Block Change Request: Snowy Thatch Block Addition(s)

[AerioOndos]

Request: Snowy Thatch Block Addition(s)

Request Type: General Addition

Try to describe all workarounds and associated issues that make it necessary to add this block in your eyes.
By having stairs and perhaps a slab that has snow on its top facing sides and thatch on its bottom, in snowy environments we can have fewer heavy set, dense plank ceilings and more primitive structures.
Currently we need to fill practically the whole underside of a roof with wooden plank block, which makes an ugly single colour structure that doesn't make sense with the less advanced snowy North and Beyond the Wall.

The current answer to this issue is to have 3 block thick rooves: outer layer of snow, inner of thatch, ceiling roof beams. Understandably, this does not work for a hovel.

Types of evidence to support your request: Canon

Canonical Evidence
While fleeing south for the Wall after the mutiny at Craster's Keep, Samwell and Gilly stop in a village which Sam hopes is Whitetree, although all wildling villages look alike to him. This village has a handful of one-room hovels with sod roofs, a log longhall overgrown with moss, a stone well, and an empty sheepfold. WOIAF, ASOS iirc

Because they have sod rooves and aren't in good repair, a way of indicating this is if there was no snow would be to have exposed thatch ceiling etc. But we can't do that in the snow at the moment without having 3 block thick rooves/ceilings

 

[Thamus_Knoward]

So I'm assuming you'd want something like this:

If thatch was used only as thatch in the north it would be quite easy to do this as a biome-specific overlay.

Would you mind if I tried my hands at a new block for this that looks a little more like a thatched roof and less like the ambiguous fur, straw, sawdust, and hay kind of block we have? With and without the snow cover obviously.

 

[Thamus_Knoward]

Short progress report:

Snowy thatch, or actually, thatch in general is a tricky texture. If we want to get it just right we want to account for the volume of the thatch itself and the fact that the center area of a roof ages/ weathers differently than the edges. Snowy thatch as you can see in the image above forms a homogenous surface in the center but thins out towards the edges.

To ultimately achieve this effect we will need a block with some special properties able to handle the slope of the roof itself and the fact that we have started to build diagonal roofs and roofs that include full blocks, walls, and slabs.

I have a clear vision of what I want the final product to look like (this is done entirely in photoshop, so the final result may differ due to the way I need to implement it in our RP):



Shading on the left and right edges of a given roof helps to add some volume. I can achieve that with horziontal CTM which looks fantastic on straight houses but it leads to vertical streaks on diagonal houses.
Straight:

Diagonal:

Shading on the bottom indicates the overhanging edge of the roof and again gives that some depth and thickness. When we add snow later on we need this to indicate the snow sitting on top of the thatch. This is impossible to do with CTM; I could add horizontal CTM that colors the bottom of every stair block but that would apply to every row of the roof creating a very distinct horizontal banding.

I'm talking to red about ways of achieving this by creating a dedicated thatch roof block.

The one thing that I can achieve already is random discoloration of using repeat CTM:

For comparison here's what this looks like in the regular resource pack:

I drafted a few shades initially but I suggest we'll stick to light, dark, snowy and mossy.

 

[AerioOndos]

Looking good! For some reason this never pinged me so it’s my first time seeing a continuation of the thread.

Tham, while these look beautiful the most important thing about this block is that it allows northern builds to have exposed thatch in their ceilings.
I’d be satisfied with something identical to the Mances Tent stair but with snow on it instead of patch leather.
But what you’ve produced is absolutely stunning and I’d love to see more of it!

 

[Thamus_Knoward]

For the sake of a simple solution to this request, I'm withdrawing my ideas for a thatch overhaul. It was a half-baked idea anyways with too many ifs. We'd need a way to add CTM diagonally, it breaks on diagonal houses, and there's the matter of having a block that suddenly looks almost too much like thatch and too little like fur/carpet/sedge, etc. It also doesn't really fit the pack.

"By having stairs and perhaps a slab that has snow on its top-facing sides and thatch on its bottom, in snowy environments we can have fewer heavy set, dense plank ceilings, and more primitive structures."

Emoticone11 should be able to achieve exactly what you wanted with some straight-forward CTM.

 

[Emoticone11]

Yeah this certainly sounds reasonable, given that we've done a similar thing for mance fur/thatch. I've moved it to in-progress. I wouldn't mind seeing more experimentation with thatch (I think we have a little wiggle room to improve the texture while still having the ability to represent fur/sedge/etc.), but this should be opened as a separate ticket.

 

[AerioOndos]

Can I also add on a request to have a version with Muddy Snow texture on the top side? That way we can have a little more versatility in terms of look. Or another option is to make a few slight alterations to the snow to make it seem like there is thatch underneath?

 

[geeberry]

bump

 

[Emoticone11]

Since this request has already been completed, I'd recommend making a new thread for e.g. some of the other ideas that were discussed in the replies.