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.
Development
Writing about software development.
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.
Updating to NeoForge 1.21.1
It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally gotten around to it. Bok’s Banging Butterflies now supports NeoForge 1.21.1. This means you can add butterflies to a Minecraft world that has almost all of the latest features in Minecraft. It wasn’t easy.
How to Report a (Butterfly) Bug
Bug reports help modders fix issues and improve their mods. Whether your game crashes, an item behaves incorrectly, or something just seems off, reporting the issue properly ensures it gets fixed faster. This guide explains how to write an effective bug report.