Oh wow I wasn’t even referring to villager agency but I kinda agree with you - ESPECIALLY on the grounds of what you described in terms of pathing for them, what I feel I’d call “parbaked pathing”.

My idea with using pathfinding algorithms as the root of village generation was to prevent ridiculously awful disasters of architecture in the first place by ensuring that villages would only tend to generate where a village would hypothetically have all the things it needs:

a. Open, stable, solid, reasonably flat-ish ground

b. Hypothetical easy connectivity to (imaginary speculative) “resources” in the world (that are in actuality arbitrary points of interest that tried to pathfind to each other and whose paths inevitably converged at a.)

c. Potential access to other villages for travel.

If villagers DID have agency to actively build instead of magically-already-have-been-built-now-they’re-stuck-with-a-lava-pool-burning-all-the-wooden-houses, what would be cool about that PLUS never developing a village on top of a lava pool would be the potential for villagers to build actual roads between villages when the POI-linking pathfinding in the background happens to touch two villages concurrently…
(like lightning, shooting out tracers to establish a current but then committing once a viable route is found)

This should not be something happening in the foreground though so as not to harm chunk loading performance. Maybe only actionable when a player trades with villagers and somehow tells them “yeah, I’d like you to proceed with that”.

We already have sculk that spreads - and arbitrarily, chaotically so! - in response to player interaction, after all. This proposal would violate precedent LESS than that.

Well, I’d like to point out that this isn’t manipulating the terrain so much as taking the terrain as it is and predicating the generation of villages on the extant properties of the terrain. And while the POI generation system in minecraft does not guarantee something is always there, it would be fine if the ‘attempt’ to generate a POI there was enough for a corresponding ‘attempt’ to pathfind to it. Dead end paths manifest in real life too sometimes.

Also, it’s perfectly feasible to limit recursion in tiers, somewhat the way that the Distant Horizons mod does: It performs a limited query of minecraft’s terrain generation code that only roughs out surface-level details speculatively. They are not fully realized. Precalculating speculative paths between potential POI-sites in the far distance as a background operation before you get close enough to generate those chunks “for real” would be a function of what process cycles you have to spare rather than being a prerequisite before rendering the next frame.

“why should we develop the game when instead we can simply ‘encourage’ the players to develop it for us?”

in minecraft, ‘factional regions’ could be defined by drawing voronoi diagrams whose seeds/sites/generators are the woodland mansions… implying that the ruling classes of the villagers are the illagers and that their standing army of enforcers are the pillagers at the outposts…! With just the barest hint of structure, an entire narrative can emerge almost effortlessly. If the world were filled with stone walls delimiting these regions, suddenly there is a sense of political tension and territoriality. Just as roads convey a “sense” of connection, walls can convey a sense of conflict. With these in place, the world would feel much more lively and interlinked!

If you felt so inclined, this village was in Seed -592881470 at x+784 z+80

i mean … as i type this i feel a little silly thinking someone would spin up a copy of this world just to go to that specific village and graciously unfuck its shit, but … i can’t help but put myself in your position given what you’ve said and feel the urge to represent at least one version of their universe where their town isn’t a total disaster 😅

All it did was update the professions, make some layout variants that remained entirely blind to terrain circumstances, and eventually add the pillager outposts (village and pillage) but…

Heck, if you think about it, we have three strata of a society right in front of us, and it’s even anarchism-coded!

• Peasants living their happy little egalitarian lives in villages,

• Hostile constabulary tromping through with their jack boots wielding the state’s monopoly on violence to exploit the villagers’ labor (Pillagers from outposts)

• Nobility debaucherously luxuriating at their isolated estates detached from all the worldly drudgery (Illagers in Woodland Mansions).

Connecting them with roads and implying that pillagers only raid because they consider Steves and Alexes to be dangerous foreign outlaws would even make sense. Of course they would want to punish the village that was collaborating with that “dangerous outsider” who killed one of their lieutenants!

I for one think that pillagers and illagers should be hostile toward spiders, zombies, and skeletons, but that once roadways are generated in a world they should be patrolling them.

Adding nuance to this such that maybe pillagers might only retain the name for the sake of the pun and would otherwise be dangerous but ‘neutral’… would suit the world terribly well.

hexbear isn’t even malicious. hexbear is spicy at best. not nearly as bad as lemmygrad, which is outright repugnant in its overt hostility. hexbear users are at least CAPABLE of communicating, whereas in my experience lemmygrad users pull the animal farm squealer move and defecate on the floor before storming out.

“never ever be biased except in these subjects we want you to be biased about, and always be controversial except about these specific concepts about which we demand you represent our opinion and no others”

These fucking chuds don’t deserve oxygen.

deleted by creator

the only “self-check-out” system I have ever liked is:

1. I have the store app on my phone.
2. I scan the items with my phone app as I grab them off the shelves.
3. I then tell the app, “ok, i’m ready to pay for these”
4. it runs the charge digitally.

no waiting in a queue,
no ‘place the item back in the bagging area’,
no stuffing bills into slots,
no ‘follow the instructions on the pin pad’.
I’m already done!

It’s called working at a towing company, and I already have. I know what those “roadside assistance” firms do from the inside, because we’re the ones who actually do the work when they call, and most of them are trash; you could just skip the middle man and call us directly, but the good ones actually pay decently and are more likely to get our help. Prices become better for individuals when they act as a group who collectively pool resources to subsidize cost on the basis that having a lifeline to fall back on when you don’t need one is better than not having one when you do need one. Technically any handful of people can found a private social club that they all pay ten bucks a month into but don’t always use, and such a club’s warchest will snowball to thousands of dollars while no one is looking. Then when suddenly one person is in trouble, the club swoops in and eats the cost. Socialization of risk. Mutual aid. Wish more people did that.

And anyone who would pay that much for a car is a gullible fool who doesn’t deserve to keep their money anyway, so that tracks, yeah. What a fucking waste.

Indeed; what we need is a jailbreak and a way to operate these systems on our own independent or third party / aftermarket resources. In a REAL competitive market, someone else could set up a server and offer to run these applications (or others!) for a different price. Not that I’m even particularly fond of capitalism myself nor how vulnerable it makes your car to turn it into an IOT device.

This WILL be hacked though, eventually.

For my home internet, I’m pleased to have municipal fiber optic broadband in my city.
I don’t know what the width of the bottleneck is or where it’s located (because there will always be one) but i have never hit it.

I also use T-Mobile for my cellular data.
They were fairly straightforward with me about how it works:
The data transfer bandwidth will never be throttled by ‘decree’,
though it is finite and everyone connected to the same signal tower as I am are all going to have to share whatever is available
up to the hardware limitations of the mobile devices themselves which are connected.
however, after I have downloaded approximately 10 gigabytes of data, my pings are to be de-prioritized. If there is not a lot of activity on the network, then connections establish in a snappy and responsive manner. If there is a lot of network traffic, however, I may have to ‘wait my turn’ while other people who have not downloaded as much get to go first, to an extent. Once the connection is established, the speed of data transfer is just as fast as before. It just takes longer for that connection to be established in the first place.

I am satisfied with this arrangement.

i’m not so sure it was even my local feed that got me feeling like i belonged, really; more that I started reflexively defaulting to the federated feed and found it to be much more lively. Perhaps it was actually the changes brought on by time. Perhaps it was because twitter is rotting like a forgotten corpse in a warm, damp room and all the smart people who actually give a shit finally all started to say “fuck this” and enough of a critical mass has finally accumulated in federated services for them to affect its overall feel. I definitely see content from technically minded, creative, motivated people more on mastodon than i EVER did on twitter, but especially now. Twitter now is just … sad, and it reminds me that I have a better place that I’d enjoy visiting more.

i started reading your reply in the voice of Dracula from the intro to Symphony of the Night XD

“WHAT is REDDIT 🍷💫💥 but a MISERABLE pile of SHITPOSTS!”

The 'net ill-needs a failure such as him.

His terms of service are as empty as his revenues!

all this to say, yeah fam 100% totally agree

mastodon finally clicked for me and i don’t miss twitter at all. sometimes i accidentally load twitter out of force of habit, but immediately recognize how much it sucks now and close it again. Likewise, reddit’s dead to me too now. i’m finally starting to feel like decentralized federated social media systems might actually work out.

oh hey it’s the return of the Trillian / Pidgin app morphology.

are there any frontend webapps like wefwef/voyager?

I like it too honestly. It reminds me of stories about how Usenet used to be before the Eternal September.