I almost forgot about this! I am going to keep it reasonably short today and as a warning, it is a little technical. This last week I finally got to actually focus on mod support relating work. There is still a great deal left I would like to accomplish but I made a nice dent in it.
My major focus was rewriting how mod packages and their content is handled. Now mod packages have a load order which opens up several possibilities. The biggest one being that two packages can have the same content and the package with a higher priority gets loaded. With this new system, packages will be able to be enabled and disabled on a world basis – so players don’t have to adjust mod settings every time they want to switch worlds.
Another huge and welcomed change is that now content files are referenced by name (“wood”) instead of by path (“mods/base/item/materials/wood.ce”). This was actually a requirement for the mod content overwriting provided by mod priority. In other words, any where the game references “wood” another mod could provide that content and change how it works such as making it possible to place it down in the world and emit a light source.
Similarly, other assets, most specifically images, can now be referenced with a relative path. In content files you would normally be required to have “add(Render(‘mods/base/item/materials/wood.png’))”. Now it can just be “add(Render(‘wood.png’))”. Additionally, I added support for asset redirection, which makes it extremely easy to create texture packs.
Moving forward to this next week, I’m continuing to beef up the game engine for mod support. While I am at it I am also adding support that’ll enable us to add Realms into the game with relative ease when we are ready to. One of my goals is to try to solidify as much of the game engine as possible before we start making any real public pushes, such as Steam Greenlight or trying to get onto news sites.