Hello, folks. Been quite awhile since this mod was updated, and - at this point in my life - I think it's time to admit that I'm not coming back to it.
Don't get me wrong, it was fun while it lasted. The modding community in Minecraft, though, is... difficult, at the best of times, and trying to keep up with all the madness that was Forge back in the day was tiring.
Some of you, over the years, mentioned the possibility of me posting the code somewhere, or making it "open source," as it were. I resisted, sometimes vehemently, and it is only now that I'll tell you why.
I don't believe in open source.
That probably sounds bizarre, coming from someone whose first real programming project of any merit was this: a mod to a game that was "sort of" open source (ah, the days of helping in deobfuscating Notch's code... good times). But I really simply don't believe in the idea of giving up creative control over something because of some weird ideology: at the end of the day, I really do believe in capitalism, and open source sort of flies in the face of that.
Now, you may say, "But GnomeWorks, you gave your mod away for free. You never even implemented any of those weird 'look at an ad for 5 seconds before you can download my stuff' thing, and were also vehemently against those! So what gives?" The answer is that this project was intended as a way for me to hone my craft. That other people could use it and give me feedback was payment enough: the apprentice does not - and should not - expect to be paid for his efforts, save in the form of appreciation from those who receive his work (or their criticism - but that, too, is appreciation of a kind).
Some have lamented the lapse of this mod from the community, and I know that nothing could ever quite take its place: there are some who tried, and I'm sure they were successful in their own way. But Dungeon Mobs was special, in that I had a very specific philosophy and very specific design approach in mind, throughout the entirety of the mod. Other monster mods had - and still perhaps to this day, retain - a sort of weird thing about adding in a bunch of superfluous nonsense, items and pets and dimensions and... ugh.
The engineer knows his work is done not when there is nothing left to add, but nothing left to take away. I was very cautious about what mobs I added, and even kept a list of future plans: alas, it is likely now that few of those will ever see fruition, if any.
And so, here is my final gift to the Minecraft community: what was to be Dungeon Mobs v4.2.0, which includes the beamos monster, which was teased a few years ago. I never did get it working properly, but I don't want to go through all the noise with Forge and such of getting a Java development environment for Minecraft set up on this machine, so... you'll have to slog through it. Should be fairly simple to at least comment it out, if you know what you're doing: or, if you're feeling real gutsy, go ahead and try to figure out how to make it work (pro tip: don't attempt to work out whether or not the beamos is looking at a player based on its rotation angle, there's a client/server divide there, which is what eventually made me give up on this incarnation of the beamos on a HD that crashed).
Well... there it is, then. It's been a fun ride, and maybe someone out there will pick this up and run with it.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.