BeemerWT

Improved Exercise! It's quite the quality of life change that I felt was much needed from the game. Simply put, because exercising doesn't do much unless you spend hours of playing, I have created this mod. It works by increasing your passive Fitness and Strength XP in two ways: 1. The individual exercises, themselves, gain a bonus from their own regularity, increasing the total amount of experience you gain after fully completing it. This is a pretty marginal amount. You get 3x the XP if you maximize regularity on Squats, Situps, and Pushups, and 2x the XP if you maximize regularity on all others. 2. The experience you gain passively increases by the total regularity of all exercises. This means if you max out on regularity on your squats and situps you will have a total modifier of 5 when gaining fitness XP randomly. The same goes for strength, but only applies to the passive XP when carrying over your maximum weight. The total modifier for Fitness is 6 if you maximize regularity on Squats (+200% XP), Situps (+200% XP), and Burpees (+100% XP). The total modifier for Strength is 8 if you maximize regularity on Pushups (+200% XP), Burpees (+100% XP), Barbell Curls (+100% XP), Dumbbell Press (+100% XP), and Biceps Curl (+100% XP). I feel like it's balanced enough to further incentivize doing exercise regularly, but it's not going to make you level up so fast that it becomes the number one priority in any playthrough. https://github.com/beemerwt/ImprovedExercise/releases/tag/v1.0.0 ImprovedExercise-1.0.zip

I can confirm that modding in Java DOES work. You can recompile some of the classes and replace them within the folders. However, some classes will give you a null errors, as if the file wasn't loaded properly (mainly when I recompile UIManager). This could be caused by a number of reasons, and ultimately it would be a lot to have to track down what is causing it. That said, the methodology I've had the most success with so far is creating an external "ModLoader" class, to which I call the various lifecycle methods (init, update, render, destroy) from the IngameState class. The problem, however, is when you start to add UI elements using the UIManager. Despite having no "Kahlua table" to reference, they still wind up being called upon in the various UI elements, resulting in a bunch of Kahlua errors saying "no table available." This could be fixed by adding conditionals to the Lua files that have the problem, but I feel like that kind of defeats the purpose of modding the game using Java? The engine SHOULDN'T be referencing those UI elements if they don't have a table, but for some reason they still do. Additionally, the UI manager seems like the only way to reasonably add UI elements to the game because of how it threads everything, so not being able to do this is basically the biggest reason why modding in Java seems so hard. I have yet to test a lot of other functionality like adding items to the game, adding certain events, etc. I can't imagine there will be too much of a problem with all of that, though. I'll post updates if I decide to further pursue modding in Java, maybe I'll even post a framework to allow other creators to more easily do so. Right now I have a few ideas for mods of my own, but they all require me to find a way to get around the UIManager problem. I think I'll re-attempt recompiling it, but this time I'll just add everything to a separate list for rendering that doesn't get provided to the Lua.

Obviously Lua is very nice for the simplicity, but does anyone know if there is already a way for you to write Java for modding? I've tried hooking into various different classes and recompiling them, but ultimately it gives a bunch of null exceptions because the java is bound in a certain way? There are a couple more options that I've not looked into, but I just wanted to be absolutely sure there isn't already such a thing.