Publish standalone Ponder

[cactusdualcore]

Describe the Suggestion

Ponder is an excellent in-game documentation system, the best I've seen so far (and I've played a lot of mods and videogames). I would first like to express my appreciation for this wonderful construct. Unfortunately, Ponder is bundled only with Create and totally exclusive. This much weakens its potential as the documentation for mods, as it requires both a developmental and runtime dependency on Create. I've requested this before in #4661 and many people seem to agree with this.

[treycool23]

I agree, and as someone trying to create a modpack with a lot of tech mods that Create doesn't thematically fit into, the Ponder system would be an amazing way to replace Patcholi or quest descriptions.

From my own experience, having to go into a specifically-crafted book guide for a mod and searching for a specific entry you need is tedious. I'd argue most people don't want to read because they want to play the game. Plus, being able to Ponder other blocks in the scene or other blocks of the category is something that I don't believe can be done in Patcholi, other than making the chapters for each entry. It's much faster, sleeker, and more convenient than reading a Patcholi book.

Some other factors:

• Sometimes you simply don't have enough books to make all the Patcholi guides you need, or the item you combine with the book to make the guide.
• If a mod has poor documentation or no documentation at all (no book), it would be much better for a modpack developer to make Ponder scenes than trying to explain it through the description of a quest.
• It helps people understand the multiblock instead of just recreating it from documentation (looking at you, Extreme Reactors) by allowing them to visualize it.

I'm sure my point has been made by now, but I wanted to stress how effective and enticing a standalone Ponder mod would be, for both modpack makers and players. It could revolutionize Minecraft mod in-game documentation while appealing to an audience that doesn't want Create along with it for one reason or another.

TL;DR Reading books is bad, watching funny videos in-game is good.

[drwoops]

Please, consider that the devs have absolutely no incentive to do this: it's a lot of work and does not help them at all. The only way I ever see this happening is if someone external to the team actually does the job.

[Adzetko]

There are many UI elements, like the crossair arrow for continuous block placing, or when showing how much materials a rail will use before being placed, which would be great as a standalone lib. However I understand it's absolutely not in the developers' priority, as this would mean massive code refactoring, and huge changes in it's architecture. But this would make the codebase more SOLID, which would be a long term goal, when the mod will be complete feature-wise. I think this is so huge, that only the lead developers could say if or when this will happen.

[Attack8]

I’m gonna bump this as well, super cool idea! I would like to ask here if people feel that the Ponder system simply moving to a data-driven model in Create would solve the issue, without the addition of an additional mod?

[cactusdualcore]

I’m gonna bump this as well, super cool idea! I would like to ask here if people feel that the Ponder system simply moving to a data-driven model in Create would solve the issue, without the addition of an additional mod?

I think data-driven is definitely the better option for ponder in the long term, especially for modpacks. But that's something I intentionally excluded in the new issue, because such a transition is probably much less useful as long as ponder is still bundled with Create. Think of mekanism multiblocks, which are horrible to understand, but their source mod has a very different spirit than Create. I've very rarely seen sb use both at a time.

On a technical note, this might be an excellent step in the right direction though. That should strongly decouple the code of Create and Ponder, so might make future changes towards this direction much easier.