I have an enchantment that deals certain damage to an entity every second over certain amount of time.

I attach a capability that contains current state (active or not), player id, duration and damage to the entity.

Then, I use LivingUpdateEvent to decrease duration every tick and damage the entity every 20 ticks passed.

I have two questions related to this implementation.

1. What happens when no one is tracking the entity? Will the entity still get damaged?
2. Is this considered a bad practice in terms of performance? If so, what method would you recommend?

Potion effect might be a easier way to do this (just my suggestion), but there should be other more proper ways to do this.

27 minutes ago, lisilew said:

What happens when no one is tracking the entity? Will the entity still get damaged?

Yes.

28 minutes ago, lisilew said:

Is this considered a bad practice in terms of performance? If so, what method would you recommend?

It's fine, but stuff like potion effects might be better.

13 hours ago, poopoodice said:

Potion effect might be a easier way to do this

 

13 hours ago, DavidM said:

potion effects might be better.

Potion effect sounds good as it has a method that gets called every tick but I want to damage the entity using DamageSource.cuasePlayerDamage, thus, I save player id in the capability.

As far as I know, Effect is constructed only once so how can I store extra data?

2 hours ago, diesieben07 said:

You could also use World#getGameTime, which is incremented every tick

Do you mean I put start time in the capability and check every tick if difference between current game time and start time is multiple of 20 instead of decrementing duration? Or is there a different way to use it?

1 hour ago, diesieben07 said:

attach a capability to players and in that capability store the entity that is being damaged.

Actually, I attach the capability to the entity that is being damaged so only one player can affect the entity at the same time but one player can affect many entities at the same time.

Player's unique id is stored in the capability and when LivingUpdateEvent is fired, I get Player object from World#getPlayerByUuid.

How would this approach work when the entity is not tracked by any players and despawns?

Is this approach wrong and should I flip it like you said and attach the capability to players?

Bump