Saturday, October 17, 2015

Hello everyone!

I'm Alex, alex_6611, BlockWorker or however you want to call me, and the new secondary developer of Femtocraft!

I found this mod by playing on the OTE Genesis server. I was instantly interested in it and powered through Alpha 1's Micro and Nano phases, even with those insanely hard crafting recipes. Once I found out that the main developer was part of the OTE community and open to any help he could get, I got very excited, especially because I planned on getting into modding myself.

So here I am. I started off as a design helper, just throwing ideas in and participating in dev talk. Later I tried my hand at 3D Modeling, and my models turned out to be somewhat good, at least Itszu and me liked them a lot. So I was modeling everything for some time.
While doing that, I tried to write some of my own code, but I was new to Scala AND Minecraft Forge, so I wasn't really able to put anything good together for quite some time.
Some more time passed and I was confident enough at Scala to get into coding, so I started making things.
After all that I ended up as a secondary developer (and the only person besides Itszu who fully understands the current design/dev plans).

Here's a summary of what I've done for Femtocraft as of yet:


First of all, the machine frame with its corresponding render code, although that was very inefficient (as it was one of my first attempts at writing Femtocraft code) and was mostly rewritten by Itszu:


Then, the arc furnace model, its render code and the frame machine build logic:


Also the small nanite hive model:


Last thing that I made is part of a major feature and design change that wasn't explained on this blog before. I won't explain it in this post, but stay tuned! I'm still working on it to have more to show you and to be able to explain it better, but just know that it's a very big thing with about as much code as the entire frame system:





General news

Itszu is currently away on family vacation, so I'll be the only one working on this for another week or so. We have some awesome design progress and plans, which we will explain once there's more stuff to show.
If you have any questions, feel free to join me on IRC, channel #Femtocraft on esper.net.
My nick is alex_6611 and I'm usually around on evenings and afternoons at GMT+1.