Minecolonies, the popular Minecraft mod that lets you build and manage your own thriving colony, just got a significant upgrade for builders and creators! As part of our ongoing commitment to improving user experience and expanding creative possibilities, we’ve overhauled one of the mod’s core features: the Scan Tool Minecolonies. This essential tool, used to capture and replicate structures within the game, has received a brand-new Graphical User Interface (GUI) and a host of improvements designed to make building and sharing your creations easier and more efficient than ever before.
Previously, the scan tool, while functional, operated through a series of right-clicks to define the area and then saved the scanned data with a generic name. This process, while quick for experienced users, lacked clarity and could lead to errors, especially for those new to the mod or working on complex structures. Players often found themselves needing to rename files manually and were sometimes surprised by accidentally capturing unwanted blocks or entities within their scans. There was also no visual confirmation of the selected area before saving, making precision scanning a challenge.
Recognizing these limitations, we’ve completely redesigned the scan tool experience. The biggest change is the introduction of an intuitive GUI that appears immediately after defining the scan area with the tool. This new interface transforms the scanning process, offering players unprecedented control and feedback.
The new Scan Tool GUI presents several key enhancements:
- Visual Position Confirmation: The GUI clearly displays the coordinates of the scanned area, allowing for immediate verification and adjustment. In creative mode, players can even directly edit these positions within the GUI to fine-tune their selection.
- Filename Suggestion & Customization: No more randomly generated filenames! The GUI provides a field to suggest a name for your scanned structure, making organization and retrieval much simpler. You can easily give your creation a descriptive name right at the point of scanning.
- Real-time Resource Inspection: A game-changing feature, the GUI now allows players to instantly check the resources contained within the scanned area. This invaluable function helps identify if you’ve unintentionally captured entities (like animals or mobs) or blocks that might be unobtainable in survival mode. This pre-scan check prevents errors and ensures your scanned structures are buildable and clean.
For users who appreciate the speed of the original method, we’ve retained a “fast scan” option. By shift-right-clicking, you can bypass the GUI and perform an instant scan, directly saving the selection just like before. This provides flexibility for both quick captures and detailed, controlled scans.
Behind the scenes, developing this enhanced scan tool involved creating several new components and refining existing systems. We built a dedicated GUI class, leveraging our XML-based GUI framework to create a flexible and visually appealing interface. This framework allows us to define GUI layouts in XML templates, which are then dynamically populated with data and functionality through corresponding Window classes.
The Window class handles the interaction logic, registering button handlers and responding to user input. When the GUI is opened, it populates the displayed information based on the scan data. Button actions like “Discard” (to close the GUI without saving) and “Confirm” (to finalize the scan and save) are straightforward, ensuring ease of use.
The “Show Resources” functionality reuses and adapts existing code from the builder system, which already calculates resource requirements for structures. This efficient reuse of code allowed us to quickly integrate the resource checking feature into the scan tool GUI.
Finally, network messages were implemented to communicate the scan data from the client to the server, ensuring seamless saving and integration of the scanned structures within the Minecolonies system.
The enhanced scan tool minecolonies is more than just a visual upgrade. It’s a significant step forward in usability and functionality, offering tangible benefits to all Minecolonies players:
- Improved Accuracy: Visual confirmation and position editing ensure precise scans, reducing errors and rework.
- Enhanced User Experience: The intuitive GUI makes scanning more user-friendly, especially for new players.
- Increased Efficiency: Resource checking and filename suggestion streamline the workflow, saving time and effort.
- Greater Control: Players have more control over their scans, ensuring they capture exactly what they intend.
We believe this update to the scan tool minecolonies will greatly enhance the creative building experience within Minecolonies. We encourage you to try out the new feature and experience the improved workflow firsthand! For those interested in the technical details, you can view the pull request on GitHub: https://github.com/Minecolonies/minecolonies/pull/2429. We look forward to seeing the amazing structures you create with the power of the updated scan tool!
