Since my friend has decided to start a realm, I decided that I needed to update one of my custom resource packs that I made in 2019 to the current format. It's pretty crude, with some minor texture changes, but the biggest part is the custom language pack that I made, which took many hours to customise to my liking.
However, this was back when the pack format was 4 for Minecraft, which comparatively is like trying to run a Win7 theme on Windows 11. I knew that there was going to be some heartache when transferring over to whatever the recent pack order is, but good lord did they not optimise the resource pack creation one bit. Thank goodness I didn't attempt to persuit a programming degree if just learning file pathing and troubleshooting is making me tear my hair off.
So I thought, all I needed to do is to reorganize what texture names are and which file paths that they're located, right? Wrong. They split the spritesheet for the inventory GUI into a dozen dedicated folders for a heart, a hunger bar, and so on. I would have to cut out every custom sprite I made on that sprite sheet piece by piece (and convert it to an indexed format) so that I could finally see my HUD customised like before. That was time consuming to do, but I didn't start on the icons and the widgets.
Then comes the biggest hurdle I have with it so far, having to update the pack.mcmeta file. Increasing it to the current version would make it usable, and for a short while it did. Then, when I went to refresh my resource packs, the stupid thing disappeared and did not want to come back for me to select it. I tried zipping the file, adding the min_format and max_format, readding my files to the window, but it is not appearing. Looking at the other forum posts and YT videos troubleshooting this didn't help me at all. I don't have any resources or clues for me to fix it, so I'm just stuck in a position where my resource pack is effectively toast.
The other massive issue that I know that I'll have to fix in the future is to edit the lang file to it's current iteration, since they added more stuff for me to address. Can't copy and paste my previous file into the lines since they changed even the order of what lines to read out for the game, and I do not have the patience to re-piece all my text into it.
Another thing that's weighing on my resource packed mind is the fact that I need to re-skin the other iterations of the skeletons. I can't imagine how it is to make a resource pack in bedrock edition, I hope that at least they streamlined making custom textures, models, and sounds for those. The multiple times that I take a peek inside of Java Edition, the spiderweb of entity tags and IDs balloon even higher. I guess that's what happens when you just keep adding onto the game, the amount of coding exponentially raises until your spaghetti code is knotted into god knows what.
Maybe I should take a break and come back when I don't have brain fog and not deficient in patience. I dunno, maybe there's should be a 'blank' resource pack in all future iterations of MC for people who want to just edit and replace sounds to do just that, instead of having to essentially build a pack with all the branches and file paths from scratch. Then again, since they're on microsoft's dime, I guess they'll expect the audience to pick up the slack, given that it's probably the biggest gaming phenomenon since Mario.
LATER UPDATE: It was because I put a wrong comma in the pack.mcmeta file, oops. That mental break really did wonders. NOTE TO SELF: When debugging a resource pack, always set the output log to on to prevent this silly mental block from happening as often.
