mc-silica

Dynamically display cool down on each item using vanilla shaders.

Overview

This project uses beet. Beet is not needed for functionality and if you don't want to use beet you can just take the shaders and follow the manual steps in this README to create the textures and models.

Because these shaders only modify rendering of the GUI, they are fully compatible with modded shaders (Optifine and Sodium/Iris).

To communicate with the shader, the tint of the item is used. Therefore cool down can only display on items that can be colored (Leather Horse Armor, Potions, Tipped Arrows, ...).

Please only modify the shaders if you are working on an isolated project since it hinders compatibility if the shaders overwrite each other.

Configure

This project uses a texture to set the maximum cool down and the shape of the visual cool down.

The silica plugin of this project can generate such a texture from human readable input but you can also create the texture manually.

Generating the Texture

To generate a texture you just need to include the plugin, and provide the following information, in the beet.yml file:

size, an array holding 2 integers. This will determine the size of the output texture.

cdMax, the maximum cool down of the item in seconds. You can put any number here, the plugin will snap it to the nearest possible value.

Note: The maximum cool down has limited precision
From 0.0s to 10.0s precision of 1/10th of a second
From 10s to 60s precision of 1 second
From 60s to 585s (9.75min) precision of 5 seconds

shape, the shape how the cool down is displayed. This can be either linear, radial or a path to any black and white gradient file relative to the beet.yml file.

path, the path this texture is saved to. This is the same path you add to your model as the texture of layer0. You can use this refence as a guide.

Manually creating the Texture

To identify a texture usnig mc-silica, all pixels have to have the red channel set to 🔴15 and the alpha channel set to ⚪19

The green channel of the corner pixels determines the maximum cool down:

• 🟢 Green from 1 to 99 maps to 0.1s to 9.9s
• 🟢 Green from 100 to 150 maps to 10.0s - 60.0s
• 🟢 Green from 151 to 255 maps to 65.0s - 585.0s (9,75min)

Note: The maximum cool down has limited precision
From 0.0s to 10.0s precision of 1/10th of a second
From 10s to 60s precision of 1 second
From 60s to 585s (9.75min) precision of 5 seconds

The blue channel detemines the shape how the cool down is displayed:

• Pixels with blue set to 🔵255 are always displayed when the item is on cool down
• Pixels with blue set to 🔵0 will only be displayed if the item is at its maximum cool down
• All pixels in between are shown accordingly, so a pixel with a blue value of 🔵127 will be displayed at half cool down and above

Now reference this texture as layer0 in any colored item's model. You can use this refence as a guide.

Set runtime variables

Tint

The shader reads the time until it is on cool down and a cool down reduction applied to the maximum cool down from its tint/color value.

The time until it is on cool down has to be a value between 0 and 12000.

• This value has a precision of 1/10th of a second and is calculated like this:

  time_until = ( gametime/2 + cool_down ) % 12000

  Where gametime is the result of time query gametime and the cool_down is the time the item is on cool down for with a precision of 1/10th of a second.

The cool down reduction is a reduction to the maximum cool down set by the texture.

• This is a value between 0 and 1000, where 1000 means 100% of the maximum cool down is displayed and 0 means the item has no maximum cool down at all.
• This again works with all values in between, giving you a precision of 1/10th of a percent.

These two values are combined as the tint of the item to be read by the shader like this:

• tint = time_until + ( cool_down_reduction * 16384 )

Functions

Included with this project are functions to set a cool down and reset a cool down. These functions are written in bolt but should easily be understandable even if you have never used bolt.

Since the GameTime in vanilla shaders resets once every 24000 ticks (20 minutes), you need to periodically reset the last cool down so the cool down ins't shown twice.

• Because of this, the real gametime that the item is on cool down until is also stored when setting the cool down.
• When executing the function to reset the cool down, that information is used to see if any particular item's cool down can be cleared.

You can see these functions as a template of how you could implement a cool down system in your data pack, feel free to use anything from these function and implement them in your own data pack.

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