Thursday 13 June 2019

Genetics Development - Day 2 - Getting it in Minecraft

Day 2 started where day 1 left off. I had packs, I had 4 flies, and now I had to work out how to get the game to render the four different flies. It started with the 4 flies, their models, textures and everything in the right place. I swear it! But no matter how I tried I could not get them to render.

The issue I was having was that the 'render controller' was being 'ignored' by the game. OK, so I had something wrong that meant the mobs would be spawnable, but have no geometry or texture. They did however cast a shadow! Which, given that I usually have issues even getting the spawning to happen was a step up from my normal first attempt at packs.

One thing I noticed was that there was a way of calling multiple geometries, and I had the example from the sheep mob to look at, but is used a 'set' data point, and I still don't know how to add my own 'conditions' to entities and call them out later for use.

So, I also had things like horses, who have multiple textures, but the one geometry, and I spent about 5 more hours trying to figure out how to 'merge' the two magics into one render controller. The really unfortunate thing, is there is zero 'clear' documentation on how anything works. There is plenty of documentation, but nothing that directly applies to me, and I have to try and stitch together breadcrumbs from about 4 different official Minecraft web pages into some form of coherence that both I and Minecraft can make sense of.

The big issue I have is that Minecraft doesn't really throw errors at you. Things just don't work, it ignores them, and continues doing what it does. It wasn't until I started making Minecraft actually crash that I felt that I was making progress.

After about another 4 hours work, I finally got all 4 flies to render in the game, based on different geometries, and textures, that I could 'call' upon when I needed it. Sadly it turns out that I had everything pretty much right at the start, only I was missing one, apparently, very important set of [] in the render controller. Oh well, 3 hours 'wasted' but not really, because I learned a lot!

So, this is where I ended day 2, another late night/early morning and bed at 1am!


Thanks for reading, feel free to leave a comment below.

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