Block Physics

[zml2008]

I've already got basic block physics for a few blocks in the repo, but there's a lot left to do.

• What to do for blocks that grow/decay over time - I'm think a per-chunk scheduler task every second or so
• Find a clean way to deal with inventories and other interactions
• How to separate item actions and block actions -- Item actions depend on item in hand, block actions don't care but depend on block right clicked? How for specific combinations?
• How to efficiently handle this on chunk generation, possibly with chunk snapshots and an async scheduler task.

[zml2008]

From @zhuowei: Maybe we should split this out into a plugin so that other custom servers can also make use of it?

[nevercast]

To plugin or not is going to come up a lot, I think we need to discuss what we want to have in the core of the project and what should be outside of it in a plugin, World Generation and Block Physics are just some of the examples.

The core server is in a state at the moment where it's quite a clean slate and there are many paths we can head down. But how modular do we want to be? I think having something like Block Physics as a plugin feature (Which implies that it could also be disabled), could actually be worse off. Because it's one more component we need to have on every server we set-up to have it 'Vanilla' like.

Thoughts?

[1Rogue]

@nevercast imo Glowstone should focus on being nothing more than a vanilla server without downloaded plugins, so all of the functionality is there from the first run. Now, how to go about that method could be different entirely, but modularizing the actual internals and components of the project will lead to adding greater and unnecessary complexities to the code in the long run.

One of the biggest things with Glowstone is that it's a fresh start. There's no NMS, obfuscated code, or old API to have to work off of. Simply focusing on creating a full, well-structured API from the start should already be a fantastic enough start.

[nevercast]

So keeping simple functionality in there so that it is a working Vanilla replacement off the shelf? I guess we only have to implement Vanilla in it's simplest form, such as our default world gen being flat

[samis]

Perhaps something like worldgen could be plugin but the default is shipped in the jar? This allows more flexibility while retaining vanilla-like behaviour

[SpaceManiac]

The plans for world gen are covered in #76. I think it makes sense for at least the mechanism for block physics to exist be in core. It might be prudent to delegate the specifics to a plugin somehow. Not sure.

[MeanMaggie]

Sand blocks do not fall if dug under

[mastercoms]

Glowstone++ has added a block tick system.