Well that's annoying. The guys on #MinecraftForgeTuts IRC specifically told me the opposite when I asked about that very issue, because I read about it somewhere. They said it was "old and outdated, you can use any ID now".
So, that being the case... I have quite a lot of blocks across my mod that will be world-generated. Would it be sensible to use metadata to keep the ID count down? If not, chances are there physically wont be enough free IDs for me to use...
well, I heard about a new constructor thingy in your WorldProvider/ChunkProvider/whatever or some sort like that, so I'm not sure if there's a way to use higher block IDs now or I just misheard it...
renderAscenderModelAt((TileEntityAscender)tileentity, d0,1,d2,f);
There's a typo, you forgot to prepend a 'd' before the 1:
renderAscenderModelAt((TileEntityAscender)tileentity, d0,d1,d2,f);
You probably can call worldObj.getBlockMetadata(X, Y, Z) in your constructor to get the block's metadata. With it you can call your second constructor with the type parameter.
The lighting glitch (the black areas) are not fixed yet. They reverted their changes before the release because of performance issues. However, they want to fix that when they're working on the Rendering Engine.
The issue with the stone brick stairs are probably caused by a too high block ID for the terrain generation. Since the block ID values on terrain generation are byte values (which should have been fixed by Mojang, they never did, but oh well) and thus can't go higher than ID 255, you need to set your block IDs (which are used for terrain gen) below that value.
1. Copy your start.bat, rename it to start_forge.bat or watever
2. Open that bat in your prefered text editor (I have Notepad++, but you can also use Notepad / Editor)
3. change every reference to your minecraft_server.jar to your forge-universal.jar
4. save your copied bat and execute it. Done
If you wanna see how I did it with several blocks, look at the fresh Turret Mod 3 source on github, here: https://github.com/SanAndreasP/TurretModv3/tree/master/sanandreasp/mods/TurretMod3
You mean this?
MinecraftForgeClient.preloadTexture(ITEMS_PNG);
MinecraftForgeClient.preloadTexture(BLOCK_PNG);
Just ignore that, it's a leftover from the old texture system. Put your Entity Render register method there instead.