jakj

For now, I'm just going to use the ones already built into the game for player heads.

Busy week at work done. Phew! Let's do this thing.

We also believe in doing what makes sense instead of what people tell us to do.

Yeah, well, when my mods actually release in beta, I'll have huge disclaimers up that say that taking and using the code, making spotlights, posting about the mods on other forums, or whatever, is all fine via the WTFPL. If that isn't enough to get them over it, then they are damaged beyond repair.

I think you'll find that the only people willing to work with me on anything are people on this website. But it doesn't matter: It's open source. iChun or xCompwiz or CPW or whoeverthefuck can just take the code and stick it in their own projects without saying word one to me at any time. (If their pride allows them to, of course.)

I haven't found the forge guys to be too receptive in the past. It might just be that they don't have time to pay attention to anyone who isn't popular. If lots of people start using my mod, maybe they would.

Luke, I'm not sure you've been around here long if you think those words apply well to me. Most consider me either a novelty or a jackass.

I live in southwestern Virginia, USA.

Sorry about the lack of updates: This time of year (just before the fiscal changeover) is rough at work, because I'm one of the few people who doesn't run out of hours, so they keep going "pleeeeeeeeeeease". I'm working on it a little bit every night, though, and this weekend is free!

You made 16x textures? They look quite nice. I suppose I could have them in the mod as an option, if people don't want to use the full-resolution texures. For the engines, I hadn't decided: They could be anything from full 3d models to simple textured blocks with the upgrades drawn on like decals. The drives will need to be symmetrical, though, around the N/S/E/W faces, because they can't be rotated (since they don't have a facing anyway). The drive textures just need to have enough variation between them to be distinguishable by the colourblind, which can be done with patterns or decals or anything really.

Well, I could let you spawn a new one with the egg, or reset the flag that says he's dead. Would be a nice tweak. No spawner, though.

That's why I think it's unlikely. Most creatures I just use their head or core body as trophy, and some like slimes I just shrink down in their entirety as mini slime. Big boss monsters won't be added as spawners.

Heh. Anyway, I finished generalizing the renderer this morning, so 95% of the time I can add spawning and trophy support to the mod for a mob in about five lines of code. The only hard part will be if someone makes a huge entity with awkward shape and no articulation, which is unlikely.

Eh? You must be using some sort of build system like Eclipse. I just use MCP, and all you have to do is drop the 'src' folder in with the rest (my path is forge/mcp/src/minecraft/JAKJ/src) and it works just fine. Having all source files in the same directory is massively confusing to me, and making subpackages for a project as small as a Minecraft mod just bloats the imports and makes it more irritating to code.

Considering the way I weave in and out of the mid-level chunk code, I expect anything running protection to collapse completely, some things being moved and some things not. Honestly, I don't see any way this mod could ever be compatible with any protection plugin, considering I have ripped out portions of Minecraft's internals and rewritten them myself, and this mod would have to have its own protection code added. In theory, it wouldn't be difficult, because my code already pre-loops through all blocks before doing anything and does a validity check. In the class CarriagePackage, several functions can easily be modified to do checks against a protection plugin by block X,Y,Z value, and the class CarriageBlocks can be modified to pass in the EntityPlayer object to the CarriagePackage to issue checks against the player's name. Probably would have to add one check in the actual carriage classes to make sure the empty space it finds to move to isn't protected. If you're already intimately familiar with the protection plugin in question, it'd probably be an hour or two of work to add support to the mod. I'm probably going to do no such thing, since server-play on Minecraft is vomitous and I don't do it, but seeing as it's open-source, someone else certainly could. The same goes for bukkit support: I've never even looked at bukkit code.

Especially since I'm doing no such thing. Even if he had trademarks, he couldn't sue me for those, because the only terms/concepts from his mod that I'm using directly are terms that have been in common usage for anywhere from decades to centuries. It'd be like Vivendi suing Sony because Everquest and WoW both have orcs.

I'm not so sure about that anymore. My little idea of just recreating his mod with a few tweaks has grown into an actual mod all of its own, and our methods are actually going to be quite different because I'm doing it the way his mod used to do, and he's changing his mod drastically to use some sort of mana/fuel system instead. So...I dunno. I would certainly prefer that he be upset about it, because hopefully that would serve as a wake-up call to change his attitude into a more community-friendly one, but I'm starting to think he'll just turn his nose up and ignore me instead. We'll see.

Ars magica has about a billion things in it and an API for adding more.

Use ars magica for that.

It won't work on mobs not listed in my tables, and I'll not let it work on bosses. And I changed my mind about player trophies. Current plan: By default, all mobs have a chance based on rarity to drop a trophy. Players do not drop trophies. Create a vorpal blade: Use on mob, instantly kills and drops a head, chance to kill you based on how full your inventory is. If it kills you, your own head drops too. On a player, vorpal blade does nothing, unless they are also holding a vorpal blade, in which case it's just like using it on a mob: Instant kill with chance of self death. This might make for some silly PvP battles with armies of vorpal soldiers.

No, just from creatures. You can already get player heads without any additional code by editing an NBT tag.

Aha!@$%% Neowulf, you're an inspiration. I've been able to rip out parts of a model and render it independently without having to touch texture coordinates at all, using texture packs fine, and with only one translation, one scaling, and one rotation per. And mod models should be no different except in the most extreme cases of weird physiology. This is gonna work. Mob heads: Mob heads everywhere!

I think you overestimate modders' willingness to use some random Joe Shmoe's API just because he says they should, no matter if it's easy or not. But it's worth a shot. I will go decompile Redpower again and see what she did. If she didn't have some amazing trickery, I'm thinking that hooking into the models is going to be the best bet for success: In theory, I should be able to just have a mapping from entity class to a set of translation/rotation/scaling tuples to apply to a standard block, which would also make it slightly easier to preserve non-cubic heads.

I looked into your idea about the mob heads, and it kind of would and kind of wouldn't work. As I suspected, the rendering function for the heads has a bunch of hardcoded translation and scaling calls based on which mob is being rendered, because all their textures are different. It would absolutely be possible to extend and replace the existing skull block/entity/renderer classes with extensible ones, and make every single mob in existence drop their head. The decision is whether I want to fiddle with every single mob texture to figure out the rendering coordinates. And...maybe. The idea of mob heads is really starting to appeal to me. And I can't find any mod in existence yet that does extra mob heads. Is there one? I absolutely don't want to do all that work if somebody else already did it, but if they haven't....... Of course, I could always do plan B, which is to just edit the textures in GIMP into 6 block faces and include them as textures in my mod. The downside to that is it would not support texture packs. But it's always good to have a plan B. Other than the rendering, it turns out to be quite a simple thing after all. EDIT: Hmm...I revise my statement slightly. It seems like most but not all model files have submodels specifically for their heads, and mobs with integrated heads like squid/ghast/slime could be rendered as a scaled-down whole-body without the tentacles. So I may not actually have to dick around with the textures after all, and instead just use reflection to hook into the renderers. Now I'm intrigued.