State of the petrak@, November 2022
Hello hello! I try to keep people reasonably up to date with what’s going on, and “being enough of a regular on my Discord you catch all of my messages” is not a good method to do this.
So, here’s a blog post about what’s going on.
Hexcasting#
I took a long break off of Hexcasting and Minecraft modding in general because I was so burned out on it. But I’ve had my rest and I’m back on it.
As Minecraft 1.18 is abandoned and 1.20 is on the horizon, I’m putting Hexcasting for Minecraft 1.18 on long-term support.
That means I’ll fix critical bugs (probably) but won’t back-port any new features. It will stay on 0.9.x
forevermore.
On the other hand, Hexcasting 1.0 for Minecraft 1.19.2 is coming out Soon™! I purposely tried to keep the scope really small for this update, but here’s the new stuff:
- Booleans are now first-class instead of using
1
and0
. - More stack manipulation operations like
NIP
andOVER
, if you’re familiar withFortranForth. - Dark background behind the stack when casting to make it easier to see.
- Fancier pattern drawing, with cool new code that shows the stroke order statically instead of with a moving dot.
- Falkory re-sprited the entire Patchouli book and it looks really good.
- For addon devs, iota types are now a registry! Make the linear algebra library of Soaryn’s dreams.
![The new fancier line drawings. There are little dedents at the intersections to show which lines are crossings and
which are turns.](/img/2022-11-13_stateofthepetra/1.png)
There will probably be some kind of contest once 1.0 releases properly, also, like the quine contest I held way back. Stay tuned, and maybe win a colorizer or position in the Hexcasting Corps prefecture.
Once 1.20 comes out I’ll probably also move 1.19 to long-term support and dev exclusively on 1.20. (I’m just one person, and I just don’t have the time.)
Other Mods#
After Hexcasting 1.0, is out the next mod to be updated is probably going to be Miner’s Lung. I’m really proud of the idea, but I think the implementation is kind of garbage (not to mention incredibly laggy).
So, the air model is going to change. Instead of blocks being able to project air bubbles, there’s just gonna be a height lookup and a biome lookup.
New Project Announcement: Bemis!#
Patchouli, to put it gently, really sucks for developers. Why?
- JSON is not a markup language and it sucks to write.
- The two-page design makes it hard to put a lot of information for the player to read all at once, and shuffling text across page boundaries is a PITA.
- If you want to read a Patchouli book outside of the game, there really isn’t a good way to do so. There have been a few implementations but they’re all custom and very personalized to each book.
Williewillus, the current maintainer of Patchouli, has been itching to make a better version of it but hasn’t found the time. So, I’m getting the jump on him.
Introducing Bemis, a ingame documentation mod. All the docs you could ever want! All the docs you could ever need!
- Books are written in XML, not JSON
- First-class HTML support right out of the box
- Extensible for developers
This definitely won’t be out or ready to test for a while, but I’ll be chipping away at it in the background. If you want to check it out, though, the repo is here.
Why is it called Bemis? I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader :]
Commissions Open#
Just in case I don’t talk about this enough I do in fact take Minecraft mod commissions. DM me on Discord if you would like to know more!
That’s It#
Thanks for reading!