Coder Application

Hello everyone, I go by eazymc its an old crap TF name from back in the day but w/e, you can call me Chris, I created this account to drop an app. I've been following your mod for a while, probably since June or so. I'm coming up on my slow season at my job and figured I'd offer some assistance.


Here's my experience:

Java, I have about 2 1/2 years of coding which is off and on depending on my need for it at work (tbh most of my time is spend building PHP web applications, but I often use Java to build my API's which communicate directly with the file servers). I program API's for transaction based data transmission and file transfer stuff for my job. I have a good understanding of OOP and started my programming career in C++. I'm also proficient in Perl, PHP, RoR and have a bit of experience in JSP and Python, though if I never have to look at either of those ever again, I wouldn't be sad not to mention scripting languages are sort of useless for modding anyway. I have a lot of database, file, and data-transmission experience with java and various other languages. I'm quite familiar with version control software (GitHub, Subversion etc) as well as virtualization software (KVM, Xen) which I know is super important for modding lol.

I don't have any experience with Minecraft mods, however I took a look at the MCP stuff a few days ago and it's pretty strait forward (loaded it into Eclipse w/o a problem) and I have been trolling minecraftforums (where I found your mods post!) checking out the problems people have with mods and also get an idea of what sort of code is going into these mods.

Umm, not sure what else to include here, so I'll leave it at this for now. If you guys can use me, let me know!

Not sure when I can check the forums so if you'd like to directly contact me, my email is disappeared! (sorry, don't need spam bots ninjaing my email ^_^ )

Hey there and welcome to our forums .

Talk to fr0stbyte. Right now it's mostly hypothetical except for the eternally indev engine mod to make this possible, but if you can help with that...well, I'm not a dev, but that's the big thing that needs to get done.

Unless you have a degree in computer science, there is not much to do right now. Frost is doing engine work.

Could you define engine work? (I know you're referring to the game engine) Do you mean he's modifying the game engine? or building an entirely new game engine?

I don't have a degree, just real world application

hyperlite wrote:

Unless you have a degree in computer science, there is not much to do right now. Frost is doing engine work.

Give him a chance, man.

It looks like fr0st is completely redoing the game engine.

Besides Programming is not really a thing that needs a degree I believe. I guess there is a difference but much more minor than in other subjects. You need to get the logic behind it and just learn a language to apply your knowledge. I believe he has both.

Iv121 wrote:

Besides Programming is not really a thing that needs a degree I believe. I guess there is a difference but much more minor than in other subjects. You need to get the logic behind it and just learn a language to apply your knowledge. I believe he has both.

I agree, and disagree. There are both advantages, and disadvantages to having a degree.

To be brief, I'd say the advantage of having training and a degree in computer sciences is that you will be very familiar with the languages syntax and functionality.

The advantage of learning it by yourself (as I have with some on hands training by my supervisor and mentor) is that you become very familiar with how to find the knowledge you need to accomplish said task as well as learning how to use the language in a real environment as opposed to a test environment where nothing is being done "out of the ordinary".

I agree 100% about the logic. Understanding the way a computer interprets what you pass to it is very crucial to making something work however understanding in what order to process something will often make the difference between a working program and a pile of code-pooh.

eazymc wrote:

the difference between a working program and a pile of code-pooh.

Oh, I have a feeling you'll be more than welcome here..

There is a difference between computer science and programming. If you would like to help out directly on the engine, what we need is legitimately computer science.

Take a look at these two articles,
http://0fps.wordpress.com/2012/07/21/simplifying-isosurfaces-part-1/
http://0fps.wordpress.com/2012/07/07/meshing-minecraft-part-2/

A bit overly formal for my liking, but very close to what we are doing with the graphics pipeline, though our solution is a bit fancier in terms of optimizing data for minecraft terrain and there's a novel gpu-based virtual memory module for textures. The point is, though, what I'm looking for right now is innovation. You need to be comfortable reading and adapting methods from research papers, like the ones in the first link, and tailoring algorithms to specific use-cases.

I definitely appreciate how valuable it is to have a practical background in the language you are working in, but if you haven't gotten very deep into the science aspect of the discipline, this is probably not a place you'd want to start.

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That said, there's plenty of more conventional non-engine modding that needs to happen, and pretty much nobody is doing anything right now because they are all lazy and can't work without supervision yeah I said it.

Among the more interesting projects is 3D context crafting, in which you assemble larger entities and tile entities piece by piece in the real world, rather than with a crafting table. We need a framework for handling that. Along with crafting, we need to get some 3D modeling going, and a way to import the models for entities (there are some leads already, but no one has taken the reins). It would also be nice if we had a way to generate basic entities (for models and other simple things) from text markup, possibly xml. This in turn would make it easy to tweak and update objects in realtime without rebuilding the entire library.

Let's see, what else can we do in this phase...oh yeah, Keon never got anywhere with the shipyard system. That would be a fun project. Hull painting and decals are part of the graphics pipeline, so probably not... Danice had started with a power framework and computers, but I'm not sure if anything came of that. We were considering using LUA like in Computer Craft for server scripting and ship macros. And before you ask, we can't use that or any forge mods because the Futurecraft engine is going to break everything.

There's probably a bunch more stuff I can't think of right now, and if anyone else remembers feel free to chime in.
But if any of this sounds interesting, we've got tons of discussion and plans for all of it which I can direct you towards, so how about it?

p.s. The normal means of private communication here is via PM, which you can set to notify you via email. There's no need to post your actual address.

Sorry for the delayed response, spending some QT with the g/f over the long labor day weekend.

Anyway, none of that is "over my head", just haven't played around with it in Java in some time. Like I said a majority of my current Java experience is in Servlets and database/file data storage, reading and manipulation, though I have played with some of the OpenGL libraries recently and would find it fun to play with it a bit in a practical environment like minecraft. Also, since my last post, I've been playing with the Minecraft source code and MCP, familiarizing myself with the code I guess.

I have a couple of questions for you Frost, since you are obviously well versed in programming and would (by all my reading in the forums) appear to be the head programmer behind this little (lol, little) endeavor.

Firstly, since this appears to be a complete engine over-haul of the minecraft game engine, what minecraft version are you using to build off of? I ask this because from what I've seen from other mods that stay up-to-date, this mod will break everything and have to be re-adapted every release which judging by the size of this mod, would take weeks if not months to adapt, so imo and I suspect your opinion as well, it would make more since to stick to one version of the game initially and release the mod as a over-haul or even a sort of mini-game withing a game rather than an actual 'modification'. Though I would obviously leave that call up to your better judgement.

Second, do you have a repository (GitHub or w/e) that we can share code and/or test each-others work for compatibility? I don't suspect I would need to see your code as much as you would need to see mine, in other words, I'd be handing you code to implement into your build since your code (the graphical engine over-haul stuff correct?) and ultimately your build is going to be what eventually is released as the mod.

Thirdly, what project would YOU prefer me to take a crack at? Since I'm just hoping in and tossing my hat in the ring, I'll respect your authority as the project manager and head programmer, so I will let you decide what is more important to the project rather than me saying "ooh that'll be fun" and running off doing my own thing.

Anyway, thanks for the consideration, look forward to helping you guys out.

eazymc wrote:

Sorry for the delayed response, spending some QT with the g/f over the long labor day weekend.

Anyway, none of that is "over my head", just haven't played around with it in Java in some time. Like I said a majority of my current Java experience is in Servlets and database/file data storage, reading and manipulation, though I have played with some of the OpenGL libraries recently and would find it fun to play with it a bit in a practical environment like minecraft. Also, since my last post, I've been playing with the Minecraft source code and MCP, familiarizing myself with the code I guess.

I have a couple of questions for you Frost, since you are obviously well versed in programming and would (by all my reading in the forums) appear to be the head programmer behind this little (lol, little) endeavor.

Firstly, since this appears to be a complete engine over-haul of the minecraft game engine, what minecraft version are you using to build off of? I ask this because from what I've seen from other mods that stay up-to-date, this mod will break everything and have to be re-adapted every release which judging by the size of this mod, would take weeks if not months to adapt, so imo and I suspect your opinion as well, it would make more since to stick to one version of the game initially and release the mod as a over-haul or even a sort of mini-game withing a game rather than an actual 'modification'. Though I would obviously leave that call up to your better judgement.

Second, do you have a repository (GitHub or w/e) that we can share code and/or test each-others work for compatibility? I don't suspect I would need to see your code as much as you would need to see mine, in other words, I'd be handing you code to implement into your build since your code (the graphical engine over-haul stuff correct?) and ultimately your build is going to be what eventually is released as the mod.

Thirdly, what project would YOU prefer me to take a crack at? Since I'm just hoping in and tossing my hat in the ring, I'll respect your authority as the project manager and head programmer, so I will let you decide what is more important to the project rather than me saying "ooh that'll be fun" and running off doing my own thing.

Anyway, thanks for the consideration, look forward to helping you guys out.

Have you read Ectrimble's dev log? You may try replicating what he was doing with inter-server travel and communication, if you've skill in network stuff.

Shiva wrote:

Have you read Ectrimble's dev log? You may try replicating what he was doing with inter-server travel and communication, if you've skill in network stuff.

Having read through his log, sounds like he was trying to build an infrastructure for a database-based inter-server travel type stuff that appears to be another key point of this mod. Correct me if I'm wrong but it seems like the space ship engine and the inter-server travel stuff are kind of the meat and potatoes of the mod.

Biggest issue I can see with what he was doing is that he didn't seem to have a good direction to what he was doing. He was working on blocks, guns, and random stuff as well as server to server travel. Really should have just been working on one thing. I'm quite curious as to how far along with the server stuff he got, but I'd assume nobody knows what/why/where he went off to, though from what I can make of the last couple of pages, would appear he got a bit tired of people nagging him for some kind of demo.

Regardless, I'd be willing to take a crack at that stuff, sounds kinda fun actually and it is an area I have experience with (well transaction based server to server stuff, close enough I suspect) and since this mod isn't worried about compatibility, I can probably just build my own hooks on the server and the client to make it work.

From here I'll just make an assumption (I know, I know) and start up a development log and we can work out what I'm doing more specifically later.

Give eazymc area 51 access so he can look through the code and stuff in there.

Welcome to the team.