Tutorial Series has Begun!

I finally built up the courage (silly I know) to release the first episode of the new tutorial series that goes alongside the genetics map creation.

This first video is a very quick one, that shows you the tools and software you need to start this process.

What I have found most difficult with this series is finding the time to actually create the videos as I want them to be. I have recorded plenty of footage, deliberately without audio. However, editing that footage and writing a script to go along with it is time consuming. Then taking that one step further and recording the narrative, and then aligning the footage to the script takes even longer.

That being said, I think the quality and ease of use of these videos for their intended purpose is much greater than my previously available tutorials. I have had a couple of people view and provide feedback, with a few tweaks having been made before pushing this video live to YouTube.

If you are interested in how I create my maps, or customise Minecraft and bend it to my educational will, follow along with these tutorials as we create the genetics map. Some of the content will not work until M:EE updates to 1.17, but that should be in the next few weeks hopefully. As always if you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to reach out in the comments section below.

Classroom Management Pack 2.0 (for 1.17)

I managed to find some time to revisit an old project of mine and apply new learnings and new features to it. My Classroom Management Pack, which was originally released via my YouTube channel April 2019 and had some 'easy' toggles that allow teachers/players to control certain 'educationally distracting/destructive' items that EE didn't allow fine control of.

I have learnt an awful lot about the backend of Minecraft since 2019, and the update I am working on has features I didn't even think would be possible. The one that I am most proud of is the ability for players to 'set a home' and teleport back to that point from anywhere in the world. They can also pick up their 'home' and re-set it elsewhere. The textures are all temporary, and need a bit of work, but I am very pleased with the basic systems in place. 

  The 'home' is a letterbox (currently textured in pastels) and the 'go home' is the big purple ring on the right side of the screen. As I said, the textures need some work.

Putting in the 'safety' features was a fun problem solving task, and I think I have it so that only the owner of the home point can remove it and teleport to it. There was some pretty neat tricks about making sure the entity knows who it belongs to, and some even neater tricks in the scoreboard to make sure that each player always goes to only their home.

In the middle of writing this I had a brainwave about how to make it even better. Now if a player sets their home, and the home toggle turns off, the home can stay, but cannot be used, and if home is toggled back on, they can go right back to using it.

I do have concerns about lots of students using this in the one world because each home loads a ticking area of 2 chunk radius around it, but we will have to wait and see how EE copes when we get there. Technically there are infinite home points able to set, however I have deliberately limited it so that each player only gets the ability to have one point set at any given time.

I am also considering whether to incorporate multiple models/textures and allow players to swap between them and find something that 'suits them'. This is quite easily doable, but time consuming to create the models and textures, so if you had students who want something in particular, get them to make it and send it my way and I will include it if I get around to adding this feature.

It is now also much easier for users to start using the pack now. In the previous version you had to copy/paste the commands into the command blocks for the controls, but now the common ones are all in-built and no longer require typing in. Any custom controls unfortunately still need to be manually input, but I cannot help that.

I have also fixed, what I guess you would call a bug, that used to wipe all the command blocks when you tried to revisit and adjust or add any commands to the control center. Now that doesn't happen, which is great.

I am considering adding a system so that teachers can 'freeze' a certain student, rather than only the whole class, but I am not exactly sure how useful that would be, and how stable and 'cheatable' it will be. I have a solid setup for it in another project I was working on, so I know I can do it, just a matter of making it as simple as possible for the teacher to actually use. Of course now that I type it out, I have some pretty good usability ideas that would make it easy for teachers, and less likely to be 'cheatable' by students.

If you have used my CMP pack before, and have some ideas of anything else you would like to see added, please let me know in the comments below. Thanks for reading, and the first video of the tutorial series should be out soon, I have the video edited, the script written, now I just have to find the time to record the script and align it to the video. Then onto the rest, I have quite a bit of footage recorded, just no scripts or audio to go with them at this stage.