Slap-Snap Repixelated! - Pixel update!
It's been a while huh? Slap-Snap Repixelated is the future Slap-Snap of the Pixelmon server/world, but because the server just got released, this particular slap-snap will be posted here for the first time and the next ones will be at the pixelmon section.
Unlike previous Slap-Snaps, I don't have much of a personal story about this, I actually had a hard time to install the pixelmon mod(nobody said to just put the zip and not extract it >.>) so until a few days I have never played it, what I can tell you that this project has been here, for probably half a year if I recall, and I've been dying to be a part of it, but I'm not, oh well.
The Pixelmon update features a new pixelmon world and a brand new hub for the Slap-Gaming Minecraft server, that some of you might have seen.
Here are some screenshots:
http://i.imgur.com/ZWJHsbh.jpg
The Pixelmon server spawn, truly a nice sight, with the fresh scent of a new journey to begin with your starter pokemon, take your choice, who will be your starter?
http://i.imgur.com/bluDOWA.jpg
A special picture of the Water Gym city mounted on a lake, it's quite a sight, lovely.
http://i.imgur.com/9v2XruM.jpg
The Minigames new hub! indeed impressive and lovely.
http://i.imgur.com/ka5pi9B.png
A ship that is found in the new Survival hub, quite nicely done, you can see how much time was put into this update.
http://i.imgur.com/EK1ZEsf.jpg
The Portal to the pixelmon world, and with a groudon, never have I seen groudon so welcoming.
This time the pictures are not the important part at all, we can all go and see for ourselves, but what that is truly important is our special guest for the interview, Honking_pigs, leader of the Pixelmon World project:
1. How long have you been working on the pixelmon project?
Me and a team of others have been working on this project for several months now, the idea was presented to jack and he liked it. he assigned me as project lead and i started formulating a plan. The team initially consisted of Slacky456, Moody_Octopuss, Imallskilzy, Viet1982 and me. However over time this changed. We picked up a few new members such as; Jack, Babydoggyshadow, Ryuuga, Sparkleunidog, Gnoekeos, Cheos313 and Dark_Wyvern. I would have to give a massive thanks to BabyDoggyShadow and Slacky456 at this point as they provided a lot of help and support along the way voluntarily without being asked!
2. Can you tell us about the experience of building a whole new world?
Well, it's not always easy to know where to begin, however luckily as it was a pixelmon world, we already had a theme giving us easy directions to go from the start. We built a nice spawn town first, and from there decided we would build themed cities to hold gyms of the type. We went on to build a Bug, Rock, Ice, Flying Water and Fire typed city, with the spawn town hosting the normal type gym. One of the biggest tasks was terraforming, we wanted to make it look nice, not just flat cities/towns that we could build easily, so we all put lots of work and time into making sure the scenery around the cities fitted the theme too.
The second biggest task would of been the plugin side of the server, the side most people will never notice how much effort went in, and appreciate it. Simply setting up the DynMap is a horrible task, rendering the world took over 24 hours, and on top of that you need to manually explore every chunk. so i give massive thanks to slacky at this part, for his continued work on this task even with his slow descent into insanity with how dull the task was.
This all started off as a side project on a hidden world on the survival server, but with me having worldedit there and causing lag for the server, it soon moved to a separate server that has now become pixelmon.slapgaming.com, this allowed a lot more worldediting potential as we didnt need to worry about causing breif moment of lag for the server. With a combination of worldedit and manual building, we managed to create the cities to the point where we were happy with them, but this wasnt the end.
Pixelmon3.0 decided to release in 1.6.4 minecraft and we had been anticipating 1.7.2 and we had used stained glass etc, so now began the task of going around the world, removing all 1.7 blocks and replacing them with something we were happy with. this didnt generally look as good afterwards, but we have backups of the 1.7 version so we can replace the current one when that arrives.
3. Can you tell us a bit about the world itself, about it's content?
Well, each city consists of a Pokecenter, a Pokemart and a gym. on top of this some will have decorative housing in which we plan to fill with npcs, others may have some plots.
The gyms will have a challenge before you can fight the battle, it may be parkour, or it could be redstone related etc, and then after this you will be in a waiting area to fight the gym leader. currently the furthest you can progress down this route is obtaining all of the gyms badges but who knows, maybe we'll add something to do after obtaining the badges.
The plugin we use for shops on slap wont work with forge, so were using a sign based shop plugin now. we are also using this to sell items, and not relying on the /sell command. this way players will need to go to a pokemart to sell things, this will add a little bit more interactivity with the theme in my opinion.
We've left the spawning of naturally spawned pixelmonmod included pokecenters, so they can also be found throughout the world, so players can find those and ask for them to be worldguarded if they so wish! We've tried to keep everything as similar to the survival server in some ways, so slap members don't feel out of their depth.
4. What was your source of inspiration?
Pokemon.
Me and slacky are massive fans of the ruby/saphire generation, so we've enjoyed taking some inspirations from that. but mainly, our inspiration has just come from pokemon in general. we've been trying to build a nice aesthetically pleasing server, that in the cities look like they could be found in pokemon.
The water city consists of buildings on platforms just above the water level, like the Pacifidlog Town in the hoenn map, in another way it is like the sootopolis city, with the tall mountains around the edges, and a small lake down at the centre in the valley. We also plan to introduce an electric gym, that will work hopefully like the mauville city gym from the hoenn region also.
5. I assume there might future plans to expend the Pixelmon world, and even a possible Elite Four, can you confirm that?
Yes we will work on an Elite Four after the launch of the pixelmon world. But we're not sure how long this will take as we plan to make this something we put a lot of time and effort into, to make it very impressive.
The capital city of the world is also something we've spent a lot of time working on, but we are delaying the release for now. it will have a pokehospital, a pokemall, a team rocket building and all of this is going to be fully functioning. We also plan to add many skyscrapers to the city that can be rented out by teams of players in the future, but i cant talk much about this at this stage!
as i mentioned before also, we plan on adding an electric type city, so that will be the next city we add to the map. what order this is released in depends on several things.
6. Could you tell us about the recent improvements of the survival spawn and the minigames spawn?
Well due to the addition of pixelmon, and the new multi server setup, it was time to add an overall hub world. This overall hub world will lead to survival, pixelmon creative and minigames. When minecraft and pixelmon are running on the same minecraft version, this hub world pixelmon portal can physically link to the other server. but when they are on different versions it will take you to a room with information on how to join the pixelmon server.
Stepping into survival will then take you to a new survival spawn world, which will have portals for the end, the nether, resource world, new and old survival and the pvp world.
The minigames world spawn remake as been due for a long time, as the original one was very basic. the version we have made now is a lot nicer.
Slacky456 was the hub designer and builder for these projects, and then i did the worldediting for them such as terraforming mountain ranges and such, Cheos313 also helped us by designing and building us a dutch naval ship as we needed one and he offered to help with the job!
The new spawn setups should make it a lot easier for people to get to where they want to be and to see what we have to offer.
7. What do you hope for the future of Slap-Gaming community and the pixelmon server to be?
We hope that opening up this new server will help bring more members into both servers. with the hub setup. and also applying for membership on one will give you membership on both, when people sign up for this on pixelmon, they will see they also get membership on survival and will be more enticed to check it out!
We hope to keep expanding and also for the pixelmon server to be a success, if the pixelmon server does take off then we can rent a better server for running it, and also look into paid advertisement options to help continue the growth of slap.
8. Anything else you'd want to share with us?
Just want to mention the fact that there will be a guide on installing pixelmon in the pixelmon forums section for those who arent the best at installing mods.
And finally i want to give a massive thankyou to anyone who was involved in this project, i could not of done it without the continued suppoort and help of those involved!
Thank you honking_pigs for the lovely interview and this wonderful update, and for the finish, I have one thing to add myself:
http://youtu.be/BxPPH-Ykm5E
This is all for this slap-snap, hope you enjoyed, join us next time with a brand new Slap-Snap Reborn! yes, Slap-Snap is back!
