Hall of Stars - Character Sprite Animations & Walking Logic

First devlog for Hall of Stars, yipee! I came up with this idea while playing Pokemon Diamond on my old DS lite. I just like the way it feels, the movement is so jittery, but it still feels nice to play. So I came up with the idea to make a game with a matching style. I was kinda done with minecraft-themed projects, so I thought: “Why not do something with the Stardance API, since I’m building this project for stardance anyway.” I decided to start making a retro topdown game (just like Pokemon Diamond) where you spawn into a long hallway with doors on the sides. Those doors represent all the projects you’ve made on stardance. When entering a door it will give you more information on the project, like hours spent, number of devlogs and their contents, number of ships, and more if I get the chance.

New Features:

• Screen: Yeah, I added a screen. This makes it possible for your eyes to see what’s happening. It must be one of the best inventions ever in gaming.
• Character Sprite Texture: I textured the character in all the frames, this took long . The animation and character template are made by ErisEsra, so big shoutout to her.
• Character Sprite Animations: I’ve made sure the template animation works properly and the player now has idle and walk animations for all four directions.
• Player Movement: I implemented the logic for moving the player, with the same system as most retro games: Up, Down, Left or Right. No diagonal walking.

Future Plans:

• Constructing the hallway
• Adding the doors and rooms
• Making an API class that communicates with the stardance API.
• Add projects to the hallway through the API
• Add project details to the rooms

Hall of Stars - Character Sprite Animations & Walking Logic

First devlog for Hall of Stars, yipee! I came up with this idea while playing Pokemon Diamond on my old DS lite. I just like the way it feels, the movement is so jittery, but it still feels nice to play. So I came up with the idea to make a game with a matching style. I was kinda done with minecraft-themed projects, so I thought: “Why not do something with the Stardance API, since I’m building this project for stardance anyway.” I decided to start making a retro topdown game (just like Pokemon Diamond) where you spawn into a long hallway with doors on the sides. Those doors represent all the projects you’ve made on stardance. When entering a door it will give you more information on the project, like hours spent, number of devlogs and their contents, number of ships, and more if I get the chance.

New Features:

• Screen: Yeah, I added a screen. This makes it possible for your eyes to see what’s happening. It must be one of the best inventions ever in gaming.
• Character Sprite Texture: I textured the character in all the frames, this took long . The animation and character template are made by ErisEsra, so big shoutout to her.
• Character Sprite Animations: I’ve made sure the template animation works properly and the player now has idle and walk animations for all four directions.
• Player Movement: I implemented the logic for moving the player, with the same system as most retro games: Up, Down, Left or Right. No diagonal walking.

Future Plans:

• Constructing the hallway
• Adding the doors and rooms
• Making an API class that communicates with the stardance API.
• Add projects to the hallway through the API
• Add project details to the rooms

PROJECT CONTEXT: I don’t own a chair, so I sit on my bed, with my laptop on a desk so that I can play videogames (attached below is a detailed sketch of my setup). However after some time playing, say, Minecraft for example, my back begins to ache.

This could be solved by building a better posture or simply buying a chair, but I’m unemployed, and I’d much rather move backwards and rest my back on the wall. However, this makes it incredibly difficult to play Minecraft now that there is a significant distance between myself and the gaming device.

“Man, I wish I could play Minecraft without touching my laptop, like just by gesturing with my hands or something”

And this is how the general idea behind MotionCraft was birthed. The issue is: I have never made a Minecraft mod before, so this will be a learning experience in which I will learn ML and Java, as I take you all along with me on this journey.

Monicraft - Offline Player Caching, More statistics, Better Exception Handling & More

The final devlog for Monicraft is finally here. It has been a long, but really educational, journey. I’ve locked in for a last time and rewritten the whole player manager logic . It is now way more optimized and only updates the data for online players. I’ve switched from keeping everything apart to making a class for each player and storing all the data in it, and then keeping those objects in a dictionary with the player’s uuid as the key.

New Features:

• Offline Player Caching: The data for all players is now cached at all times, right into memory. It then checks the online player list and updates it every 30 seconds (by default).
• More configuration: You can now change the interval for the player data fetching and the online player list fetching. You can also set a prefix for the chat mode, like Admin Camilio13 > {message}.
• More Resource Management: You can now also see the disk usage (total size of the server) and network inbound and outbound on the main screen.
• UI improvement: I gave the main screen a little overhaul to make it look a bit better. And I tried to make the buttons and everything else as stable as possible, but they’re still sometimes shifting or not perfectly centered depending on your screen size and terminal zoom. This is a problem I can’t fix and will always be there when using Textual.
• Fixed bugs:
  • Several bugs with dummy mode, the app relied on non-existing API functions.
  • Cursor kept shifting when player list refreshed.
  • Pterodactyl client API rate limit was exceeded on big servers.

Monicraft - Offline Player Caching, More statistics, Better Exception Handling & More

The final devlog for Monicraft is finally here. It has been a long, but really educational, journey. I’ve locked in for a last time and rewritten the whole player manager logic . It is now way more optimized and only updates the data for online players. I’ve switched from keeping everything apart to making a class for each player and storing all the data in it, and then keeping those objects in a dictionary with the player’s uuid as the key.

New Features:

• Offline Player Caching: The data for all players is now cached at all times, right into memory. It then checks the online player list and updates it every 30 seconds (by default).
• More configuration: You can now change the interval for the player data fetching and the online player list fetching. You can also set a prefix for the chat mode, like Admin Camilio13 > {message}.
• More Resource Management: You can now also see the disk usage (total size of the server) and network inbound and outbound on the main screen.
• UI improvement: I gave the main screen a little overhaul to make it look a bit better. And I tried to make the buttons and everything else as stable as possible, but they’re still sometimes shifting or not perfectly centered depending on your screen size and terminal zoom. This is a problem I can’t fix and will always be there when using Textual.
• Fixed bugs:
  • Several bugs with dummy mode, the app relied on non-existing API functions.
  • Cursor kept shifting when player list refreshed.
  • Pterodactyl client API rate limit was exceeded on big servers.

Monicraft - Offline Player List, Async Player Data Fetching & More

Monicraft’s second-to-last devlog has arrived . I’ve now added the last feature I wanted to add, the “include offline player list” button. It works by simply getting the whole usercache.json file and getting all the names and UUID’s in it. After that it’s just using my old function to retrieve the saved data and stats on the server. I still wanna optimize it and take some time to fix and improve the application overall.

New Features:

• Include Offline Players: A toggle which toggles (yeah, the toggle toggles something ) the visibility of offline players in the Player List. Also added a extra column to the table to see who’s online and who’s not. Online players will allways show up at the top. You’re also able to use some of the Player Manager’s features on offline players.
• Async Player Data Fetching: The fetching of playerdata (stored in {UUID}.dat) now operates in parralel, so bigger servers don’t have to wait for seconds every time the table is built. This brings up the problem that the default rate limit for the client API is 240 requests/min, so really big servers with more than 40 recent (offline) players or even online players will exceed this limit. This is why I wanted to implement offline player caching, more on that in future plans.
• Improved Stats UI: The statistics pop-up was a bit too small and not all the data could fit in. So I made it a bit cooler by making it bigger
• Small Fixes
  • Only ping the server when it’s running to prevent errors.
  • Fixed a problem where my Unicode characters got turned into ugly emoji’s . I didn’t discover this until I ran it in my native terminal, I’ve done all the testing in my built-in terminal in my IDE.

Future Plans:

I think I will be doing one more devlog where I will add these features and polish it for the first SHIP.

• Fix a bug where you suddenly select the first row of the table after rebuilding it
• Create a cache for offline players
• Add disk usage resource data
• Settings: Changing the loop delay
• Settings: Chat mode and message prefixes
• Make the GitHub workflow files
• Make an installation guide in the README

Monicraft - Player Statistics, Asynchronous Networking & More

I’ve been working hard on some big changes to make the project, faster, more reliable and visually attractive. I’ve gone ahead and implemented one of the two final changes, the statistics screen for players. It was alot of repetitive work, but I managed to make it look good. At first I wanted to parse some of the saved stats (such as play time, deaths, etc.) manually, but I came to the conclusion that formatting the tag (minecraft:damage_dealt –> Damage Dealt) and showing them was a better idea. I found some naming logic in the tags so I could filter out time, distances and damage to format them into a readable format. All distance stats end with one_cm and are stored in centimeters (1/100 of a block). All time stats contain the substring "time" and are stored in ticks (1/20 of a second). And finally all the damage stats contain the substring "damage" and are stored as 10 times the damage for more precision (or 20 times the hearts damage).

New Features:

• Statistics screen: This screen is accessed trough the “Stats” button in the player manager and contains 3 tabs: General, Entities and Items. General contains stats like amount of jumps, distance walked and interactions with special blocks, entities shows the kill count for every entity you’ve killed and the Items tab shows how many of each item you’ve crafted, mined, used, broken, picked up and dropped.
• Async Networking: I’ve switched from the requests library to the httpx library to make it so queries, server statuses and normal requests all operate separately.
• UUID caching: Monicraft will now no longer have to send a request to the API to figure out someones UUID. On the first request it caches every user and their names, which are stored in usercache.json on the server, right into RAM for faster acces and less requests.
• Small fixes and optimizations: When starting up without any credentials, it will now scan for credentials until inputted in the settings instead of crashing. The request headers are also updated when new credentials saved. I’ve fixed a logging issue with the API class which was trying to show notifications, without being part of the actual GUI. It is now fixed by passing the app class onto the API class and giving it acces to the GUI.

Future Plans:

• Include offline players in player manager: Last real feature I want to add.
• Finalizing and polishing: I wanna make sure everything runs bug-free, the program doesn’t crash and also make it look good on most (I can’t make it look good on all screen sizes) screen sizes. I need to build the executables and make sure they’re working.

Monicraft - Player Manager, Dummy Mode & More!

I’m getting close to finishing this project (fr this time ). I think it will be one more devlog, it’s been a long ride.

I randomly realised that not everyone has a minecraft server laying around, so I decided to make a dummy mode, so everyone can test out the Monicraft dashboard. I’ve now polished all the player manager buttons (except for Include offline players and Statistics, more on that in future plans). You’re now able to message, kick, ban and change gamemode with the player manager. I made this more user-friendly by using pop-ups.

New Features:

• Pop-ups in Player Manager: You’re now able to give the reason for a kick or ban with the use of an interactive pop-up. The message feature also uses a pop-up to send a message directly to the selected player. Changing the gamemode is done trough a pop-up with a selection menu, which excludes the gamemode the player is currently in and let’s you choose between the other 3.
• Dummy Mode: This mode is accessed by adding the --dummy argument when running the program. This makes it so every command that is sent to the “server” is just displayed in the terminal, making you able to see what’s going on. I’ve added a stream_dummy_data() function that updates the stats every 2 seconds with random values. The mod list will be empty. The player list will display a random new player every 10 seconds (those are the default minecraft skins’ names + some random number). You’re able to use every feature from the player manager in dummy mode, everything being sent will be displayed in the console.
• Fixed Reconnect Logic: When the server disconnects for whatever reason, the dasboard will now try to reconnect every 5 seconds.
• Queries with statusses as fallback: The recent implementation used both queries and statusses if queries were enabled. It now only uses statusses if queries are not enabled. This makes it alot more optimized, using only one of two all the time.

Future Plans:

• Implement the Include Offline Players button: This makes it so offline players (cached in usercache.json in the server’s root) will be displayed in the player list. Maby I’ll also add the ability to manage offline players, but I’m not sure.
• Implement the Statistics button: This button will show a pop-up that shows all the player’s stats (such as blocks broken, mobs killed, etc.)

Monicraft - Player Manager, NBT Parsing & More

It’s been a few long session with alot of thinking and implementing . I never thought that getting the online players would be so hard. At first, I wanted to use minecraft’s list command and then parse the output from the terminal, but that was way too hard and would not work on big servers with terminals full of commands. So I decided to use the mcstatus library to get a list of all online players. This is done by:

1. Sending a query to the server.
2. If queries are disabled on the server or the query simply fails, it sends a normal status request (server list ping) to the server.

I then use the name to get the UUID of a player stored in the usercache.json file in the root directory of every minecraft server. That UUID is then used to get the saved {UUID}.dat file in the worlds folder. All the player’s data (e.g. health, hunger, position, gamemode, etc.) is stored in there. This brings the restriction of the server’s autosave time (which is 5 minutes by default). So I’ve also added a refresh button which saves the game and updates the player list. The player list is automatically updated every ten seconds and based off the lastest safe file.

New Features:

• Player Manager: A way to see all online players and their statistics. You can also kick and ban people by just selecting them and clicking a button.

Future Plans:

• Adding the functionality to toggle the visibility of offline players in the player list.
• Adding functionality to the following buttons: Stats, Message, Gamemode
• Adding a player stats screen (viewed by clicking the stats button) which shows all the statistics of a single player (e.g. mobs killed, blocks broken, distance ran, etc.)

Monicraft - Mods list, Server kill, Navigation buttons & UI/UX improvements

• I’ve added buttons to navigate between screens. I forgot to add this last time, so travelling between screens was a bit tricky.
• You’re now able to kill the server for when the server get’s stuck in a shutdown or crashes. It will sent a confirmation pop-up message upon the first click, telling you to click another time to confirm. This lasts for 10 seconds and then it will reset.
• I’ve also added a new screen with a list of all the mods you’ve installed on the server, including name, file size and last changed date.
• The UI/UX is now alot more stable. I had orginally designed everything on my monitor. But when I would use it on my laptop screen, the whole UI collapsed. So I made everything a bit smaller.

Future plans:

This project is close to being finished, but I want to add two last features.

• Player management: Quickly see who’s online on the server and manage them (kick, ban, whitelist, unwhitelist)
• Version manager: See what versions of Minecraft, Java and mod loader you’re using and modify them.

I spend my time today and yesterday to learn Python. So i did some assignments to learn it a bit. I made a little game guess the number with helped a lot to learn!

My plan for now on is to make a calculator for minecraft weapon damage. I still need to start working on it. But atleast im a bit more familiar with python.

I really want to get better at Python. So when a friend of mine invited me i started working!
I came up with the idea because i play Minecraft a lot and i was curious how the game calculates the damage. And a Sword is a bit basic. But the Mace and the Spear work allot differently.

I also switched from VS code to Antigravity IDE. So ai could help me more easy when i need it to.

Here is a screenshot of my guess the number game.

Monicraft - Settings, Power action buttons, Visual Improvements

• I’ve added a settings page where you can configure your API key, Panel endpoint and Server ID. It has a save button and automatically saves when leaving the screen, which writes the inputs to an .env file. You can also reset these value’s.
• I’ve added power action buttons, which can be used to start, restart or stop your minecraft server.
• I’ve added pop-up toasts for errors and informative messages.
• I’ve improved the connection funtions to retry every 5 seconds when the connection is lost.

Future Plans:

• Adding a button to navigate to the settings menu (it is now accessed by sending the settings command).
• Version manager for Java, Minecraft and Mods.

Monicraft - Server resources viewer, Sending commands, Chat mode & Styling

• The console now works properly. It now streams the console directly from your Minecraft server to your terminal trough websockets.
• The server resources (RAM usage, CPU usage and server state) are now visible in a sidebar and are constantly being updated.
• It’s now possible to send commands to the server using the input bar at the bottom. I also added a extra “Chat Mode”, it basically puts say in front of every command you send, which makes it easier to chat with the people that are online on your server.
• The style has been upgraded. I went for a green/nature looking style, because I like the color palette.

Bugs and Future Plans:

• The Chat Mode button doesn’t change color until you move your cursor after you clicked it, not a big problem, but it is kinda confusing.
• I wanna add the option to view/update/remove your installed mods on the server and give more insight into the installed version of modloader.

First devlog for Monicraft!

How I came up with the idea:
I was just thinking about what I could possibly make, I felt like coding, but I just didn’t know what I should make. So I just started playing minecraft as always, on the server with my friends. When I was changing something on the server panel, I was wondering how the panel really works. It turns out almost every hosting provider uses the Pterodactyl dashboard. It relies on a REST API, which is publicly available to anyone. I decided to try and recreate such a panel, but in Python.

The foundation:
The connection with the Pterodactyl API is established trough websockets. I decided to start with a screen which is an overview of the main server resources (such as CPU usage, RAM usage and Storage usage) and the console. The GUI is build with Textual and customized by the built-in TCSS.

What I have done so far:

• Setup the main code space
• Do some research about the API and learn how Textual works
• Design the UI shape
• Connection with the API trough websockets (WIP)

I initially started this project to learn more about API’s and specifically websockets. I also wanted to see how it would be to build a GUI app in python and if it’s really as hard/bad-looking as everyone says.

First devlog for Monicraft!

How I came up with the idea:
I was just thinking about what I could possibly make, I felt like coding, but I just didn’t know what I should make. So I just started playing minecraft as always, on the server with my friends. When I was changing something on the server panel, I was wondering how the panel really works. It turns out almost every hosting provider uses the Pterodactyl dashboard. It relies on a REST API, which is publicly available to anyone. I decided to try and recreate such a panel, but in Python.

The foundation:
The connection with the Pterodactyl API is established trough websockets. I decided to start with a screen which is an overview of the main server resources (such as CPU usage, RAM usage and Storage usage) and the console. The GUI is build with Textual and customized by the built-in TCSS.

What I have done so far:

• Setup the main code space
• Do some research about the API and learn how Textual works
• Design the UI shape
• Connection with the API trough websockets (WIP)

I initially started this project to learn more about API’s and specifically websockets. I also wanted to see how it would be to build a GUI app in python and if it’s really as hard/bad-looking as everyone says.

I’m now officially done with this project. You can see a preview on https://asciinema.org/a/vIZ6F7bfI0mkdDf5. I really happy with what it turned out to be. I learned alot of json formatting, database data flow and code structure. This is the final product:

The Wandering Modder

A fast, AI-driven search engine for Minecraft modding. It fetches data via the Modrinth API and uses a local ChromaDB vector database, allowing you to search for mods, shaders, datapacks, resource packs and plugins using natural language.

Installation

Windows:

git clone [https://github.com/Camiel13/The-Wandering-Modder.git](https://github.com/Camiel13/The-Wandering-Modder.git) the_wandering_modder
cd the_wandering_modder
pip install -r requirements.txt

Linux:

git clone [https://github.com/Camiel13/The-Wandering-Modder.git](https://github.com/Camiel13/The-Wandering-Modder.git) the_wandering_modder
cd the_wandering_modder
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

To start execute this command:

python3 main.py

The Wandering Modder Commands

You have to replace {project_type} with one of the following project types: mod, datapack, resourcepack, shader or plugin. Make sure to describe your project in keywords (e.g. redstone, technical, components, wires)!

{project_type} init - Sets up the searching of a specific project type. !! REQUIRED !!
{project_type} query - Search the built database for specific mods with keywords.
help - Shows all the commands available.
clear - Clears the terminal.
exit / quit - Shuts down the program.

Hardware Acceleration

You can make the process of building the vector database up to 10-50x faster by using a dedicated Nvidia GPU with the CUDA toolkit. This is done by replacing the normal package with a GPU-supported variant and installing the CUDA toolkit onto your system. Note that this can only be done when using a Nvidia GPU with the proper installation of the CUDA toolkit and using recent drivers!

pip uninstall onnxruntime
pip install onnxruntime-gpu

The Wandering Modder

This project is close to being finished.

• I’ve made sure the output looks nice and is visually attractive by using the rich.panel module.
• I added more detail to the metadata saved in the vector database, so I could show it in the output
• I updated the README.md with installing and usage instructions.

Last things I wanna add:

• Hardware acceleration
• Accuracy improvements

The Wandering Modder - Database updating, result formatting and code refactoring

• I’ve finished the update_database() function completely to make sure unfinished databases are complete or to put new (versions of) projects into databases without having to rebuild the whole database. The hardest part was getting the data from the already existing database and comparing it to the new data, since they used diffrent formatting.
• I’ve implemented a format_results() function to make the results into beautiful frames with the rich library. This feature is not completely finished.

My future plans are finishing the format_results() function to make it print beautiful panels into the terminal. I also wanna make the results more accurate to what you type.