U4EA Journal, 2014-09-07

~ LazyJ's "U4EA" Journal ~

U4EA now has two houses!

That doesn't sound like much but considering what it took to get to this point, actually starting to build stuff in U4EA is a milestone.

The first house built in U4EA is an open-room, one-and-a-half story tall build. When I laid the foundation I followed the contours of the land in a few places. This resulted in the house having an irregular shape which made things like the stair roof more challenging to build. The interior is furnished and decorated, the exterior is complete but the landscaping may remain unfinished for reasons I'll discuss further down in this post.

The second house is a small bungalow I created expressly for my Build Concepts post, "Use Different Materials", which is about the importance of visual variety. There were more thoughts that I wanted to add but they went beyond the focus of that particular post. So I'll put those thoughts into another post.

I flew back a bit farther away to be able to see both houses at the same time and wrestled again with some old thoughts and observations.

Both houses are made of the same materials and both houses look very "old world" (referring to Europe, Africa, Asia, in this case, mostly Europe). The first house is slightly more modern looking,... but still "old world".

Old world build style vs modern, concept-home build style. That will be a set of build skills to work on and develop.

The next issue that came to mind was the landscaping around the two houses.

In the past I've usually had to do a lot of landscaping around my builds because the default mapgen of Minetest is bland and generic by design. Which is a good thing.

Going off on a side topic here.

One of the frequent complaints about Minetest is that it is boring. "There's nothing to do." "It doesn't have..." this, that, or some other thing.

The default, "vanilla", Minetest game is intentionally quite generic because Minetest is all about customizing. The idea is to start out with a generic base and then players can add mods to their singleplayer worlds and servers can add mods to their server worlds to customize the default game to their liking. This is a good thing and one of the reasons I'm able to enjoy Minetest so much.

Ok, back to the landscaping around my houses in U4EA.

In the past I've usually had to do a lot of landscaping around my builds; however, I've customized U4EA so that the green grass areas are very lush. Watershed's mapgen also creates a dramatic, visually stimulating, terrain. U4EA's landscape is already quite pleasing.

At present, I think the only landscaping I may do would be to knit the land, that the houses are sitting on, together with the roads and paths that I will build in the future.

Roads and paths.

Hmm... that's another old quandary.

Roads and paths connect places. For the time being, all I have are two houses sitting on the same hill. As yet, I can't think of a good purpose for connecting the two with a footpath or a road. I think it will be more likely that, in the future, the two houses will not connect to each other but rather the road will connect them to something bigger.

And just what will that "something bigger" be?

I don't know yet... exactly.

It depends on the proportions of the landmass, the builds, and the larger unit they will form. If I build full-sized buildings, then there may only be enough room on the landmass for a small village or suburb. If I build background scenery houses, then I might be able to fit a large town or city on the landmass. In that case, the final, developed area would be more like a theme park that you can wander through but the builds aren't big enough to actually live in.

Now that I have two builds of two very different sizes, I'll gain a better feel for the scale of things after I've rendered the next overview map of the area.

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