Hrm

These 'it's been awhile, sorry, not a lot has been done' posts are getting a little too routine for my liking.

This one's excuse?  WoW.

That, and a lot of things just happened in quick succession at work and I found myself in a position of much more responsibility than I was anticipating.

The irony is I always find myself much more willing and (wanting) to code after work/school, when I have been coding a lot during work/school.  Something about doing something I really enjoy for someone else makes me really motivated to do it for myself.

The opportunity the last month to capitalize on this feeling was instead taken by WoW.


But good news is, my main character is pretty much capped, so there's no real constant drain on my time gone to Legion's end-game grind anymore.  Now we're just dealing with work stress, which I pray starts to resolve in the next few weeks.

When it's not one thing, it's another, right?




Oh and I finally finished dropping those 25 lbs I started working off in April and hit my goal weight of 200 this past week.  Hopefully now I don't put it all back on.

1.10.2 Rendering

\o/

I'm pretty much exactly back to par in 1.10.2.


My tile entities render, dynamically, through .objs.  Even better, they render in-inventory and in-hand dynamically as well.

Otherwise, I have rotatable, colored machine blocks, beams still render like before, as do particles.



The end result is that rendering works, and from a certain point of view, works better than it did in 1.7.10.




Will continue to work on gameplay mechanics, but I have a very small initial goal set.  After I get everything working there, I will continue to expand (similar to Femto 1, but with actual mechanics in mind.)

1.10.2

Hey all!

Just finished getting ItszuLib to 1.10.2.  Started working on Femtocraft today.

Better yet, I also have a plan for Femto, and a roadmap! \o/


Otherwise, still alive, still kicking.  Finding time to work on this when I can, but I'm not out yet!

Why the long face Update

So.  Yeah.  No excuses.  I havn't really done anything Femtocraft related in a long time.  I think I got ItszuLib as it is (mid-conversion) compiling (and almost certainly not working) on 1.8.9, and that's about it.  Femtocraft is still unconverted and uncompiling.



I probably did the worst thing possible when I started to convert to 1.8.9 by doing it while I was attempting to write an api (ItszuLib) over Forge.  The result is that half the things I wrote needed to be fixed, which would have been probably easier to do if I hadn't even wrote them in the first place.

The main points of ItszuLib is just to completely remove forge/minecraft namespaces out of anything inside my mod.  Ideally, a forge update should consist of dropping in a newer version of ItszuLib, and no other work.  Any mod built on ItszuLib should continue to work fine, hopefully even on a large switch like 1.8.9.  It probably won't, due to things I really can't abstract like rendering changes and whatnot, but smaller updates theoretically should be fine.



Though I may not have expressed this publicly, I will do so now.  I set out making Femtocraft with 2 goals.  The first goal was to gain experience writing a program of more complexity than I had previously.  The second was to make a mod I would enjoy playing inside of Minecraft.

The first goal drives the second.  I will continue to look at and use Minecraft both because I enjoy the game, but also because the world offers a unique combination of technical and interesting challenges.  Chunk dropout, server/client, etc.

I will admit, I have considered dropping this to make mods for other games.  A.R.K., Terraria, Starbound, etc.  I stayed with Minecraft because it offers the most freedom in what I can accomplish with a mod.




As I have said many times before, I suck at rendering/graphics.  I spent weeks fiddling with things to get everything you saw in Femtocraft 2 previews working.  I have, now, absolutely no idea how much of that work is still usable.  And now, I have a huge extra set of goal posts erected between me writing these things and figuring out how they work, thanks to all the 1.8.9 changes.


Add on to that the fact I just started a coding job, where I'm daily having to deal with an entire code base I don't know.  The last thing I want to due after dealing with feelings of uncertainty and lack of knowledge, is to then dive into the same thing again.  Ideally, I dive into a code base I'm familiar with with a clear plan of what I want to achieve, and I can just relax and pump out cool things.  That was the driving idea behind ItszuLib, and it still is.


As I ramp up at work, I'm slowly, slowly starting to feel like tackling these problems again.  I can't guarantee any progress nor a rate, just the fact that, as always, I will continue to try.


Until next time.

Slow Progress is Slow

Hey.

So I finally got ItszuLib compiling on 1.8.9.  Doesn't necessarily mean it's actually working, though.


Life has been busy with a lot of things lately, and I started up an exercise regimen which is eating up a good portion of my evenings.  However, I'm finally settling into that and not feeling the effects of it too much anymore, which is getting me my evenings back once again.


I'm reorganizing the setup once again.  Though I have my code on my own site, it's almost certainly not going to stay there.  I misunderstood some things, and one thing which I want to do away with is the fact that no one can pull request my code in its current setup.  To enable pull requests, I need to enable other users to make new repositories on my own machine, which will then lead just to multiple copies of the same project on my machine, and no other projects.

So to that end, I'm almost certainly going to move back to the main Gitlab website for the main copy of the project.  I'll still keep a remote repository on mine for backup, but that way if anyone feels like contributing they are now able, and we keep the assured up time and don't rely on my local isp.

Mod progress?

Just more design ideas.  You know...it's really hard, as someone who solves problems for a living, to try and introduce interesting problems for YOU guys to solve.  I keep wanting to eliminate these issues myself, or I see the problem and think it's too easy/too hard.  That and carving out some brand new mechanics for you guys to play with is hard as well because all too often I reduce it down to just itemstack / machine gui interactions and then it's not distinguished enough....or I go too far the opposite direction and then "wtf is this" and it's some hugely archaic system for almost no real interesting gains.

But we'll see.

Until next time.

Another Update

Hiya NotEnoughMods traffic.


Yes, I have started porting to 1.8.9

I put it off for awhile, and it's just as terrible as I had thought it would be.
It's absolutely stupid that I have to add 2 additional files that are multiple lines long in order to have even a basic block, where before I could literally do it in 3 lines of code.

I also started picking up automated testing of my code, to make sure that I catch bugs early.
The key point is, is that certain parts of Minecraft, and Forge, are just inherently untestable.  The amount of code coupling and burden of responsibility is ridiculous.

Some workarounds work, but some just don't.

Renovations!

Hey guys!

I'm still alive!



And with changes.

This blog's days are limited.


I'll be moving towards a new url


blog.itszuvalex.com



It's not up yet, and I'll post here the moment I get it set up.  However, other things ARE working!


gitlab.itszuvalex.com
artifactory.itszuvalex.com


The first now hosts my repos.  It's also mirrored on gitlab.com as well, so if you can't catch it here catch it there.
The second hosts my build artifacts!  Want to try the latest, breaking build of Femtocraft?  Grab both it and its dependency ItszuLib right there!  Right now, it's still VERY proof of concept.  I do not condone using it in any actual packs.  You can...but I won't be reponsible for anything happening.


Design is coming around.
Another refactor sweep from the bottom up is happening, which will make doing what I want to do a LOT easier.
Finally settling into my job and home, and spent my last couple of weeks getting all of this put together.  Should see a lot more updates coming out of me once I get the blog up.  (And hopefully a site to bind it all together...but that's CSS :X)

Still Alive!

Hey everyone,

Acclimating to the job, the location, the apartment, all that jazz.  Getting a schedule, trying to pick up running (which I absolutely hate) so that I can drop some weight this year.  Cause it'll be next year before I know it...and if I spent a whole year running then I'd probably be exactly where I would love to be, and can then focus on the next big thing in my life.

As far as Femtocraft,


It's not much, but it's progress.

Slowly but surely building out the core experience.

My new approach is to start out with the "first steps", off the mod.  Get those implemented, and see what's missing.  Rather than piddle around with all these cool what-ifs.  I've always found it easier to think of new things when I'm building off of existing ones, so right now that's what I"m trying to do.

Also, another approach.  I'm definitely one for the 'functionality first, looks later.'  If you see me post guis or other things up here, and they look awful and bland, chances are ...they are.  I am definitely anticipating, once I have a core, playable experience in, going back and reworking everything.  Making better models, doing better pixelwork, adding in more advanced behavior for machines.

But, first things first - gameplay.

Also -
Thank you all for sticking with it.  There's not much else I can say.  You guys are awesome.