Board Thread:Bug Reports/@comment-25102046-20161124040259/@comment-25101089-20161125042523

Nothing classified, I'm pretty sure I've explained this a few times before. Basically, the reason that we stopped our short burst of work on seasons back around Beta 23 was that grass blocks couldn't be made to update their colouring dynamically. We wanted grass blocks to change colour smoothly, so that we could define a "spring colour" and a "summer colour" and so on, and have the colour change between these smoothly over the course of the seasons. I finished coding that part (and the same for leaves).

But the problem was that the grass blocks would only change colour when their chunk was updated for some reason (placing or removing a block there, or just wandering in sometimes, or some random block update, etc.) because unlike entities, blocks aren't rendered dynamically - the game compiles a list of instructions every time the chunk is updated and only when it's updated. Which is of course much more efficient for ordinary blocks, which aren't supposed to change colour dynamically over time. But this led to the problem of having some chunks go unchanged for days on end and then their grass would look awfully mismatched with the grass in nearby chunks.

And it was a bigger problem for leaves, since some leaves didn't just vary their colour smoothly, they actually had completely different textures for different seasons (such as Mallorn leaves, or dead oak tree leaves) and on the cusp of a season change, having a tree straddling two different chunks with part of its leaves golden in autumn and the rest dead in winter looked pretty awful.

But also, back then, I'd started coding seasons as an afterthought, just to see if I could, and I didn't realise at the time how much time such an enormous overhaul would require. Rewriting all the snow and ice mechanics... rewriting how fruit trees grow... making saplings drop automatically and regrow in the spring, while leaves gradually decay over autumn and then somehow regrow despite the blocks being gone... even hacking into all the vanilla crop growth code to alter growth rates depending on season (which almost certainly wouldn't even be possible without resorting to editing base classes)... It was just too much to do on the side. The amount of work would have been monumental, the rewards not enough to validate it, and I had so many much more important things to spend my precious mod time on (and still do).

I hope to revisit it some day and either figure out some ingenious way to overcome these problems, or just ignore them and let people deal with the graphical discontinuities. It probably wouldn't actually be that bad, since most chunks would get updated fairly often and the colours change.

But to see the Shire in autumn, with all the trees golden, or in summer with the fields bright green... while I had it working, that was quite a sight to behold. Maybe one day we will be able to look on it again.