General Q&A For Frizzil

[Leonal]

I've checked out this mod and I (speaking only for myself) am severely impressed by the full blown makeover this mod does to minecraft. Frankly, it's like playing a whole new game (apologies for the Yogscast reference) and I'm excited to see what else this mod will present in the future. The kind of code-crafting that you put into this mod shows you at least have a clue what your doing and rewriting a good chunk of how Minecraft works is impressive. For my own curiosity and to share with the other asshat prima donnas of the Technic forums I have a few questions I want to ask.

1) How much is this "your" mod: would you be offended by other people modifying the source code or adding (game) elements of their own?

2) How do you feel about mod compatibility? particularly dealing with Forge and the coming official Minecraft API that mojang will release in the future?

3) What are some of your favorite features you've added so far? what are your least favorites? anything you are particularly proud of?

4) Any sneak-peek ideas you would like to share with the community before you actually implement into the mod? new mobs? new skills? new classes? ect...?

5) More on mod compatibility, what are your feelings about adding compatibility (randomly generated weapon enchantments?) for new weapons and armor from other mods? Balkon's Weapon Mod and Battlegear Mod come to mind.

6) How about compatibility for mobs from other mods? Mo' Creatures (sans scorpions) being the popular example? I presume you are working on making Vanilla mobs compatible at present, but what about the other.

7) Any plans for new passive mobs? as much as I'm overjoyed by seeing farm animals, some new fictional animals would be a sight for sore eyes.

Extra Credit: What is your favorite pizza and how much is an Extra Large +10% tip at your favorite pizza joint?

[Frizzil]

I've checked out this mod and I (speaking only for myself) am severely impressed by the full blown makeover this mod does to minecraft. Frankly, it's like playing a whole new game (apologies for the Yogscast reference) and I'm excited to see what else this mod will present in the future. The kind of code-crafting that you put into this mod shows you at least have a clue what your doing and rewriting a good chunk of how Minecraft works is impressive. For my own curiosity and to share with the other asshat prima donnas of the Technic forums I have a few questions I want to ask.

1) How much is this "your" mod: would you be offended by other people modifying the source code or adding (game) elements of their own?

2) How do you feel about mod compatibility? particularly dealing with Forge and the coming official Minecraft API that mojang will release in the future?

3) What are some of your favorite features you've added so far? what are your least favorites? anything you are particularly proud of?

4) Any sneak-peek ideas you would like to share with the community before you actually implement into the mod? new mobs? new skills? new classes? ect...?

5) More on mod compatibility, what are your feelings about adding compatibility (randomly generated weapon enchantments?) for new weapons and armor from other mods? Balkon's Weapon Mod and Battlegear Mod come to mind.

6) How about compatibility for mobs from other mods? Mo' Creatures (sans scorpions) being the popular example? I presume you are working on making Vanilla mobs compatible at present, but what about the other.

7) Any plans for new passive mobs? as much as I'm overjoyed by seeing farm animals, some new fictional animals would be a sight for sore eyes.

Extra Credit: What is your favorite pizza and how much is an Extra Large +10% tip at your favorite pizza joint?

Thanks! I worked on it on and off for a long time, about 3/4 a year thus far, though I didn't start spending every ounce of my being on it until the last month and a half or so (what with Technic and all!)

1) I would only be offended to the extend anyone pretended it was their own work or just didn't give me credit. The parts of the mod I'm proudest of are the Area system, both how it merges multiple chunks into larger Areas and the naming convention system (eliminating name components that fit together awkwardly even required a bit of graph theory, along with some well thought out design). I'm also fairly proud of the Roflconda (both in premise and in actual code (the block-sliding was a PITA!)) Finally, I'm proud of how I implemented the recent additional block textures, in that they're HD compatible but don't change resolution themselves (H/M just blows up the texture and pastes it into the terrain.png image in memory) I'll be using plenty more textures under this scheme. A lot of things already extend from the Area system, from level progression to dungeon management, and much more remains to happen with it. I might extend core features like this and release mod dependencies some day.

2) I don't know enough about Forge to say, but I was under the impression ModLoader was more widely used and was planning on at least supporting that at some point. The Technic guys seem to also have this planned major mod-integrationg for Hack/Mine in the distant future (perhaps to go in Yogbox or the like? I'll be very impressed if they do), but some minor things now like Optifine compatibility go a long way. I really want the mod to be accessible to everyone, so helping lower-end computers and promoting HD texture packs seemed like a high priority.

Speaking of Optifine (god how I love it and the man who developed it), it's recently posed a few difficulties in creating the mod. I've just added *see below* which will be included in H/M v 0.5 this weekend (and I'm stoked about it), but making the Camera's positioning positionable for it went from changing one measly line of code to subclassing two entire pre-existing classes, along with an hour and a half of frustration thinking I couldn't actually both implement the new feature and have Optifine. Glad I was wrong! There is still the issue of the new grass colors not showing in Optifine, however... we'll see about that one.

3) Oops, I may have answered this a bit in number 1 XD Areas, dynamic texture loading, the fast radar, the spell system... there's a lot I'm happy about Adding a complicated spell takes mere seconds, it's just a matter of thinking of something good. For example, I experimented with a "Whirlwind" spell for the Warrior, but wound up getting severe headaches and straying away from it :/ Apart from coding, I am proud of some of the creative work that's gone into the mod, mostly in the naming conventions and such. I'm sure some people could do without the humor, but nothing beats a pair of "Dream Stompers," a "Sweaty Axe of Lube," or even the "Legendary Broadsword that Won't Come Out of the Damn Sheath." Once villages of varying races have been added, I'll be adding some more serious Elvish/Dwarvish name generating systems (unless I can think of a way to screw with them as well).

4) Some players will be getting their height optionally nerfed this weekend... 3-4 different options, to be precise. Also, now that a lot of the major bugs are getting fixed, I can focus on adding more mobs, and hopefully the first boss mob before then. I can't decide if I want him to be a giant, overworld soaring Cockatrice-Serpent (as the first Ubermob!) or a slightly-above-Steve sized Ghost-Armor wielding a giant flail (the first Boss Mob!) The Cockatrice will of course be related to the Dire Chicken

5) Compatibility is a tough question. It will vary from case to case, mostly depending on whether or not they've modded the ItemStack, Inventory, EntityLiving and EntityPlayer classes specifically. I may be able to shift things around a bit. There's also some networking involved for the new magical properties, but this is only one change in the Packet class as of this moment. Battlegear has been mentioned frequently since its release, but adding several of the core features available in Battlegear may actually be easier than trying to integrate the entire mod. Plus, it would give me a lot more creative leeway in how to handle dual-wielding and shields.

The Technic team has expressed a distant-future interest, as a short and potentially overlookable comment, in incorporating Hack/Mine into another grand-scale mod already selectable from the Technic launcher. I don't want put any words in anyone's mouth, especially considering this would be a highly laborious undertaking It may also depend on just how successful H/M becomes (keep rooting for me!)

6) It's an interesting question. Adding mobs to the new systems is actually by far the easiest part-- users will even be able to create XML files full of normal and rare mob features for any additional mobs (I could even make an editor to go in-game for this!). What's tricky are the more logical, high level aspects-- for example, Zombies and Skeletons no longer set on fire during the day, in order to increase the variety of mobs at all times-- there is no trivial way to achieve this or detect cases to the contrary without modding the Zombie and Skeleton classes themselves, so user-added mobs with such behavior will simply burn up and die if nothing complicated is done to prevent this. Suppose someone adds a mob that drops a pickaxe of 1000% added dig speed? While it may be compatible with the mod, it would entirely break the pacing of the game (something RPGs rely on a good bit more than, well, what Minecraft is.) Adding general compatibility is still more than doable, however, it's just a matter of doing it right

Most all of the vanilla mobs have been incorporated into Hack/Mine, there's been no trouble there. Wolfs currently die too easily, I should say XD

7) Passive? I haven't given regular animals any thought (besides expanding them into DIRE animals!!! jk... I'll be limiting that to the Dire Chicken He was my first mob, man!), but mobs that don't attack until provoked are certainly on the menu. Actually, it might not be a bad idea to go ahead and add some, considering how everyone seems to get constantly ravaged by aggressive mobs wherever they go.

Favorite pizza would be... not a pizza, but a calzone from Depalma's, right nextdoor to me in downtown Tuscaloosa, Alabama! Possibly the best restaurant in the area, and I get to order takeout every other day. Tip is a little more than a buck, more if it's a busy night.

[miniboxer]

Thanks! I worked on it on and off for a long time, about 3/4 a year thus far, though I didn't start spending every ounce of my being on it until the last month and a half or so (what with Technic and all!)

*snippy snip*

I would recommend trying to stay away from modifying any more base classes that already have hooks in APIS, and using the APIs instead. It would be great if you added modloader support, and used player API instead of using you own instance for modifying the player model. Why Player API support? because i want battlegear support I doubt it will happen anytime soon, but that would be EPIC if you either added battlegear support, or devised your own dual-weild system

[x3kross]

A quick few questions for Frizzil:

1) Are you only planning on updating hack/mine as soon as vanilla minecraft updates to 1.3? If so would you be open to uploading a single appeaser update for all those impatient users out there?

2) Are you open to submissions to the mod? (I ask this because of my increased interest in creating mods myself) Like mob, item, block and texture, etc. submissions?

3) Is it only you working on the mod currently?

4) What do you plan on working on first when the 1.3 update for minecraft comes out?

[Frizzil]

I would recommend trying to stay away from modifying any more base classes that already have hooks in APIS, and using the APIs instead. It would be great if you added modloader support, and used player API instead of using you own instance for modifying the player model. Why Player API support? because i want battlegear support I doubt it will happen anytime soon, but that would be EPIC if you either added battlegear support, or devised your own dual-weild system

This is much more difficult than it sounds, and often times difficult to support when updating versions (since the workarounds required often depend explicitly on what was inside the mod's dependencies) It'd also make installation that much more of a pita, if you aren't in Technic (Technic is definitely a luxury to have, though, and will definitely make a difference as to whether or not I decide to make installation any harder). Optifine combined with races took me hours longer than it would have otherwise. I've gone into a lot of detail about dual wielding/Battle Gear on the official Wiki if you're interested

A quick few questions for Frizzil:

1) Are you only planning on updating hack/mine as soon as vanilla minecraft updates to 1.3? If so would you be open to uploading a single appeaser update for all those impatient users out there?

2) Are you open to submissions to the mod? (I ask this because of my increased interest in creating mods myself) Like mob, item, block and texture, etc. submissions?

3) Is it only you working on the mod currently?

4) What do you plan on working on first when the 1.3 update for minecraft comes out?

1) Updating wouldn't really serve much of a purpose, except for lighting fixes and mob-movement fixes. I'll be releasing plenty of H/M updates before then, but none that transition to the latest version of Minecraft until I get improvements that actually affect gameplay and I don't expect another patch to be released for a while.

2) Depends on what you mean-- I'm collaborating with SMP to do some awesome texturing, but he's not particularly fond of item texturing (he prefers mob and block texturing), so that's a void anyone could fill (your wands were quite amazing, I should add. I'll probably be using them, hehe)

3) Pretty much, though like I said, I am collaborating with SMP on textures. Sure, I could have other people help with the coding, but that'd introduce a ton of problems to the project. Mainly, no one who's an educated enough programmer to make a living off of it would want to devote time to the project, considering how long term and profitless it is (they're out there, but they're freaking rare), and working with teams would introduce some communication/deadline/trust problems. Additionally, it only takes one bad programmer to ruin an entire project... not an attractive risk at this point. More importantly, it'd give me a lot less creative power over the mod and I couldn't take risky/ambitious decisions (everything in the mod would probably boil down to tried and true RPG elements, not inherently bad, but not nearly as awesome as it could be) There is certainly something to be said for idea-bouncing to avoid George Lucas style failures, but that's what the forums and my roommate are for The trade-off is a Blizzardesque one: higher quality, but slower updates. I'm sure people have issues with that, but I say they've never played a Blizzard game (and they're pissed because I told them they couldn't contribute to the project XD)

4) No idea, depends what I have done by then. There are Ubermobs, Bosses, the Questing system, additions to the existing dungeons and mobs... a lot XD I'll be referring to public opinion (via topic polls) to help decide what I should add throughout the life of the mod, hehe.

[miniboxer]

This is much more difficult than it sounds, and often times difficult to support when updating versions (since the workarounds required often depend explicitly on what was inside the mod's dependencies) It'd also make installation that much more of a pita, if you aren't in Technic (Technic is definitely a luxury to have, though, and will definitely make a difference as to whether or not I decide to make installation any harder). Optifine combined with races took me hours longer than it would have otherwise. I've gone into a lot of detail about dual wielding/Battle Gear on the official Wiki if you're interested

neat article you got there, and I would absolutely LOVE to see a dual-weilding system in hack/mine, considering that you will never add battlegear support. Although, like you said, the balance issues is what is really holding it back. perhaps a slower attack speed and less damage while dual weilding? I mean, you can't hit as hard when you only use one hand to swing.