Vandor Labs

Full details here: https://github.com/rheide/vandorlabs/blob/master/docs/versions/version-2.3.md

Developer Notes

This mod started out as a way to use AI to generate things that I felt were missing from Minecraft: more variety in modern and sci fi textures, better doors, and space-age thruster blocks that look cool on spacecraft. It was never intended to become what it is now, but as I started building, I kept on getting more and more ideas, and this has now expanded into something much, much larger. "Vehicle Mode" is a thing now, that lets you create vehicles and drive them around, as long as it has a Pilot Seat, a thruster block and at least 3 landing gear wheels. Hover mode is a thing for vehicles that have antigrav or repulsor blocks. Canopies can open, ramps can extend (this looks great for vehicle wings btw), moats can drop. Redstone channels and screen controls enable so mcuh configuration possibilities.

Where to next? The recent versions introduce 6 different companies:

• The titular Vandor Labs
• Ashiro-Mai Technologies
• Seyr Astronautics
• Vektor Heavy Industries
• Pinnacle Global
• Paladyne Systems

I am planning to build more on the lore of these companies. The latest version introduces Access Cards and Data Chips, which I intend to use to distribute lore in the game world. The Data Chips will also be used for a plausible way to distribute and come upon this high technology in a world where the most advanced wizard's vocabulary still consists of just "haaaa".

Vehicle mode is a thing, but it definitely does not scale. I think this will naturally be limited to vehicles with at most the current block size limit, or maybe even less. There may be vehicle classes with different size limits, different levels of Vehicle Controller blocks, and different capabilities. I also want to hook these up to proper RF power and fuel/fluid support. There is now a Battery block and a Tank block. Different thrusters will probably require different fuels and different levels or RF, and I'm still contemplating whether to require that people actually hook up tanks and batteries to the thruster blocks, or if the scan for vehicle mode will automatically pick these up and link them. More to come on this.

The big challenge though, is space. Let's go to space! Some other mods do this: Galacticraft and Advanced Rocketry allow for space dimensions, and have done a lot of work on procedural generation of alien worlds, which is not something I'm keen to duplicate at this point. What I am thinking about is a way to travel to these dimensions from a Vandor vehicle. I want this to work for very large vehicles, so I'm thinking about perhaps a kind of "jump" or "teleport" drive that simply displaces all the vehicle's blocks from one dimension to another. I think it can be done, though I have no idea of a timeline for this yet. More to come.

Changelog

• Extend release regressions for plain Canopy Glass sharing cockpit and Pilot Seat upper space, including rear wall clicks, all seat heights and facings, both placement orders, collision and removal.

• Allow canopy placement against wall faces directly behind a cockpit or Pilot Seat by recognizing shared upper space in the client placement check as well as on the server.

• Resolve Configurizer clicks on shared cockpit/canopy cells by the visible surface. Let the seat's upper rear reservation share compatible canopy space, retaining seat collision and preserving the canopy when returning.

• Use Access Card names for card items and mounts, including registry IDs and assets, without legacy registry remapping.

• Replace mount company multiselects with the door's shared inventory sample picker, one selected company, and click-to-clear wildcard. Retain the four shared reader behaviors and use the common redstone channel editor.

• Add independent Auto / Left / Right hinge selection for diagonal trapdoors. Fresh vertical placement retains the clicked leaf's physical hinge edge, including reversed-facing continuations; the existing swing-direction option remains available.

• Default new Programmable Stairs to Tile, preserve saved Fit settings, and match vanilla neighbor-brightness sampling and directional UVs on generated stair surfaces. Mounted surfaces carry their texture orientation and normals with them.

• Preserve lighting of the neighboring block visible through the empty recess beneath sideways stairs.

• Align opening canopies placed against the rear of a Cockpit with its back edge, without reserving an extra block behind the cockpit.

• Add a saved Rotation: Normal / Reverse control for each diagonal trapdoor. Vertically placed rotating leaves inherit the clicked trapdoor's rotation direction; sliding motion and hinge positions remain independent.

• Allow Canopy and Long Canopy to share the raised cockpit reservation, preserving cockpit collision and controls. Inherit facing and upright/inverted mounting when placing against another opening canopy.

• Show the selected company name and “Click to clear” in the Programmable Door card filter; unrestricted filters remain “Any card”.

• Remove native-water interface sheets over the solid footprints of wet walls, panes and doors, including the top/near half-width diagonal join. Retain genuine dry-gap boundaries and verify fully wet contacts across the native-fluid matrix.

• Include contained water in wet glass, wall, porthole and slab render bounds, preventing water rectangles from disappearing when the solid pane leaves the camera view. Add bounds/frustum regressions and close-range pool-edge views.

• Match vanilla water lightmap channel order for contained water and native water adjoining programmable blocks, correcting overly bright pool edges under uneven sky/block lighting. Add a direct vanilla vertex comparison across all 256 light-level pairs.

• Cull contained-water faces at opaque neighbor contacts, separate closed-leaf fluid boundaries from door geometry, and prevent underwater back faces from painting water over panes or leaves. Preserve visible free water–air surfaces and exterior pool compositing.

• Expand fluid regression coverage to 780 solid-contact geometry cases, 760 submerged contact/door camera views and 32 pool viewpoints above, below and across the waterline, including inward/outward glass and porthole views. Retain independent exterior comparisons, sorted chunk geometry checks and optional OptiFine compatibility runs.

• Sample vanilla solid-block materials with the Duplifier, preserving block metadata and applying through the existing shared material path.

• Add saved Programmable Stairs step sizes of 1, 2, 4 and 8 pixels and dialog-controlled Normal / Sideways orientation. Keep vanilla wall placement, rotate face textures with sideways mounts and preserve exposed neighbor faces; share rendering, collision and fluid geometry and retain shape in configured items and copies.

• Replace the Programmable Door card multiselect with Any card and an optional, non-consuming single-company card sample.

• Continuously supply vanilla water flow while a door with just one stored water side stays open. Drain the managed outlet after closing, draining or removing the door, preserve existing sources and retain independent compartment storage.

• Include wet diagonal columns above native flowing water when calculating shared corner heights, preventing gaps beneath stacked wet glass and doors.

• Match contained and native free-liquid heights, separate inset pane contacts from frame pixels, and render water surfaces from inside the liquid, including forward views through glass near the waterline.

• Keep Advanced Pilot Chair armrest slider selection on each moving grip at every height and detent.

• Batch both contained-fluid sides into one draw, reuse cached fluid descriptions and remove per-triangle temporary arrays. Release checks compare rendered pixels against the previous renderer across all waterlogged block families.

• Restore underwater camera effects and eye immersion inside contained fluids, including the exact center of an open waterlogged door. Keep dry door halves and dry compartments outside the fluid viewpoint.

• Restore the exposed frame rail at clipped diagonal-glass ends, including the bottom edge of half-width full-height panels. Discard zero-area clipping fragments that incorrectly cancel exposed frame edges; check rail positions and artwork across all diagonal shapes, orientations and wet/dry states.

• Use still-fluid artwork on the remaining native-water faces at contained-fluid contacts, including flush diagonal-glass ends beneath porthole walls. Preserve visible boundaries beside dry compartments.

• Inset exposed door water surfaces to prevent z-fighting with the door top at a two-block water level, while preserving seamless water between door blocks.

• Let vanilla sponges absorb contained water from supported Vandor blocks, retaining the blocks and other liquids. Bound absorption to connected water within vanilla sponge reach.

• Keep one-block-deep door waterlogging in the submerged block; bucket filling, draining, persistence and reversible opening fill operate per block.

• Include diagonal waterlogged neighbors in native water corner-height calculations to prevent mismatched surfaces around shallow pools.

• Automatically retain source and flowing liquids when placing supported walls, glass, portholes, diagonal variants, doors, trapdoors, slabs and stairs in fluid. Respect wet/dry boundaries on the two faces, preserve registered fluid identities and capture each door block independently through Forge placement snapshots.

• Join contained water/lava to ordinary world liquid without duplicate boundary faces or false falling-water borders. Clip the native liquid face to the actual wet compartment while retaining exposed faces beside dry compartments.

• Rebuild adjacent native-fluid meshes when contained-fluid packets fill or drain a side, including across chunk/section boundaries and both door halves.

• Preserve diagonal thickness faces against solid neighbours and retain glass rim geometry at flat porthole joins. Add rendered contact matrices across shapes, orientations, inversions, fills and frame settings, plus real submerged item-placement and native liquid vertex regressions.

• Render opaque diagonal-glass rails before translucent world water. Use still liquid artwork, vanilla alpha and directional lighting for contained fluid. Restore the dedicated glass interior material and existing wall UV mapping on diagonal rim interiors, keeping clipped pane edges aligned with their inward-facing caps.

• Move the outer cockpit keyboard decks and their supports 2.5px toward the pilot to clear the lowered side screens.

• Support contained fluid sides on Programmable Door, Programmable Trapdoor and Programmable Diagonal Trapdoor. Fill open passages from stored or adjacent water and restore the original sides on closing. Keep upper/lower door fluid storage independent and render diagonal fluid boundaries as continuous planes; only doors supply the managed outward water flow described above.

• Reestablish texture units, alpha testing and depth state before drawing cached turntable contents, and synchronize both texture-unit caches when restoring nested render state.

• Preserve Advanced Pilot Chair height when saving pilot controls or reopening the casing page. Synchronize cockpit riders and their camera to the seat timeline instead of periodic mount position packets.

• Match cockpit screen/input playback to Programmable Screen speeds. Open the shared redstone row editor from cockpit surface selectors, including row labels, channels, pulse/toggle/slider controls and slider limits.

• Angle all three cockpit keyboard decks with matching 2:1 proportions, lower the extended screen bank by 2px, and tile casing artwork at one-block scale.

• Add small cockpit buttons for retracting the whole screen bank and sliding the seat and armrests backwards for exit clearance, with reversible saved motion, blocked-path checks, rear reservations and vehicle support.

• Lower Advanced Pilot Chair by 6px by default and add +0/+2/+4/+6px height settings for its chair, side rests, controls and rider. Preserve height through configured items and vehicles.

• Flip new Cockpit placement, use red seat upholstery, enlarge the side screens with a shallower tilt, separate the outer input decks and add an angled center deck. Default to Bridge Bare Pilot/Engineering, Navigation/Sensor Controls and Bare Personal Terminal.

• Extend seated throttle hit areas to cover the visible grips in all detents, move both levers forward and keep their hit areas independent.

• Render the cockpit screen bank as one rigid model and cache display corners, status matrices, chair-height meshes and reusable render-state buffers.

• Add access-card security to Programmable Doors, including centered Both-side panels, company filters, leaf-wide insertion, retained-card and scan-and-return pulse/toggle behaviors.

• Add directional Redstone Transmitter and Receiver blocks with channel lists, Analog/Digital modes and configurable receiver On/Off levels.

• Add Security Glass, Ancient Relief and ceiling-tile panel/speaker/light finishes. Correct six-direction light placement and smooth the fluid surfaces and glass recesses of waterlogged wall families.

• Add a generated texture browser with nested categories, search, previews and category collages, served through repository documentation and GitHub Pages.

• Flip the Redstone Transmitter side arrows while preserving its port and type faces and the Receiver artwork.

• Make the plain credential selector accept Any Card or Any Chip and keep its unbranded background fixed. Slow company logo cycling to three seconds. Batch reader overlays and reuse mounted-item transforms to reduce render calls and per-frame allocations.

• Add animated insert-to-toggle-and-return behavior to Access Card and Data Chip Mounts, with saved output, inventory-safe returns and reload-safe scan progress.

• Add compact Access Card and Data Chip Mounts, with a non-consuming single-company sample filter or Any, output channels and continuous/pulse behavior.

• Correct cockpit dialog sizing and contrast, keyboard proportions, armrest orientation and overlapping chair geometry. Add selectable casing textures, name Advanced Pilot Chair and use red upholstery.

• Support Programmable Chair passengers in captured vehicles, preserving their style, height and assigned seat through movement, assembly and parking.

• Use server-compatible bounds constructors for cockpit collision and related vehicle, gear, canopy and door interactions.

• Cache rigid turntable wall artwork within the shared frame budget, sort only translucent Vandor tiles, and reuse the platform bounds. Add opt-in client/server CPU diagnostics.

• Let turntable surfaces use general materials as well as the six Turntable images; shorten native surface names to single words.

• Add independent liquid storage on both sides of programmable wall, porthole and glass panels, including diagonal variants. Support compatible Forge liquid buckets and preserve legacy waterlogged slabs/stairs.

• Queue turntable capture, restore and redstone rescans behind background journal writes. Revalidate contents before conversion and preserve inventory edits made during preparation.

• Share a transfer coordinator between turntables and vehicles. Budget turntable lighting and neighbor updates across ticks.

• Verify affected chunk saves by reading transaction markers back from region storage. Retry missing writes without waiting for the world's entire save queue; retain recovery records on failure.

• Keep temporary entity pauses out of chunk saves and refuse recovery that would overwrite changed block or entity contents.

• Add four turntable surface designs with independent On/Off selectors, and expose all six surface images in the shared Turntable texture category.

• Expose Cockpit, Advanced Pilot Chair and Yoke and Screen in creative menus; retire the duplicate Cockpit A identifier.

• Build captured turntable meshes within a shared frame budget, parse incoming structure NBT on a bounded worker, and stream turntable snapshots in bounded windows.

• Process vehicle block-update batches within a tick time budget while retaining durable transfer checkpoints.

• Batch modular landing gear rendering, omit bound member draws, and preserve hull meshes during pose updates. Reuse rigid hull collision geometry and bounded assembly pose caches where supported; index world gear by chunk for collision queries.

• Synchronize gear motion with compact, revision-checked pose packets and preserve correction interpolation.