GroovyStipple R7: Alternative Track Corners

Mine-cart tracks in Minecraft have two textures: straight track and a 90° corner. You can run diagonal lines, and carts will happily travel on them in a straight 45° line, but because it is rendered using corner pieces, it looks like a wriggly line. This vexes people who do not think that train tracks don’t look right when they make abrupt turns.

I have created an alternative version of my GroovyStipple texture pack that substitutes a 45° track piece for the corner. Here is a short video showing bother versions. Sorry the voiceover is slightly out of sync—I am still working out what incantation I need to perform in iMovie to edit audio.

This is possible partly because I have started a new project, Minecraft Texture Maker. The roadmap comes in three levels of sophistication:

  • a library that manipulates textures and can assemble composite packs from existing source packs;

  • a recipe language that specifies how to build a pack, allowing it to be updated automatically when its source packs are updated; and

  • a web application that combines a texture pack gallery with an interface for building recipes.

So far I have made a start on the library and the recipe interpreter. The interpreter works with an abstract syntax represented as Python dictionaries, lists, numbers, and strings—an abstract syntax designed to be easily represented in JSON. The recipe for GroovyStipple with alternative track corner currently looks like this:

{
    "label": "GroovyStipple (alt track) R7",
    "desc": u"A high-visibility unrealistic look with 45° tracks",
    "mix": [
        {
            "pack": "groovy",
            "files": [
                "gui/crafting.png",
                "gui/background.png",
                "gui/container.png",
                "gui/crafting.png",
                "gui/furnace.png",
                "gui/gui.png",
                "gui/inventory.png",
                "item/boat.png",
                "item/cart.png",
                "item/sign.png",
                "mob/cow.png",
                "mob/creeper.png",
                "mob/sheep.png",
                "mob/sheep_fur.png",
                "mob/zombie.png",
                "news.txt",
                "pack.png",
                {
                    "file": "terrain.png",
                    "source": "terrain.png",
                    "map": {
                        "source_rect": {"x": 0, "y": 112, "width": 16, "height": 16},
                        "cell_rect": {"width": 16, "height": 16},
                        "names": ["track_corner"]
                    },
                    "replace": {
                        "source": "terrain.png",
                        "map": {
                            "source_rect": {"x": 64, "y": 160, "width": 16, "height": 16},
                            "cell_rect": {"width": 16, "height": 16},
                            "names": ["track_corner_alt"],
                        },
                        "cells": {"track_corner": "track_corner_alt"},
                    }
                }
            ],
        },
    ]
})

What is missing is a way to specify the source texture packs (the name "groovy" in the above has to be linked to the source pack outside of the recipe at present), and a command-line program for running the recipe.

About GroovyStipple

GroovyStipple and its companion SmoothStipple are texture packs for Minecraft. They are compatible with Minecraft Beta 1.2. You can download them here:

To install them, click on Mods and Textures in the Minecraft main menu, use it to visit the textures directory and copy or move the ZIP files there.