Sunday, July 28, 2013

Texture Packs and Skins

This is the MangoMinecraft of the present. I drafted this post a long time ago and forgot to publish it. Just to clarify, I have updated to 1.6 now.
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As you may know, Minecraft 1.6 came out recently. It added horses, stained clay, coal blocks, hay blocks, and more. Another thing that was changed: Mojang replaced Minecraft's texture pack with the resource pack. While the texture pack only lets you edit images and colors, the resource pack lets you edit pretty much everything except the actual game code. This includes sounds, fonts, text, and lots of other stuff. That's the reason I haven't updated yet; I've been messing around with texture packs and skins and I've been having to much fun to update just yet. Don't worry, soon my desire to ride horses will overpower my desire to make creepers wear pink shoes and the sun to have a smiley face. If you're wondering what I'm talking about, here's a picture:



        You may also notice that I added weird scribbles on the grass and the pig over in the lower left corner. You can also edit what you look like, and although this picture doesn't show it, I look like I have very long black hair. That didn't really work out very well, because the shape of the Minecraft body is broad-shouldered and just looks weird with female skins.
        The process of drafting this post caused me a lot of annoyance. Have you ever copied something huge, and then copied something else before you pasted the first thing? Maybe you didn't realize your mistake until you tried to paste the first thing and got something else instead. Well, that's exactly what happened to me when I was drafting this post. I started writing it in the Computer Version post, but then realized it was too long and copied it to paste it into this post. Long story short, THE INABILITY TO COPY MORE THAN ONE THING AT A TIME IS SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ANNOYING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Okay, I'm done now.
        It took me a while to find a good YouTube tutorial for editing texture packs. Part of the problem is that you have to specifically type 1.5.2 tutorial, because versions 1.5 and later have separate images for each block, instead of one big image. Also, a lot of tutorials said you needed to extract the minecraft zip archive, but that just complicates things. By the way, if you're thinking of getting the computer version now, or if you have 1.6, ignore me because the format of resource packs is completely different. The most helpful video tutorial I've found for editing resource packs is this one. He doesn't explain specifically how to use the programs to edit sound and image files, but there's other resources for that. By the way, Paint.NET is an awesome image editing program. It has a really great user interface, and you can do pretty much anything. And, it's free!
        Back to the video. Back when texture packs were used, when you wanted to make a new texture pack, you created a folder in AppData > Roaming > .minecraft > texturepacks. You then copied all of the default files in there and then edited them. However, in the video, with the new resource packs, instead of copying all the default files in the beginning, you copy, paste, and edit each file individually. I don't really know if you have to do that, because it seems inefficient and time-consuming. Oh well... Both of them work. Another method that I haven't found mentioned anywhere is to use TextureEnder.jar to generate a resource pack. (TextureEnder.jar is available for download here.) If you just create a copy of the default texture pack and convert it, it does all the work for you. Doing this may require a bit of help from YouTube tutorials, though.
        One last thing. In versions before 1.5, HD texture packs required the use of a program called MCPatcher. But now, Minecraft automatically stitches textures together, so you can create HD texture packs!!! YAY!!! Here's my front door. Like, literally my front door, except in Minecraft.


        That's pretty much it. More on my exploits in the computer version later.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Computer Version

    Sorry for the late post. I just noticed that I never actually told you what happened after I made the mistake in the Minecraft Tips Post #2 and Minecraft Mini-Lesson #1 post. Well, I dug straight down, since there aren't underground caves. After about 2 minutes, I found iron: there were two iron ore blocks showing on the side of my tunnel. I dug both of them and stepped into the space where they used to be to see if there were any more iron ore blocks. There was one right above me. I dug it, and four pieces of gravel fell on top of me and I started suffocating. I quickly dug the four gravel blocks before I died, but I was lucky. If there had been more gravel on top, I probably wouldn't have been able to dig my way out fast enough. So, now you know why it's better safe than sorry, even if you're in Pocket Edition.
        I've been having a ton of fun trying out the new features in the computer version of Minecraft. One thing I really like about the computer version is Creative Mode. It's exactly like survival mode, but with unlimited items and invincibility. Yes, I know that sounds kind of obvious, but what I mean is that Creative mode in Pocket Edition is totally different, and it's not really as fun. It takes away a lot of the fun stuff in survival mode, like the day/night cycle and hostile mobs. Not to mention that even peaceful mobs don't spawn naturally and require spawn eggs (and there's only 4 peaceful mob spawn egg types available right now.)
        I'm amazed by the variety of stuff in the computer version. There's just so much. The huge variety of blocks and items makes structures look really realistic, and I'm totally a building person in Minecraft. This is a good time to mention that I love building from tutorials. I'm working on using more creativity when thinking of ideas for things to build in Minecraft, but I still think it's fun to build awesome things that other people have built.
        Right now I'm building an Ender Dragon statue from a YouTube tutorial at a 16:1 scale. That's one pixel on the real Ender Dragon to one block on the statue, which is a scale that's commonly used in Minecraft to build statues of mobs or players. I'm going to post screenshots of it in progress. Right now, I'm building the head. It's so huge that bats are spawning inside of it! Here's some pictures:

Some very confused bats


The inside of the unfinished head

The view from the outside
Unfortunately, my dragon is going batty. Excuse the old-fashioned, not-really-that-funny pun. I will try to get more posts out now, especially book reviews, because I kinda forgot about those for a while.