0.7.0

BetaMoon 0.7.0 adds a model, animation, audio, and custom-entity foundation. Scripts can now define anything from a static prop or dropped pickup to a multipart living creature with persistent data and composed AI. The current entity runtime is complete for local singleplayer worlds; dedicated-server delivery and full multiplayer synchronization are still under development.

Upgrading from 0.6.0

• Move texture-pack overrides from betamoon/ to bm_assets/. Registered assets, direct paths, and built-in model replacements all use the new ZIP-root directory. The old betamoon/ entries are no longer consulted.
• Automatic reload after saving a Lua file is now optional and disabled by default. Set hotReloadOnFileChange=true in BetaMoon's configuration to restore that workflow; manual reload remains available from the Scripts screen.
• Asset registration paths are now optional. A key-only asset uses its conventional <namespace>:<category>/<key-path> location. When path is supplied, both the script default and its texture-pack override preserve that path beneath lua_scripts/ and bm_assets/ respectively.

Custom entities

• Add betamoon.entities:add, get, and getRequired with four explicit entity kinds: general-purpose prop, configurable projectile, collectible pickup, and living. Declarations are script-owned, validated before publication, saved with the world, and recover safely when a definition is temporarily missing.
• Add native and fully manual lifecycle modes. Scripts can keep each kind's standard simulation or take over every tick while retaining interactions and lifecycle events. Spawn, load, activation, deactivation, tick, interaction, pickup, impact, damage, death, and removal callbacks have scoped world and entity access.
• Add direct control over position, rotation, facing, velocity, movement input, health, damage, attacks, targets, paths, visibility, animation, and visual transforms. Common inspection and control methods also work with vanilla and externally added entities when they are exposed through a callback handle.
• Add saved typed entity data for booleans, integers, numbers, strings, vectors, item stacks, stable entity references, bounded lists, and nested records. Add a separate transient memory store for AI routes and short-lived runtime state. Incompatible data schema changes are rejected atomically during reload.
• Add optional health to nonliving entities and before/after-damage callbacks. kill() enters the death lifecycle, remove() removes without death, dropLoot() explicitly resamples declared loot, and dropItem() emits one requested stack. Declared totals split into legal native stack sizes, including separate stacks for nonstackable items.
• Add saved inventories and logical equipment, optional death drops, owner and team relations, alliance checks, native single-passenger mounts, saved behavior states, and simulation-time one-shot or repeating timers.
• Add living AI presets for idle, wandering, and directed ground behavior. Advanced declarations can replace targeting, path choice, attacks, and movement independently, or run a wholly manual AI routine with access to entity, world, sensing, health, data, and native pathfinding information.
• Add optional multipart hit and interaction shapes tied to named model parts. Each part may be visual-only or have independent boxes and callbacks. Add bounded overlap sensors with player/living filters and enter, stay, and leave callbacks.
• Add natural spawning for living types with passive/hostile categories, weights, group sizes, per-type caps, light and height ranges, dimension/biome/substrate filters, and native or persistent despawning. Spawn attempts inspect loaded terrain only.
• Add swept projectile collision, configurable speed/gravity/drag/lifetime/damage, owner grace, impact responses, and owner-aware damage attribution. Items can launch a registered custom projectile while retaining ammunition, cooldown, and consumption behavior. Player and BetaMoon-entity owners survive save/load through stable identity.
• Add pickup entities that use native dropped-item movement and inventory collection or an optional custom appearance. Partial collection keeps the remainder; manual lifecycles can trigger collection explicitly.
• Add entity model rendering, per-instance animation selection, visual offsets/rotation/ scale, optional pickup bobbing and spin, positional sound bindings, and direct sound playback. Gameplay state and presentation state remain separate.
• Add bounded world queries for time, weather, dimension, spawn, biome, height, light, terrain, redstone, nearby players and entities, plus safe block changes, effects, and entity spawning. Nearby queries use true spherical distance; getBlock returns nil for unloaded chunks without loading terrain and enforces Beta 1.7.3's Y range.

Assets, audio, and texture packs

• Add script-owned texture, sound, model, and animation registries with stable namespaced references, atomic publication, lookup, source/path inspection, deferred refresh, and cleanup after failed initialization, unload, or reload.
• Resolve key-only textures as PNG, models as JSON, animations as .animation.json, and sounds as exactly one matching OGG or WAV file. Explicit relative paths remain available for projects with their own directory layout.
• Accept registered texture references and keys in block/item textures, worn armor, texture overrides, and container GUI images. Atlas-backed content keeps stable slots and uploads again only when its content or relevant display state changes.
• Add weighted betamoon.soundEvents and local one-shot betamoon.audio:play, including volume, pitch, range, world-lifetime cleanup, and use by entity presentation events.
• Refresh registered content when requested or when the selected texture pack changes. Invalid replacements fall back to the script default; an already usable asset remains active if every new source fails. Diagnostics report the selected source and path.

Models, animation, and appearances

• Add Bedrock geometry JSON model importing and a bounded Bedrock/GeckoLib-style numeric animation JSON subset. Geometry supports named bones, parent hierarchies, pivots, cuboids, UVs, mirroring, inflation, and locators; model files use the .json suffix.
• Add independent poses, named-part translation/rotation/scaling, clip sampling, loop modes, weighted blending, bone masks, procedural onPose callbacks, and locator inspection through Lua.
• Add reusable model appearances for blocks, items, and entities with material textures, render layers, lighting/tint controls, and GUI, held, dropped, and world transforms.
• Add per-variant block and item appearances with default inheritance and explicit ordinary-rendering fallback. Blocks with any dynamic variant always use dynamic rendering; blocks whose variants are all static remain chunk-rendered. Visual hot reload rebuilds rendering data without replacing blocks, metadata, or Lua tile data.
• Add bundled minecraft:block/* Beta 1.7.3 models for stairs, every fence connection, trapdoors, doors, beds, levers, torches, rails, ladders, slabs, buttons, snow, and pressure plates. Directional models use one base geometry plus appearance rotation.
• Validate required rendering hooks before accepting model content, isolate failing pose callbacks, and restore graphics state after rendering errors.

Blocks, items, Lua API, and fixes

• Add betamoon.callbackResults.pass, .deny, and .handled as read-only constants for interaction callbacks while retaining the equivalent strings for compatibility.
• Rotate custom collision, selection, and ray-trace shapes with horizontal block facing. Facing-model examples now orient toward the placing player and stair geometry is walkable instead of retaining a full-block collision box.
• Fix face culling between adjacent non-opaque custom blocks while preserving ordinary rendering and model-rendered blocks.
• Fix Lua projectile owners, legal loot stack splitting, consistent spherical nearby queries, and unloaded-chunk handling for world:getBlock.
• Fix quoting of the update-notice menu action and improve installation path examples.

Interface, configuration, and platform foundations

• Add semantic-version update checks with configuration switches for checking and world-join notices. Available releases appear on the main menu with browser and copy-link fallbacks.
• Split startup responsibilities into client, common, and server entry points so shared gameplay code no longer depends on client presentation classes.
• Add bounded handshake, content-digest, entity snapshot/delta, presentation, sound, and resynchronization protocol foundations. These are infrastructure for later dedicated server support and do not yet make custom entities multiplayer-ready.

Documentation, examples, and verification

• Expand the public LuaLS definitions and wiki with the asset, audio, model, animation, appearance, entity, AI, lifecycle, data, multipart, sensor, and action APIs.
• Expand the example set from 62 to 75 Lua files. New lessons cover registered and key-only assets, local audio, built-in and Blockbench models, facing appearances, animated items and machines, props, custom projectiles, pickups, persistent entity data, native composed AI, and manual multipart AI. Example content keys now use the consistent example:<type>/<name> layout.
• Add regression coverage for asset lifetime and pack fallback, atlas refresh, audio, model parsing and rendering, appearance variants, entity behavior and persistence, natural spawning, network codecs, configuration, instrumentation, and all examples.