Naming conventions revisited: TSPlayer & TPlayer

[hakusaro]

I'm not sure that we ever discussed this when implementing it. Are TSPlayer and TPlayer really the best names for TSPlayer and Player objects, respectively?

I understand that there's some level of verbosity we avoid in spelling out what objects are. However, I think it's probably really counterintuitive to new developers who look at this codebase what's going on. You can get really great references too:

• Referencing a Player object named TPlayer from a TSPlayer object named Player.
• Referencing both a TSPlayer and a TPlayer in the same block of code, such that you can mis-read one as the other.

Finally, though this isn't part of a discussion, we should really clarify how to canonically refer to players we're passing around. Right now, we have three really brilliant ways of doing nearly the same thing:

• Passing around TSPlayer objects (which contain Player objects named TPlayer).
• Passing around Player objects (each of which obviously doesn't contain a TSPlayer).
• Passing around int player or equivalent, the index that the player is in the array in Terraria.Main.

In my opinion, I think we should:

• Rename one of the player objects canonically so that only one of them starts with a T. This makes it easy to distinguish between the two objects in code.
• STOP passing around anything other than TSPlayer objects. If we're reading raw net code, we should never pass another method a Terraria Player or an index to a Terraria player.

This all comes down to usability. We need to expose hooks consistently and pass data around consistently. A lot of the newer code already passes around the right object (TSPlayer) but a lot of legacy code swaps around player indexes like they're going out of style.

[bartico6]

It would be a lot simpler if the naming within the game's code was akin to Minecraft's (or CraftBukkit's? I don't remember) - CraftPlayer can then be wrapped by the generic Player, and the entire conflict would be gone.

It would be nice if OTAPI/TSAPI could enforce this (name terraria player objects TPlayer or TerraPlayer) so that we can have the generic tshock player object named "Player" without conflicts.

If we cannot get this benefit, I think that renaming TSPlayer to something without a T (WrappedPlayer perhaps? idk) and then making the 'native player' named TPlayer/Player could work?

Or we can take example from CBukkit and just make it a .Handle or .Native getter to get the "native" "handle" to the player.

I can't decide which would work better. I'd personally opt with version 1 if @DeathCradle can arrange that, then if that's impossible - version 3 [more familiar to devs from other backgrounds] and then as a last resort version2. This will be a breaking change for all plugins though. [let's break it this too right now, if the next release breaks a lot anyway]