Flower's Dev Diary (Week of December 17th)

[FlowerChild]

Another week, another round of feature development (or in this case...not) :)

As always, rules for this thread:

-DO NOT post suggestions.
-DO NOT critique unreleased features. Wait until you've had a chance to try them before passing judgement.

With that out of the way:

I figured I'd start of this weeks dev diary with my regular in-game screenshot. Given it's thematically appropriate, this time I've decided to post a screen of one of my favorite in-game activities, which makes good use of Hardcore Melons in the process:

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I think the above pretty much sums up the last week :)

Beyond that though, I find myself having attained a certain level of detachment over the whole affair. I'm just as determined as ever mind you, but I think it's finally set in with me that this is going to be a *looooooong* battle, and thus I need to calm the fuck down, take a long-term view on this, and get back to living.

And for me, living involves a large amount of modding MC ;)

So, I'm slowly getting back to picking up where I left off a week ago: wrapping up BTW with the goal of moving my development focus largely over to RTH.

I had previously been planning to release the "final" version of BTW on Dec 21st, for obvious reasons. Unfortunately though, having lost the last week of development, I have to now accept there's no way that's happening, so I'm going to shoot instead for sometime around the New Year (chaos gods willing).

And with that goal in mind, I think this week I'm going to start by slowly easing back in by working on a few lingering hooks that I want to get in for add-on authors, probably starting with the Saw this evening (so that they can implement custom code for Sawing their own blocks). As I've mentioned in the past, I need far less concentration to do straight out programming "grunt work" than in implementing and balancing new content, so I figure that's a good place for me to start up again and get back in the swing of things.

After that, I'm planning on wrapping up a few more aesthetic features I started in on last week, and then am intending to go on a bug-fixing rampage to get the existing mod into a state where I can consider it "final" in that regard.

Once that's done, I'll be looking into the elements that finalize the "story" aspect of BTW to put a period on the end of the sentence, but that will more likely be the topic of next week's dev diary, rather than this one ;)

And with that...keep on fighting the good fight, and I'll keep on keeping on :)

[BlackCat]

Neat, glad you're finally going to be able to get more work done, hope you start feeling a bit less stressed soon.

[dawnraider]

Glad to hear you are able to return to work on the mod after all this BS going on. I just hope it blows over and you can keep powering on to RTH. Keep up the great work!

[Mikko_blu]

Yay! hopefully we get the finalized versin by new years!
I'm super anxious to play RTH!

We'll all keep supporting you, no matter what, but it is hard to keep fighting when the mods keep removing banners and giving infractions. Will they ever cease?

[FaceFoiled]

That head! That gave me a good crackle. :) Also, Happy holidays! ;)

[EpicAaron]

Oh boy, can't wait until next week! The story has always facinated me. Thanks for everything! You have my support.

[FlowerChild]

That head! That gave me a good crackle. :) Also, Happy holidays! ;)

;)

Glad someone caught that :)

[dawnraider]

That head! That gave me a good crackle. :) Also, Happy holidays! ;)

Oh, that's what it is! I figured it was a head, I just didn't know whose ;) One question: How'd you get that? Did you personally invite him onto your world and then proceed to slaughter him with a battleaxe? (As entertaining as that would be, it is probably not what happened ;) Happy holidays from me as well!

[The Lord of Brick]

Hmmmm...

Is that an archery range with a human head as the 10 point target?

If so, I love it.
If not, I still love it. :D

[dawnraider]

Hmmmm...

Is that an archery range with a human head as the 10 point target?

If so, I love it.
If not, I still love it. :D

Think of who that 'human' is. And yes, I believe it is :)

[ada221]

Once that's done, I'll be looking into the elements that finalize the "story" aspect of BTW to put a period on the end of the sentence

I think the proverbial semi-colon would be more appropriate haha.

(because A: in my opinion I will see the two mods as a proverbial compound-complex sentence. and B: lines of code ending in semi-colons.)

[Gears]

That head! That gave me a good crackle. :) Also, Happy holidays! ;)

;)

Glad someone caught that :)

We've all wanted to shoot LexManos, flowerchild. You just turned it into a game as well as a way to blow off steam.

Personally he's been bugging the fuck outta me since Forge made its own modloader, and this whole BWF thing is getting out of control.

[Ethinolicbob]

Nice one bud.
I always look forward to your dev diarys.
Better not forget to take out the test recipe to craft that head out of the game before release, because if everyone could somehow reproduce it... well wouldn't that be terrible.
Such a thing could so easily happen, forgetting to comment out a line.
Especially with you know, the claimed quality of your code.

[FlowerChild]

Nice one bud.
I always look forward to your dev diarys.
Better not forget to take out the test recipe to craft that head out of the game before release, because if everyone could somehow reproduce it... well wouldn't that be terrible.
Such a thing could so easily happen, forgetting to comment out a line.
Especially with you know, the claimed quality of your code.

Lol...now now, don't get carried away ;)

Actually, I just reassigned my player name through MCP. That way, even the process of killing myself to collect my own head became enjoyable :)

[Ethinolicbob]

Hah nice one.
I'm pretty jealous of the amount of time you can get to do this kind of stuff.
After work and being domestic I barely can get a moment in before I need to recharge on that.... sleep thing.
I find it pretty great when I can get to code enough to figure out it wont work, and put a note down for the next day as to what my thought process was at that particular point in time.
If I had your time and experience... I could sure do... something...
Well anyway, goodluck on getting through that grunt work, keep on keeping on and all that.

[FlowerChild]

Yay! New Saw hooks are complete and working fine. I've converted a number of existing blocks over to them as well to act as test cases and help to clean up the saw code in the process. Of course, as per my statements earlier today, I didn't convert *all* the existing blocks to the new system because, well...then I'd be wanking ;)

Should be super simple for add-on authors to add in custom interactions between their blocks and the Saw though.

Anyways, just a very small thing, but considering it's the first addition to the mod in just over a week, it sure did feel good to be back on that horse :)

[Elensaar]

Yay! A new dev diary! :) Always enjoy getting a glimpse of your process. I hope the battle won't be as long as you fear, but we'll keep supporting you no matter.

And congrats on getting the Saw hooks up and running. :) Finishing a bit of code after being stuck for a while (not necessarily because of the code itself, as the situation of the last few days exemplifies) feels quite good, doesn't it? :)

[FlowerChild]

And congrats on getting the Saw hooks up and running. :) Finishing a bit of code after being stuck for a while (not necessarily because of the code itself, as the situation of the last few days exemplifies) feels quite good, doesn't it? :)

Yes it does :)

<dances>

[odranoel]

congrats on getting back to what you love. and while of course the shit storm may be far from over, never forget that revenge is a dish best served cold ;)

[Extreme Boyheat]

Have had this awful toothache all day, but once I noticed that head filled with arrows it certainly numbed the pain.
Good to see you're trucking along after recent events. :)
Can't wait for you to tease us with subtle hints of what's planned in the future. ;)

[SterlingRed]

I'm glad you've been able to get back to that happy coding/design place man!
Haha I've often considered running myself through my mob farm to get my own head. Never considered renaming me and trying to get someone else's. That's pretty clever.

[FlowerChild]

Just a little bit of news. Some of you may have seen Kahr, the author of MCPatcher, pop up in the MCF btw thread the other days asking for a hook for stoked fire.

I took care of that earlier today, refactoring the stoked fire code to take into account variable texture sizes, and sent him along an advanced copy of the code to see if it met his needs.

Anyways, he just sent me the following screenshot indicating that it indeed does:

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I'll likely make additional changes to the regular fire code in the future so that it will generate its texture based on the stoked one if it's sitting on top of stoked, to get rid of those seams, but regardless, just a small bit of good news for MCPatcher users :)

[FlowerChild]

Oh, and I also just slipped in that change to ice with Hardcore Buckets enabled that I mentioned over on MCF.

Basic idea is that ice blocks track whether they were formed out of naturally occurring source blocks, or whether they were previously moved. This way, you won't get those unsightly holes in your lakes when you break the ice, while still not allowing moving of water sources through transporting ice.

I know at least a few people were looking forward to that change, so just wanted to mention that I got it into the upcoming release.

[BlackCat]

You are a machine.
*claps slowly*

But in all seriousness, you really do amaze me with your unrelenting dedication.

[FlowerChild]

You are a machine.
*claps slowly*

But in all seriousness, you really do amaze me with your unrelenting dedication.

Thanks man. It's been a very slow past couple of weeks for the mod's development due to all the chaos going on, but I do seem to be getting back on the horse nicely ;)

Going to try push through the update to 1.4.6 now. I just wanted to take care of those couple of things first, while I still knew I was working with a stable code base.