Editing Signs in SMP

[flAked]

I'm currently working on a mod that is all about signs and one part of it is a multi-tool that enables editing existing signs in the world.

 

Opening the GUI on the client side, changing the text and updating the TileEntitySign all works fine and dandy in SMP. But one caveat is that players are able to edit the same sign at the same time. This results in a scenario where PlayerA is editing, PlayerB just clicked on it, PlayerA presses "Done", PlayerB presses "Done" and the end result is the message from PlayerB - while both of them started on a copy of the original sign text.

 

The GUI for this works slightly different than the typical container GUI, the class GuiEditSign on the client-side does all the rendering without any container class.

 

The funny part is that TileEntitySign has a attribute named isEditable, but lets see.

 

The rundown is as follows:

[*]Player right-clicks with multi-tool on existing sign, onItemUse() gets called

[*]in there, displayGUIEditSign() gets called to display the GUI on the client-side

[*]on initGui() the method actually sets the TileEntitySign to being non-editable

[*]onGuiClosed() a Packet130UpdateSign gets send and the TileEntitySign is editable again

[*]the global packet-handler updates the TileEntitySign upon receiving the packet, showing the new text

 

Now, the culprit lies in the fact that the isEditable attribute is only ever changed on the client. The actual TileEntitySign.isEditable in the server world still reads true and won't ever get updated. That means every player can click and edit the sign and we won't be able to block it in our onItemUse() method.

 

The solution I have thought about so far:

• onItemUse() sets isEditable to false (on the server TileEntitySign) in anticipation that the GuiEditSign gets called
  
• the sign is now blocked for other players
  
• OptionA: somehow receive the Packet130UpdateSign, upon we can assume that editing was done and change isEditable to true again
  
• OptionB: somehow register an event to get notified when the TileEntitySign gets updated/changed in the world, upon we know that the editing was done
  

 

The gist of it is that we don't really know when the client finishes editing the sign and I'm thinking of ways around editing base classes.

 

If you have any ideas about this, please chip in

[DarkGuardsman]

might want to think about sending a packet to all client in the area of the sign saying its being edited. That might solve some issues. Another would be to create an event handler to store server side who is editing which sign. Third create a new gui that on every key pressed sends a packet to the server causing the sign to update. This way several people can edit it and see the changes in progress.

[flAked]

Thanks for the input!

 

The problem with a) and b) is that server-side we don't really know when the editing is done, so we would solve the issue of interfering but the sign won't be editable again... unless its unlocked after 2 minutes, which could lead into the outlined scenario again if someone leaves it open longer.

 

If I need to bite the bullet and figure out the asm patching anyways (to send some sort of notification from the client), I'd rather go with option c) and have the added benefit of multi-user-editing - that would be cool.

 

I was hoping for some way around base-class patching, but I guess its not really possible in this case.