Suggestion: A better more Arcane visual for the tracking beam.

[SirAron111]

Suggestion: A better more Arcane visual for the tracking beam.

I have been thinking that the visual for tracking items may be practical with its glow beam but not very visually appealing.

For example: I have played countless mmorpgs and other games that gave players a quest tracker that shows them the way and they all had different appeals from the plain arrow line sometimes even animated, to giving you a fairy that shows you where to go or glowing orbs as guideline. Most of them even found a rout to said location bending around obstacles instead of pointing right and straight onto the goal.

So I wanted to ask if it’s possible to make the visual something else instead of a plain beamline. Making it bend around obstacles may be a bit too much in minecraft but even the straight line could be a bit improved.

So I had some ideas I wanted to share maybe some are to your liking:

1. Themed visual fitting to the manifest: maybe instead of the beamline it could be a trail of random runes glowing and floatingly showing you the way.

2. A plain and simply approach: an arrow trail instead of the beam with tiny arrows animated into the direction of the location to make it feel less static than the beam.

3. A better beam: maybe instead of having the beam be a static thing that feels more like a reskinned direction line from the bounding box and hit box checking feature of miencrafts debugsettings, make it a beam that slowly pulses, gets bigger and thinner at spots like energy is flowing through it.

4. A little fairy guide that shows you the way: this may be nice when its only one chests the item is in but if it’s more at once it wouldn’t be that good still putting it on here since I think if you made the fairy guide visually look like a floating manifest it would be super cool XD.

I don’t know if any of this is even possible but currently the straight beam line feels just way too static with the rest of the mod being pretty visually appealing. (Well maybe adding a few glow effects to the grown crystals and crystal light sources would also be a good thing)

And lastly here is an example of what I meant with the rune trail since I suck at describing things.

GZ
SirAron

[noobanidus]

It's most likely as simplistic as it is because I don't have a huge amount of OpenGL experience, and while AranaiRa has done a lot with modeling & shaders, they haven't worked directly with OpenGL before. It's possible that we could do something else like this, but the actual plan for an additional tracking system was (and has been for quite a while) to simply outline the chests in such a way that makes them visible through walls.

I'll leave this open for the ideas/suggestions/future considerations though.

It's intended to go on a vast "prettification" spree in a later version, but for now what we have is mostly functional (although it's sometimes unclear precisely which chest is being highlighted).

[SirAron111]

Sounds good. Since I know you are also working on the Arcane arsenal feature i can live with that. I think there is a mod that when you press T or something makes chests that have a searched item glow with little bubbles I don’t know if it was quark or if it was jei itself adding this. And thx for keeping it open and considering the idea as a low chance maybe XD.

[noobanidus]

That's Extra Utilities 2 that does that -- we also have the same functionality with the Manifest Keybind. If you hover over and item and press the Keybind (once you bind it), it will automatically try searching for and if it finds the item, begin tracking it.

[SirAron111]

Ye never liked the T function from extra utils its way to easy to gain T.T
I like it way more having to earn something like this mini AE2 system,
That’s also why I like the manifest and the manifest pedestal so much.