[1.14.4] Rotating & Moving Blocks

[Obeeron]

Hello,

I'm on a journey to create an Archimedes' Ships Minecraft mod like.
One of the substep would be to be able to take any block of the game, move it as an entity and rotate it.
What should I look into to achieve such results ?

Thanks a lot

[QuantumSoul]

I think that when the ship is set, the blocks are replaced by entities having their texture

And when it's unset, they are replaced back to blocks

[Turtledove]

You know, you could just look at his github yourself, just googled it for you: https://github.com/Ckathode/archimedes-ships

 

it's very outdated but the idea wouldn't have changed much.

[Obeeron]

50 minutes ago, QuantumSoul said:

I think that when the ship is set, the blocks are replaced by entities having their texture

And when it's unset, they are replaced back to blocks

Thanks for the answer, my question was more specific to the transformation of a block into an entity and how to move it / rotate it

 

33 minutes ago, Turtledove said:

You know, you could just look at his github yourself, just googled it for you: https://github.com/Ckathode/archimedes-ships

 

it's very outdated but the idea wouldn't have changed much.

Yep, I know it's not the only one I watched but I would like to take it step by step. Unfortunatly digging into already finished projects really isn't the most efficient way for me to learn for things I never heard of before (changing a block into an entity and rotating it). Do you have any idea what I should look into then ? Like is TESR the way to go ? Falling block entity ? or is it possible to create an entity, extract the block model and apply it to the entity ? I just need a direction to look deeper into ahah

Thanks both of you for the answer ^^

[imacatlolol]

I took a quick look around the posted source for Archimedes' Ships and it's quite interesting. It seems that it saves the ship blocks in a "mobile chunk" which is rendered separately from the rest of the world. This allows it to only use one entity for the ship and allows tile entities to render properly, and it can take advantage of rendering optimizations used in regular block rendering.

 

The exact details there would require a more thorough analysis, and I'm sure some of the concepts would need overhauls to work in 1.14 and up. Entities for individual blocks would be a bad idea for obvious reasons, so that "mobile chunk" concept seems to be a great alternative or at least a good starting point.

[Obeeron]

Thank you imacatlolol ! I'll dig deeper into the mobile chunk part of the source code ! This really is a good starting point for me and will avoid me to get lost trying to create one entity per block  Thank you again

[nanorover59]

You should definitely be using one entity per ship (or perhaps some completely custom non-entity object). I admittedly made a system a few years ago using multiple entities per ship that just barely worked well enough for game play, and I was regularly finding and fixing problems.

As someone who is currently working on a completely new mobile ship system, I recommend researching how to render blocks using the MatrixStack and IRenderTypeBuffer classes. (For some reason I assumed those were introduced before 1.15)

If you want a more advanced system that performs block and tile entity updates on ships, then you should consider creating a dimension for each one to store its contents and find a way to keep a few chunks in in each dimension loaded.

 

Edited May 11, 2020 by nanorover59

[imacatlolol]

10 minutes ago, nanorover59 said:

I recommend researching how to render blocks using the MatrixStack and IRenderTypeBuffer classes.

Just a heads up, MatrixStack and IRenderTypeBuffer don't exist in 1.14.

[nanorover59]

1 hour ago, imacatlolol said:

Just a heads up, MatrixStack and IRenderTypeBuffer don't exist in 1.14.

Thanks for pointing that out. I moved directly from 1.12.2 to 1.15.2 and somehow didn't find out that the rendering changes were as recent as 1.15.