Saturday, July 25, 2015

Poll: Your Most Requested Feature

What new feature would you like to see most in the Ultimate Unicorn Mod?

If you chose the "Something Else Entirely" option, let us know what you'd like to see in the comments!

Thursday, July 23, 2015

Unicorn News

Wings, Horns, and Hooves: The Ultimate Unicorn Mod passed 4000 downloads just the other day.  It's been out for 1.5 months now, so I consider that a great start.

In that time, we've included some great custom unicorns, fixed a lot of bugs, and added some new features.  You can see the custom unicorns in the Hall of Fame, and I recommend that you make one yourself.  It's a really cool way to get your own unique piece of a Minecraft mod that you can show off to your friends.

Wand of Dropsies

Among those new features is a new wand, the Wand of Dropsies.  This odd wand can be used to knock an item right out of your opponent's hand.  Is your mortal enemy trying to blast you out of the sky with his Wand of Call Lightning?  Target him with the Wand of Dropsies and watch him fumble his wand onto the ground!  Then grab it for yourself!

(For my non-English speaking friends using a translator on this page, "Wand of Dropsies" = "Wand of Dropping").

New Configuration Screen

We added a new configuration screen, so you can modify how often unicorns, pegasi, destriers, and nightmares spawn in your world.  There's also a handy config option to change what these mobs are named, in case you run a lot of mods and have name conflicts.  There's an automatic backup name for each mob type that is used if there is a conflict already, and you can see that in the config screen.

Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Demo at GameStart!

Today I demoed the Ultimate Unicorn Mod at the GameStart game programming school in Ann Arbor.  I've taken the kids to events GameStart has held in the past, and even enrolled my oldest in one of their Minecraft programming classes. It was a ton of fun for him, and a great learning experience.

After mentioning the mod to one of the teachers at GameStart, he invited me to give a demo, which seemed like a fun idea to me.  He even invited my son along, as well.

The Demo

I showed off the big features of the Ultimate Unicorn Mod, including all four horse types, and cross-breeding them to get even cooler magical horses.  One student asked, "Are there alicorns?" and I was happy to be able to say, "Yes there are," and bred one to show her.

Showing off the Pegasus flying was really well received, and the students also enjoyed seeing the Destrier bust down trees and pieces of the landscape.  My son, acting as my assistant, introduced the horses and their abilities, and I could tell he was getting a kick out of his first presentation.

The students also liked seeing the Wand of Call Lightning, especially when I equipped my unicorn with a slotted horse helm, stuck the wand in the horn slot, and commanded the horse to start blasting away.

One big highlight was when a knowledgeable student informed me that he had already seen my mod!  The main mod showcase that I've seen was by ManuCraft, and it's in Spanish, so I really didn't think US people (especially the small sampling of kids in this class!) had had a chance to find out about my mod.  Well, he told me he'd seen it in a YouTube video by a guy named Think Noodles.  I went searching later, and sure enough, the YouTube video exists!

I even received a programming question, which is always awesome.  A student asked me how I made the Pegasus wings look so great.  I answered honestly, and told her I'd copied some of the existing Ender Dragon wing animation code, and then modified it to suit my purposes.  I used my own textures for the wings.

Finally, near the end of the demo, a student asked me what my favorite magical horse was.  That's a tough question.  I could have gone with one of the custom horses, but I decided that I had to choose Rainbow Smash (you can see a picture of him here).  So many of the custom horses look great (and have cool powers to boot), and I like all of the Ultimate Unicorn mutant breeds, but I knew when I was designing Rainbow Smash that he just had something extra special over the other Ultimate Unicorns (sorry guys!).

Giving the demo was a wonderful experience.  Thank you, GameStart (and Jake, Connor, and Nate!), for giving me (and my son) the opportunity!  And thank you to all the GameStart students - I couldn't have asked for a better audience! 

Future Demos Welcome

I'm always happy to give a demo of any software I've worked on, and I'm especially proud of Wings, Horns, and Hooves: the Ultimate Unicorn Mod.  If you have an event you'd like me to talk about the mod, or some of the code that goes into it, contact me here in a comment, through the project site at CurseForge, or through Google Plus. 

Saturday, July 4, 2015

Custom Horses

Since launch, we've had a few Custom Unicorns designed and included in the mod.  You can see the entire list in the Hall of Fame.

I thought it would be cool to show some in-game pictures of some of these new custom designs.  Being able to create your own horse design, including choosing magical powers for it, is one of the coolest features of this mod.

Every time I launch Minecraft with a new set of custom horse designs, I can't help but to check them all out and see how great they look.  I imagine it must be even more fun for the people who have created them, especially knowing that all their friends can also load up that same design, even in multiplayer, even when playing on a server.

Here are a few of the new designs:

Khryseis

Evil Diamond

Shadowmere

And here are a few pictures of the new horse inventory screen, which displays each custom unicorn's magic powers and currently active magic effects.



You can design your own custom unicorn here!

State of the Ultimate Unicorn Contest

The "Find the Ultimate Unicorns" Contest continues, but there are only 2 secret horse breeds remaining to be found. People have found the following:

The contest has ended, as all secret horses have been found! Thanks to all who participated!


  • Zebra - Having no special traits (horn, wings, big size, etc.) causes this mutation to happen.

  • Red-winged Blackbird - Horn, wings (big or tiny), big size, and flaming hooves cause the Destrier hide gene to mutate to the Red-winged Blackbird hide gene.


  • Rainbow Smash - Horn, wings (big or tiny), big size, and flaming hooves cause the Unicorn hide gene to mutate to the Rainbow Smash hide gene.




The remaining two mutant breeds work just like the Red-winged Blackbird and Rainbow Smash breeds - except they mutate the Nightmare and Pegasus hide genes.

That's two more prizes remaining! Good luck!

Friday, July 3, 2015

Ultimate Unicorn Mod 1.1.1, now for 1.7.10!

Finished up and released version 1.1.1 of the Wings, Horns, and Hooves Ultimate Unicorn Mod early this morning.

The big news is that the porting to 1.7.10 is done, so lots of people can use it with their mods for that version.

Changes

There were other minor updates I put in, mostly tweaks to custom horse powers and bug fixes. I also made it so magical horses can breed with normal horses (and anything that subclasses them). In that case, the baby is a magical horse with the same DNA as its magical horse parent. This could be a useful way to clone your cool magical horses.

Update-Checking

I also added an update-checking mechanism, which is super important. Now, when I put out a new version of the mod, anyone who is using that mod can get a subtle notification that there's an update available.

New Custom Unicorns

Some neat new custom unicorns were added in this release as well, most notably the latest winners of the "Find the Ultimate Unicorns Contest". Go check them out in the Hall of Fame!

Get It!

Go get the mod here!