Devlog

Hey hey,

Once again you may have noticed a flood of notifications with various things getting updated and getting released.

I am pleased to say that we are doing really well with the roadmap thus far. We released the first dungeon last week, released a dungeon this week and we are on track to keep it going. I have also been working in the background, and I think we might keep the ball rolling like this for maybe another month afterwards, but I don't want to promise too much either.

Map updates

With regards to the maps that updated, it was mostly fixes to the world size. You may notice the downloads are much smaller, and this is because Frostcone found a cool tool that allows us to trim the worlds to the size we need them to be and no more. Turns out we had a lot of unnecessary space taken up, especially by older maps. This will matter for the performance of instanced content, and is otherwise just nice to be able to have a reduced map size.

New Sanctum!

You may have also noticed a new sanctum. This is a fun one, it is basically a two-part dungeon where in the first part you are running away from an unkillable boss, and in the second part you find a chamber where it is weakened and you can kill it, while having the size and contents of a full on dungeon, but which players will have to risk a lot to see if they can rush the other bosses down before the unkillable death machine that is chasing them gets to them.

The only reason this model came out so nice is because I was working from a reference

It is also using a bunch of custom models, both for "tnt" (fake tnt players can kill to blow obstacles up) and for the boss itself. The models were made by me (and Frostcone for the TNT block), which means that they are perhaps not the prettiest, but we were (and still are) experimenting with adding them to the maps.

Sus.

Plugin updates

Other than that, MySQL is finally in EliteMobs, something that will make a few people very happy, seemingly. Also brushed up some fixes for FMM related to hitboxes, but nothing major (thought it was a big bug).

I have actually also been working on and coordinating a lot of new things that are not in the roadmap, which I think will be welcome surprises to admins. I don't want to reveal them quite yet though, aside from one big project that I will probably start working on now.

New plugin?

So, this is a bit of a sidetrack from what I wanted to work on this month, but it is simultaneously a problem that I believe is getting worse with each passing day, and that must be solved before I finalize the installation experience for FreeMinecraftModels: managing resource packs sucks.

I have been thinking quite a bit about how to solve this. It is not a trivial problem to resolve, but I think the solution I came up with may be the best option for users, though it may take quite a bit of effort to fully develop.

Announcing Resource Pack Manager

Resource Pack Manager is a standalone plugin I want to create which will be able to do the following:

• Automatically download the official EliteMobs resource pack

• Automatically scan your plugins folder for FreeMinecraftModels, ModelEngine and ItemsAdder, and automatically put their resource packs in the Resource Pack Manager

• Automatically merge all plugins, resolving any conflicts automatically when possible, and notifying admins when the resolution has to be manual

• (Optional) Allow you to place manually any kind of resource pack you want to be merged in

• Automatically converting the final, merged, resource pack into an additional Bedrock-compatible format

• If you are a Patreon supporter, automatically host both the java and the bedrock edition resource packs on a server, and automatically configuring your server to be able to immediately start distributing the resource pack to your clients

• If you are not a supported, you can just go grab the resource pack output and host it yourself

This would solve a lot of headaches. In a perfect world, in the perfect setup, you would be able to get a custom model you like, put it in FreeMinecraftModels, reload FMM and immediately get served an updated resource pack, so the model can immediately work even if you have a custom resource pack for your server and even if you allow bedrock clients.

I will probably be doing some streaming of working on this system over the coming days, if you are interested in dropping by and seeing how miserable I am doing more resource pack work.

I don't quite know how close I will come to this idealized version of the plugin this month; if it is taking too long, I might skip the bedrock conversion part, which I am fairly certain will be the lengthiest part, especially since I have yet to even look at how the bedrock format works (and I'm somewhat hopeful existing open source projects will make it easier).

Anyhow, that's it for now.

Happy escaping from an immortal monster which wants to reap your soul,

• MagmaGuy