Porting and maintaining multiple versions of a mod can be a lot of work. Sometimes things slip through the cracks. One of those things were the Lepidopterist’s trade offers. I didn’t notice until after release that the Lepidopterist wasn’t offering all the trades they were supposed to.
Development
Writing about software development.
A Butterfly Spawn Category
One problem that’s been around since the mod’s inception is that butterfly spawns take away from other animal spawns. That means fewer cows, sheep, rabbits, and so on in any Minecraft game with Bok’s Banging Butterflies installed. And as more butterfly species were added, the problem only got worse.
Porting to 1.21.4: Stage 4
In my porting adventure, I was almost there. I could load the game and create a new world. That didn’t mean that I was ready to release, however. Next came the laborious task of testing (almost) every feature in the mod to ensure that they still work.
Porting to 1.21.4: Stage 3
I’ve been porting Bok’s Banging Butterflies to Minecraft 1.21.4. The code compiled – great! The game loaded to the title screen – even better! But I still wasn’t done. Because now, the real test began: could I create a new Minecraft world?
Porting to 1.21.4: Stage 2
Last week I talked about how I got the mod compiling for version 1.21.4. I was optimistic but, as most developers will know, this is only the first step. The next step in the process would be to get the game to actually run.
Porting to 1.21.4: Stage 1
Stage 1 of porting a mod to a new version is to get the thing compiling. Once this is done you can move on to getting the game to launch, managing to create a world, and then a wealth of tests to ensure all the features work.
A Fix That I Did Not Like
Sometimes you will find a problem and not be able to work out the actual cause of the problem. No matter how much you debug or trawl through code and documentation you cannot find a reason for a bug.
How Many Butterflies is Too Many?
How many butterflies should there be in the world? Too few, and players will barely see them. Too many, and they’ll overrun everything. This has been a challenge since the start of this mod, and as one player recently pointed out, I may have gone too far in limiting them.
Butterly Wings Flap to Pi
It’s Pi Day, and to celebrate I thought I’d write a small article on Pi (π). While I’m not a mathematician or a physicist, π does still crop up in game development. So here’s a small example of how I use π to create great looking butterflies.
Fixing An Exceptional Bug
No matter how much you test a mod you will always miss something. This time it was a crash that I couldn’t reproduce, nor could I find the cause for.