Author: jlbshecky

Well ExtrabiomesXL 3.16 for Minecraft 1.7.10 is finally complete and ready to ship. Aside from getting the last of the door textures on in nothing has changed on our end aside from some organization things and frame work of how we do our build process. That said there are two caveats that you may want to know about.

First off slimes will not spawn in the Green Swamp if you are in single player and have Optifine A4 installed, word on the street is that Optifine has a new build in the works that fixes the incompatibility but sp614x is currently working on the 1.8 update so it may be a while till it sees the light of day.

Secondly you should avoid Minecraft forge 10.13.1.1224, a change was made in it that broke backwards compatibility not only with us but  potentially any mod that adds biomes. That being said we should be compatible with all version of forge from Forge recommended (10.13.0.1180) up to 10.13.1.1223 if you need Java 8u20 support.

All our finalized door textures, with their item variants on the hot bar.

Downloads

Official Direct Download
Direct Download from Curse.

Full Change Log for ExtrabiomesXL 3.16

New Features

• Slimes now spawn in Green Swamps (Please note due to an incompatibility between Forge and Optifine, if you are playing single player and have Optifine installed slimes will not spawn in the Green Swamp. If you are connected to a server or playing without Optifine slimes will spawn under the same conditions as they would in a vanilla swamp.)
• Our biomes now have weights that are configurable, allowing some of them to show up more frequently than others. You can also configure them via the config file to make them more likely to spawn. Please keep in mind that these values must be divisible by ten due to a bug is how the selection code works in vanilla/forge.
• Doors are available in all of our types of wood
• By default they can have up to 64 in a stack like vanilla doors in 1.8 and you get three from each crafting action.
• If you want stacks or one or only one item per crafting action you can change the setting in the config file.
• Like all other mod doors villagers and zombies will not interact with our doors, and our doors are not considered to be part of villages. This will probably not change till Minecraft 1.8 due to how things are coded in minecraft itself.
• Fences are also available for all of out types of wood.
• Crafted using four of one type of our planks, two on the left and two on the right, with two sticks in the middle.
  
• Fence Gates for all of our wood types.
• Crafted using four sticks, two on the left and two on the right, with two planks in the middle.
  

• Redrock Stairs were missing the ‘s’ to make them plural.
• Strawberries should now be able to be disable via the config file.

Well the time has come to get a few more crashes out of the way. We had a major server crash that some how managed to slip through testing on our end, along with a client side crash with tukMC is also installed and you looked at one of our quarter, elbow or mini logs due to tukMC trying to render an a block with invalid metadata.

We also started updating some of the block “names” that minecraft/forge stores in maps in preparation for upgrading to 1.7. This will cause MC to complain that blocks have changed but is just MC/forge letting you know that we updated stuff on our end so that once the fully get rid of external id’s you won’t have to type something like “extrabiomes.block.BlockCustomFlower:extrabiomes.block.BlockCustomFlower” and instead be able to do something more along the lines of “extrabiomesxl:flower1”, much easier on the keyboard ehh?

Oh and we back-ported the new localization and smart tool tip code so that flowers and such can now have their tool tips localized. If anyone has any suggestions for flavor text for any of the flowers that don’t have descriptions feel free to chime on in, although Annysia would probably prefer that you do it over on the official forums thread where you gets notifications about such any posts.

Download EbXL 3.15.6

Change Log

Bug fixes:

• Fixed crash with tukMC and any other mod that creates fake items for render resulting in invalid metadata in the item form for Mini, Quarter and Elbow logs.
• Fix server crash from missed placed SideOnly in BlockCustomFlower.

Changes:

• Tool tips for flowers are now localized, and will automatically wrap text so that it does not need to manually be formatted as such in the localization.
• Flower names localization has changed for easier translation in the future. No more extrabiomes.flower.0, as the localization string now says the flower name. This breaks most existing translation, but will be better in the long run.
• Some blocks had their internal “keys” changed in preparation for updating to 1.7, this will result in MC saying that some blocks have changed but it is not an issue as it will not break anything in 1.6.

1.7 Update Blurb

Another emergency fix for the 3.15.x branch to deal with log spam slowing down world generation.

Download EbXL 3.15.5

Bug fix:

• Commented out debug code from flower generation that was causing lag due to log spam.

I’ve been working on finally getting the EbXL 3.15 branch ready to be re-synced with github again so that we can finally have other people able to contribute to out code again, along with doing some minor tasks on the build for 1.7, mainly focusing on code that we can bring back to MC 1.6 stuff such as localization in tool tips. It is almost ready to be re-synced again and we just need to make sure that everything matches on up and then we will be good to go and other’s can once more push bug fixes if they are needed.

So in starting in EbXL 3.15.x we started adding tool tip flavor text to things like flowers and other such things. There were two minor issues with it, firstly for longer flavor text/descriptions each line of the text had to be manually separated, and hard coded into the mod itself. With the work that we have been doing in 1.7 that will no longer be an issue, as we will be able to simple enough back port the update to allow for wrapping formatted text in tool tips.

As you can see by this example I have also been working on getting the mod config screen up and running, and although it is nowhere near complete, it is progressing nicely. Unlike the video settings screen in 1.7, the buttons on our config screen actually make the clicking sound when you use them and also have can tool tips to better describe what they do. Also the code that for adding new properties has been simplified a bit more and now only needs the property to be defined, as the button text and the tool tip are now localized. Due to the server not having access to the resource packs and thus localization the actual config file will not be able to be localized as I understand it, but you could easily enough edit the configuration on a client and then copy the config on over to a server/mod pack.

You may have noticed that in the screen shot the the tool text switched colors, and although you can’t see it from just the one screen shot, the tool tips can each have their own default color for text although it defaults to gray if no color is specified as the first part of the localization string. Unlike the vanilla formatting codes (although this is virtually the same codes) when you use the reset command in localization definitions it will remove any formatting and will reset it to the default color for the tool tip be it gray or some other color that was specified for that tool tip’s text instead of white like vanilla does, unless of course you have set the default text color to white. (Or is it black by default, I can never remember.)

Another critical patch for if you have had issues upgrading from 3.14.x and early versions.

Download 3.15.4 Here

Change Log
Bug Fixes:

• Old block/item ids are kept when upgrading from versions prior to 3.15.
• Blocks/items can once more be disabled by setting them to 0 in the config. Some blocks that are used in recipes such as redrock can not be disabled without all the things that are made from them being disabled as well.
• The redrock in the Forestry carpenter recipe has be fixed so that it does not use a random fluid instead of water.

Well it took longer that I had hoped, but we have made some great progress. All of our terrain blocks with the exception of quicksand are in game. In relation to terrain blocks, I finally took a look over at the the terrain generation code, namely the chunk constructor code/biome filler/topblock code, and it looks like we will be able to use any type of block, even if it has metaData in terrain generation. We haven’t had a chance to test this out, but what it means if I read the code correctly is that we can use any type of block as the top of the biome, and what’s more we can pack up to 32 block types into the existing block id’s that we already use.

Our block configuration loading code got an upgrade as well as it now has the ability to load drops for any block/sub block. The blocks/sub blocks can drop rare and/or normal drops.  They can have more than one of any type of drop and each drop can have it’s own unique drop chance. If no drops are specified then the block will drop itself all the time, with some limited exceptions. Corner Logs (what used to be called Quarter Logs) and Elbow Logs are able to find out about normal logs and drop them if silk touch is not used to harvest the blocks. (This needs to be added to the config options still.)

Also we now have wooden planks in the game, along with wooden and stone slabs/double slabs. The half and double slabs are able to find out about each other and they interact like normal slabs/half slabs do. (Edit: redstone behavior still needs a little work with half slabs it seems.)

The mini log got a bit of an update in that you can now click past it if the bounding box does not intersect what you are looking at, meaning that you can interact with blocks behind the mini logs if they don’t connect to something and extend their bounding block to block you.

So you might be wondering what is left to complete, well at the moment we still need to get stairs added into the game along with the brick wall type brick for the Redrock and while I was at it I considered adding wooden fences and gates for all our plank/wood types and after talking with the rest of the team, I think it is something we would like to try to do. After that we also have the flowers/plants that need re-added and our saplings. Once that is complete, I will probably be calling EbXL for Minecraft 1.7 block complete. Then I will probably need to take a couple of days to do some maintenance on 3.15.x for MC 1.6.4 before I can get to work on the fun stuff, world generation.

I don’t have much to report today, but I have leaves about 90% coded back into 1.7, with the main things that are not complete as of yet being the dropping of saplings and other items as saplings are not in the game.

However things are far enough along that I can get a build on out for other team members to start crafting trees that I can then turn into the basis for code later on.