[1.14.4 ?] planning and progress

[lehjr]

I've decided to skip 1.13.2 and go to 1.14.2 1.14.4. As always, there will be some changes to the mod due to changes in Minecraft and Forge.

• Modules will be items and install costs will be replaced with crafting recipes. This change has been a long time coming, but will likely be needed unless manual texture registering becomes available again. For now, the only way to get an icon into the texture atlas is to have it bound to an item.

• External mod support modules will likely be external addons due to the lack of the @Optional annotation and the interface and method stripping that went with it. I MIGHT not to do this. I was hoping to not do things half-assed and just extend items where needed instead of having to wrap individual methods in reflection.

• Armor model customization is still an unknown. Currently custom model loading is possible by manually loading and baking models. But again, the texture registration isn't available, so they are displayed with the "missing texture". No longer an issue. Everything is now working or working with a few bugs here and there.

• Armor, energy storage, and energy generation modules will be limited to one per armor piece. The armor and power fist may end up becoming tiered with built in energy storage. I haven't decided yet. Yeah, no, not happening.

• The cooling systems will change, there will be a fluid tank module and a cooling system module that will optionally use fluid from that. Yeah, no, not happening. On the other hand, I will likely add a GUI for filling the advanced cooling module.

• I will be using my own repo for both Numina and MPS for 1.14.2 and beyond due to the inability to set default branches. it's not critical, but it's an annoyance I've dealt with for over 3 years now. It's time.

• I've set up a Patreon basically to support development because at the current combined average of about $10 monthly for both MPS and Numina, I cannot even offset the cost of the electricity I use for mod development and maintenance on what I get from CurseForge rewards. That's on top of how hard it has gotten to redeem those rewards. As such, it's unlikely that I will be pushing the mod to CurseForge beyond the current Minecraft version. It's just not worth me checking every single day whether or not CurseForge has restocked their gift cards so I can cash in the points that I've been accumulating for months because they still have not restocked. And I hate to say it, but the future of the mod is going to depend heavily on that Patreon. I'm not trying to get rich but I would actually lose less money by just laying in bed and breathing oxygen than I do constantly working on this mod.

I'll update this as time goes on...

[lehjr]

Yes. There have been other recent attempts like Nova, Rift, and now Fabric.

Among other things, Nova was supposed to replace the need for porting a mod from one version of Minecraft to the next. What makes that ironic is it being a Calclavia project, especially since he couldn't even maintain compatibility between his mod release on the same version of Minecraft.

Rift was created for 1.13.x mainly because Forge development was taking forever, largely because of a massive cleanup effort, that and waiting for certain people to finish certain things.

Fabric is basically a 1.14.x successor to Rift with what's been described as an "everything is a coremod" approach.

[lehjr]

The 1.12.2 backport of MPA-Lib and the 1.12.2 side port of MPS to use MPA-Lib are both almost finished. The backport of MPA will take a bit longer due to the need to create recipes for the modules.

[lehjr]

1.12.2 backport of MPA-Lib is done and up. I have a test build for MPS done, but I haven't uploaded it yet. I will be working on MPS2MPA this weekend as well as MPA-RecipeCreator.

MPS2MPA will be a mod for turning MPS items into MPA items, a small 1.12.2 only mod. MPA-RecipeCreator will be a utility mod for creating recipes for MPA, and will help me get MPA out much sooner. This one will be used for future versions.

[lehjr]

The recipe creator is coming along. I started with this mod which hasn't been updated in a long time: https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/minetweaker-recipemaker Basically, the GUI design wasn't horrible, but used all MInecraft controls and elements and limitations, so I've been editing it to use the MPS/MPS styling and filling in the gaps by creating new controls and elements. So far it looks like this: .

[eyeonus]

I remember using that in my games before. It's pretty decent.

[lehjr]

The basic GUI work is about 80% finished. I still need to write the code that turns the recipe into a json file, but that’s the easy part. The up side of this is that porting this to 1.14.4 is pretty trivial. The GUI probably won’t get the kind of polish that MPS or MPA got, only because this is a pretty limited purpose tool, mainly for me to create the missing module recipes, but also for server admins and mod pack authors to create their own customized recipes.

[lehjr]

Ok, so a little update, since it's been awhile. I'm still working on that recipe creator tool.. yeah, still, and still on 1.12.2. I've slimmed down the GUI so it only has elements that are relative to the mod. So that part is all done. The only thing is left is to finish the JSON parts of it, where it displays the recipe in a scrollable frame, and then writes it to a file when finished.

Once that's finished, I will be porting some updates to MPA-Lib for 1.14.44, and working on the next update of MPA. Unfortunately, I don't know how much I will be able to do in 1.12.2, since Forge has recently ended support for it. A recent update in OpenJDK has broken it, and I've had to install an older, unsecure version as a work around. On the other hand, they've given 1.14.4 LTS support, which is kind of a first, at least officially. I think there I'll finally be able to implement some of the things from earlier wish lists.

[EzerArch]

Hey, let me ask you a thing: should we better follow this repo or the https://github.com/lehjr/ModularPowerArmor?

---

(BTW https://twitter.com/EzerArch/status/1224698072871198720)

[lehjr]

Thanks! For now, I'll probably just post here until the mod is closer to a beta or release state.

I've decided to just move the development of the recipe creator to 1.14.4 due to issues with older Forge gradle and Java 8. On the plus side, this means I'll be back to working on the mod itself sooner rather than later. The downside is it means I probably won't be putting much more effort into anything older unless those versions are fixed to work with Forge Gradle 3.

[lehjr]

1.14.4 progress for the recipe creator:

• The conditions don't work yet since I still need to come up with a way to access the "data" folder because recipes are no longer located in the assets folder.
• The Oredict code still needs a bit of work moving over to the new tags system.
• The checkboxes aren't rendering quite right (line width of the border).
• I still need to finish the display box on the bottom.
• The display box for the selected slot needs to have the text moved to the left
• The code for saving the file needs to be finished
• I need to write a "transfer plugin" for JEI to get the JEI overlay to show
• anyway, this is what it looks like so far:

[lehjr]

Sadly, after spending the entire day figuring out how to load the conditions from MPA into MPA Recipe Creator, it looks like none of the conditions regarding other mods will be of any use anyway, since the other mods have yet to update or have gone to Fabric and cannot be loaded with Forge. I'll finish it up anyway, since it may someday be of use.

[lehjr]

I'm currently testing the mod in 1.14.4 to see what it is at and what it needs. One thing I did notice is that a lot of mods seem to have already gone to 1.15.2. I don't know if I should finish up 1.14.4 and then go to 1.15.2, or if I should just start now. I'm not even sure what the changes are yet, so it might not be that difficult.

[lehjr]

Recipe creator is pretty much done. It's not perfect, but it will get the job done.

{
  "result": {
    "item": "modularpowerarmor:component_wiring",
    "count": 8
  },
  "conditions": [
    {
      "type": "forge:mod_loaded",
      "modid": "centralizedmaterials"
    }
  ],
  "type": "minecraft:crafting_shaped",
  "mirrored": true,
  "pattern": [
    "   ",
    "FOF",
    "   "
  ],
  "key": {
    "F": {
      "tag": "forge:ingots/copper"
    },
    "O": {
      "tag": "forge:dusts/redstone"
    }
  }
}

[lehjr]

So far I've got quite a few bugs fixed and quite a few things working. I will be making some changes before the next release.

• The first of change is I'm going to be dropping a few of the components only because they are redundant and confusing. Those would be the capacitors, and the armor plating. So now the plating modules and batteries will be directly crafted rather than having an intermediate step.

• I will also be dropping the ore scanner. Unfortunately, it does not look like Scannable will ever be officially updated and I just don't have the time or skill to do a fully working update.

• Cooling will probably be similar to 1.7.10 with a single cooling system module, and a water tank module.

• The vein miner module will be rewritten so that it doesn't rely on Mekanism or any other mod.

• The heat generator will probably be disabled since there currently isn't any way to block specific types of damage at the moment.

That's pretty much it for now.

[lehjr]

vein mining now no longer depends on outside mods.

[lehjr]

Was hoping to have another alpha out this past weekend, but there are a couple broken modules that need to be fixed first, the raigun which currently does no damage, and the diamond drill upgrade module which does not work. A fix for the railgun is in progress, but not finished. The diamond drill upgrade might be dropped and just do the same level of mining with the pickaxe module... just change the recipe to reflect the change. I'm not sure yet.

[EzerArch]

Another video with MPS + other mods, this time with Elytra on 1.12.2:

https://youtu.be/OvpAcf8baF0

To be able to use the elytra, I have to take the chest piece off. Since there's the Glider module, it could emulate the elytra in the new version, couldn't it?

[lehjr]

Elytra behavior is hard coded in vanilla and still requires core modding. It’s not impossible, it’s just a bit lower on the priority list. It’s on the list, just not at the top.

[lehjr]

Another video with MPS + other mods, this time with Elytra on 1.12.2:

https://youtu.be/OvpAcf8baF0

To be able to use the elytra, I have to take the chest piece off. Since there's the Glider module, it could emulate the elytra in the new version, couldn't it?

Looks like Elytra flight should finally be relatively simple to implement without a bunch of hackery.