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.