EMMAITAR
Emmaitar is a craftable custom paintings mod for Minecraft 1.7.10 which I developed for use alongside the LOTR mod.
When installed on a server, the admins can upload painting images and configure them to be available in-game with specific recipes. Crucially, the client does not need to have Emmaitar installed to connect - however, without it, the custom paintings will not show up in-game.
Emmaitar is Quenya for 'picture-artist' - painter.
Mod Download - Emmaitar 1.2.2
NEI Plugin for Emmaitar (developed by The_Ranger_Malvegil, shows painting recipes) - download, requires NEI Recipe Handlers and NEI itself, etc.
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How do I configure the paintings?
The mod generates a server directory, emmaitar-paintings, into which you place the painting images. A painting must be a .png file, and the width and height must be multiples of 16.
Each painting must have an associated metadata file of the same name as the .png. These are plain text files with a special extension, which is .epm (Emmaitar Painting Metadata).
In this metadata file you specify:
- the author name;
- the painting's title (different from the filename);
- the in-game dimensions of the painting (width and height, in blocks);
- and a list of dyes used to craft it.
Here is an example of a metadata file: gondolin.epm for a painting gondolin.png.
# The first ever test painting metafile!
#
# Lines beginning with #### are comments and will not be interpreted by the loader.
#
author=Goldbar22
title=The City of Gondolin
w=4
h=4
dyes=LightBlue,LightBlue,LightBlue,White,White,Gray,Green,Gray
Lines beginning with # are comments, which are ignored. Note the metadata format: author=Goldbar22, a key and a value separated by =, with no spaces. And the key is case-sensitive (don't capitalise Author).
Most of these properties are self-explanatory, but let's take some time to explain the recipe syntax:
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Recipe syntax
The recipe format is a list of eight dyes. In-game, this generates a crafting recipe of the form:
[Dye 1] [Dye 2] [Dye 3]
[Dye 4] [Painting] [Dye 5]
[Dye 6] [Dye 7] [Dye 8]
The painting item in the middle must be a normal painting item, not an Emmaitar custom painting. The dyes use the Forge ore dictionary, so any dye of that colour will work to craft the painting: you can use vanilla or modded dyes.
To configure these recipes in the metadata file you use a comma-separated list of dye names, as above:
dyes=LightBlue,LightBlue,LightBlue,White,White,Gray,Green,Gray
Again, these names are case-sensitive and there must be no spaces between them. There must be exactly 8 dyes - no more, no fewer!
The list of dye names:
Black
Red
Green
Brown
Blue
Purple
Cyan
LightGray
Gray
Pink
Lime
Yellow
LightBlue
Magenta
Orange
White
For the sake of completion, I should point out that each custom painting needs to have a unique dye recipe!
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Commands
The mod also adds two ingame commands: emmaitar_give and emmaitar_print.
emmaitar_give <player> <painting-id> gives the player a pre-made item of the specified custom painting, so you don't have to craft it.
emmaitar_print <painting-id> is a singleplayer-only command which will auto-generate info images for paintings, like this:
These images are placed in the folder emmaitar-paintings/info-printouts.
The point of this printout command is to help server admins if they want to make a recipe catalogue available to the players. Rather than spending ages arranging your configured recipes in-game and taking screenshots, you can just run this command in singleplayer with the paintings and auto-generate a catalogue of painting information.
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Other stuff
These paintings render with a consistent lighting level (the light level is averaged over all blocks) so they don't go patchy indoors.
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To-do list
Future features that I intend to work on at some point:
reloadcommand, to reload the painting list from the filesystem without needing to stop and restart the game- craftable painting catalogue (a modified book item), to view all loaded paintings and their recipes and information in-game
- (Possibly) an option to specify an alternative rendering style for paintings, without the wooden frame