FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

(This is a suggestion for a mod API feature that would greatly enhance things like armor, custom inventories, custom crafting, etc.)

We have interfaces for handling changes to node inventories and detached inventories. What is missing is handling changes to entity inventories, including player inventories. This would be invaluable for things like custom games, armor, and custom crafting mods. It CAN be done now by creating a separate detached inventory for each player, mangling the name using the player's name, and being careful with permissions "just in case", so it isn't shared between players. However, this defeats the purpose of a "detached" inventory and REALLY isn't pretty (it gets even uglier for Lua entity instances...).

The design I would suggest is to add methods to the InvRef object so that handlers could be set for ANY inventory in the game (underneath they might have to be polymorphic on the type of object the inventory belongs to). This could look like:



As an example of how this could be used, here is a bit of mod code that uses a Chain of Responsibility pattern to do something special with an "armor" inventory list in the player's inventory:

awesome +1

You actually can modify the inventory of an player:

The only thing that hasnt an inventory are Lua SAOs.

PilzAdam wrote:You actually can modify the inventory of an player:

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Code: Select all

minetest.get_inventory(location) -> InvRef
^ location = eg. {type="player", name="celeron55"}
                 {type="node", pos={x=, y=, z=}}
                 {type="detached", name="creative"}

The only thing that hasnt an inventory are Lua SAOs.

Oh, I know you can get and change player inventories, but you can't deal with move/put/take events in a nice way. The only real option for that would be to run a method on a very fast periodic timer and try to apply some really complex custom logic to figure out exactly what changes had been made to the inventories of EVERY PLAYER IN THE GAME, figure out how to handle them, and undo them somehow if the change is inappropriate (e.g. equipping a torch as a helmet). Also, for custom crafting this would probably open up holes where players could duplicate items.

I didn't realize Lua entities don't have inventories. Well, that could actually be changed in a mod using this API! You could allow a mod to put an object with a custom implementation of "InvRef" inside the entity instance itself, and the rest is history.

Here's another interesting side effect of this. ALL crafting could be moved to the Lua side entirely. The default crafting would just be a default set of handlers installed on player objects, that deal only with changes to the "craft" and "craftpreview" inventory lists. Mods would be free to either replace them or wrap their behavior as I showed in the first post.

The only thing that would be left to the actual engine (EDIT: apart from passing these events to the Lua code) is loading and saving the inventories on player join/exit and map chunk load/unload.