Geodesic: A Figura Based Hexporter
So yeah, figura! Silly little minecraft mod that lets you make custom "avatars" for yourself! No longer are you limited to just the default skin format, you can add cool little accesories, or redo the entire body format, all up to your whims! It even lets you use lua scripting to control your avatar, isnt that amazing?
But now, wait a second. Lua scripting? Minecraft has very few mods that straight up allow you to execute arbitrary code like this. And even fewer allows you to essentially drag and drop a text file and use it basically instantly, at the snap of a finger.
The most comparable, and closest to figura in terms of capability in this regard, is CC: Tweaked, aka computercraft, and even it, an absolute staple of minecraft programming mods, falls short compared to figura in quite a few aspects.
I think thats one of the key reasons why we started this project, not only is using things in the most blatantly unintended ways extremely fun, figura also proves itself to be a monstrously powerful tool, provided you sprinkle in a little bit of support and lots of creativity.
Now, lets first start with the main purpose of the project itself, Hexcasting. Hexcasting is basically one of those programming mods. It is quite unwieldy and wildly alien compared to what you normally get with such stuff, even compared to something like psi, but it is quite powerful, especially with addons.
People have made some truly terrifying and amazing things with this mod, me included to some degree. Its very fun and I love it. But it has one big problem, atleast for me.
While hexcasting does not have much of an ingame grind, bringing in programs (hexes, in hexcasting terminology) is… Painful. There exists plenty of methods but most of them have shortcomings. The best ones currently use, as you might have guessed, CC. And even then they are quite unwieldy, often requiring the use of pastebin or hosting a server for files, etc.
Now, most people are fine with this. A few addons and most other importers just satisfy most people, and honestly, me too. I dont mind spending like 20 seconds to just import hexes, its whatever. But I am not one to pass up on a possible improvement, especially when its this unhinged.
Now, lets talk a bit about why figura is so good for this. It mainly has to do with the design goals I set out for this project at the start, which are, listen closely now, they are very sophisticated!
Its laziness. The primary design goal for this thing is laziness. Being less blunt about it, its specifically infrastructure, external (such as using the internet, hosting stuff yourself etc), or internal (such as CC computers, specific setups etc).
Figura is wonderful in this regard because its essentially clientside CC that requires no blocks or crafting or building to run. All you need to do is, well, just put your avatar into the relevant folder and get into a world. Thats basically it. Then you equip it and there, thats all the setup you need, on the minecraft side.
Now, theres still an external setup side to things of course, we have to grab hexes from somewhere, and figura does not disappoint.
Figura has a neat feature where you can read and write files from a specific folder. What you can do is, simply put all the relevant files to be read here, and bam, your avatar can just read from all of those files now!
Now, the final thing to figure out is how to get that data from your computer into minecraft. CC has ducky peripherals, and that works quite well. What does figura have?
Well, theres essentially 2 options. The one I went with, the first one, is mediatransport. Its a figura x hexcasting interop mod that utilizes the dev builds of figura, with the figura server backend, to send things to the server.
The second option is less powerful, but far more versatile. Figura can send messages for you. You can use mods like hexal, or hexparse, to interact with messages on the hex side. This is alot more versatile, since it basically only needs an addon for hexcasting thats both on forge and fabric, and everybody plays with already.
Now that we figured out our setup, inputs and outputs, let me finish this by talking about the more nitty gritty of the project in more detail, for those interested.
The whole importer is essentially composed of 3 main parts, with a couple of auxilliary parts. We have a script that crawls through whatever folder system you have for your hexes and makes an action wheel represantation for them, which you can use to call hexes to be imported.
Then we have the heart of the importer, the script that takes a text file of hexcasting patterns (Opcodes, essentially), and turns them into a format that the importation mechanism itself can use.
This part has a few auxilliaries attached to it, one that parses a huge json file for the pattern conversion, and then caches it for easier retrieval later, one to handle configuration of the importation mechanism for each server and also add the patterns that are world specific, and finally a simple script to add in custom pattern definitions should we ever want to mess around with such stuff.
And then finally, the importation mechanism itself. Its probably the most complex yet the most interchangeable part of the whole importer, as mentioned before requiring to be configured for each server, because of a few peculiarities with mediatransport.
Apart from these main modules, there is also a few things to interface with github and copyparty. They're kinda useless, the base method of just getting files from the PC is way better, but I get bored and make things. They're cool, but do basically the same thing, just access files on the internet.
PS: Its named geodesic because a geodesic is a straight line in curved geometry. More specifically for the name sake, every object in spacetime with no force (excluding gravity) acting on it moves in a geodesic. Gravity is excluded, because its a result of the spacetime itself curving, rather than curving the lines themselves. Thats where the name comes from.
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