Hey there, this post is here to explain Abilities in Morph to you because it’s too long to explain in the changelog!
Abilities…. Where do I start.. Well, first off right now they’re actually more of “traits” rather than “abilities”. However, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll call them abilities.
Packaged with the mod right now there are 8 abilities, some good, some bad. They are as follows:
- Climb
- Fly
- Float
- Fire Immunity
- Hostile
- Swim
- Sunburn
- Water Allergy
Explanation:
Climb: Mimics spider climbing up walls etc, you have to push yourself against a wall and you’ll climb up it. You need to remain pushed against the wall to climb up it, of course, and you fall if you let go.
Fly: Mimics creative flying, available for vanilla mobs that fly.
Float: Only one mob in vanilla supports this, and that’s the chicken. Instead of falling to your doom, you slowly float downwards like chickens do.
Fire Immunity: A variety of mobs have this, especially all the nether mobs. This will make you fire resistant and let you swim around in lava if you want to.
Hostile: Certain mobs are labelled hostile specifically because they try to target players. There is no use of this ability unless you enable Hostile Mode in the config (explained later).
Swim: This ability allows mobs to breathe underwater, and optionally, make them drown when out of water.
Sunburn: Think Zombies and Skeletons burning in sunlight. Yeah.
Water allergy: You take damage when wet. Like endermen and blazes.
To identify abilities, look in the Morph gui under the name of the morph, listed there are abilities that may be available to the mob. (For example, the skeleton has an additional fire immunity which affects wither skeletons and sunburn which affects normal skeletons instead).
Hostile Mode
This is a config option that affects the “Hostile” Ability. By default it is turned off. This modes allow you to walk amongst (some, not all) the hostile mobs in the game, if you are morphed as a hostile mob.
EG: You’re a skeleton and you walk up to a zombie, which completely ignores you unless attacked.
Mod support
Alright… Here’s the interesting bit. In terms of mod support, there’s two ways you can go.
1. Bug the Mod author to support the mod by using the API found here.
2. Allow the mod to try and figure out mod mob behaviour (Ability Tracking)
Ability Tracking
Also bundled with the Morph, is the ability of the mod for it to try and figure out what mod mobs have what abilities.
WARNING
This is a very slow and time consuming process. It is not *instant* and may never succeed in realising stuff like “the firebat should be able to fly”, or may give mobs the wrong ability. This is provided as a workaround solution to mod support without the API. Once the mod learns a mod mob ability it will save it to the config folder and will be loaded along with the mod.
This also uses the space around y-level 240 of the spawn point to do testing with mobs. I would recommend staying clear of this area if you want to leave the ability tracker enabled.
Once an ability is learnt it will be sent to all the clients currently connected to the server as to sync abilities client-server. That way, clients will be able to fly as well using a mod mob once the server has learnt that said mob can fly.
Simple enough, but this took days to work on, and might be buggy. Forgecraft did me a very good favour of not having to release a fix/update every half an hour for this. However, I find it “satisfactory enough” to be included in the release.
Usable abilities
Right now, usable abilities are planned. What are usable abilities? Stuff you can trigger on command, like teleportation, exploding, shooting projectiles, etc. HOWEVER, these are not included in Morph just yet, and will most likely come in the later update.
That’s about it I guess.
Cheers,
iChun