments

  Helpful 2 Unhelpful
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  Warr1024 2021-06-23 21:53 UTC

  Great Concept, Well-Executed, Fun

  This is great concept and well-executed. Once you get the hang of movement the rest is simple and easy to learn, but there is a smooth learning curve to the existing puzzles, and room for a lot of challenging puzzles in the future.

  The game itself is short, but there are instructions on how to create and submit new levels right in the project README; adding a "puzzle creation mode" to the game itself might be a way to encourage players to submit more levels. It also feels like it could be easy to extend the concept with new mechanics, like spaces only the player (not boxes) can enter, one-way movement spaces, etc. I would very much like to see more of this in the future.

  Box World 3D by Hume2 0 comments

  Helpful 2 Unhelpful
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  Warr1024 2020-07-09 05:22 UTC

  Excellent all around

  Attractive design, especially stone and other earthy materials (which are a LOT of NodeCore). Faithful to the original, blends well with mod content even when not yet supported, while still providing a distinct and improved look. Immersive, actually makes the game feel colder.

  WinterCore by Winter94 0 comments

  Helpful 3 Unhelpful