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For Players

LibShapeDraw is a Minecraft client mod that is required by other mods. It doesn't do anything on its own. Rather, it provides a set of flexible and powerful drawing and animation tools for those other mods to use.

See the official LibShapeDraw thread on minecraftforum.net for some screenshots and videos of what sort visual effects are possible.

Installation

First of all, make sure that either ModLoader or Forge is installed. LibShapeDraw is compatible with either.

Next, download the jar and do one of the following, whichever you prefer:

Use a launcher utility to add the jar (recommended). There are many launchers out there, e.g. Magic Launcher.

Move the jar file to the coremods subdirectory. This subdirectory can be found in your Minecraft directory. If you use ModLoader rather than Forge, use the mods subdirectory instead.

Manually patch the contents of the jar file into your minecraft.jar. Old-school modding still works. Be sure to remove the META-INF folder.

Compatibility

LibShapeDraw was designed with compatibility in mind. It does not modify any vanilla classes directly and therefore should be compatible with virtually every mod that works with ModLoader or Forge.

Troubleshooting

If Minecraft is crashing, check Minecaft Game Client Support on minecraftforums.net as a first step.

If it's not, the next step is to verify that LibShapeDraw is installed properly. Browse to your Minecraft directory and look for a mods/LibShapeDraw subdirectory. There should be a file named LibShapeDraw.log in it; you can open it in a text editor. If this file doesn't exist or has an old timestamp then LibShapeDraw is not installed correctly. Try reinstalling.

If you're still stuck with a specific problem, see the contact section at the bottom. Please have the crash report and LibShapeDraw.log handy.

For Developers

If your mod could use any of the following things, LibShapeDraw is the library for you:

The ability to create arbitrary shapes and draw in the game world itself without having to mess with OpenGL contexts, finding a render hook, or other tedious details.
The ability to smoothly animate shapes (and anything else, really) using the easy-to-use Trident animation library built-in to LibShapeDraw.
Vector3 and Color classes, full of well-documented and throughly-tested convenience methods. Want to calculate the pitch and yaw angles between two 3-dimensional points in a couple lines of code? No problem.

Design goals

LibShapeDraw is designed to be easy to use, both for devs and for players. These are the design goals to that end:

Minimal dependencies. Either ModLoader or Forge is required to get up and running. That's all.
Maximal compatibility. LibShapeDraw does not modify the bytecode of any vanilla Minecraft class. You are free to modify Minecraft classes in your own mod if needed; LibShapeDraw will not interfere.
Unobtrusive. Pick and choose the components you want to use. LibShapeDraw is a toolkit for your mod to use. It is not a heavy DoEverythingThisWay framework.
Powerful. What good is an API that doesn't let you do cool stuff? Check the demos for some of the many possibilities.
Concise and clear. Convenience methods, fluent interfaces, etc. let you write less code to do more. That's what LibShapeDraw is all about.
Well-documented. The key to success for any API, really.
Throughly tested. A full JUnit test suite to help prevent bugs.
Open source. MIT-licensed and open to community feedback and patches.

Enough high-level overview stuff. Let's dive in and actually use the API:

Basic usage

Add the jar to your project's classpath and instantiate LibShapeDraw somewhere in your code. Create and add some Shapes for the API instance to render.

Each Shape type is defined using classes like Color, Vector3, and ShapeTransform. You can easily animate a shape by calling animateStart and animateStop on these classes.

Plenty of sample code is available; see the Documentation section below. Here's a quick example:

    // Create a 1x1x1 wireframe box at x=0, y=63 (sea level), z=0.
    this.libShapeDraw = new LibShapeDraw();
    Vector3 pointA = new Vector3(0, 63, 0);
    Vector3 pointB = new Vector3(1, 64, 1);
    WireframeCuboid shape = new WireframeCuboid(pointA, pointB);
    Color lineColor = Color.CYAN.copy();
    shape.setLineStyle(lineColor, 2.0F, false);
    libShapeDraw.addShape(shape);
    
    // Reposition it up a dozen blocks and make it 2x1x1 instead of 1x1x1.
    pointA.addY(12.0);
    pointB.addY(12.0).addX(1.0);
    
    // Animate it! Smoothly change color from cyan to green and back every 5
    // seconds, and also spin in place, rotating once every 7 seconds.
    lineColor.animateStartLoop(Color.GREEN, true, 5000);
    ShapeRotate rotate = new ShapeRotate(0.0, Axis.Y);
    shape.addTransform(rotate);
    rotate.animateStartLoop(360.0, false, 7000);

How to add the LibShapeDraw jar to the classpath in MCP

Minecraft Coder Pack (MCP) is an excellent tool for creating mods, letting you work with deobfuscated Minecraft code. Using external libraries (such as LibShapeDraw) involves a few extra steps:

Get a copy of a LibShapeDraw release jar. You can use either the normal release or the special dev release (named LibShapeDraw-VERSION-dev.jar). Check the downloads list for the latest.

The dev release is recommended: either release type will work for compiling your mod, but the dev release also lets you test/debug your MCP mod without doing a full reobfuscate/deploy.
Copy the LibShapeDraw jar to jars/bin.
Edit conf/mcp.cfg. Scroll down to the [RECOMPILE] section. There is a property named ClassPathClient; this is where we will add a reference to the LibShapeDraw jar. Add ,%(DirJars)s/bin/LibShapeDraw-VERSION-dev.jar (changing VERSION as appropriate) to the end of the line.
If you are using ModLoader, also copy the LibShapeDraw jar to jars/mods. Skip this step if you're using Forge.
If you are using Eclipse, add the LibShapeDraw jar to the project's build build path. Go to the Project Explorer pane and expand jars/bin. Right-click the LibShapeDraw jar, Build Path, Add to Build Path.

The dev release also includes the source code for convenience, giving you easy access to the Javadocs in your IDE.

Documentation

Javadocs are available.
Browse the demos, located in projects/demos. To see the demos in action, you can download the pre-built demos jar and install it like any other mod.
See README-Trident.md for information about the built-in Trident animation library.
See README-contributing.md for information about contributing to LibShapeDraw itself, including build instructions and a list of features planned for future releases.
If you'd like additional guidance, check the contacts section below.

Contact

This project's official GitHub repo is located at github.com/bencvt/LibShapeDraw. Anyone is free to open an issue.

You can also try the official LibShapeDraw thread on minecraftforum.net.

Finally, feel free to ping me (bencvt) in IRC. I'm often lurking in various channels related to Minecraft development on esper.net and freenode.net.

bencvt / LibShapeDraw