Quick update

Hello everyone,

February was a crazy month for me. A lot happened at a personal level (nothing bad), but that's not what I wish to share here.

Instead, I want to talk about what we've been working on.

Item models

First of all, you can see in the images of this post a bunch of mysterious weapons. Or, perhaps, you used your powers of deduction to realize that these are the community-funded models for EliteMobs!

These items will be used for the different tiers, and I hope that they are just a sample of what is to come. Ideally we would have a total of 19 sets, of which we now have 5.

Without getting into too much detail, these models will be used automatically per EliteMobs item tier. The details of how this will work will actually soon be voted for by you, and you can expect details on that really soon.

For now, though, if you think these models look awesome and think that the concept of having items per tier for EliteMobs is equally awesome, you can read about that here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/community-for-96516835 

I hope to be making a video about this real soon.

Documentation

Moving on, we have kept working on documentation. Aside from general website tweaks, Frostcone has been hard at work making sure that we are providing images, gifs and examples in large amounts for the features we documented to try to make the documentation as easy as possible to follow.

Contest

Now that the documentation is mostly done, I plan to run a community contest with a small prize pool to encourage people to create their own content! I will be writing a full post with the rules and the prizes probably this weekend.

EliteMobs

EliteMobs has an experimental build currently out that reworks quite a lot about how instanced dungeons work, plus quite a few other things. This seems stable, so I plan to release it soon.

Further, Dali_ has continued working on a new map, which I think will be quite nice.

I am hoping that we will be able to release some new content this month for EliteMobs, continuing the story-mode dungeons, if things go smoothly.

FreeMinecraftModels

FreeMinecraftModels have been the thorn in my side this month. I want to take this plugin to the next level, and that involved hitting a few goals - making the entities fully async (done), making them packet-based (done) and prioritizing the use of display entities over armor stands where possible (uh oh).

My goal is to create a system that is also able to automatically detect bedrock vs non-bedrock clients to serve either armor stand entities or display entities, depending on client-side availability.

Ultimately this is all to serve the purpose of not only improving the accuracy and performance of the system but also allowing me to create more complex features out of it. A prototype mount system has already been created, and one of the first things I want to do with it is create a decoration system.

This system has been the thing that has delayed me the most this month, as every time I thought it was nearly done I turned out to be hopelessly wrong.

Ultimately, in order to get display entities to work alongside armor stand entities, a deeper rewrite than what I had initially hoped for turned out to be necessary, as I ultimately ended up finding out today.

Fortunately, now that I fully understand the scope of the problem, rewriting it should (hopefully) not take more than a few days.

Further, I've been talking to the modeler, and we have sorted out some of the details of how we might be doing content packages for FMM in the future. We're considering doing packs of 50 props, with one free and one premium at launch, as I usually do. Unfortunately we're still very early into this so I don't have any good images to show for it, but we'll be doing prop packs based on themes.

To avoid getting too ahead of myself, I'll just leave you with that as a teaser.

So, there you go. We have a lot of good stuff in the pipeline, and we're working hard to get it out for you! You can expect to hear from me quite a lot this month.

Happy adventuring,

- MagmaGuy