Hello lads and gents,

I recently came up with an uberly complex and difficult mod to make. I think you already know what this thread will be about ... right: horses ... nah, just kidding ... smartphones! I know that there are already some candidates out there like the iPod mod, but I think nobody has gone as far as I want to do it. Let's be honest, a real working smartphone in Minecraft would be amazing and coding your own apps to improve your experience would be an amazing thing, so here I am trying to make this a real thing.

This idea popped up in my head two days ago and I immediately started to make some schematics and blueprints (due to they are all in German, I might not be able to post them yet). Let me introduce you into my concept:

If you have already worked with the Android SDK you might already have an advantage, but if you didn't then it's fine too. The only thing you need to know is that Android is very complex and I could make a trilogy of books out of that. Because I don't have a real idea about how everything really works in Android, it is necessary to improvise.

This mod will add only one item: the smartphone (and maybe some components to craft it). If you right click it, a GUI will pop up with all the apps installed. They will appear with their name and the app's icon file (I'll be showing this lateron). If you click one of them, the app will launch.

The launching process is a bit complicated. The mod will access the app's file and retrieve the information about the main class from the manifest file and THEN it will run the main class file from the "bin"-folder as shown below.



As you can see the app will simply be a zip-file containing a bin, res and layout folder. The main class should contain a setLayout(xmlResource) call in its onCreate() method which retrieves the style information from the xml file inside the layout folder and then display it. Naturally, you can dynamically add listeners and components to the objects shown on the screen which will probably be the most complicated part about this mod.

There will be a lot of different callbacks and methods inside the basic app file from which all apps WILL extend, but I'll be figuring this out later when I got some feedback

My main goal with this mod is to make this a REAL thing. Not like these "only GuiButton" things, but with advanced rendering and maybe fallbacks to the native LWJGL methods. I want this to be as close to the original as possible. Of course this will take AGES to make and since I am just doing this for fun, I'd appreciate any help or suggestions.

So please tell me your thoughts about this mod in the comments and leave a vote on the poll above this post

Greets from Germany
~sep87x

Current state: blueprint