Swapping area of blocks between dimensions properly (1.12.2)

[pacguy]

I'm creating a block which, when activated, teleports the player to another dimension and swaps the nearby terrain between the two. To accomplish the latter, I've got a custom teleporter class that overrides placeInPortal with modified code to swap around blockstates in both dimensions (ignoring indestructible blocks like bedrock of course, and blocks with TileEntities because I can't seem to swap TileEntities properly). It also has some special code to deal with the item slots for the teleporter block itself. It works for the most part, but has some issues:

 

• Sometimes, Certain blocks, like grass and torches, break before they can be swapped properly.
• Occasionally, some of the swapped blocks turn into ghost blocks on the client, needing a block update or a right click to appear as they should (or a block placed where they are, if the ghost block is air).
• Lighting is never updated; transporting a bunch of exposed glowstone still results in the area being completely dark (block light level 0, only surfaces that are supposed to emit light themselves are visible at all) if it isn't exposed to the sky. The only way I've found to work around it is to manually place a light source as the player, which fixes everything.

 

How can I tackle these issues? Should I be doing this in a different way? The solutions I've tried thus far haven't done anything (you can see part of what I've been trying thus far in the calls for "world.markBlocksDirtyVertical" and "world.scheduleBlockUpdate".

Edited September 7, 2019 by pacguy

[Animefan8888]

47 minutes ago, pacguy said:

Lighting is never updated; transporting a bunch of exposed glowstone still results in the area being completely dark (block light level 0, only surfaces that are supposed to emit light themselves are visible at all) if it isn't exposed to the sky. The only way I've found to work around it is to manually place a light source as the player, which fixes everything.

Lighting needs a block update.

 

48 minutes ago, pacguy said:

Occasionally, some of the swapped blocks turn into ghost blocks on the client, needing a block update or a right click to appear as they should (or a block placed where they are, if the ghost block is air).

Give the blocks a block update when you place them.

 

48 minutes ago, pacguy said:

Sometimes, Certain blocks, like grass and torches, break before they can be swapped properly.

You'll have to put them down last they are probably receiving neighbor placement updates. Place things that rely on surfaces last. Or make sure the surfaces are placed first.

[Draco18s]

Another idea is to place everything, then place everything again, and clean up dropped items. This does require storing the blockstates in a separate (non-world) array though.

 

Its not great and I've played around with this a little (I've teleported sections of terrain around in the same dimension). It's really really hard to determine whether or not a block requires a solid surface.

[pacguy]

Which routine do I run to start a block update? I've been sniffing around for one, but haven't found much. world.scheduleBlockUpdate looked like it'd do it, but clearly not...

 

That seperate array idea is a good one! I'll look into implementing that later.

[Animefan8888]

28 minutes ago, pacguy said:

Which routine do I run to start a block update?

Instead of using 2 as the flag in setBlockState use 3

[pacguy]

Odd... I've tried that before. Tried it again just now, nothing happened. The main teleporter block emits light and is always placed last after all the others have been placed, so I don't see why it wouldn't light everything.

[ZigTheHedge]

52 minutes ago, pacguy said:

Odd... I've tried that before. Tried it again just now, nothing happened.

There are no flags in scheduleBlockUpdate, it's only delay and priority. Try to start block update with world.notifyBlockUpdate instead.

[pacguy]

Thanks for the suggestions thus far! The ghost block issue seems to be gone now, but lighting still doesn't update unfortunately...

[pacguy]

I've tried World.checklight() and World.markChunkDirty(), they seem to update the lighting properly, but only sometimes?