OpenFlares - Flare Guns!

OpenFlares adds a **configurable**, **multiplayer-ready** flare gun system to Minecraft. Load colored cartridges, fire server-authoritative flare projectiles, and leave dense smoke trails that can remain visible far beyond vanilla chunk render distance when the server allows it. Fire a flare gun loaded with yellow, green, red, black, purple, or blue cartridges. The server simulates the flare projectile, publishes smoke clouds to clients, and controls the gameplay-facing limits. Clients render the smoke with configurable visual styles, optional long-distance smoke, and accessibility settings for players who need clearer color identification. ## Feature Highlights * **Flare gun item** with empty and colored flare cartridges. * Yellow, green, red, black, purple, and blue flare colors. * Loading, unloading, firing, and reload-preference controls. * **Crafting** recipes for the flare gun, empty cartridges, and colored cartridges. * **Server-authoritative** flare projectile travel, limits, collision behavior, and smoke publication. * **Configurable** projectile speed, gravity, drag, maximum distance, flight timeout, hit damage, smoke lifetime, smoke opacity, and smoke size. * Long-distance 3D flare smoke that **can render beyond vanilla chunk render distance** when enabled by the client and allowed by the server. * Server-side far-smoke line-of-sight occlusion, so **distant smoke can be hidden by opaque terrain even if the obstruction is outside the player's chunk render distance** all the while transparent blocks such as glass remain see-through. * Adaptive far-smoke occlusion budgets for ray checks and optional missing-chunk loading. * Client-side stable smoke colors, enabled by default, to reduce lighting, view-angle, and background color shifts. * **Optional color-blind accessibility** label that names the flare smoke color the player is looking at. * Optional background behind accessibility labels for extra readability. * Fabric Mod Menu and NeoForge mod-list **config screens**. * Separate client-side and server-side config screens. * `/openflares reload server` command for op-level config reloads. ## Smoke Renderer Options The server selects the smoke renderer and syncs that choice to clients. | Renderer |Description | | -------------------------------------- |---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Friday's Vanilla+ Textures |Default renderer. Uses FridayNextWeek's color-specific texture sets, with a dedicated look for each flare color. | | Friday's Vanilla+ Textures #2 |Uses FridayNextWeek's generic Vanilla+ smoke frames for a softer vanilla-style sequence. | | Minecraft Smoke Textures |Uses vanilla Minecraft smoke particle frames while keeping OpenFlares distance, occlusion, and far-rendering behavior. | | OpenFlares Particles (Spherical) |Dense, clean OpenFlares spherical particle smoke. | | OpenFlares Particles (Spherical-Bumpy) |Rougher spherical OpenFlares smoke using Arrowstorm_1000's <code>CC-BY-SA-4.0</code> bumpy smoke texture. | | OpenFlares Billboards |Stylized layered billboard smoke with a broad silhouette. | ## Accessibility OpenFlares includes smoke readability options intended to help players identify flare colors in difficult lighting or when color perception varies between players. * Stable smoke colors are enabled by default. * Black flare smoke is rendered as pure black. * The optional smoke color label can be off, a pop-up label, or a persistent label. * When multiple flare colors are under the crosshair, the label can show the closest color or list all visible colors from closest to farthest. * The label position and text scale are configurable independently from the flare gun reload-preference overlay. ## Configuration OpenFlares writes two TOML config files: | File |Side |Purpose | | ----------------------- |------ |--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | <code>open_flares-client.toml</code> |Client |Local smoke rendering, overlays, and accessibility settings. | | <code>open_flares-server.toml</code> |Server |Flare gun behavior, projectile simulation, smoke behavior, network limits, and far-smoke occlusion. | In single player and locally hosted worlds, the server-side config screen edits the server settings for worlds hosted from that Minecraft install. On dedicated ser