jakj

It's safe.

This one.

I get that a lot.

I just had another thought: How about an item that you use on a mob that is recognized by the mod; When you use it, it immediately and utterly destroys both you and the mob (calling the normal death functions to drop inventory), but in doing so, it produces a 100% guaranteed drop of a head. I like the idea, but my only concern is that servers might get annoyed with the additional death messages. But I *really* like the idea, so probably I'd just put in a config option so servers could disable that item, and then do it anyway. Sure, it'd be easily abusable if somebody has the keep-inventory gamerule on, but that's the player's choice in the first place, so eh.

Hmm. You know...I could make you use charged shard + heads + empty cage to craft a spawner instead of just having you click on the spawner with the shard. Using the heads to craft the shards instead of the drops...would that work? I haven't looked at the code. The thing to consider is that I do want people to start accumulating kills early. It's nice to get a set of shards and just keep them in your inventory to charge them up. Though...I could scale the drop rate of heads with the rarity of the mob, just as I scale how much of a tier they're worth. Do heads work with absolutely any model, though? I can't imagine there's anything stopping anyone from making a monster without a head, like some sort of tentacle beast. I should look to see how Minecraft renders them. On another note, I've decided that all tiers will be controllable by redstone as a convenience, but only the final tier will be able to spawn creatures outside of their normal conditions. Any objections?

I think Thaumcraft lets you get heads right now. I could use the heads for something some day, but right now, requiring enchantment just to get the mod started puts it too far into midgame. This mod works best as a long-term thing, especially since I didn't restrict the shards to being on the hotbar (they'll accrue kills anywhere in the inventory), so I want the player to be able to grab a shovel, a pick, a few pieces of obsidian, and dive-bomb the nether for ingredients right off the bat to get started. The only thing in this mod that really is expensive at all (by vanilla standards, anyway) are the highest of the boosters; Everything else, if you're willing to do things more gradually, is pretty damn cheap. I like the balancing factor of having to take damage while in melee range to craft/upgrade the shards. (Should make iron-armored players think twice before trying to get a skeleton spawner!)

Since this is a much smaller mod, this may be the only testing version I put out before beta release, unless something pops up. On to the mod! http://j-a-k-j.com/EssentiaVitae_testing1.zip (Crafting recipes are in, and you can also use NEI and the creative tab (flip past page 1).) General crafting recipes: sugar + gunpowder + redstone dust + glowstone dust = 4x modicum vitae soul sand + gravel + sand + clay block = granulated soul sand smelt granulated soul sand = potentium vitae modicum vitae + potentium vitae = sothom spice 8x quartz pieces + lapis piece = crystalline housing quartz block + 2x modicum vitae + 2x potentium vitae = luminescent crystal shard Craft luminescent crystal shard with particular items to attune to a mob. Currently implemented: Craft with raw porkchop to attune to pig. Find a pig, and activate (right-click by default) the shard on the pig. You will take 1/2 of your remaining life or 2 hearts in damage, whichever is more. Armor and difficulty level do not affect it. You must take points of damage to charge the shard. For a pig, 20 points (10 hearts). You do not need to do the damage all at once. The shard when charged becomes vital crystal shard. Craft with crystalline housing to make essentium vitae (the soul shard). The soul shard has eight tiers: It begins at tier 1. You must accrue kills to reach the top of the tier. For pigs, each pig is worth 1/100 of a tier. Craft "sothom core" to get enhancement bonuses on the soul shard. There are 7 tiers of sothom core, from 110% value for kills to 1000% value for kills. When you upgrade your shard from one tier to the next, your enhancement is lost. When you apply your enhancement, if you had any charge on the shard already, it is kept. Once a shard is maxed at a tier, craft and charge another luminescent crystal shard into a vital crystal shard, then combine it to unlock the next tier. Tier 8 (VIII) is the top, shown as the "containment level". Spawners are not currently implemented yet. When they are, they will take top-of-tier shards in order to work. You will be able to retrieve your shards by breaking the spawner. A shard cannot be used in a spawner if it is in the process of being charged up to a tier. The tier of the shard determines the quality of the spawner. All currently-implemented stuff should have names and textures and everything just fine, so let me know if they don't, or if you find any other bugs or have any suggestions. To compare to the existing Soul Shards mod by Shadow Dragon, mine is intended to take less time but more effort, be started earlier in a world (early game, not late game), take more resources, but use fewer rare resources. It should not feel "cheaty", but it should also not feel like GregTech. Somewhere around the level of Dartcraft in terms of effort v. reward would be perfect to me. Let me know what you think!

If they don't have a unique drop, I'll just come up with something that makes sense, or if nothing else, just something. Like bats, for example: I could try to use Dartcraft claws to craft them, and if that fails, I could use leather, while using steak to attune to cows. It's not like there's a law that says I can't pull shit out of my ass and say "Hey, here's how you do this. So go do it."

Adding items and mobs from other mods is as easy as a reflection call. I can add infinite mod support with no problem. All I do is wrap it in a try{}, and if there's an exception, that means that mod wasn't loaded, and the recipe simply doesn't get added.

If anyone's curious, I have everything except half the recipes and the actual spawner implemented: Crafting the soul shards and charging them up now works. I decided to go with a system that (roughly) is summarized as follows: You craft up a shard and attune it with a drop from the mob in question. Then, you use (not attack with) that item on the correct mob: It will damage you by half of your health or two hearts, whichever is greater (so it can kill you if you go too fast). This damage is not affected by game difficulty and is not affected by armor. You have to take a total damage amount based on the mob, with harder enemies requiring you to take more total damage. (The damage doesn't have to be all at once, so you can strike-and-run.) This process doesn't hurt the mob, and the risk comes that it's attacking you while you're trying to do this, unless it's a pig or something. Once you have that shard charged up, you craft it into the actual soul shard. This soul shard has multiple tiers: Each tier takes the same number of kills. (Rarity of the monster determines kills per tier: Common creatures require more, and rare monsters require less.) You can also craft enhancements (which replace the weapon enchantments) that can boost your gain per kill anywhere from 5% to 1000%. The upgrades are consumed each time you fully charge one tier of the shard, and you have to do the damage-yourself shard again to upgrade the shard to the next tier. Any shard that has been charged to the top of any particular tier can be crafted into a spawner: How many tiers attained by the shard determines the properties of the spawner, just like the Soul Shards mod. Overall, the differences in balance between my mod and his are that mine will take less time than his to get a top-tier spawner, but mine will require more effort and resources, but unlike his, mine uses simple nether materials (glowstone, quartz, soul sand) instead of his crazy shit (end stone and diamonds). You are intended to be able to start this mod very early, as soon as you're able to either mine obsidian or use a mod to produce it (like TE's igneous extruder or IC2's lava+water cell recipe) and make a quick dash into the Nether for a few things. If you're good at Minecraft, you can get started with your first tier of shards in roughly an hour of play, or just under.

Bugfix patch: http://j-a-k-j.com/RedstoneInMotion_testing9.1.zip (Prevents a crash when the server is slow sending rendering information to the client.)

It looks like it began trying to render the moving carriage before the server had sent the information needed to do so. I'll add a check for that, so if the communication with the server is delayed, it'll just not draw anything until it catches up.

Oh damn! Now I'm positively gleeful. I can just throw the textures into my texture pack and use MFR stone. Woot. Yeah, since I've never used MFR and barely used CC, I thought "RedNet" was just the CC equivalent of "TCP/IP". I do remember the word "cable" being used, and I also remember now that I paid absolutely no attention since I thought it was only between CC machines. >_> But hey, in this case, all's well that ends well, especially since I found out Forge is hiding a metadata-sensitive version of adding smelting recipes in the FurnaceRecipes class that it hasn't exposed to the GameRegistry class. Heh.

It has just come to my attention that Minefactory Reloaded already has a replacement for red-alloy wire. (If any of you have already told me this and I was too stupid to understand what you said, I apologize. ) Therefore, I will not be implementing this feature. Yay! Less work. ;-) That also encourages me because I know I'll spend less time on that, and have more time for additional carriage and drive types (if anybody suggests any) and optimizing the code over time. I will still be making my blocks compatible with CC as peripherals, however. And I may throw a quickie mod together that adds basalt and marble stuff in, since I did like building with those. Not volcanoes, though: Other mods have added that. I'd just add crafting/smelting recipes to make the marble/basalt from vanilla materials instead of doing worldgen. And I already even have textures for them, since I collected them back when I actually used to play with Redpower.

Wait, code monkeys eat flies? Gah.

Since I'm such a Negative Nancy, I thought I'd throw out a list of the people that really make me smile in the community. There may not be many of them, but they do shine. mDiyo Author of Natura and Tinker's Construct, this fellow not only has a good attitude about things, accepting suggestions and discussions when it's reasonable for him to do so, he also publishes under an open-community license and welcomes derivative works. His ideas are amazing, and any deep modularity and complex integration in a mod is something I enjoy immensely. Bluedart Author of Dartcraft, this fellow isn't afraid to mess with other mods, and has really gone out of his way to make player choice his #1 priority. He turns the entire world of Minecraft into even more of a play-dough set than it already was, giving you the tools to do anything you need at any time you need them. And he is so well-spoken, I almost imagine he could be a professional literary author. The Logistic-Pipe Dev Team These folks are really going the extra mile, making Buildcraft pipes their willing bitches to make a glorious visible living automaton out of everything you ever do. Don't get me wrong: Applied Energistics is neat, tidy, and efficient, but there's just something frickin' awesome about pressing a button and watching shit fly everywhere in an industrial ballet. And the icing on the cake? Buildcraft reimplements the auto-crafting table to be useless in Logistic Pipes despite that table being a core element of any Logistic Pipe system, so the devs just say "Challenge Accepted" and make their own. Boom! MachineMuse Author of Modular Powersuits, who has chosen both scala and glsl to be her bitches of choice to bend to her creative will, with an open attitude and great ideas, and even a neat hand with a 3d modeller, she's turned Steve into an electrically-charged superhero. If you ever want to see someone making Minecraft do things it honestly shouldn't have been able to ever do given the skill of its original author, look no further than this lady. Searge (EDIT) And how could I forget the creator of MCP, what makes this all possible? As open a mind as they come, sharing his effort with all of the community out of the goodness of his heart, and even running coding contests for fun to encourage new modders to get into the scene, he's the lynchpin of everything. If he ever burns out on Minecraft, ladies and gentlemen, we're completely and totally fucked, so keep him happy as long as he deserves to be. This is not an exhaustive list, but this is what I came up with on the top of my head. Have I missed anyone else deserving of the title "Awesome And Open Minded Creator Of Stuff"? Post away.

Be careful: I can pretty much guarantee there will be mod blocks that don't get moved 100% correctly (so loss of electrical energy or what-not), and it doesn't have a blacklist yet (meaning it will let you pull up a layer of bedrock).

New testing code: http://j-a-k-j.com/RedstoneInMotion_testing9.zip *) Drives now make sure they won't move things above/below the height/depth limit of the world. *) Fixed screwdriver propagating from client instead of from server (meaning it didn't actually work). *) Implemented support carriages: These will let you make a flat platform in any shape and in any direction: N/S/E/W or Up/Down. Use the screwdriver or sneak with empty hand to change which side is open: All of the same side must be open for any particular support carriage (so you can't have some up and some down on the same one.) Pictorial demonstration: http://imgur.com/a/xHEeh *) Implemented structure carriages: These will let you move entire cuboid areas of the world. Place the structure carriages in a wireframe box around whatever you want to move (8 corners, 12 edges), then use the screwdriver on the CORNERS to open/close the carriage sides appropriately, place the engine/motor on the CORNER, and boom: Your house just moved. Pictorial demonstration: http://imgur.com/a/jFySc *) Implemented balancing features: There are now four tiers of drive and four tiers of carriage. Each successive tier of drive can move more carriages at the same time, and each successive tier of carriage can move more blocks at the same time. You can mix and match carriages of the same type at will (so you can mix tier 2 and tier 4 support carriages but you can't mix support and platform carriages). Tooltips tell you how much of what they can handle.

The anchor records the pattern of carriages and becomes a pattern. The pattern is a block just like an engine: Apply a redstone signal or CC or whatever to make it move. When it moves, it uses the pattern to determine if it can move and what it should pick up. Super-simple example: Place anchor on ground. Place Foo Carriage on anchor. Activate anchor. Anchor eats Foo Carriage and becomes pattern. Put block on pattern (where the foo carriage was). Signal pattern. Pattern moves block. So instead of having engine -> carriages -> blocks, you just have pattern -> blocks, because the carriages are already recorded inside. It lets you be more compact because you don't have carriages taking up space, and it lets you be more precise because you always have the exact same pattern no matter where you move it.

It's a 1-stage process: Place the carriages as desired to describe the pattern, place the anchor next to them, activate anchor. Anchor consumes carriages (they're just gone). Although I could make it so that the anchor drops the carriages if you break it but you can't get them back otherwise; That might be more fair, so people don't feel stressed over making mistakes in placement. Tooltips should be enough documentation, but I can add a book if absolutely necessary. Keep thinking about the names: I won't finalize them until I actually start coding this feature, which will be after I get Redstone In Motion into beta and pound out a quick soul-shards ripoff. A few weeks, ish.

It's not actually overcomplicated: It just seems that way without pictures. Let me lay it out: There are three types of carriages: Foo Carriage, BarCarriage, and Baz Carriage. These are just blocks you craft. Put down the carriages where you want your pattern to be. If you place a Foo Carriage, that means simply add that spot to the pattern, so it'll move blocks if they're there when the pattern is moved. (Example usage: Move the pattern to one position, where a cobblestone block formed from lava and water meeting, so it connects to the cobblestone block; Move the pattern to another position, where it stops with the cobblestone block; Break the block, and repeat.) If you place a Bar Carriage, that means add that spot to the pattern, but remember whether that spot has a block or not when the pattern is formed. When the pattern is moved, if it remembers there being no block but right now there's a block, it'll just leave that block there instead of moving it. (Example usage: Making a set of hanging lights on your ceiling that you want to move around the place at will, without picking up any of your other furniture along the way.) If you place a Baz Carriage, that means add that spot to the pattern, but remember whether that spot has a block or not when the pattern is formed. When the pattern tries to move, if it remembers there being no block but if it moves there will be a block, it'll prevent the movement. (Example usage: A mobile platform or rig that needs empty space preserved, such as for allowing arrows to be shot from a dispenser.) To make a pattern, lay out the carriages, stick an anchor on it, sneak-activate or screwdriver the anchor, and it sucks in all the carriages and makes a pattern.

This would get back to your problem you mentioned before, though. Imagine a pattern like this: ABCDEFGH Now, the blocks in that pattern are like this: ABCD F H You move the pattern, and where you moved it to, there was already a block in the G position, so now the pattern contains this: ABCD FGH If you move the pattern again, it's going to take G with it. Now, I could make a simple check for empty space v. not empty space, but not include id/metadata at all beyond that. In fact, there could be a set of conditionals: *) Just move the pattern, absorbing any new blocks at the destination if they didn't block movement. *) Move the pattern, but remember where the pattern was empty, and don't pick up new blocks in space that was empty when the pattern was formed. *) Refuse to move the pattern at all if any blocks are present at the destination where in the pattern is empty space. And you would select which of these you want by using different carriage blocks to form the pattern, so you could mix and match. This method would certainly be a whole lot easier than having to track ID/Meta.

Believe it or not, while my way might sound more complex, it's actually much simpler to code, and I think you'd agree it's much simpler to use as well once you have to deal with trying to not only manipulate but also visualize a 3D pattern of blocks in the world with a GUI made up of 2D slices represented as inventories. From a programming standpoint, drawing the translucent templates is just iterating through an array of X/Y/Z offsets each time the core block is rendered. I suppose I could have two different types of Carriage X, one which records just ID and one which records ID+Metadata. Not going to touch the tile entities, though: It'll use the same moving code as the rest of the mod, so they'll be preserved as normal on motion, but I'm not going to reimplement the entire BC gate system. If your build requires blocks to be moved or not moved based on anything besides Id/Meta, you can either have multiple different patterns overlapping, moving one or the other based on conditionals you evaluate, or else you're SOL.

Looked more reminiscent of the traditional comedy/tragedy masks to me, which is why I liked it so much. How about you mess around with Google Images a bit, and see if you can find me something similar to what you think would be appropriate? I could always include both with a config option on the client.

Interesting idea. It might go like this: Create a new carriage type: Call it Carriage X. Create a new block: Call it Carriage Anchor. Place Carriage X in the world in the shape of the blocks you want to move. (So there would be one Carriage X in every spot where you're going to put a block, and then extra Carriage X as necessary to make it a contiguous shape.) Attach the anchor to the set of Carriage X and activate. All Carriage X are absorbed into the anchor. The anchor draws the carriages translucently like they're still there, but in reality it's now empty space again, rather like guide lines on a piece of paper for you to write on. The Carriage Anchor becomes Carriage Template. Put blocks where you want them within the template, and leave empty space where you want it. Activate the Carriage Template: All id/metadata pairs are recorded within the template. The Carriage Template is now finalized and becomes Carriage Pattern. The Carriage Pattern will act as a carriage drive: Signal it on a side or via CC peripheral, and it will move, taking its predetermined blocks with it. Something like that?