Archived
This blog was active from 2015 to 2017, but is active no longer. The posts are archived here for posterity.
Custom JavaFX controls and Scene Builder
This is my second blog post today! I've never written two posts in one day before, so this is kind of exciting. I must be inspired or something. The other post today was about using JavaFX to build GUIs for cross-platform games . This time though, I'm going to write about a tip to make your life easier if you want to write custom JavaFX controls and use Scene Builder at ...
Better GUIs for Java games
Progress on the new unannounced game is going well. But only if by 'going well', we mean I've been sidetracked by a million other things instead. =P It's going to be great though, I promise. I've been working on a lot of great tech lately that's going to end up in my upcoming Java game engine, the Horde Engine. You might have already noticed cuchazinteractive.com looks a little ...
NEP Dev Update #14: Scooped!
Again, it's been a while since I've written a development update... Turns out, I don't get to spend all my time doing gamedev these days. Working enough jobs to keep the bills paid continues to suck up most of my time. But that's indie game dev for ya. Anyway, I've been on a bug crusade in my game engine the past few weeks. The engine (and the fledgling game I'm ...
NEP Dev Update #13: Networked physics
Wow. It's been a long time since I've written one of these. A lot has happened since then. I took another break from working on my indie game for a while to make some money. I still have my part-time job doing research at the university, but I also filled the rest of my work time doing freelance work for other games. Sadly, I'm not allowed to say anything about that yet, ...
NEP Dev Update #12: Lots of physics updates!
I'm still trying to figure out how to balance a part time job doing heavy thinking/programming with working on my game engine (also heavy thinking/programming), but I'm getting better at it. My development pace on NEP is a bit slower than it used to be, but I'm finding ways to be more productive all the time! Lately I've been working on completely overhauling the physics simulations in the Horde engine to be ...
NEP Dev Update #11: Back in action!
After a bit of a break, I'm back with another development update for my indie game, Non-Essential Personnel. I took sometime off over the winter holidays to travel, see friends, family, etc. I also started a new part time job in January doing computer science research at a local university. Gotta pay the bills while I work on my game somehow. =P I lost some momentum with all the recent ...
NEP Dev Update #10: A programmer trying to art - Part 2
The exciting conclusion! When we last left our hero, we had a usable render of a normal map for our sprite, the RIG. The trouble was, the Horde engine (the engine I'm making to run Non-Essential Personnel), didn't actually support rendering with normal maps. Luckily, adding normal maps to a rendering engine is actually pretty easy. The basic recipe is: bundle the normal data into your material texture format. ...
NEP Dev Update #9: A programmer trying to art
The game engine is coming along pretty well. At least well enough that I can actually focus on adding content to the game now. So I'm making content now. Or trying, at least. Art is hard too. =P Adventures in actual game content: The RIG An indispensible piece of equipment for your adventures in space mining is your lifeline from Earth to the barren mineral-rich lifeless hunk of rock out ...
NEP Dev Update #8: Networking is hard
I thought I was just about done working on the game engine. I was looking forward to adding more content to the game. Then I remembered that networking is hard. =( Non-Essential Personnel is a multiplayer game. And not just LAN multiplayer. It's over-the-internet multiplayer. Over-the-internet multiplayer means we have to deal with the horrific badness you find in large networks like latency, packet loss, packet re-ordering, and lag spikes. ...
NEP Dev Update #7: Eyes are weird, why we need motion blur, and how to do it
This post is part of a development update series about my upcoming indie game, Non-Essential Personnel . I've been writing these every Friday for a few weeks now. So far so good. =) Why are simple things so hard? So, last week I got rock-throwing working. Hooray! Now the game has something to do. You can break rocks. You can pick them up. And you can throw them back at the ...
NEP Dev Update #6: Now you can throw rocks!
This post is part of a development update series about my upcoming indie game, Non-Essential Personnel . I'm going to challenge myself to regularly post one of these every Friday. I spent most of this week working finding all the bugs in the network synchronization system I built last week. And fixing some design flaws too, which means lots of annoying refactoring of code. But the system is working rather well ...
NEP Dev Update #5: Progress on items and inventories
This post is part of a development update series about my upcoming indie game, Non-Essential Personnel . I'm going to challenge myself to regularly post one of these every Friday. This week I've been working a lot on network synchronization and inventory manipulation. I'd love to do an in-depth blog post about how networking works in NEP, but I think I'll save that for later. For now, I'll just show some ...
NEP Dev Update #4: Explore mode
This post is part of a development update series about my upcoming indie game, Non-Essential Personnel . I'm going to challenge myself to regularly post one of these every Friday. We'll see how that goes. =P It's been a while since the last update... I got distracted. =P I took a few days off to whip up a quick website for Minecraft players I thought would be useful. It's ...
NEP Dev Update #3: The title screen
This post is part of a development update series about my upcoming indie game, Non-Essential Personnel . I'm going to challenge myself to regularly post one of these every Friday. We'll see how that goes. =P Here's the new main title screen! Click on images to enbiggen. I'm no artist, so the design is very minimal, but I think it looks pretty clean and attractive. The GUI ...
Now with RSS!
I just upgraded the blog to publish an RSS feed so you can follow along with my development progress without missing a post! Each page on the blog has link at the bottom with the familiar little orange icon. Click that link and your browser should leap at the opportunity to help you subscribe to the feed. I also applied the special <head> magic to the blog's HTML, so you ...
NEP v0.2 Release - The Lighting Update
Click to enbiggen. The lighting engine is all fixed up, polished, optimized, and ready to go. It's not perfect just yet, but it's good enough for now. Have fun playing around with the new light blocks in this release. If you find any issues, please report them in the forums . It took me forever and an extra week to finish the lighting engine! I think it looks ok for now, ...
Ships Mod v1.7.10-1.0.4 Released!
Here's another maintenance release of Ships Mod that fixes a ton of crashes . Download Ships Mod v1.7.10-1.0.4 Change log Fix crash when ship leaves the y=[0,256] range Gracefully handle crashes thrown by activating blocks on launched ships Gracefully handle crashes thrown by tile entities during ship rendering Gracefully handle crashes thrown by blocks during random ticking Update to Forge current recommended version 1448 Increase size restrictions for ship data sent over ...
NEP Lighting Engine Part 3: Light channels
This is the fourth and final installment in a four-part series on the lighting engine in my upcoming indie game, Non-Essential Personnel. If you ended up here first, maybe try starting at the beginning instead. Tossing colored lights into our approach so far looks really bad Red vs. Blue Incidentally, this is a kind of discrete Voronoi diagram . Since we decided that we were only going ...
NEP Lighting Engine Part 2: Diffuse Light
This is the third installment in a four-part series on the lighting engine in my upcoming indie game, Non-Essential Personnel. If you ended up here first, maybe try starting at the beginning instead. What do I mean by diffuse light? In the last post , I talked about the "diffuse" component of the Blinn-Phong lighting model, and how we used some hacks to make it look better without modeling ...
NEP Lighting Engine Part 1: Shaders and materials
This is the second installment in a four-part series on the lighting engine in my upcoming indie game, Non-Essential Personnel. If you ended up here first, maybe try starting at the beginning instead. Making flat things look not flat The first trick for the lighting engine in a 2D game is to make sprites look like they have some depth and not look like characters out of Flatland . ...
NEP Dev Update #2: The lighting engine
BEHOLD! LIGHT! Click on images to enbiggen. At long last I'm done with the lighting engine for my indie game, Non-Essential Personnel . For now, anyway. I've finally crossed that glorious rendering threshold where screenshots of my game compress better as JPG images than PNG images! =D What can the lighting system do? NEP's lighting system has a lot of nifty prettiness-inducing features. Here's a quick overview. ...
Minecraft deobufuscation mappings for v1.9 snapshot 15w32a
Mojang just released a new snapshot this morning, so I wanted to put Enigma to the test and see just how fast I could get deobfuscation mappings. Turns out, the answer is about an hour . That's not bad I guess. If all the future conversions can be this routine, maybe I should put some effort into making my converter more user-friendly so other pmodders ...
Minecraft deobufuscation mappings for v1.9 snapshot 15w31c
I just finished converting the open source Minecraft deobfuscation mappings from v1.8.8 to the latest snapshot for v1.9, 15w31c! The deobfuscation mappings are available under a very permissive Creative Commons license so you're free to use them for just about whatever you want, as long as you abide by the Minecraft EULA . Download the Minecraft 1.9 15w31c deobfuscation mappings here. The mappings were created using the ...
NEP Dev Update #1: The launcher
This post is the first in a development update series about my upcoming indie game, Non-Essential Personnel . Behold! The Cuchaz Interactive Launcher: It logs in. It downloads. It installs. It updates. All that stuff you need to worry about before actually playing the game. I even found away to make Java-based GUIs not look terrible! Play any version, even if it's not the newest one The ...
Ships Mod v1.7.10-1.0.3 Released!
As promised , before I work on another update for Tall Worlds Mod , here's another stability/fixes update for Ships Mod. Download Ships Mod v1.7.10-1.0.3 Change log fix physical units in propulsion gui and website fix item dupe bug fix items (and other entities?) falling through launched ships ship controls can now be bound to mouse buttons ...
Announcing a new game: Non-Essential Personnel
I'm making a game! Many of you know me for my Minecraft mods , which I spend a lot of my nights and weekends working on, but now I'm working on game development as my day job too! For my day job, I'm making an entirly new game from scratch. I think this game especially appeals to Minecraft players (particularly modded Minecraft players), but I'll let you be the judge of that. Read ...
Results: What should I work on next?
The Results Here are the results of the latest poll on where I should focus my modding time in the near future, with 345 players responding: The majority of players want me to keep improving Tall Worlds Mod . Apparently Tall Worlds has become my most popular mod in a very short amount of time. However, Ships Mod is not far behind, with loyals fans showing their ...
What should I work on next?
Players and modders, what do you want the most? ...
Tall Worlds Mod v1.8.3-0.3.1 officially released!
At long last, a public beta for Tall Worlds Mod is finally available! Tall Worlds Mod is a mod for Minecraft that implements the Cubic Chunks idea, the most popular suggestion for improving Minecraft to date. In other words, the mod extends the maximum build height to about 16 million blocks instead of 256. 16 million blocks is probably plenty of space for whatever you want to build. ...
Poll Results: Advertising
I ran a little experiment on the side of my website for a few weeks. Someone suggested I take away some space from traditional advertising and use it for affiliate programs instead. So I did a little digging and decided to go with Amazon.com. I found a few Minecraft items I thought would be interesting to players and put links to them in the newly-carved-out space on the side of my site. ...
Ships Mod v1.7.10-1.0.2 Released!
Ooops, some last minute bugs popped up that needed to be fixed. Here's a quick release to take care of that. Download Ships Mod v1.7.10-1.0.2 Change log Fix bug that made multi-line block config files completely useless Make more parts of Ships Mod water-agnostic. ie modded water blocks should work better now. ...
Ships Mod v1.7.10-1.0.1 Released!
This is mostly a maintenance version that fixes a whole ton of bugs so there aren't a whole lot of new features. However, the fixes are still pretty exciting. The theme of this release is compatibility with various Minecraft environments. These changes should hopefully let Ships Mod play a little nicer with other mods, and other Minecraft launchers. The biggest updgrade is the new block properties system. This version gives ...
Ships Mod v1.0 Released!
The extremely long beta period for Ships Mod is finally over. Today I'm releasing v1.0 of Ships Mod. A lot of work has gone into getting just the basic core of Ships Mod working. The idea that you can put a bunch of blocks together, press a button, and have your ship come to life in a somewhat realistic way is something Minecraft (ironically enough) was not designed to do at all. I think ...
Ships Mod v1.0 Released for Minecraft 1.7.10!
Ships Mod is now out for Minecraft 1.7.10! This is basically a straight port of the 1.6.4 version, so there aren't any new features. There might be some new bugs though, so be sure to let me know about those on the bug tracker . As always, you can download the new version here: http://www.cuchazinteractive.com/ships And for extra fun, all the old versions will always be available here: ...
Brand spankin' new website
Today I'm releasing a new version of cuchazinteractive.com that has much more useful information on it than the old version. The old website was just kind of a list of the mods I was working on, and not much more. The new version not only has more detailed information about each mod, but also has more information about what's going on at Cuchaz Interactive in general. The new website shows the three ...
