Hooking my forge mod into a Bukkit plugin

[Flenix]

Hey guys,

 

Before I start this thread, I know a lot of people here don't like bukkit or don't "agree" with trying to connect the two. However, due to the nature of my mod, it would be stupid for me to not do this.

If you are opinionated against bukkit, please just keep it to yourself, I just want to get the issue solved without flame wars breaking out

 

Right, onto my issue;

 

I'm currently making an economy mod for Forge. It has physical money, which can be stored in a bank (with the balanced stored as NBT data on the player).

 

What I want to do, is add support for Bukkit plugins, if the server is running BukkitForge or MCPC+. For this, I have two options:

 

Option 1:

Hook Vault directly. This would mean that my economy mod would directly support the Vault API, and most bukkit plugins which have economy support will work with it. But, it would be hard to create new accounts on this system, unless I somehow allow players to have multiple accounts which I'm not quite sure how I would do...

 

Option 2:

Create an interfacing bukkit plugin. This would just be a simple bukkit economy plugin, designed to sync with my mod's balances. Using this, I could also have other accounts created very easily - which is essential for plugins like Towny or Factions.

 

 

In terms of Option 1, I did post on the Vault forums about how exactly I'd do that:

make the mod hook vault's economy service and register it into the bukkit service API.

 

What I don't understand is how I would hook Bukkit in the first place with a forge mod, without it being a dependancy. If Bukkit isnt' installed, my mod should continue without the bukkit support, I don't want it crashing if Bukkit isn't there.

 

 

As for Option 2, the main thing I can't figure out is how I would sync the accounts, and what would happen if a non-player account was created. The Forge side is stored as NBT on the player, in the /world directory, and the Bukkit side (I assume) would be stored in some sort of flatfile or db, in the /plugins directory. Both sides need to read each other frequently to check for changes, and sync accordingly. But what if the bukkit plugin creates a new account for a town with the name "Foobar"? There's no player called foobar, so what would the forge mod do when trying to sync that one? I can't just create the NBT... if a player made a town called "Notch" then Notch logged in, he'd have access to that towns money.

 

 

Final note, I have considered there might be issues with sync. For example, say an account has 300 in. If a town claims land and loses 15, but at the same time a player deposits 25 into their account, the numbers would both be off - bukkit would think it was 285 and Forge 325. I would handle this by storing a copy of the balance each time it syncs, then when it resyncs it checks that balance comapred to itself, and instead of saying "I'm 325", it would say "I have added 25". Bukkit would reply with "I have taken 15, so we are adding 10 to the existing balance" and they'd agree to sync on 310. Is that the best way of handling that scenario, or is there something easier? I don't want to sync too often, I was thinking every 5-10 seconds so it shouldn't cause any form of lag.

 

 

I'm open to any ideas, I'm really not sure how I'm going to do this integration at all. I'm pretty much just rambling now.. help!

[GotoLink]

I don't know anything about Bukkit, but I'll give my opinion (on your ideas )

 

Option 1:

Reflection.

If Bukkit are good and give an appropriate answer to their registering methods, this could be as simple as any code, except you catch more exceptions.

 

Option 2:

Brings the syncing issue.

I don't know how Forge+Bukkit would load mod+plugin (order, dependency ?), might be messy.

 

About the syncing, I'll say that Forge should keep priority. Isn't the purpose of the Bukkit part for compatibility only ?