Building on our last post for the Sphere creator and other geometry experiments, we’ve made some more shenanigans. At our Weekly Wednesday Tech club meet up we did a small demo for the kids in attendance, and the discussion quickly turned into fun destruction and wanting to animate the creation of spheres among other things.
So, over the last week we tinkered some with vector math and Bukkit.runable to generate block animations, and came up with a random Meteor Shower plugin. So much fun in here, dodging meteors falling from the sky, watching as magma blocks fly through the air and explode like TNT on impact. There is a lot of fun math involved, and some new Minecraft Plugin behaviors we didn’t get to with the geometry stuff.
Above is the overhead view of a before / during / after of the same landscape from a single Meteor Shower happening.
In the during picture, about 20 seconds had elapsed. The after showing about 2 minutes of default-behavior meteor shower crashing.
Each magma block follows a vector from max world height and within 140 blocks of the player (280, if you count positive and negative x and y offsets), and targets a spot randomly within 42 (84 +/-) of the players current location. ParticleEmitters are attached and drawn at each step, making the block itself leave a trail of smoke as it passes through the sky.
Any non-air block the meteor passes through causes it to explode. When it lands in water a block of obsidian is created. When it lands on a tree or wood structure, the explosion doesn’t happen but instead ignites the surface with a spreadable fire.
As before, you can download the plugin .jar file directly, or clone the github repository and build it on your own!
I hope to add some better configuration options to control the behavior currently hardcoded in the plugin, and perhaps even come up with some custom items/lore that would trigger or prevent an apocalyptic meteor event from destroying your home! Suggestions and, even better, pull requests, are definitely welcome!