Questions about possible windmill aesthetics mod.

[BrainNoMore]

By picking and poking, I somehow learned to patch up no longer BTW supported texture pack. This is for my private use only of course, as I am nowhere near qualified to call myself texture pack artist as most of my "patches" are crude, quick and simple copy/paste jobs with minimal amount of editing. After watching one of Vintage Beef's videos, and seeing what beautiful job Kezza did with texture for vertical windmill in his Derivation support, I made similar texture for my windmills only to realize wood get's tinted too after applying color to windmill. As workaround I made default windmill sails blue, and I just drop 4 lapis in lava each time I make a windmill, but then I thought this might actually be my opportunity to finally contribute something to BTW community.

I should point out I have no programming skill what so ever, so I was wondering how difficult would it be for complete noob to develop add-on that would enable texture pack artists to make texture for windmill sails separate from actual windmill sail canvas, so color would affect only canvas while not altering the wood frame (kinda like patches on leather armor).

I will warn that even if I do decide to try and develop this add-on, that I am very likely to loose my inspiration and dedication and take unnecessarily long amount of time to finish it, and I might not finish it ever at all. Sorry for the boost of enthusiasm, but I have no idea of what I am getting myself into :)

Sorry for any possible bad English.

[Vexalor]

Well, this addon does not sound like something that would be overly difficult to do, though I am not very much familiar with the way non-block textures (such as those of the windmill) are loaded. It really depends on how quickly/well you learn basic Java (since you have no programming experience). My only concern is that this may involve editing and redistributing FC's code (since, obviously, the windmill is of his creation), which is not permitted under his copyright of Better than Wolves.

P.S.- Don't quote me on it, but this thread might be better off in the addon/texturepack subforum.

[BrainNoMore]

Yeah, I thought about putting it in add-on/texture pack subforum, but it's still just theoretical so I thought off topic might be better :)

[Gilberreke]

Remember that you can't distribute any code written by FC, making this near impossible to do. It might be possible (I can think of a few routes to explore), but it probably isn't.

[Stormweaver]

There was a mod a whiles back - Finer than wolves, now abandoned - that managed to add in a different model for the waterwheel and stuff, but without touching FC's code. I'm no modder, and the actual mod and any details about it are gone, and as such the value of this post is steadily decreasing as I type, but...

...yeah. This just kinda reminded me of that, for what it's worth. Someone might remember more about it than I.

[Vexalor]

Based of the Finer than Wolves thread, it looks like what you would have to do is create a new class that extends the class of FC's that renders the windmill and, in this class, overwrite his render model for the windmill. This would not be overly difficult, but it would still likely take you some time to actually make the new model (not to mention whatever time is needed to learn the necessary Java). However, I have a sneaking suspicion that this may not be as simple as it seems. FC recently rewrote the entire render code to optimize the game and depend less on Modloader. Magnavode's method of overwriting FC's model depended Modloader to function, so there aren't any guarantees that this will work for the current version.