About

This mod aims to trace players and other living entities in the game to highlight their position. It is technically an ESP (extra sensory perception) hack (aka wallhack / "x-ray for players"). Currently the only highlight method supported is drawing lines from the player/camera towards other players or living entities, literally tracing the path toward them.

Screenshots

Tracking different kinds of living entities:

Example: lines drawn towards mobs

Same situation, with opaque blocks:

Tracking players:

The "why", and a cheat disclaimer

I made this mod as a fun exercise and use it on a non-PVP server for moderation purposes. The workings were inspired by similar feature of many "hacked clients". Beware that on many servers this mod would be considered an illegal hack or cheat and using it could get you banned, as it allows you to see even invisible players, crouching players behind blocks, teams at a glance and similar.

It's in a pretty decent, feature-full state at the moment (Oct 2018), but I don't play Minecraft very regularly so you should not rely on me updating this mod.

Configuration

This mod uses Forge configuration - see the tooltips in the mod's configuration for detailed descriptions of what setting does what.
You can configure various aspects of every entity category (players / hostile mobs / "friendly" creatures / others like villagers): the color, maximum draw distances, whether to draw that specific category, etc.
For players you can opt to show their team's colors instead of the configured color, and you may also choose to filter out teammates to see enemies better or the other way around (note that these features use the native Minecraft Teams only; if a server uses some custom system this may not work).
The mod also tries to filter out "fake players" by default, but again, depending on how it is implemented on the server this might not work (it essentially checks if the target player is in the "player list"; the same list that you see when you press tab in-game).
You can configure various aspects of rendering (line width and anti-aliasing, for example).
You can configure a key bind to toggle the display on and off quickly.

License

Feel free to redistribute the unmodified compiled binary (JAR) of the mod (for example in a mod pack).

You are also free to look at the source code, use parts of it in your own projects or modify it and compile the mod for yourself.

If you want to redistribute the modified mod, please let me know first - I'd prefer pull requests if possible, improving this mod over having multiple copies and whatnot.

Player Highlighter