[1.14.4+] Unlocking Lore Book Sections as Player Progresses

[JayZX535]

Hey all,

 

I've got a few theoretical questions pertaining to an in-game mod manual.  I've seen a lot of mods (especially tech ones) implementing their own lore/guide books, so that the player doesn't have to constantly toggle back and forth with the wiki to figure out what they're doing.  The mod I'm working on has quite a bit of complexity to it, so I'd like to implement something similar-- a book you can refer back to if you're curious about how something works.

 

There are a couple of caveats about how I'd like to do that, though, and I'm wondering how possible/easy/efficient they'd be to implement.  First off, I'd like to make the info reveal a bit at a time as the player discovers stuff-- sort of like how the advancement system works.  And secondly, I'd like to tie the information to the player itself, so if they die and lose their book, they can make a new one and the information is still there.  (lore-wise, the book is considered to be magic and soul-bound).

 

My first thought was that the capability system is probably the way to go.  However, this book has the potential to hold a lot of unlockable segments.  So for example, you might unlock the general category for an entity, which leads you to 5/6 more detailed categories about its regional traits, which could lead to even more details that unlock separately under each of those categories, depending on how much this player learns about the entity.  It's a tree, much like the advancement system.  So if I put that into a capability, I feel like it's just going to be a lot of "has the player unlocked this? y/n" booleans.  That might not be bad?  But I'm curious if there'd be a more efficient way of doing this, or if I just do need to store everything in a capability with a lot of booleans.

 

Also, is it probably best to just store all the lore translations in the lang file the way advancements are, even if they're longer blocks of text (like, whole paragraphs/multiple paragraphs)?  Or should I try to set up a different system of, say, storing them in .json files or something and have some other way of indicating which language they are?

 

It's worth noting that I'm not locked into using the 1.14 update for this.  If 1.15 introduces any changes that would make this easier, I'm not opposed to waiting until I upgrade the mod to add this in.

 

Anyway, I'm not sure if I'm on the right track with this idea or not, but I figured I'd try and get some feedback on it before I start practically implementing it, so that if I do need to make tweaks I can do it while I'm still theory-crafting in the first place.

 

Thank you for your time!

[Animefan8888]

8 hours ago, JayZX535 said:

But I'm curious if there'd be a more efficient way of doing this, or if I just do need to store everything in a capability with a lot of booleans.

Depends on what you mean by efficient. You essentially need a bunch of booleans right. So it makes sense to just have a Map<SOMEID, Boolean> which will map some ID of any type to your boolean. Or you could go with the raw array style. boolean[] where the ID is an integer so indexing just works. Or if you want to be memory efficient you could use bit logic(bitmasks, or simply using the bits of an int as a boolean).

[JayZX535]

On 4/9/2020 at 10:33 PM, Animefan8888 said:

Depends on what you mean by efficient. You essentially need a bunch of booleans right. So it makes sense to just have a Map<SOMEID, Boolean> which will map some ID of any type to your boolean. Or you could go with the raw array style. boolean[] where the ID is an integer so indexing just works. Or if you want to be memory efficient you could use bit logic(bitmasks, or simply using the bits of an int as a boolean).

Apologies for the delayed response.  Sounds like I have some options to play around with when setting this up-- thanks!  I'll keep these in mind for when I start adding lore!