Willing to Help

[PringleMan]

Greetings,

Myself and a friend of mine Icewolf have recently begun trying to set up a server with BuildCraft and Better than Wolves.

First let us say that we absolutely love your mod, and that we understand that you are very very busy with it. We also understand how you feel about Build Craft and definitely understand how you feel about people pestering you over SMP.

That is why we would like to offer to HELP write the SMP software rather than just pester you about it. If there is some portion of the task that seems incredibly mundane or tedious that you would rather not do we would be happy to do it for you.

Packet writing is a bit out of our league but we do have a good understanding of Java. At least to the point of being able to understand and modify code even if we cannot write it from scratch.

I look forward to hearing back from you. If you are at all interested please pm me back and we can set up times to be on TeamSpeak to work on it and what not. We have a shared dropbox of the work we are doing so adding you in would be no problem.

Of course if you are not interested at all, that is perfectly alright and feel free to just say "Bugger off" and we will not bother you with this again, at least until we make significant progress (if ever) on our own.

Cheers!
PringleMan

edit: Oh and we would not even dream of distributing said code without your permission. The end result of this work would be sending it to you and letting you do it, just hopefully with some credit to us for the work. Alternatively if you do not want us to even touch it, it is certainly within your rights to do so and we will abandon the project.

[the_fodder]

Not speaking for FC but he has said in the past that he is waiting until 1.8 to even think about SMP , he wants to see how Notch "combines single and multi player".

Personally even though your request was well written and thought out I think you ready yourself for a buggering .

[PringleMan]

I am prepared for a buggering lol. I think that is a good verb for that, well played.

And if that is the case I would rather him just say don't touch it and put us out of our misery. We just realized we would have to write packet handlers, something that neither of us have any idea how to do. As well if he is planning on adding more stuff soon it may be better for us to put it on hold until later anyways.

So i suppose my next logical question is: Are you planning on adding anything soon? You don't have to answer in detail, just a simple yes or no. If yes we are probably going to abandon our current attempt for the time being.

[sargunv]

I am prepared for a buggering lol. I think that is a good verb for that, well played.

And if that is the case I would rather him just say don't touch it and put us out of our misery. We just realized we would have to write packet handlers, something that neither of us have any idea how to do. As well if he is planning on adding more stuff soon it may be better for us to put it on hold until later anyways.

So i suppose my next logical question is: Are you planning on adding anything soon? You don't have to answer in detail, just a simple yes or no. If yes we are probably going to abandon our current attempt for the time being.

I can't speak for him, but as far as I know, he's always planning on adding something soon so my guess would be yes.

[FlowerChild]

Yeah man, as Sargunster said, I'm always in the process of adding something :)

The last couple of weeks have been slow as I was temporarily overwhelmed by the Yogaboo invasion and the overnight mass popularity of the mod (like, it was popular before, but in an instant the download rate was multiplied by a factor of ten, along with the messages I was getting), but in general I tend to release something new every 2 to 3 days. I've been getting back in the saddle with that too, so I suspect they'll be another release within a couple of days.

I do appreciate your offer of help, but for now, I will have to pass. I am indeed on the road to making Better Than Wolves SMP compatible, but I can give no estimates to when that will be. I'd very much like to see what Notch is going to do to restructure the code to unify the single and multiplayer code, as the overall Minecraft code architecture is a bit of a mess at the moment in that regard and I'd much rather save myself the trouble of effectively porting it over twice if at all possible.

Also, I think as has been already established, I just don't play (or work) well with others. I am a former professional game developer, so my standards tend to be rather exacting, and I know that working with me just wouldn't be much fun at all for either party involved.

Again though, thanks for the offer.

[PringleMan]

Well, thanks for responding and not being a jerk about it either!

I think we probably will put it off for a bit. I had somehow missed that Notch was going to unify the code, which from what we have played around with so far is very unlikely to make things worse and will hopefully make things much much better. The obfuscation of the code returning different class names for SSP and SMP alone is a nightmare to try and shift through, especially for your 2500 line edited world file :/

And grats on your popularity shooting up that much. We hop around mods looking at the various neat things they add. Right now in the MC community it seems that the three biggest mods are Buildcraft, IC, and yours. Yours is the only one that seamlessly integrates into minecraft. BC pipes are fantastic and give the game a nice flair, and we feel IC is just so far over the top that we just about ignored it after half an hour of playing around with it.

Yours on the other hand, as I said, fits in perfectly. I think the Yogscast guys got it dead on when they said that your mod is what Minecraft would probably look like after a year or two of tender loving care. It does not really have bugs in the same ways that other mods do, and it does not really cause Minecraft itself to unbalance or have random bits and bobs that look out of place.

So yea, the reputation of the mod is well deserved.

Also from a coding perspective your code is very nice and easy to read, even obfuscated. Some mods you just scratch your head at, yours has a great logical flow.

[FlowerChild]

Thanks man! And despite my reputation, I'm generally not a jerk unless someone starts acting like one with me first, or when they absolutely demand attention without taking into account that I'm dealing with tens if not hundreds of thousands of users ;)

Yeah, I'm big on code-structure overall, although admittedly I've been a bit lax on this project as I've tended to just "go with the flow" and imitate Minecraft's base structure in several places.

I've stopped doing that as of late though, having realized just how atrocious some of the code-base is, and have gone back to my professional standards, so more recent code is likely to be better structured than the older stuff. There's really no reason to drop proper object oriented methodology just because the game's author seems to ;)

[BuLLZ3Y3]

God, you people make me want to go back into programming. >.< I gave it up because my brain simply could not understand object-oriented programming. Granted, my high school decided to fuck over our programming department and cut the C and C++ course, which threw me from Pascal (lol, yeah I started with Pascal) right into an AP Java course. I passed simply because I had a friend who knew java and gave me his code.

The times I had programming were so much fun though...I remember writing a fully-functioning blackjack game in Pascal, and my friend Chris and I wrote a four hour long text based roleplaying game with 16 different endings. I miss those days of furious coding, bloodshot eyes, and wondering where the hell the decomp error is (Stupid semi-colons)...

-BuLLZ3Y3

[PringleMan]

I did not understand object oriented programming very well until I started to come up with my own analogies for the code logic using real world objects. The simplest is basically that if you have a Dog class, it contains all of the attributes and things that a dog can do. Most textbooks like to refer to this as "blue-prints" but I hate that analogy. When you write Dog you want to tell it everything that a Dog should be a do when you reference it in another program. Things like name, age, height, weight, fur color are variables, and what the program actually does when you say the dog jumps (Dog.jump()) are methods.

But you are a Programmer already, so I will skip forward a bunch.

When you see:

Code: Select all

Dog fido = new Dog(String name, int age, Double height, Double weight)

That basically breaks down into saying that you have an object referred to as Fido. Fido is a dog, he is a new dog that has not been used before, and his attributes are passed using that parameters listed. Obviously you dont have to write String and then the name, just his name in quotation marks.

And that is the basic beginning point of object oriented programming. Most other code operations handle very very similarly. Booleans are still T/F, 2*2 is still 4. The big difference is that you can effect changes to your object using code, and you can pull variables or reference specific variables to each other extremely easily. This is why Object oriented programming MUST work in packages, but it also makes it much easier to write individual parts of a program and have them all see each other, cutting down the size of any one part.

So for example I might say bruce.setAge(fido.age) in this case it would go into the Dog class (for now assume bruce is also a Dog) and look up the setAge method. We might see a section of code that looks like this:

Code: Select all

public void setAge(int age)
          {
                this.age = age;
           }

this.age is just a way to distinguish between the age of the do and the parameter age. It also has some other meanings but for the time being it does not matter. If we look at our original code, we see that what we put in for the method's parameter is fido.age. fido.age is a reference to the variable age of fido. The logic flow of that operation is then take the age of fido, and assign it to the age of bruce. Another way to say it, though slightly less correct for more complex operations is that bruce's age is equal to fido's age.

And that is basically the other part of object oriented programming. If you understand that object oriented programming creates an instance of a class, and that you can reference all of the public data in that class simply by putting a . followed by what you need, you are good to go. A lot of operations will work the same way, they just need some tweaking to fit in.

As a side note, if you have never used Java, it is CASE SENSITIVE. Fido is not the same as fido, Int int and INT are three different things. Some of the biggest headaches come from the case sensitivity when you are starting out because you always make little capitalization mistakes.

Anyways I know it was not a shout for java help or anything, but I started writing to explain and kept going. Also partly to just move the thread along lol.