About the project
The music editor is made with every intention being to create cool song covers inside of (mostly) vanilla minecraft. By having the ability to make custom instruments with various combinations of the 16 in game sounds, the music editing software allows the creation of songs that are simply too ambitious to be built by hand.
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The editor is a custom made software using Unity. To export into minecraft, the software converts all of the song's data and noteblocks into a series of nbt files that can be loaded in game.
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As an aspiring game developer, this project is a massive step out of my comfort zone. Not only is this the biggest project I've taken on, it is also by far the most technical. The coding for this project is either hooking up UI, or storing/changing/deleting/converting raw data.
The troubles of exporting into Minecraft
Despite attempting this project many times in the past, I always hit the same wall: exporting into Minecraft. The goal was to make a custom nbt file in c# that is recognized by Minecraft and can be loaded into the game using a structure block. The problem was that creating such a file through code was well outside of my experience.
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Every time I returned to the project, I once again tried to create a valid file. After many failed attempts, I finally cracked the code with the help of a nbt converting library that I tweaked to my project's needs.
This process gave me a lot of insight into building code around a pre-existing baseline. I am used to making everything I do from scratch, where the most I had to think about was how I would add things on in the future. Since I am exporting into Minecraft, I had to make sure my code worked seamlessly with the game first, then I could build my software around that.
What Comes Next
Although I am at the point that I can start making songs using the software, it is still far from done. Many core features are either implemented in a weird way, or are simply missing at the moment. Once the software is in a more complete state, this page will be updated to give more insight into the project, including a post-mortem video.
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If you want to learn more about the project, you can follow my Youtube channel and ask questions there, or reach out to me directly on discord using the username "fishy_f1shy".
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