Has DumbCode passed away? In short? No. In long? Also no, but in more detail.
While at times it can seem like DumbCode is no more, there is almost daily work being done behind the scenes. Whether that be discussing ideas, giving internal feedback on textures/models/animations or creating content, rarely a day goes by without some sort of message (even if it’s just photos of capybaras). This progress however, can be difficult to show, and thus it’s been almost 200 days since we posted an update.

Why progress can be difficult to show

Observable progress

You have to understand that not all progress is observable, especially once the initial progress has been made. In game development (any in many other programming developments) at the very beginning, there is nothing. As you add content you can show it off and move on to the next piece of content to add, and then show that off. Without careful planning, you can then get to a point where you have loads of cool content, but none of it links together.

This is essentially the problem we encountered. We had the dinosaur DNA system working for the dinosaurs, and all the cool machines and power systems, but nothing worked together. There was no way to go from raw materials to a dinosaur with customized DNA. You could collect entity DNA, but not use it. You could customize a dinosaur's DNA, but only by spawning it in with code. The cloning process was not the only place that suffered from this, many of the dinosaurs AI was all there, but as individual parts, so instead of one fully realized dinosaur, we had a dinosaur that would do things like die from dehydration because it was too busy sleeping, or it would be chasing the player down and then just decide to sleep. It goes without saying that there are some parts of the mod that work together beautifully. The tablet system, each individual machine, the animations of all the machines and the fences are amazing and work beautifully with each other.

Piecing together all the different content parts takes a lot of time, and really doesn’t give us much to show. We could show the updates for the machines, but we’re currently working on an in-depth tutorial/showcase for the entire cloning process, so you’ll have to wait for that. Besides you’ve all waited so long you must be good at it now ;). We hope that this video will act as a guide for people when the mod comes out, allowing people to easily understand the entire method and what items are needed. The video is already fully planned out in a 6 page google doc, but recording and editing might take some time, as we want it to be good.

Porting from 1.12 to 1.16

A lot of time and effort was put into porting the mod from 1.12 to 1.16. Between those two versions, the internals of minecraft were given a (much-needed) rewrite. While good for players and new mods being made, the rewrite is not good for a port of a whole mod. Porting began on 19 March 2021 last year and took around 3-4 months before you could even open a world up, mainly due to the fact that the codebase has over 40 thousand lines of code. Porting takes so much time and effort and gives you absolutely nothing in return (like Kash’s ex wife).

Other projects

The DumbCode studio is being rewritten in a much cleaner and efficient language. This obviously takes time and effort, but it means that our animators and modelers can make better models faster. After some work on PN, the plan is to get this done so the modelers and animators can pump out assets for us to use when the code is at a ready state.

Conclusion

At the time of writing this, DumbCode is 3 years 195 days old. When it started I was still in highschool, just starting my A levels. Now, I’m in my second year of University living somewhere completely separate with different friends and different responsibilities. DumbCode and PN have been one of the only consistent factor in my life for the past 3.5 years, and I am so happy and proud of all the things created, by everyone on the team past and present. I have so much passion for this project, and although I understand that it can feel like it has died, I can assure you that internally, things are pushing forward.

Thank you all so much for sticking with us for so long,
Wyn and the rest DumbCode team