Simple Mod Manager is a lightweight utility that allows players to easily enable, disable, and manage their installed mods without manually moving files. For Stardance, I am trying to add the two most complicated features-creating an in game mod, resourcepack, and shader downloader, as well as a mod hot-swap to update mods in real time to avoid a full game restart. These will be difficult to perfect mostly because I have barely any experience in JVM class loading, and I have done little to no work with file downloading. Before Stardance, I had planned to make a separate mod called ModGuard with these things added, however I realized there wasn’t many features to add to it, and since I already had a decent user base to Simple Mod Manager, I decided to merge the two instead, so that users wouldn’t ever have to leave the game, or even restart it when installing any modifications (super helpful for modpack creators and streamlining the creation process)!

1. Download System:

I fixed the download pipeline. For whatever reason, before fetching stuff from the api wasn’t working, and today I fixed that. It came down to a mix of a few issues both involving my internet connection, as well as a broken enum.toString() method getting called, which caused a crash. The old download system also didn’t support resourcepacks and shaders, so I added a few fields to the widget class, and made an enum to represent that (ProjectType). Now whenever fetching from the API, I must specify the type which I am getting (e.g. ProjectType.MOD), and it will filter for mods in the facets. After that was done and tested, I had the whole pipeline for downloading done, meaning I just needed something to represent the mods.

2. Screen System:

I made a screen which had the facet buttons, project widgets, search bar, and tab bar. Since these were all stored inside of ArrayLists, I would only have to call the render method for each button within a for loop, making the rendering process super easy. After getting that to work, I added a few background containers, as well as a method to auto detect when a button/search query was changed and fetch the project details for the user. Now I just have to add automatic scrolling detection which will automatically call the API when I am out of projects to see. In order to avoid overlap, I will use the offset and limiters inside the Modrinth API query to skip the first set of mods which the user already saw, and then display the next set, by simply adding them to the ArrayList..

Next Steps:

After I add those small features, the next step will be to extend the project widget class in order to make a more detailed version for when you actually click on the project to download it.