Voxel's roadmap - 2025
Voxel - November 2, 2024
I am very excited to present you Voxel’s roadmap for 2025.
First, a small announcement: content updates for Yggdrasil 2.0.0 and NeoEnchant 5.7.0 will be available in the coming week, including eight new enchantments, reworks, balancing and performance improvements.
As well as two new structures: “The Asflors Village” and “The Runic Fracture”, as well as a variant of Alfheim: “The Dark Alfheim”. This update includes a deep story, balancing and unique items.
Voxel was initially created to provide resources in programming, Java, modding, shaders, resource packs and datapacks, while deepening the understanding of how Minecraft works.
Voxel has changed course and evolved to become a platform providing a Minecraft content customization experience, notably through its datapack configurator.
This configurator was initially intended to modify the enchantments of any Minecraft data pack, it has undergone several evolutions throughout the year.
After massive use, I decided to proceed with an internal rewrite. The goal was to transform the project into an engine allowing to create several types of configurators for any type of Minecraft content.
Shortly after, a second rewrite step was undertaken. The goal this time was to be able to load the configurator from a simple data file. This functionality is not yet exploited, but it will have a significant impact in the future, allowing to use multiple contents at the same time.
A few months later, the configurator was extended to support Minecraft mods, whether Forge, NeoForge, Quilt or Fabric, an important step.
And for the end of this year, the configurator has recently received huge internal evolutions, notably the export of part of the code in JavaScript dependencies, but that is much too technical to talk about here. I will make an article specifically about the internal workings of the configurator.
Voxel Studio is under development and will address various needs. Thanks to a Visual Programming interface, it allows you to create and manipulate datapacks without any line of code. Inspired by powerful tools such as Unity, Unreal Engine and Blender, Voxel Studio offers simple, intuitive and visual control of your creations.
For users: These tools will be integrated into the configurator to manage complex elements, like enchantment effects (balancing, adding new effects, etc.)
For developers, this will allow you to manage your datapacks, facilitating faster, more efficient and better organized work.
Voxelia is a project intended for the configurator and studio. It will integrate artificial intelligence features. From a simple text prompt, you will be able to modify balancing and create content. It will offer you suggestions, all while staying in the configurator and studio environment.
Concrete example of my vision for Voxelia:
Moreover, thanks to the previously mentioned “content validation”, this theoretically cannot propose things that don’t exist and ensure your content will load correctly on Minecraft without possibility of errors. In case of errors, the AI will understand the errors sent and apply solutions automatically in the background.
This will be the central point of 2025. I wish to extend the configurator to more content.
I plan to develop everything related to world generation, including biomes, structures, dimensions and trial generators. Concretely:
I remain reactive to snapshots. If Minecraft undertakes to add custom items or custom potion effects for 1.21.4…, or 1.22, this content will become my priority and will be supported in the configurator as soon as possible.
What about other datapack features, that is, the following elements:
These elements are simpler to integrate and will be supported in parallel in the configurator, without being priority. Some, like predicates and Item Modifiers, will not be directly configurable to preserve intuitive and simplified use. These technical features will work in the background, without requiring intervention on your part.
And one last info: thanks to the configurator overhaul, and as it can now load from a data file, datapacks/mods will be able to include a configurator directly in their datapacks/mods. This will allow creating custom configurators specific to their content.
Here are some examples:
Here, I will present you the other projects I have in mind for Voxel, two of them are already under development, but are technical projects.
This project was not initially planned, but thanks to recent evolutions and new dependencies under development, this functionality will be simple and quick to implement. The goal is to allow the conversion of datapacks from one Minecraft version to another without loss of functionality. Misode already offers this service on his site, and I wish to develop it as well and integrate it into my internal tools. This functionality will be used for the configurator as well as for future projects like Voxel Studio, facilitating the transition between different Minecraft versions.
Content validation is an intelligent system that analyzes your datapacks and mods in the background to automatically detect potential errors. Errors are automatically corrected in the background.
This is just an idea, but this project is close to my heart. It will allow obtaining “Voxel Studio”, “Voxelia” and the configurator in a desktop application, intended for players, but also developers.
This version will be able to directly find the location of your datapacks/mods, a significant time saving.
For developers, the interest is to be able to continue using your favorite code editor and have Voxel in parallel to manage your datapacks/mods like with Unity. You can modify your scripts and see changes in real time in the application.
Voxel is a recent project, and I don’t hide from you that the means of living from it are non-existent, but despite everything, I love what I do and what we have been able to bring to the Minecraft ecosystem.
I wish to integrate a way to live from this project, but I haven’t yet found the ideal way. What is planned is to continue exclusivities on Patreon, but also to include Google ads, but not in an intrusive way. I wish to have a balance like Modrinth has done.
So, that’s Voxel for 2024 and 2025. I am very happy to present all this to you and I can’t wait to show you all these features. If you have any questions or suggestions, don’t hesitate to share them with me. Thank you for your reading and see you soon on Voxel.
