Dol Amroth

[Eaglz24]

Yeah like you said, these are solitary trees and not forest trees. They'll be used around the farms in Dol Amroth not in any forests. Here, this might help a bit Beech (Fagus sylvatica) - British trees - Woodland Trust

 

[Julius_the_Great]

I found this map of Dol Amroth online from LOTRO and hadn't seen it posted here yet, so I thought I would submit it in case it is of any help

 

[_Luk]

Wall Update 16.12.2016:
Planning of the Wall has started. As you can see we are trying to get rid of that quite monotonous look we have in many walls on the server.
In term of style, the wall will be mostly flat, and made out of Sandstone (prob), the Walkway will feature red shingles. (expect new textures comming)
We also added a moat for defence purposes.

Pictures:

 

[Eriol_Eandur]

List of professions: Astrologer, Historian, Philosopher, Engineer x2, Cartographer, Bookbinder, Bricklayer, Gatekeeper, Blacksmith, Mason.

!!! CALL FOR ITEMS !!!​

To make these homes we still need a lot of items: Tools, books, maps, dishes.... With the next Architect update we will be able to place hundreds of different items using invisible armor stands. These items may use simple textures like this arrow

or complex 3D models like @ArtemisiaOfCaria's beer mug.

Spoiler: Example: beer mug

If you have any textures or model files post them in the Gondor textures thread and I will add them to the custom inventory. If you need help with model files look here or just ask me. Also here is a nice model creator program.

Let's bring house interiors on MCME to the next level !!!​

 

[Thijs1801]

Guys, I need to get something off my chest.

To be completely honest with all of you, I really don't like where this is going. The line between ArdaCraft and us is so thin on this project. The realistic planning and designs, sudden realistic textures. When me and Eag were planning this, I certainly did not want to make the city a merge of AC Mithlond and Novigrad. Every day we stray further away from our plans, the only thing that is left now from the original plans is the city map. Nothing else is being used/going to be used. I'm certain it will be great if we continue this planning, but it will not be looking like an MCME city. This will look like AC made something on our server.
I used to love MCME because of its magnificent builds with so few blocks, and its textures were a good mix between realism and cartoon. Now that love is fading, to be fair. For everything we are using a new block, no innovation left to use our imagination in making stuff. The textures are becoming more realistic, the MCME style is vanishing. Look at Aldburg, great things made without blockstates and it looks amazing.
If you want a hyper realistic world where everything is made with different textures and looks 100% real, just go to ArdaCraft.

Edit: This is for the Dol Amroth specific things, not that Im against blockstates in general (<3 you Eriol)

So that's my opinion on this matter, I'm glad to have it off my chest.

Thijs

 

[greglas2]

Guys, I need to get something off my chest.

To be completely honest with all of you, I really don't like where this is going. The line between ArdaCraft and us is so thin on this project. The realistic planning and designs, sudden realistic textures. When me and Eag were planning this, I certainly did not want to make the city a merge of AC Mithlond and Novigrad. Every day we stray further away from our plans, the only thing that is left now from the original plans is the city map. Nothing else is being used/going to be used. I'm certain it will be great if we continue this planning, but it will not be looking like an MCME city. This will look like AC made something on our server.
I used to love MCME because of its magnificent builds with so few blocks, and its textures were a good mix between realism and cartoon. Now that love is fading, to be fair. For everything we are using a new block, no innovation left to use our imagination in making stuff. The textures are becoming more realistic, the MCME style is vanishing. Look at Aldburg, great things made without blockstates and it looks amazing.
If you want a hyper realistic world where everything is made with different textures and looks 100% real, just go to ArdaCraft.

So that's my opinion on this matter, I'm glad to have it off my chest.

Thijs

I agree, and with this new city it sort of raises the bar for us and our level of detail, meaning we'll have more to redo. This may come as a surprise to some, but many do not enjoy redoing projects.

 

[Fireinferno13]

Guys, I need to get something off my chest.

To be completely honest with all of you, I really don't like where this is going. The line between ArdaCraft and us is so thin on this project. The realistic planning and designs, sudden realistic textures. When me and Eag were planning this, I certainly did not want to make the city a merge of AC Mithlond and Novigrad. Every day we stray further away from our plans, the only thing that is left now from the original plans is the city map. Nothing else is being used/going to be used. I'm certain it will be great if we continue this planning, but it will not be looking like an MCME city. This will look like AC made something on our server.
I used to love MCME because of its magnificent builds with so few blocks, and its textures were a good mix between realism and cartoon. Now that love is fading, to be fair. For everything we are using a new block, no innovation left to use our imagination in making stuff. The textures are becoming more realistic, the MCME style is vanishing. Look at Aldburg, great things made without blockstates and it looks amazing.
If you want a hyper realistic world where everything is made with different textures and looks 100% real, just go to ArdaCraft.

So that's my opinion on this matter, I'm glad to have it off my chest.

Thijs

This is gonna get very off topic very quickly. We might want to consider creating another thread for this topic of discussion.

I agree with your point about making the server community accessible, that was one of our core founding beliefs and we have done our best to maintain that despite changes in style/quality over the years. Therefore, I think there is a balance in innovation and thinking about the bigger picture of MCME. Minecraft is somewhat of a competitive media, if you don't grab people's attention and maintain it you lose community support and man power. The original uniqueness of MCME gradually was lost to the plethora of servers that popped up over the years that aim for the same goal in a different setting.

Overall, I think your point is a valid one about balancing texture pack innovation and community mindset. For example, I think many of the texture work and accessibility put forward by Eriol is great and very applicable across the server. However some of the textures specific to DA are a bit of a problem to me. Rather than innovating what we currently have it feels like we are relying on the crutch of just designing a new block to be used in a single location and never again. I think this is a bad idea. Texture innovation should focus more on server applications not individual builds. I'm obviously biased, but there is a reason I focus on windows/crops/etc, its because I see their application as relatively broad and easy to use.

If I understand you correctly Thijs, it sounds like your problem is less with the AC-afication of the server and more with the idea of designing textures specifically for a single project rather than focusing on the broader server applications. Texture innovation is awesome, but designing project specific textures is a little bit of a slippery slope if other blocks could do the job..

 

[Eriol_Eandur]

I agree with you very much @Thijs1801.

I love the look of MCME and I see the problem for some time already. I just had the feeling no one else does as all my concerns about small houses, flat walls and more random mixure of blocks were not heard in the past.

I never wanted to use the new blocks for many new main textures. I would prefere to use them for many details. I think we can do so without loosing the MCME look. The sandstone textures @_Luk made some time ago and the wall material combinations by @Beathaven are great examples. They don't introduce completely new textures, but they create many possibilities for wonderful variations.

Spoiler: sandstone details

Then a kind of hype for new textures came up and I think we probably overshoot with too many new ideas. I wasn't too afraid of as I saw this as a kind of brainstorming. I expected that we will sort them out and decide which to use. Also many of the suggested textures don't fit well enough to our MCME textures in my eyes and need to be improved. For example in the picture above the cornerstones have darker joints between the stones. But I think those are details that can be easily fixed.

So I'm 100% with you @Thijs to keep the MCME mixture of realism and cartoon. I think we should be very careful to keep this balance. If we do so I'm sure we can use the new block states to improve the unique MCME look greatly instead of adapting it to other servers.

 

[_Luk]

Tbh i really dont understand where this is comming from, i feel like the past builds didn't strive for a cartoonish look, it was more the uninterest in making as realistic builds as possible which lead to it. I see absolutely no problems in adding new textures as long as they fit the current look. These new textures we are making arent restricted to dol amroth only, ofc at first you will only find them there, but as time goes by they will be found across the server.

I think we are at a special point in the history of MCME right now, a point where we have to decide whether we just wanna stand still and be happy with what we accomplished thus far in terms of building quality, or if we wanna make the probably biggest leap in the evolution of MCME builds. I can understand if this is frightening to some, so we should really talk about it.

(Note: Please leave ac out of the discussion, we shouldnt just make decissions to make sure we are as different to them as possible, (there is now such thing as our style and their style in that matter imo, jusz the best result) but for the health of the server and its builds.)
This ends my after rogue one thought

 

[SKy_the_Thunder]

I agree on the aesthetic part. But then again I'm someone who groaned when the higher resolution tools were introduced... I just enjoy (base) Minecraft's limited aesthetic enough that I tend to see higher res textures or new models as unnecessary - but that's just me...

Something I would have avoided though, is to mention ArdaCraft at all. That name tends to shut down everything for a month each time it's used around here. I really don't care why that is, but opening a statement with a direct comparison doesn't seem like the best idea.

 

[Atlantispy]

Just do you boo, don't worry about it being similar to another project, just do what you think looks good

 

[dabbing_king]

I was confused on the announcement of a new texture along with a new Dol Amroth, but the more I see these projects come along, the more faith I have in it. It'll take time, but I believe this will work out for the best.

 

[Eaglz24]

Alright, ill try to make this post as short as possible. nice one eaglz

I agree with most of your post @Thijs1801 regarding the textures, some of the textures that have been made are straying too far from the mcme style and need to be fixed a little bit (currently working on that now), so don't worry too much about that, we'll carefully choose all the blocks that look good and match the other blocks before adding them. Most of the blocks you see (in staff forums) are the basic 'first' edit of the texture, I usually go about and change them several times and I don't really update you guys with them, which probably would be a good idea . So what you see there is by no means the final version of the block.

And perhaps some of the textures might seem a bit too DA-oriented and wouldn't fit so well with the rest of the area, is because DA is literally the last thing in Gondor that is using building blocks at this point, so you can imagine that they'd have a bit more of a foreign vibe to them. And unless we start revamping more parts of Gondor which I don't think anyone here is particularly in favor for, we won't be using all the new blocks at all (other than some exceptions that might be transferred into future resource packs). Now i'm not defending the 'DA only blocks', it's obviously not something that will benefit anything much other than DA, but that's my thoughts on the current DA-bias blocks. (And who knows how much the mcme resource pack style will be altered in the years/months to come, it's hard to say what fits now will fit into the far future).

Every day we stray further away from our plans, the only thing that is left now from the original plans is the city map. Nothing else is being used/going to be used. I'm certain it will be great if we continue this planning, but it will not be looking like an MCME city. This will look like AC made something on our server.

Now I don't quite see what you mean here, but i'll try list all the primary plans we made.

- House and building style

This is the big elephant in the room seeing as we have brand new blocks, something that we had no idea would happen whilst we were planning until after we finished as it came quite out of the blue. I think it's quite apparent that with all these new blocks the style would normally be altered somewhat. But I don't think that is entirely necessary for our case as the original house style is still quite modern in a drawn back view of it (see the wool house above gate town, its the exact same as our concept, but in wool). But something I think we and everyone else hopefully can agree with, is we can use the new blocks to add the fine 'layers' of detail (everything that isn't on the wool house). We could use some of the new fancy blocks like retextured wood/stone trapdoors, fences, walls, anvils etc, and some of the new blocks, onto that basic wool house. Hopefully that made sense and you understand what I mean. So in that aspect I don't think the house style is 'straying' away from our plans at all, we're just going to use advantage of the abundance of new blocks we have.​

- Map

Like you have already mentioned the map and plan view of the city hasn't changed at all.​

- Walls

Obviously for this one it has changed a bit from our original wall concept I made. Again you can link this with the house and building style, the new blocks gives us more opportunity for wall designs. But from the looks of it, it seems that the wall will change yet again, so perhaps for the 'new' wall we can incorporate the white stone again, because imo that combined with the sandstone is what gave the style we originally (and still do) it's finesse and 'DA feel'. So hopefully that should be sorted out, i'd say this one is a 50/50.
​

- Farm houses

Again, this one is another build style situation. Though it always was a controversial concept due to it being 2 story high, we don't even have a set style for the farm houses at the moment I don't think, so i'd give it another 50/50.
​

- House layout

Actually for this one I kind of agree it has strayed somewhat. In the aspect of general size of the cliff side gate town it is actually the exact same planning style and size that I used for the row of concept houses, the other side however needs a few touch ups, sorry @Wodleth my fault for not explaining as well, looks good nonetheless though. However some of the shapes of the houses on both sides are a bit odd, and need to be more squareish.​

That is pretty much all of the main plans we made for DA I could find and think of, and gave a bit of clarity for the ones that might have strayed a little bit off

Welp, in retrospect, this post is rather long, oh well...

- Eaglz

 

[Thijs1801]

Keep in mind that we agreed on double walls for the houses, and stairs and slabs for the roofs. If we want to change that, we should decide with the entire team.

 

[Tyranystrasz]

SNAP

Why we didn't have better and more realistic textures before but the "MCME" classic looking style?
Simple! We had less blocks available, second we didn't have good texturers (and this changed when despot started to make 32x eriador and moria) and now we have more people interested in making texture. Also we have a super active dev that is also one of our most active and productive member that is @Eriol_Eandur that is spending many and many hours into testing and bring for mcme new stuff.

Spoiler

Look at this, we can have so many new blocks for interiors for having more "alive" cities. It looks that you are scared of having a tons of new textures.
We can't continue to use the same stuff forever.

 

[Thijs1801]

I am not scared, its just that if we start using them now, we would need to redo every city to make them feel 'alive'. And as @greglas2 said, not many people like redoing everything again.
And to comment on 'We cant keep using the same stuff forever' We managed to build an amazing Gondor with the textures we had.
Also this is Minecraft and not a realistic as hell medieval world simulator.

 

[Tyranystrasz]

I am not scared, its just that if we start using them now, we would need to redo every city to make them feel 'alive'. And as @greglas2 said, not many people like redoing everything again.
And to comment on 'We cant keep using the same stuff forever' We managed to build an amazing Gondor with the textures we had.
Also this is Minecraft and not a realistic as hell medieval world simulator.

Anyway our older builds will looks outdated some point. It doesn't have any sense to don't update our texture for this point

 

[Finrod_Amandil]

“The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot for ever fence it out.”
“A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.”

- J.R.R. Tolkien

Tyran is nailing it. If we would always be afraid of adding new things our builds would still look like back in 2010. However our current situation is, as far as I can judge, unique in the history of MCME. Since I joined, and probably before that as well, we always tried to get the maximum out of Minecraft for as accurate buildings as possible, with the one exception of not wanting to rely on client-side mods. Now we experience the special situation of having an abundance of new possibilities at hand, armorstands, banners, many many more blocks, new models, new plugins.
It would be easiest for sure, to ignore it and move on as we did so far. But then I guarantee you that over time more and more of you will feel like there's more out there.
You all are doing your best to make our builds look as nice as possible. But no matter how much thought and effort you put into it, it'd always be possible to go one, or in our specific case, multiple steps further.

It IS a very delicate topic, as these things can quickly overwhelm people. For that reason, together with Eriol and Eag and with all staff members, and soon most likely also with everyone on here, will discuss which new things are added and which are over the top for now. As Eriol said, we were brainstorming for the past few weeks. Now it's about sorting out and reflecting on the ideas we had.

Don't be afraid, I am aware of the dangers, but also of the possibilities that are open to us now.

 

[Smaug_Niphredil]

"A man that flies from his fear may find that he has only taken a short cut to meet it.”

Mushrooms.

 

[FireFuss]

On topic of the thread, I finally got around to running a job and finishing up the splattering of blocks in the moat around Dol Amroth. A big thanks to @Greenleaf1234 and @Lindolas for the help. Pics soon!!