This week has been a week of fixes (and a little content as well).
Last week I mentioned that there were two main caveats of the current Mekanism 1.7 build – the first being the strange rendering of cables, and the second being the temporary removal of NEI. Both of these issues ended up turning into hours of troubleshooting for me, which I will detail below.
Strange Rendering of Cables
That doesn’t look right, does it? Something is…off. Like the entire model is inside out. Or like the textures are all flipped. Yeah, it turns out this is a known issue in 1.7.2, and was fixed in 1.7.4 (like I mentioned before).
Anyway, I spoke to ChickenBones about this, and we ended up finding a workaround that involved using his library to take a two faced copy of the model and render both at the same time. Not very efficient, but it works for now.
Removal of NEI
There’s a bit more too this than “it wasn’t ready yet.” I wasn’t able to get the build script to run properly with the latest Forge and NEI installed, so I was putting this off until I updated.
Well, upon updating Forge, the script failed, stating that it was unable to reference some classes that were added with the new simpleimpl Netty wrapper system. After troubleshooting on the #ForgeGradle IRC channel for a solid two hours or so, I was about ready to give up. That’s when I realized that the log only was spitting out this error for 8 out of my 26 packet classes, and I found that there was a pattern – the error only occurred on my packet classes that had enums nested inside. In other words, I found a bug with the javac compiler. Probably the strangest issue I’ve ever encountered, and I’m going to report it to Oracle as soon as I get a chance. I fixed the issue by taking the enums out of the nested classes.
With the fixes of these two issues, 1.7 is now technically more stable than the current 1.6 branch – this means that a release will be pretty soon. I also have a few new features in the works :)
Hope you all are enjoying the summer, I sure am.
-aidancbrady