Fuck MCForums and all it stands for

[jakj]

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.

[theprolo]

Not all modded mobs have unique drops. Take Mo' creatures for example - how many of those mobs drop fur? How many of those mobs actually drop anything at all?

[jakj]

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."

[Neowulf]

You could reimplement the vorpal enchant RP2 has and use severed heads as the crafting ingredient.

[holymage!]

You could reimplement the vorpal enchant RP2 has and use severed heads as the crafting ingredient.

that would be a cool way to get souls....

[theprolo]

Perhaps a higher tier shard?

[jakj]

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!)

[Neowulf]

Add heads to the loot table of all mobs but really rare, the vorpal-type enchant just helps get them easier.

The heads then have the double duty of crafting ingredient and decorative block. Players could use them for soul shards, or just show their skill by building a house out of enderman heads.

[jakj]

Add heads to the loot table of all mobs but really rare, the vorpal-type enchant just helps get them easier.

The heads then have the double duty of crafting ingredient and decorative block. Players could use them for soul shards, or just show their skill by building a house out of enderman heads.

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?

[Neowulf]

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.

One server in 1.4.6 I played on had someone selling player heads, thought that might have been a microblock sculpture thing.

Either way I'd expect you of all people to be able to spank the renderengine class and make it do your bidding.

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?

Sounds good.

[jakj]

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.

[Richs_Yard]

Well. So far I am impressed. Both at the mod, and how off topic this got. I think the mod will be great, and would love to have it. Your avatar also made me think you were a girl at first... Dont hurt me D:

[jakj]

Your avatar also made me think you were a girl at first... Dont hurt me D:

I get that a lot.

[Richs_Yard]

I get that a lot.

What gender do you think I am based off my Avatar?

[jakj]

What gender do you think I am based off my Avatar?

This one.

[Richs_Yard]

This one.

You were right

I am actually the gender known as "Text"

[Kocken926]

This one.

I am scared to click that.

[jakj]

I am scared to click that.

It's safe.

[miniboxer]

It's safe.

I can confirm that.

[Niavmai]

I can confirm that.

Both liars, not safe at all, do not click.

[Neowulf]

Both liars, not safe at all, do not click.

Lies and deceit! Click the link, it has kittens!

[jakj]

Lies and deceit! Click the link, it has kittens!

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.

[Neowulf]

I know redpower vorpal enchant does all the stock mobs and possibly others, but I have no clue if she just coded with textures or did some rendering wizardry. I only ever used them as thaumcraft research fodder.

Jammy's furniture has craftable blocks that look like heads (that make noises when activated), but only for the vanilla mobs.

No clue about any others.

You could add an API so others mods could add their own mobs. Give access to a register function so they can specify an entity reference and the texture offsets needed to render the head, then you can snag the texture ID out of the reference and add the head drop.

Make it a trivial couple of lines and a file to add in for reobfuscation, and people would add support just because it's an easy selling point.

[jakj]

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.

[Xylord]

I think Thaumcraft lets you get heads right now.

Getting head... Hehe.

I'll show myself out.