DanseAvecLaStare

Paper 1.21.x plugin that displays animated 3D dancers on your server, powered by ModelEngine 4. Make players dance with their own skin, or place persistent static dancers (NPCs) to decorate an area, a nightclub, an event, a party...

Originally developed for the TomorrowCraft server.

⚠️ Required dependency: this plugin requires ModelEngine 4.0.9 installed on the server, as well as the resource pack generated by ModelEngine added to your own resource pack's configuration. Without ModelEngine, the plugin cannot function.

⚠️ Incompatible with shaders: models animated via ModelEngine do not display correctly (or at all) on clients using a shader pack. This is not a limitation of the plugin itself but of how ModelEngine renders models client-side.

✨ Features

• Player dance — trigger a dance animation on yourself or another player, using their real skin (fetched via the Mojang API, cached to avoid repeated calls).
• Static dancers (NPCs) — create persistent dancers, automatically saved and restored on server restart. Move, resize, rename, highlight.
• Skin cache — pre-register reusable skins under an alias, without a new call to the Mojang API each time it's applied.
• Choreographies — synchronize multiple static dancers as a group for coordinated animations.
• Playlists — schedule sequences of dance styles (looping or one-shot), applicable to a player, a dancer, or an entire group.
• In-game menus — full interface for players (styles, preview) and for staff (NPC management, playlists, choreographies, skin cache).
• Fine-grained permissions — one permission node per dance style, per feature, and per role (player / DJ / staff / admin), designed for LuckPerms.
• Performant at scale — all static dancers and choreography groups share a single global task (instead of one task per dancer): the number of scheduled tasks stays constant regardless of the number of NPCs.

🎮 Main commands

(Full list of commands and permissions in the documentation provided with the plugin.)

📦 Installation

1. Install Paper 1.21.x and ModelEngine 4.0.9.
2. Place the DanseAvecLaStare JAR in the plugins/ folder.
3. Start the server once to generate the configuration.
4. Add your .bbmodel models to plugins/ModelEngine/blueprints/, then run /meg reload.
5. Grab the resource pack generated by ModelEngine and add it to your own resource pack.
6. Configure your dance styles in config.yml (no recompilation needed).

⚙️ Configuration

Dance styles are freely defined in config.yml. The plugin also manages:

• dance.maxConcurrent (default 500) — maximum number of simultaneous player dances.
• skinFetcher.maxThreads / skinFetcher.timeoutSeconds — tuning for the Mojang skin fetcher pool (useful when many custom-skin dancers load at startup).

🔧 Dependencies

• ModelEngine 4.0.9 — required, not bundled with this plugin.

📜 License

Project distributed under the MIT license — free to reuse, modify, and redistribute with attribution.