Hippocamps and Seeing Underwater

Now that version 1.4.1 is out, riding a hippocamp lets you see underwater.  This works even in the dark, because the way I currently have it implemented, going underwater while riding a hippocamp triggers the Night Vision potion effect.

Special thanks go out to Adrian, who suggested I add the Night Vision potion effect to a hippocamp's rider.  It's a nice, easy solution to a problem that others had discovered while using the hipppcamp's otherwise awesome ability to let you explore underwater!

Even though giving the rider Night Vision is a nice way to solve a tricky problem, it still feels a little hacky to me.  The potion effect doesn't turn off right away, and it flashes the screen annoyingly when it does start to wear off (at least I think it's annoying).  Writing code to turn it off immediately when you come out of water is kind of complex, and may result in turning off legitimate uses of Night Vision potions, so I haven't done it yet.

The main problem is that the Minecraft code is written in such a way as there's no easy, central place to change the code so that it provides the Night Vision effect, without also changing core Minecraft classes.  For now, I'm avoiding changing core classes, just because it increases the likelihood that The Ultimate Unicorn Mod will break something when used with other mods.  Things break often enough with other mods that don't play nice, so I want to make sure to play nice! :)

I'll keep thinking about it, and if I come up with a better way to let players see underwater, I'll jump at it.  For now, though, this is a pretty good solution.

If you have any ideas, feel free to let me know in the comments!

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.

Wings, Horns, and Hooves, the Ultimate Unicorn Mod (for Minecraft)

My latest project has been to create a Minecraft mod using the handy Minecraft Forge mod toolkit and loader. I sort of started with a scattershot approach, making items, some new block types, and a new dimension.

Then my kid said, "Hey Dad, can you make a Unicorn mod?"

And I said, "You bet I can."

After going for a few weeks, I thought to myself, "Erg, I should check to see if there are unicorn mods out there already." Sure enough, there were.

So I differentiated mine.

Two months later, I have released my mod, and I admit to being proud of it. It's called Wings, Horns, and Hooves, the Ultimate Unicorn Mod and you can get it at CurseForge.

The mod features four new magical horse types (Unicorn, Pegasus, Nightmare, and Destrier) and a bunch of new specialized equipment for them. They have their own behaviors, they can interbreed, and there are a bunch of secrets you can discover. The secrets include one secret magic item, five secret special horse types you can find through the breeding process, and an easter egg or two. Over the next few weeks I'll document all of these secrets, but until then I'll leave them for others to find!

Oh yeah, there is also a cool magical horse customization option.

I haven't quite finished the documentation part of the project, but I'm getting there. You can find out a lot more at the following links:

Overview
Magic Items
Crafting Recipes
Breeding Guide
Cheats
Make your Own custom Horse
Custom Horse Hall of Fame

Finally, a Use for My iPad - Codea!

I discovered Codea a week ago, and have finally found a use for my iPad.

For those of you who don't know what Codea is, here's the low-down:

Codea is a $10 iPad app made by Two Lives Left that lets you program on the iPad in the LUA programming language.  Codea provides lots of handy features, libraries, and examples to make game programming easy and quick.  You can find out more here: http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/

It's pretty darn cool, and I've been having a lot of fun with it.  Just downloading the app and installing it on my kid's iPad nabbed him a few hours of entertainment playing (and mucking with the code for) the example games.  It's enough to make a dad think that he might just succeed in turning his son into a code slinger.  In fact, a day later he said, "I want to be a coder, like Dad."  Awesome!

I haven't done a whole lot with Codea yet.  I've done my own experimenting with the different example game projects.  I have an idea regarding an example game that came with Codea.  It's an anagram game that involves unscrambling words from a given word list.  My idea is to turn it into a full-fledged spelling game that I can load with my kid's weekly spelling words.  I've taken the first step toward that goal in making the game download new word lists using an HTTP request instead of using a hard-coded list.  Pretty awesome feeling, just making that simple change.

I've also started a simple game project that allows the user to navigate a character around an empty field and shoot at enemies that spawn in random locations.  We'll see where that goes.  Even something as simple as this is enough to entertain my kid for a little bit, though.  And being able to tell him, "I did that today," is pretty cool.

Not sure where this will go, but I'm having fun.  Could it intersect with my bot programming project?  I don't know, but it's definitely a possibility.