Dragoness Eclectic's Journal

Standards or lack thereof

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 18:46:43 GMT

The more I work with ad-hoc APIs, the more I appreciate formal, written standards. Means code doesn't break because some dev suddenly decides it would be more aesthetic to re-arrange the order of parameters in an API call in the newest version. With a standard: forty-year-old C code will compile and run just fine as long as it follows one of the international standards the compiler recognizes. Without a standard: yesterday's Minecraft mods may be broken because some dev decided to re-arrange the terrain generation code overnight.

I have encountered both situations. There's a lot of open-source devs out there that don't seem to understand that an API (Application Programming Interface) is supposed to be a STABLE interface to back-end code; you can re-arrange the back-end code to suit, but the interface (API) is supposed to remain the same.

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And more programming stuff..

Wed, 20 May 2020 02:05:13 GMT

So "WeatherMaker", the old command-line tool for generating D&D weather reports, has now been cleaned up and made to compile under a semi-modern C++ compiler. I've posted the source code to GitHub, and released both a Windows-64 and a Linux version of the executable. Yay, me! Hopefully the gentleman who sent me the e-mail query gets my replies and the update. It's also possible his spam filter ate my replies.

In Minecraft modding news, I investigated a crash bug one of my users reported, and kicked myself for blowing off testing my code in server-client configuration, as well as in single-player configuration, because the alloy furnace thingy (aka the 'fusion furnace') was indeed "crossing the streams" and calling server-only code from the standalone client. Whoops. I fixed that, but between overhauling WeatherMaker and the Fusion mod's little issue, I haven't moved forward with any of my modding--just fixed bugs for several days now. Meh.

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Fixing old stuff, namely my website...

Sun, 17 May 2020 20:33:00 GMT

Thanks to a gentleman who inquired about a possible update to an 18-year-old weather generator program for D&D, I decided to find it and check on that. That led to realizing I'd never finished repairing my old website from the damage done by my web host's PHP upgrade (namely, all the old pages broke, because they used deprecated/removed functions), including the page with the download for the weather generator. That led to fixing as many broken links and malfunctioning pages as I could and recovering misplaced old sections of the website (I had links all over to old versions of the site, and wanted to move them and reconcile them), and now it's late afternoon, where did the day go?

I still haven't unpacked wthrmkr and checked if it still compiles yet. I think I'll do that next.

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Forge for 1.9.4 is out!

Wed, 18 May 2016 14:17:01 GMT

So Forge has updated from 1.9 to 1.9.4, which helps me decide--yeah, no more mod updates for 1.7.10, and no more porting to 1.8.9. Going to port directly to 1.9.4 from here on out.

It's too damn much work to keep three separate, incompatible ways of writing Minecraft mods straight in my head. Git is great for keeping the 3 branches of code separate, but I don't have a Git for my brain, so, one port to rule them all, one port to bring them all and in the compiler bind them. Long live 1.9.4!

Also, Mojang has already announced the first 1.10 snapshot, so as far as I'm concerned, 1.7.10 development is dead and overdue for burial.

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Minecraft mod: akkamaddi's Sterling & Black

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 23:00:45 GMT

Just posted my 2nd Minecraft mod; this time, it's a port of someone else's code to Minecraft/Forge 1.7.2. akkamaddi has not been able to work on his mods, and he gave permission to all and sundry to pick up his open source code and update it. At my daughter's request, I ported akkamaddi's Sterling & Black. It was an interesting project, and I may pick up and port some of his other mods.

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Just posted my first Minecraft mod today

Fri, 18 Jul 2014 00:19:15 GMT

Sinhika's Bark, which is a mod to add things to do with tree bark to Minecraft--including making unbreakable birch bark canoes. I actually started it some time ago, and had a semi-working version for 1.6.4, but never released it. Recently, at the request of some fellow players who were really annoyed by Minecraft's incredibly fragile boats (lilypads break them), I dusted it off, and re-wrote it as a Minecraft/Forge 1.7.2 mod and have finally released it.

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Actually somewhat useful Minecraft Modding links

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 14:57:49 GMT

DEPRECATED - see for 1.13/1.14 modding info

To wit, posts I have found somewhat useful for Minecraft modding, particularly 1.7.X. This list will be changing over time, hopefully growing, but also having outdated stuff pruned from it.

Not all modding tutorials are useful. Some are outdated, and some were written by people with a shaky grasp on Java, how Minecraft works internally, the MinecraftForge source, or all three. A lot of them are uninformative, because the authors start at the beginning and never get to advanced topics, so you have a lot of tutorials on how to make a basic block, but very few (if any) on how to add new items to the ore dictionary or render entities or add new crafting interfaces.

( Read more... )

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Traveller utilities updated

Sat, 26 May 2012 18:29:50 GMT

I have updated some old Traveller utilities, htmlsect and associated static library cworlddat, to actually compile under gcc4. Updated the Makefile to something more modern and standard, too.

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