Nomad Physics: Bowling

What you get

• One complete game. Balls, pins, and Emberlane Place, the eight-lane alley they belong in. The alley ships inside NomadPhysicsBowling.jar and installs itself into your server's prefabs/ on first boot. A prefab of the same name already there is left alone.
• Six balls, six weights. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, from 5 kg up to 10 kg in one-kilo steps. A wind-up puts the same energy into every ball, so a heavy ball is thrown slower but carries through the pocket and deflects less. The weight is a real choice, not a skin.
• Real ten-pin scoring. Every delivery down a lane is scored on the bowler's own card: strikes and spares carry their bonuses and the tenth frame buys its extra ball. The toast after each ball says what fell and what the board reads.
• Games for up to four. A lane starts as free play, where anyone on the approach may throw. /bowling players <1-4> and /bowling join turn it into a game with seats and a turn order, and the lane announces who won.
• Your ball comes back. About four seconds after it reaches the pit, the same ball rolls back into your own lane's return rack. Balls the alley owes a player are written to disk and handed back after a restart.
• Action camera. A lane throw switches the bowler to a follow camera that stops at the pin deck to watch the pins fall. /bowling camera skip returns early and /bowling camera off turns it off for you until the server restarts.
• Free lanes and ball walls. /bowling freelane and /bowling rack hand out kits that build a single open lane or a wall of six house balls anywhere, for a hub with no room for the full house.
• No client mod. Everything runs on the server. Players join with the ordinary Hytale client.

Requires Nomad Physics

Bowling is a pack for Nomad Physics, the free core, and goes through its public physics API rather than shipping physics of its own. Install NomadPhysics.jar alongside NomadPhysicsBowling.jar in Server/mods/. Without it the items do nothing and the server logs one warning at first use.

Install

1. Download Nomad Physics and put NomadPhysics.jar in your server's Server/mods/ folder.
2. Put NomadPhysicsBowling.jar in the same folder.
3. Start or restart the server. Emberlane Place installs itself into prefabs/, and NomadPhysicsBowling/NomadPhysicsBowling.json is written with the defaults.
4. Run /bowling alley and you are handed an Emberlane Kit. Aim at the block that should sit under the alley's north-west corner and a ghost of the building shows there; use the kit and it pastes Emberlane Place and opens it in one step. It refuses rather than half-pasting if the area is not loaded or does not fit.

To check it worked, run /bowling venue status. It lists emberlane-1 and whether it is awake.

How to play

1. Walk up to a bay. With an empty hand, press F on a house rack to take a ball. You may carry one house ball at a time.
2. Stand on the approach and face the pins. Pins stage themselves when somebody walks up, so there is nothing to set up.
3. Hold primary to wind up, for up to 1.5 seconds, and let go to bowl. A longer wind-up throws harder, and turning your view as you swing hooks the ball with it.
4. Meet your ball at the return rack, or let it settle in the tray. /bowling score reads back the lane's card at any time.

Running the alley

• Permissions. nomadphysics.bowling.lane covers games and lane management, nomadphysics.bowling.place putting venues down and taking them away, and nomadphysics.bowling.give handing out balls and pins. Throwing a ball and the camera commands need none.
• A stuck lane. Look at the lane's return rack with an empty hand while it is empty. That re-racks it, whatever went wrong. /bowling venue reset --lane=lane-3 does the same from a console.
• Restarts. Every venue comes back by itself once its chunks load, and balls owed to players are handed back. Seats in a game live in memory, so a restart returns every lane to free play.
• Taking it away. /bowling unplace disables a venue, clears the blocks its prefab wrote to air and takes it off the books. It does not put back the ground that was there before.
• Tuning. NomadPhysicsBowling/NomadPhysicsBowling.json sets throw speed, ball and pin masses, rolling resistance, hook strength and the return delay. EnforceTurns makes a lane refuse a ball thrown out of turn instead of scoring it on the thrower's card.

Known limits

• The physics body cap. Nomad Physics allows 128 physics bodies per world by default, and every ball, pin and prop counts. Emberlane Place stages up to 80 pins with every lane in use, so a busy world running other packs can reach the cap. A lane that says it cannot set pins has hit it: clear some physics bodies out of that world first.
• Eight balls in play per player. A ninth throw retires that player's oldest.
• A crash can lose a ball in transit. A crash in the few seconds a ball is on its way back can lose that ball. It can never create a second one.
• No writing on the ball wall. Hytale has no world-space text. Each ball's item name carries its weight, and /bowling weights prints all six with their tradeoffs.
• Free lanes are just lanes. No scorecards and no turn order: the pins go back up after a strike or your second ball, and one line says what fell.

Before you buy

• Version history: changelog.
• Licence: the Commercial Plugin EULA. Refunds: refund policy.
• Support: nomad-labs.co/support. Include the output of /bowling venue status and the log lines around any error.

Questions