Schilcote

... Eh? How does that work? I'm planning on only doing the simulation for air blocks that can't see the sky, of course.

That's not very helpful though, because it needs to be done on a block-by-block basis.

Dang! That's what I was worried about from the start. Maybe I could set it up as an array with each entry representing an air block instead. Hmm.

Yeah, I saw that, but unfortunately it isn't very helpful. I need the air to actually do something. It's for a mod that adds air temperature simulation to the game, so I mostly need to add one int holding the temperature value and one method doing the simulation.

I asked on here if air blocks were actual block-objects that could have methods and properties some time ago, and the answer I got was "yes". Now I'm trying to add some code to the air block, but I can't seem to... find it. It isn't really defined anywhere. Material.java defines the material, but there doesn't seem to be any object representing a specific air block that I can mess with. Does anyone have any idea how to make this work? This is the first thing I've ever done with Forge besides doing tutorials, and I don't really understand how anything works.

This is an absolutely ballin' idea! Next, make 1% of them spawn with picks that they can break blocks with.

That might work- I'd have to talk to Sengir about making the mods talk to eachother, and the Minecraft modding community seems pretty closed, so that's not likely to happen 'till I'm famous or something, but it'd probably be a piece of cake on both ends once contact was made. And the mod itself was made, of course. Engines and such making ThermoCraft heat is another thing I'm planning, which might be a bit easier to do since BuildCraft extends an API. There's one advantage ThermoCraft could offer- engines don't heat up and explode as fast in a cold area. I'm gonna try to figure out Forge modding again over the weekend. If I make any progress I'll knock up a prototype and see if it works or drags the game's FPS down to hell.

Worst comes to worst, I can just do the same thing Elorram did with Blutricity: make it work really really slowly, spreading those 450 checks over a hundred ticks. I'm not totally sure how your 'zone' idea would work, but one way it might work based on that idea was if every uninterrupted square of air blocks on one z-level were treated as one entity, or something. Probably the best thing to do would be to code up a rudimentary form of the simulation and see what happens. I'm not sure if I mentioned it in the design doc, but I think I might not run the simulation on any air block that can see the sky. That ought to save a pretty good amount of computation. It'd be neat for beneficial temperature effects to exist, but I can't really think of any.

Added a summary of the document's contents, since it's kind of silly to expect people to download something just to read your dumb ideas. Disappointing lack of interest, though. "ur dum go craw in a holl and die" type responses would be better than silence. Well, alright, maybe not.

ThermoCraft will be a mod that implements ambient air temperature and effects related to it to Minecraft. Players wanting to explore cold biomes will have to put a jacket on, and those who build their houses in the desert must install air conditioning. The full WIP design document is here (in PDF format): http://www.filedropper.com/thermocraftdesigndoc (http://www.mediafire.com/view/?2ik6az65k15uwru in case filedropper breaks) Here's the short version: The mod adds a temperature value to every air block in the game, which they all try to equalize with each-other. The player also has a heat value, and if this gets too far from 98 F then he starts to get status effects and eventually dies. To prevent this, the player can wear clothes that protect him (players that start in cold or hot biomes spawn with clothing), but that only lasts so long; to remain in a cold or hot biome indefinitely, the player needs to build an HVAC system in his house with a heat exchanger, which takes BC/IC2 energy. As you can see, I've put a pretty significant amount of planning into this already. However, my modding skills are not up-to-par (Forge modding seems pretty... obtuse might be the right word. Very difficult to get started). It'd be great if I could have a mentor of some sort to answer basic questions and offer suggestions on how to do things. Anyone have any comments?

It probably has less to do with people being wrong and more to do with things changing often. There really ought to be "official tutorials", though- the barrier to entry of Minecraft modding seems pretty insurmountable.

Cooool. That's good, otherwise I'd have to throw out a couple days worth of planning, as well as a really neat idea.

I'm writing up a concept for a mod, but I'm not sure it's actually feasible to do it. It depends on how air blocks are represented. Are air blocks an actual thing, or are they merely the absence of a block? Can I store data and perform operations on them?

Huh. Well, I think we ought to wait for someone who knows how to do these sort of things to show up, then.

I'm looking into using a hashmap. Java is confusing.