This could be fun, so let's do it.
It might come as a shock, but I'm a fellow who likes to play Minecraft. I've played since back when the addition of the sponge block was the best thing ever. My friends and I would fill up our confined maps with video game sprites and junk, then we'd just start on another one. Compared to Minecraft today, that seems like forever ago.
Back then, I felt like this simple building game had a lot of possibilities, so I started poking at its guts. I learned the communication protocol, and made a simple bot which pretty much did nothing. From there I started writing my own server, with big ideas like having "portals" to other maps so that everyone could have their own space to build in, before dimensions (or even survival) existed. But gradually my friends and I got burned out on the game, so it never really went anywhere.
Long after that, after I actually got into modded Minecraft (a story in itself), I piddled around with trying to make a mod of my own on and off, but it always seemed daunting. You'd find a tutorial for one thing, then you'd realize it was for a different version of Minecraft and now completely irrelevant. I was not only trying to learn Minecraft, but also Forge and FML, as well as concepts related to how MCP worked, while still not completely familiar with Eclipse or even an expert at Java itself. I'd get as far as making a block appear, or add in an item that didn't do anything, then I'd pretty much feel overwhelmed and move on.
It wasn't until I tried to contribute to the BuildCraft project that I felt like I'd accomplished anything with the game. I did a bugfix for that which got accepted, and later tried to submit some things I felt were improvements. Initially it was a quartz fluid pipe, with capacity between stone and gold, which wouldn't connect to gold pipes. Then a change to quartz item pipes to make them accelerate somewhat slower than gold instead of just decelerating like cobble/stone, which also wouldn't connect to gold. Then there was a visual thing to render pipe sleeves on the sides of tanks where pipes connected, so that the air gap wasn't there. Alas, none of those changes got merged. But I learned a lot in the process of doing them, so it wasn't for nothing.
So then I made Hopper Ducts, which was my own basic pipe mod, partially because I wanted to have something simple that I could always update myself whenever Minecraft updated, without needing to wait on the big mods to catch up. Since it was based on something already in the game, it was an easy place to start modding. I wanted something that felt like it could be in vanilla Minecraft, and apparently I succeeded, because lots of people told me that very thing. It was very encouraging, and I was rather pleased to see that people found my simple mod useful.
Not long after, I set out with the goal of making my own redstone wire with Redstone Paste. I felt like every implementation of redstone I'd seen had limitations, and/or came with a larger mod that you don't always need/want. My mind kept going back to Space Station 13, where wires could be placed in four directions on a tile, giving you full control of how you designed your circuit. That game was 2D, however, and Minecraft was an entirely different beast. There were times when I honestly didn't think I could do it. I spent quite a lot of time figuring out how to propagate a redstone signal from any side of the block, to any direction, from around corners, etc. And I spent quite a lot more time figuring out how to interact with individual objects inside of a single block space. Fortunately it wasn't my first foray into things like ray-tracing, or I likely would have given up completely.
By the time I had it ready to release, I was a bit surprised that I'd accomplished my initial goal. I'd even managed to give it a very vanilla feel (despite initially looking like puke when unpowered), and again people appreciated it. It got way more downloads than I ever imagined it would. I see videos from people in languages I don't even understand spotlighting it. Even CaptainSparklez demoed it. I realized more and more what a great community Minecraft has, which just encouraged me to keep improving my mods.
It's also encouraged me to interact a bit more with the community itself, which I'm honestly not sure why I didn't do sooner given how long I've been into mods. I've used FTB quite a bit, run a server using it, and follow things like the Forgecraft streams and Direwolf's videos with folks from here for a while now. So I thought I'd finally check out this community!
And now I've typed way too many things and most of you probably never made it this far, so that's all!
It might come as a shock, but I'm a fellow who likes to play Minecraft. I've played since back when the addition of the sponge block was the best thing ever. My friends and I would fill up our confined maps with video game sprites and junk, then we'd just start on another one. Compared to Minecraft today, that seems like forever ago.
Back then, I felt like this simple building game had a lot of possibilities, so I started poking at its guts. I learned the communication protocol, and made a simple bot which pretty much did nothing. From there I started writing my own server, with big ideas like having "portals" to other maps so that everyone could have their own space to build in, before dimensions (or even survival) existed. But gradually my friends and I got burned out on the game, so it never really went anywhere.
Long after that, after I actually got into modded Minecraft (a story in itself), I piddled around with trying to make a mod of my own on and off, but it always seemed daunting. You'd find a tutorial for one thing, then you'd realize it was for a different version of Minecraft and now completely irrelevant. I was not only trying to learn Minecraft, but also Forge and FML, as well as concepts related to how MCP worked, while still not completely familiar with Eclipse or even an expert at Java itself. I'd get as far as making a block appear, or add in an item that didn't do anything, then I'd pretty much feel overwhelmed and move on.
It wasn't until I tried to contribute to the BuildCraft project that I felt like I'd accomplished anything with the game. I did a bugfix for that which got accepted, and later tried to submit some things I felt were improvements. Initially it was a quartz fluid pipe, with capacity between stone and gold, which wouldn't connect to gold pipes. Then a change to quartz item pipes to make them accelerate somewhat slower than gold instead of just decelerating like cobble/stone, which also wouldn't connect to gold. Then there was a visual thing to render pipe sleeves on the sides of tanks where pipes connected, so that the air gap wasn't there. Alas, none of those changes got merged. But I learned a lot in the process of doing them, so it wasn't for nothing.
So then I made Hopper Ducts, which was my own basic pipe mod, partially because I wanted to have something simple that I could always update myself whenever Minecraft updated, without needing to wait on the big mods to catch up. Since it was based on something already in the game, it was an easy place to start modding. I wanted something that felt like it could be in vanilla Minecraft, and apparently I succeeded, because lots of people told me that very thing. It was very encouraging, and I was rather pleased to see that people found my simple mod useful.
Not long after, I set out with the goal of making my own redstone wire with Redstone Paste. I felt like every implementation of redstone I'd seen had limitations, and/or came with a larger mod that you don't always need/want. My mind kept going back to Space Station 13, where wires could be placed in four directions on a tile, giving you full control of how you designed your circuit. That game was 2D, however, and Minecraft was an entirely different beast. There were times when I honestly didn't think I could do it. I spent quite a lot of time figuring out how to propagate a redstone signal from any side of the block, to any direction, from around corners, etc. And I spent quite a lot more time figuring out how to interact with individual objects inside of a single block space. Fortunately it wasn't my first foray into things like ray-tracing, or I likely would have given up completely.
By the time I had it ready to release, I was a bit surprised that I'd accomplished my initial goal. I'd even managed to give it a very vanilla feel (despite initially looking like puke when unpowered), and again people appreciated it. It got way more downloads than I ever imagined it would. I see videos from people in languages I don't even understand spotlighting it. Even CaptainSparklez demoed it. I realized more and more what a great community Minecraft has, which just encouraged me to keep improving my mods.
It's also encouraged me to interact a bit more with the community itself, which I'm honestly not sure why I didn't do sooner given how long I've been into mods. I've used FTB quite a bit, run a server using it, and follow things like the Forgecraft streams and Direwolf's videos with folks from here for a while now. So I thought I'd finally check out this community!
And now I've typed way too many things and most of you probably never made it this far, so that's all!
