Every time I add a new butterfly to the mod, I need to create multiple textures for them. Recently, I developed a method generating spawn egg textures so I didn’t have to do them manually.
Development
Writing about software development.
The New Butterfly Pipeline
I use a Python script to help generate code, data, and textures for Bok’s Banging Butterflies. However, this script was starting to get unwieldy. At more than 500 lines it was getting harder to find certain sections when modifications needed to be made.
Extracting Data for my Let’s Play
In my Let’s Play of Baldur’s Gate I use a lot of cropped and edited images, and rely heavily on the in-game dialogue to tell the story. As I am a lazy programmer, you may wonder why I spend so much time editing these images.
Doing Spawn Eggs Properly
Spawn eggs were almost an afterthought in Bok’s Banging Butterflies. They worked, but the experience was rough. Not all entities had spawn eggs, and most eggs looked identical. With 61 butterfly and moth species, it was almost impossible for players to know what they were spawning.
Butterfly Creative Mode Tab
One detail I’ve been struggling with while developing Bok’s Banging Butterflies is where to put the items in the Creative Inventory. While playing other mods for inspiration, I saw many create a dedicated Creative Tab just for their content. A tidy, mod-branded spot that makes everything easier to find.
Improving the Publish Script
Recently I implemented some scripts to automatically publish new versions of Bok’s Banging Butterflies to several platforms. In order to support this, I added a new step where I needed to update the version in the publish script itself.
Moving the Config Options
Modpack authors are always on the hunt for ways to optimize performance, and that means giving them the right configuration options. A recent bug report revealed I’d made those options impossible to find in Bok’s Banging Butterflies.
Making Dialogue Colourful
I’ve been working on a Let’s Play of Baldur’s Gate for a while now, and there’s a feature I’ve always wanted to add to the site to make the dialogue pop a bit more.
Fixing the Landing States
I got a couple of bug reports about butterfly movement recently. Some were stuck floating in the sky, others wouldn’t animate properly when moving. So I took some time this week to clean up the movement and landing code to make it more robust.
Variants of Peacock Pansies
There was a butterfly I spotted in the Buddha Park in Vientiane that I somehow forgot about. It was an old Peacock Pansy Butterfly, its wings shredded and worn. So this week I worked on adding this butterfly to the mod, as well as yet another unique feature for it.