The Unicorn Battle Royale

I needed to fix my mod (Wings, Horns, and Hooves, the Ultimate Unicorn Mod) to work on the Forge Standalone Server. I worked all that out last night, and to test it, I started up a Forge Server and jumped on to play with my son. What happened next was pretty awesome.

Battle Royale

We needed to test out the different magical horse abilities, as well as the magical items that I introduced into the game. The most important things to test included flying, wing buffet attacks, horn charge attacks, and the two wands. In particular, I wanted to test the Wand of Call Lightning, because I'd had to make some non-trivial changes to how it worked.

It wasn't long until we were shooting each other with magic wands, and blowing up horses that happened to be in the blast zone.

Getting hit with my fifth fireball, I decided to take to the air. I hastily equipped my newly-bred alicorn (pegasus with a unicorn horn) with a Diamond Slotted Horse Helm and a Wand of Call Lightning, jumped on, and flew into the sky.

He did the same, and soon we were dogfighting, whirling through the air and calling lightning down in vicious forks.

Flying in from above, I targeted him and called down a mighty lightning bolt on his head. Unfortunately for me, I crossed overhead a half-second later and was struck by the same bolt!

Wheeling, I got him in my sights again, and made the first airborn kill. I watched as his horse flopped lifelessly in the air, dropping him.

But we were in Creative Mode, so he didn't die ... and was soon back in the air, calling lightning down on my head.

It didn't take long until we ran out of mounts. Poor dead horses, you served us well. *sniff*

But this was no time to cease the battle! And that's when I got creative.

Cheat Codes

Using my calculator and my knowledge of my mod, I devised some cheat codes. I wasn't sure they would work, but I tried one out, and it did! Before long, my son and I had spawned 20 to 30 new zebra-skinned flying unicorns, and the battle was back on!

Eventually, the battle wound down and we had to turn in for the night. However, I thought that I should advertise the cheat codes. I've started posting them on their own page, but decided to leave discovering how to make the cheat codes work be an exercise for the player for now. Don't worry. I plan to explain it all in the near future.

Player-Versus-Player (PVP)

Our battle solidified an idea I'd had while creating my mod. Halfway through development of version 1.0, I'd thought, "Hey, this would probably be great for PVP minigames." Having played out our battle royale, it reinforces to me just how fun the mod is when playing in a PVP fashion.

I'm going ahead with future development with this in mind. Expect cool stuff to fight your friends with (and maybe play other cool minigames).

Edit: I realize our battle wasn't technically a "Battle Royale" - you need 3+ contestants for that. Just consider all the dead horses as contestants that didn't win.

Life Lessons and Reminders

As part of the Life Lessons series, it's important to be reminded when those life lessons will be needed.  To help with this problem, with the goal of not missing those critical periods in which each life lesson is relevant, I'll need to do the following:

1.  Figure out the earliest age at which each life lesson is relevant.

2.  Calculate the earliest date, using the answer to #1 and my child's birth date.

3.  Set a reminder that will hit me before the date from #2 arrives.

OK, #1 and #2 are pretty easy.  Technology should be able to help me with #3.

I use GMail, and thought it could send me an E-mail at a future specified time out of the box.  That would be the perfect reminder system, considering that I don't figure I'm guaranteed to be using any particular calendaring system.  However, upon further inspection, I'm not seeing an easy solution.  I see plenty of third-party solutions online, but I'm not interested in giving other companies access to my E-mail, or in paying a fee.

I see that there's a script that will integrate with GMail and Google Spreadsheets to give this kind of control.  I'll check into that, and get back with my solution.

On the Tragedy of Life Lessons

There are many things I want to teach my kids, including life lessons.  Because I am a dad, this should not be surprising.  As I go about my day, it is not unusual for me to think about these life lessons.  However, my kids are still little, and most of the life lessons I think of are beyond their understanding or are otherwise not age-appropriate.

Bummer.

So, I make a mental note to remember to one day tell my kids about how to manage their money, or whatever.  As I do this, a part of my mind screams out.  It says:

"You!  Idiot!  You are going to forget this lesson!  The time will fly by, and the day will pass, and then it will be too late!  If you even remember, your kid will have already been educated by ol' Billy Bonehead, and learned all the wrong things, and good luck unseating all that crap."

And I don't do anything about it, but maybe resolve to really remember.

Double Bummer.  It is tragic, really.

Because I've already forgotten so many of those things.

So, one New Year's Resolution for this year: Write that stuff down.

As I think of them, I'm going to write those life lessons here, mostly to help myself remember them.  It's better than some old notebook, at least.

LEGO Mindstorms and a Dead Robot

An old friend visited the other day.  Like me, he has kids, and is interested in exposing them to toys that breed creativity, especially ones with a technological bent.

In the course of talking about things like Minecraft, LEGOs, and the Hour of Code, I remembered that I had some old LEGO Mindstorms.  I pulled them out, including the robot I'd built a few years back.  Man, it's crazy to think how old these things are.

Sadly, my robot no longer works.  After replacing the battery, I found that there's a problem with the Control Brick.  Apparently, a piece of solder inside the Control Brick has cracked and caused the display to no longer function.  Searching Google, I found that this is a common problem with LEGO Mindstorms NXT V1.0, which is what I have.  I didn't have the time, resources, or gumption to fix the brick then and there.  However, I'm looking at it as a near-term project.  It'll be a good excuse to use the soldering iron, and it's not like I can make it much less useful.

It was a pretty cool little robot, too, even if it wasn't that sophisticated.  It used the sonar sensor to detect walls, back up, and change driving direction in the case that it detected an obstacle.  It also had the ability to back up and change direction if its wheels got caught and bound up in an unseen obstacle.  The sonar sensor was mounted on a motorized swivel, to allow for future expansion, with the idea that it might be able to do some primitive mapping.

All in all, he's a silly little robot, but worth saving, even if it's just to reuse his Command Block.