I've been wondering what is the most useful number of creative tabs to add to Minecraft for a mod.
Suppose a mod adds a diversity of items and blocks, a few dozen to a hundred in total. Should all the mod content go into a single tab? What about 2 or more tabs?
In one extreme, if most mods organized their items and blocks in the system as the vanilla Minecraft items, then each mod would be adding a whole page of tabs (10 total, I think). This would make it easy to find a specific block or item if you knew which mod it came from, but if you installed many mods, then every time you opened your creative inventory, you will have to click through many, many pages to get to the tab you want.
In the other extreme, if every mod only used a single tab, you wouldn't spend much time flipping through pages in the creative inventory, but finding a particular item by appearance (assume you don't know the name) would require Shirlock Holmes level of attention to detail.
Obviously the optimum number is neither extreme, but I'd like to know what you think about the trade-off of more or fewer creative tabs per mod. Personally, I hate flipping through the creative inventory pages and get annoyed if there are more than 3 pages total (including the vanilla tabs), no matter how many mods I install.
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My mods: Base Metals, Power Advantage, Steam Advantage, Electric Advantage, Minecraft Mineralogy, Dr. Cyano's Lootable Bodies, Dr. Cyano's Wonderful Wands & Wizarding Robes
My general opinion on this is that if your mod adds more than one creative tab, you're doing it wrong. You can effortlessly add a search bar to your creative tab, which makes it extremely easy for the player to find anything they want. This is the direction that many mods such as Botania have taken, and I think more mods should follow that example. There is probably a case that justifies multiple tabs, however I have not seen a single mod which justifies it. I was actually considering a core mod which would completely wipe the creative tab system and re-register every mod with a single tab, or specifically target mods that go overkill on tabs such as DecoCraft.
@LapisSea: I've never seen that before. Is it easy to do? (as in less than 10 lines of code, not counting standard java syntax)
@Darkhax: Do have a link for a tutorial on how to add a search tab? It certainly doesn't look easy to implement.
Also, is there a way to change how the items are arranged within a tab? That would go a long way towards making single-tab mods easier to use and more visually pleasing.
One case where I've been quite pleased with 2 tabs is my Wonderful Wands and Wizarding Robes mod, which adds a bunch of wands and a ridiculous amount of armor (16 different styles, plus a few hats). Having a tab that is just wands and another with just armor seems to be visually pleasing. Then again, that mod started as 2 different mods that were merged together.
My mods: Base Metals, Power Advantage, Steam Advantage, Electric Advantage, Minecraft Mineralogy, Dr. Cyano's Lootable Bodies, Dr. Cyano's Wonderful Wands & Wizarding Robes
Adding a search bar should be as simple as overriding CreativeTabs#hasSearchBar to return true.
To change the order of items in the tab, you can override CreativeTabs#displayAllReleventItems to call the super method to populate the item list, then sort the item list in the desired order (e.g. use Collections.sort with the appropriate Comparator).
Chisel Facades: For all your decorative pipe-hiding needs.
Please don't PM me to ask for help or to join your mod development team. Asking your question in a public thread preserves it for people who are having the same problem in the future. I'm not interested in developing mods with people.
It's pretty simple. Just some click events to select the different sub tabs, rendering the sub tabs and some simple list filtering.
But yeah adding a search bar sounds like a really good idea. Not exactly sure how it works (never tried it) but hell if it works it should be pretty neat.
One disadvantage is that when a mod does not add tabs sorted by themes/uses than it's harder to locate something by picture or if you don't know the exact name. This really comes to effect when you are lets say searching for a block with a specific look for decoration. I have noticed this to be used pretty frequent so it might be worth checking out.
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Not doing mc modding that much anymore because I am making a full blown game that does not have limitations that mc has. (rip Magiology for now)
I may come back if MC fixes it's rendering pipeline.
I really dislike writing rendering code and I'm still tramatized by how difficult it was to make a clickable GUI in my old BuildCraft add-on mod for Minecraft 1.6.4 (those invalid packet exception error reports give me nightmares), so I'll avoid the sub-menu system for now. If only Minecraft/Forge/OpenGL had a GUI library at least as convenient the javax.swing package.
I'll try a combination of sorting and searching to group the items by type for easy visual searching as well as text searching.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My mods: Base Metals, Power Advantage, Steam Advantage, Electric Advantage, Minecraft Mineralogy, Dr. Cyano's Lootable Bodies, Dr. Cyano's Wonderful Wands & Wizarding Robes
Adding a search bar should be as simple as overriding CreativeTabs#hasSearchBar to return true.
I did that, but my search bar is invisible. It works if I make a guess as to where to click and type, but you wouldn't know it had a search function just by looking at it. How do I fix that?
EDIT: Nevermind. I fixed it by adding setBackgroundImageName("item_search.png"); to the constructor.I now have a working search-and-sort creative tab class:
public class FunctionalCreativeTab extends CreativeTabs {
private final java.util.function.Supplier<Item> itemSupplier;
private final java.util.Comparator<ItemStack> itemSortingAlgorithm;
public FunctionalCreativeTab( String unlocalizedName,
final java.util.function.Supplier<Item> itemSupplier,
final java.util.function.BiFunction<ItemStack,ItemStack,Integer> itemSortingAlgorithm) {
super(unlocalizedName);
this.itemSupplier = itemSupplier;
this.itemSortingAlgorithm = new java.util.Comparator<ItemStack>(){
@Override
public int compare(ItemStack o1, ItemStack o2) {
return itemSortingAlgorithm.apply(o1, o2);
}
};
setBackgroundImageName("item_search.png");
}
@Override
public boolean hasSearchBar() {
return true;
}
@Override
@SideOnly(Side.CLIENT)
public void displayAllReleventItems(List<ItemStack> itemList)
{
super.displayAllReleventItems(itemList);
itemList.sort(itemSortingAlgorithm);
}
@SideOnly(Side.CLIENT)
@Override
public Item getTabIconItem() {
return itemSupplier.get();
}
}
My mods: Base Metals, Power Advantage, Steam Advantage, Electric Advantage, Minecraft Mineralogy, Dr. Cyano's Lootable Bodies, Dr. Cyano's Wonderful Wands & Wizarding Robes
Creative Tabs are one of those things that often don't get thought too much about, at least for me. Since I have never played with more than 1 or 2 mods installed at the same time, I've always felt it to be perfectly fine for a mod (such as my own...) to have multiple tabs - it makes 'browsing' more digestible, at least if each tab is clearly categorized / named.
I can see how it would become cumbersome with many mods, but I don't feel that a single massive tab with a search bar is the ultimate answer, either. You have to know what you are searching for, after all, to even begin typing it in.
Besides, aren't there mods like NEI that conglomerate everything into a single searchable interface? So there's your 'search for anything you want if you know what you want' interface, and you can leave the Creative Tabs as a 'pick a category to browse' style interface. I don't see why we can't have our cake and eat it, too
If only it was easier to change the number of tabs on the fly.
When you start your mod, you only have a couple of items and blocks and that may not justify adding even 1 tab, but as the amount of content increases, you may decide that you need more organization tabs.
I personally have a bad (according to other people) habit of using the vanilla tabs if the blocks/items I'm adding are functionally the same as the vanilla items in those tabs (weapons in the combat tab, blocks in the blocks tab, decorative blocks in the decorations tab, etc.).
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
My mods: Base Metals, Power Advantage, Steam Advantage, Electric Advantage, Minecraft Mineralogy, Dr. Cyano's Lootable Bodies, Dr. Cyano's Wonderful Wands & Wizarding Robes
I've been wondering what is the most useful number of creative tabs to add to Minecraft for a mod.
Suppose a mod adds a diversity of items and blocks, a few dozen to a hundred in total. Should all the mod content go into a single tab? What about 2 or more tabs?
In one extreme, if most mods organized their items and blocks in the system as the vanilla Minecraft items, then each mod would be adding a whole page of tabs (10 total, I think). This would make it easy to find a specific block or item if you knew which mod it came from, but if you installed many mods, then every time you opened your creative inventory, you will have to click through many, many pages to get to the tab you want.
In the other extreme, if every mod only used a single tab, you wouldn't spend much time flipping through pages in the creative inventory, but finding a particular item by appearance (assume you don't know the name) would require Shirlock Holmes level of attention to detail.
Obviously the optimum number is neither extreme, but I'd like to know what you think about the trade-off of more or fewer creative tabs per mod. Personally, I hate flipping through the creative inventory pages and get annoyed if there are more than 3 pages total (including the vanilla tabs), no matter how many mods I install.
My mods:
Base Metals, Power Advantage, Steam Advantage, Electric Advantage, Minecraft Mineralogy, Dr. Cyano's Lootable Bodies, Dr. Cyano's Wonderful Wands & Wizarding Robes
You could go crazy and put everything in 1 tab and modify the tab to have sub tabs.
kinda like this
So you could have more freedom with tabs. Kinda like decoration, power, mobs.... etc and not worry with clogging up the vanilla tabs.
That is at least what I am doing.
Not doing mc modding that much anymore because I am making a full blown game that does not have limitations that mc has. (rip Magiology for now)
I may come back if MC fixes it's rendering pipeline.
My general opinion on this is that if your mod adds more than one creative tab, you're doing it wrong. You can effortlessly add a search bar to your creative tab, which makes it extremely easy for the player to find anything they want. This is the direction that many mods such as Botania have taken, and I think more mods should follow that example. There is probably a case that justifies multiple tabs, however I have not seen a single mod which justifies it. I was actually considering a core mod which would completely wipe the creative tab system and re-register every mod with a single tab, or specifically target mods that go overkill on tabs such as DecoCraft.
Farewell everyone o/
@LapisSea: I've never seen that before. Is it easy to do? (as in less than 10 lines of code, not counting standard java syntax)
@Darkhax: Do have a link for a tutorial on how to add a search tab? It certainly doesn't look easy to implement.
Also, is there a way to change how the items are arranged within a tab? That would go a long way towards making single-tab mods easier to use and more visually pleasing.
One case where I've been quite pleased with 2 tabs is my Wonderful Wands and Wizarding Robes mod, which adds a bunch of wands and a ridiculous amount of armor (16 different styles, plus a few hats). Having a tab that is just wands and another with just armor seems to be visually pleasing. Then again, that mod started as 2 different mods that were merged together.
My mods:
Base Metals, Power Advantage, Steam Advantage, Electric Advantage, Minecraft Mineralogy, Dr. Cyano's Lootable Bodies, Dr. Cyano's Wonderful Wands & Wizarding Robes
Adding a search bar should be as simple as overriding CreativeTabs#hasSearchBar to return true.
To change the order of items in the tab, you can override CreativeTabs#displayAllReleventItems to call the super method to populate the item list, then sort the item list in the desired order (e.g. use Collections.sort with the appropriate Comparator).
Chisel Facades: For all your decorative pipe-hiding needs.
Please don't PM me to ask for help or to join your mod development team. Asking your question in a public thread preserves it for people who are having the same problem in the future. I'm not interested in developing mods with people.
It's pretty simple. Just some click events to select the different sub tabs, rendering the sub tabs and some simple list filtering.
But yeah adding a search bar sounds like a really good idea. Not exactly sure how it works (never tried it) but hell if it works it should be pretty neat.
One disadvantage is that when a mod does not add tabs sorted by themes/uses than it's harder to locate something by picture or if you don't know the exact name. This really comes to effect when you are lets say searching for a block with a specific look for decoration. I have noticed this to be used pretty frequent so it might be worth checking out.
Not doing mc modding that much anymore because I am making a full blown game that does not have limitations that mc has. (rip Magiology for now)
I may come back if MC fixes it's rendering pipeline.
I really dislike writing rendering code and I'm still tramatized by how difficult it was to make a clickable GUI in my old BuildCraft add-on mod for Minecraft 1.6.4 (those invalid packet exception error reports give me nightmares), so I'll avoid the sub-menu system for now. If only Minecraft/Forge/OpenGL had a GUI library at least as convenient the javax.swing package.
I'll try a combination of sorting and searching to group the items by type for easy visual searching as well as text searching.
My mods:
Base Metals, Power Advantage, Steam Advantage, Electric Advantage, Minecraft Mineralogy, Dr. Cyano's Lootable Bodies, Dr. Cyano's Wonderful Wands & Wizarding Robes
I did that, but my search bar is invisible. It works if I make a guess as to where to click and type, but you wouldn't know it had a search function just by looking at it. How do I fix that?
EDIT: Nevermind. I fixed it by adding setBackgroundImageName("item_search.png"); to the constructor.I now have a working search-and-sort creative tab class:
My mods:
Base Metals, Power Advantage, Steam Advantage, Electric Advantage, Minecraft Mineralogy, Dr. Cyano's Lootable Bodies, Dr. Cyano's Wonderful Wands & Wizarding Robes
Oh, now this is an interesting topic!
Creative Tabs are one of those things that often don't get thought too much about, at least for me. Since I have never played with more than 1 or 2 mods installed at the same time, I've always felt it to be perfectly fine for a mod (such as my own...) to have multiple tabs - it makes 'browsing' more digestible, at least if each tab is clearly categorized / named.
I can see how it would become cumbersome with many mods, but I don't feel that a single massive tab with a search bar is the ultimate answer, either. You have to know what you are searching for, after all, to even begin typing it in.
Besides, aren't there mods like NEI that conglomerate everything into a single searchable interface? So there's your 'search for anything you want if you know what you want' interface, and you can leave the Creative Tabs as a 'pick a category to browse' style interface. I don't see why we can't have our cake and eat it, too
If only it was easier to change the number of tabs on the fly.
When you start your mod, you only have a couple of items and blocks and that may not justify adding even 1 tab, but as the amount of content increases, you may decide that you need more organization tabs.
I personally have a bad (according to other people) habit of using the vanilla tabs if the blocks/items I'm adding are functionally the same as the vanilla items in those tabs (weapons in the combat tab, blocks in the blocks tab, decorative blocks in the decorations tab, etc.).
My mods:
Base Metals, Power Advantage, Steam Advantage, Electric Advantage, Minecraft Mineralogy, Dr. Cyano's Lootable Bodies, Dr. Cyano's Wonderful Wands & Wizarding Robes