What is this?

As a part of my goals for this year I’ll be writing more blog posts and a way of doing that for me is to write almost reviews of past months as they go by. Since January is now over it’s time to reflect on it. I’ve been waiting to try and get one last little thing finished as a “part” of January but have decided enough is enough and that can go into February.

Progress

I made a decent amount of progress with personal projects in January, although annoyingly I have come out of it with more ideas than I went in with. More personal projects I won’t finish, yay!

FreshFit

Firstly, I released a project of mine that I’ve been working on for a while! Well released, more like, opened to the public. It’s nowhere near finished but is at least usable. FreshFit.gg is a website that allows Minecraft Java players to automatically have new skins generated each day using a library/catalogue of different skin parts that can be applied on top of their base skin. Imagine it essentially as being automatically dressed in a new outfit when you wake up each morning! Except, sometimes those “clothes” are just cat ears instead.

It’s something that I first put together well over two years ago, just a simple Go program that looked in a folder and found the parts and generated a new skin. Since then I’ve been wanting to take it further and build it into a service that anyone can use, and thus a few months ago my partner and I started to build it. We’ve got a few other projects in the works that are related so keep your eyes out for that shortly. If you find any bugs/issues or have any ideas, please join our discord (found on the site) and contact us!

Theatrical

Secondly, I finally made more progress on my Minecraft mod Theatrical. If you’re new to this mod then, it’s essentially aimed at bringing stage/event items into the game of Minecraft, you can check out something people have made here. Its initial version included a moving head with beams & light emission that you connected using DMX to an ArtNet interface that allowed you to control it via real-world lighting software or hardware. It also included some more old-school technology like dimmer racks and tungsten generic lamps, but they are less exciting.

The mod had not been updated in a long time and with Minecraft’s development cycle being constant with new versions coming out more rapidly, the mod had fallen behind. This year I decided I wanted to get it back up from scratch, updating it to the latest version, fixing a ton of bugs that users had pulled up as well as generally improving the mod. One of my fatal problems when designing the mod is my desire to make it realistic and survival friendly but also easy to use and flexible for users who just want to make something. I’m now working on updating the mod, bringing it to both Minecraft launchers (Forge & Fabric) with one codebase as well as re-designing it from the ground up to be both flexible and realistic. I’ve made good progress with a very early beta version being available hopefully by the end of February.

If you’re interested in this, please join the Theatrical discord!

Other things

Generally, January has been good, work is busy which is nice! I think I’ve counted at least 4 different times that I’ll be away over the next month and a half across the UK! Between work and personal projects, I’ve found time to socialise and play games, re-connecting with some friendship groups that I had become distant with. I also had the pleasure of attending the Iris Dydd Santes Dwynwen Supper which was an enjoyable evening of food, drink and friends. As I said in my last post, If we’ve become distant or haven’t spoken in a while please reach out and say hello! Alternatively, if you’ve never spoken to me before, feel free to do the same.