Bukkit

@xs0lidus

Is this the Quests plugin?

http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/quests/

That sounds pretty epic, I'll bump this up in my "TODO: Integrate" list :)

In the meantime, can the quest run a command on completion? Is there any way to have it, say, call "wandp @p fire" with the player's name in place of @p, anything like that?

cost_reduction ranges from 0-1, like most of the properties. How much 1 means is defined in config.yml, the default is 0.5 - meaning 50%.

Confusing, I know- but this means that "cost_reduction: 1" equates to a 50% cost reduction- all spells are half-off. This is as high as it will naturally go.

Anything over 1 will be considered simply "Cost Free". Spell costs won't even show on the wand, it won't use a mana system at all or mess with the XP bar in any way. In the default config, you'll see the Wolf and Admin wands are set up this way- all spells are completely free.

@HosomITA

Not sure if you came back to see, but I'm now using Shopkeepers. Unfortunately it does require a CB patch, I'm doing what I can to try and get it fixed internally.

If you want to see what it's like, it's ... well, pretty awesome! Come check out my survival server, I'm in the process of transitioning it over.

I really appreciate you mentioning Shopkeepers. It's really exactly what I want on my server. dtlTraders is great, but Shopkeepers is 100% more authentically Minecrafty :)

I am now in the process of thinking *very* hard about how to support a physical economy with Magic. I've already restricted building with any valuable materials- this includes when using clone, replicate, etc.

I've set up a system to help balance a Magic economy, too. As always, it's highly configurable! But, currently, the only place it shows up is on the website. I'm going to add in-game support for economy help via admin commands, but in the meantime, check it out:

http://mine.elmakers.com/#spells

Each spell and wand now has a "Suggested Price". The default is an emerald/diamond/gold nugget based economy, but this could work with a balance-based economy, or with dtlTraders price "icon" items. Spell prices are set in spells.yml, and config.yml has a bunch of tweaky parameters for what items are worth, and what wand properties are worth.

Wand prices are automatically calculated based on the price of their spells, any brushes they have, and their properties. This even works for pricing upgrade items (which I've also added ot the website as a new tab).

I'm still working on a good balance for everything, but I think it's getting there. It's interesting to see the wild swing in prices- from wands that can be bought with gold nuggets to wands like Elder that cost more than 128 emeralds and so couldn't be fairly sold in a Shopkeeper shop...

I'm excited! I think Magic 3.2 is going to be the "Economy" release :)

MCStats

Just to be super clear, since 3.0 Magic has incorporated MCStats (see disclaimer above). This is a completely anonymous data collection utility, and helps me a lot to know who is using my plugin, and how they're using it.

I'm actually a big data nerd (it's what I've been doing in my RL job for many years now) so I'm excited about metrics in a very geeky way.

I was elated when, a week or so ago, Magic broke into the top 500 plugins. Well it's been climbing ever since, and today we just broke into the top 400:

http://mcstats.org/plugin/Magic

Hooray! If Magic ever makes it to the top 100, things start to get interesting :) We'll see! Only with your help....

Up til now I've really had nothing to go on other than download count, which really doesn't help to tell me who actually is using the plugin versus who just downloaded it, tried it, hated it, etc.

Anywho, I wanted to point out that there are some really cool custom graphs on there that, unfortunately, are not showing up. I think this is a general problem with MCStats, and I'm pretty sad about it. If that ever works, you'll be able to check up on the world of Magic, see what spells everyone loves, which ones don't get much play, that kind of thing. I think it's pretty neat.

It will also tell me more detailed information, like who has crafting or enchanting disabled/enabled, who has dynmap or Factions integration, etc. I really hope I can get it working.

@xs0lidus

Just a couple more random thoughts I had- I'm not sure what kind of set up you're going for, but there are a few interesting options in the realm of single-spell wands.

For instance, you can use a different "item" in the wands config- I'm not sure if there's an item that looks particularly like a sniper rifle, but you can see where I'm going with this.

If you're not going for a "magicy" experience at all you can change a lot of the text... like "Mana" could be "Ammo" - Regen could be "Reload Rate", that kind of thing. You could also just get rid of costs on all spells entirely and use cooldowns. This would mean the player gets a message like "You must wait X seconds" instead of the XP bar showing mana. Though, personally, I like the way you're trying to use mana for cooldowns.

And yet another option is to make the wand cost-free (and again rely on cooldowns). This will put "Cost Reduction X" in the wand lore, though, but of course you could customize that, too :)

If you do something like make the wand cost-free, this is where that "locked" flag comes in, assuming this is part of a greater ecosystem where one may be able to upgrade a wand. You don't want someone to be able to add spells to a cost-free wand if cost-free is not the norm.

And, of course, the spells themselves are always customizable. I actually want to circle back on Sniper and update its sound and particle effects to feel more like a gunshot. You can tinker around with this stuff quite a bit using a wand and the "sound" and "effect_particle" properties. You can make your wand spit out a particle ring and a sound at a fixed rate, then (using tab completion) try out all the different effects, tweak pitch/volume, etc.

Ok, well I'd love to come check out your set up sometime when you're done- I love customizations!

@xs0lidus

You will only see the effect color if you also enable "effect_bubbles" (though, haste, regen, or other potion effects may override it).

The color also applies to Flare and other firework effects. It also determines how you show up on dynmap. It is an admittedly subtle thing, but I'm hoping to use it for more. I recently made it so the color with automatically change over time depending on what you cast.

I've modded on a server before with Magic and NCP, I didn't notice any conflicts, but Magic does not do anything special to play nice.

I'll check out Quests, sure, I'll put it in the list of candidates to look over. I'm playing with MythicMobs right now, so MythicQuests may be the first quest plugin I look at.

What kind of integration do you have in mind ? Is there a problem with the quests plugin and magic living together?

As a general note, I'm probably not going to spend much time doing "fix wand breakage" type of integration if the CB patch I've got fixes the problem instead. I am in the process of reaching out to the bukkit team about it , my hope is one day they'll let me fix the problem.

@xs0lidus

Well I'm glad you were able to work around it! And thanks for the heads up, I'll have to look at that. I thought I supported embedding the name and description for wands and spells to make it easier to customize.

@NathanWolf

Hm- if the wand is named something, but still showing as "Wand" you may have found a bug. or it could be a config issue.

How are you creating and selling the wands? Are you adding new templates to wands.yml?

If so, did you stick "name" right in there, or did you put it in messages.yml? Either should work, but I normally use messages.yml. If you want to gist or pastebin your whole configs I could have a look.

If you're just creating the wands in-game and selling them via a chest or trader shop, make sure to do "/wand name" on them- I think it works better than "/wand configure name", it has to do some specific stuff to fix up the name.

• "bound": This makes it so the player that owns the wand is the only player that may use it. A player owns a wand when they name it on an anvil.
• "keep": Similar to "bound", but it means the player will keep the wand if they die.
• "locked": The wand may not be modified in any way. Useful for limited-use wands, or specific wands (like a wand with one spell that requires no mana). Prevents upgrading the wand via commands, item upgrades, anvil combining, etc.

I hope that helps! Let me know more about your setup and I can try to help, and/or replicate a bug you may have run into.

EDIT: I'm thinking now it's likely a config issue. Since none of the default templates have a "name" or "description" in wands.defaults.yml, it's a bit confusing. Add one, or take a look at the "wands" section of messages.defaults.yml to see what to add to messages.yml. The text is separate for easy localization, but you can also just add "name" and "description" right in the wand config, like:

sniper:
  name: Sniper Wand
  description: Deadly Deadliness
  xp_max: 100
  xp_reneration: 10
  spells:
     - sniper

If you're using custom wand templates, I'll bet they're missing the "name" property- is that it?

@xs0lidus

Hm, I think I did that in purpose because I assumed you would give a single-spell wand a custom name.

I think you can actually make the name "$spell Wand" and will auto-fill the name in- this is how the randomized ones work.

Anyway I think the idea is you'd just name the wand "Sniper Wand", and you wouldn't want that to display as "Sniper Wand (Sniper)". Does that make sense? Is there a better way I could do it?

@Silversbane

Hm... interesting idea. I rely on permissions for multi-world stuff, so maybe a pnode for "keep wands"? There are a few global config options like this I'm thinking of changing into pnodes which would probably help you out.

Otherwise, it's a property of the wand, so it can't be world-specific. But the above is doable, I'll open a ticket. :)

http://jira.elmakers.com/browse/MAGIC-69

^ If you want to vote or watch it...

I got to mess around in the CraftBukkit source some more, and I have some extremely promising results. At this point I think the main problem will be trying to figure out how to convince the Bukkit team that this is a worthwhile thing to do, since I can't think of a way to fix it outside of a CB patch.

So I'm working on a CB patch. It may or may not ever see the light of day, and I know no one wants to run a custom CB (and I'm not even allowed to suggest it here), but I want to know if it's possible for CB to easily work with custom item data, and so far it seems to be very, very possible.

I'm also not trying to be hacky. I didn't implement an "NBT API", I know Bukkit doesn't want that (though it could be added to what I've done). I have simply added an "extra data" section to CraftItemStack, which will store any extra NBT data that may be present on an item.

By "extra" I mean anything not represented by a well-known, built-in ItemMeta class. If there is no such data (as there normally will not be), the only impact is an empty Map reference (not even an initialized Map) on each ItemStack instance- which doesn't seem like a huge overhead to me.

If the extra data is present, it is serialized, copied, etc at a core level, whether dealing with a concrete NMS Item, or a Bukkit mirror ItemStack. My patch is completely contained in the CraftItemStack class, though it does add quite a bit of additional NBTTag references to unobfuscated methods... I know they won't like that, though I did some searching and there is some precedent for it here and there.

It just works. It's beautiful.

Here are the results of a Shopkeepers save using a CraftBukkit with this patch:

https://gist.github.com/NathanWolf/0ab6c020d746b3044d1d

So Shopkeepers is now fully Magic-compatible without any changes to that plugin. (I do need to do more testing...). You can see all the custom wand data was automatically serialized.

I imagine a slew of other plugins would suddenly "just work" with Magic, as long as they're using the Bukkit ItemStack serialization API for saving and loading items.

This even fixes creative mode - I'd need to update Magic to capture creative inventory mode clicks (so you don't mess up your wand in inventory mode) but with this patch creative no longer destroys wands or the spells in your wand. It just works. It's so wonderful, I can hardly believe it.

We'll see how far I get with this, but you can expect that I'll be running a custom CraftBukkit on my own server for a while to test this out.

EDIT: If there are any curious devs out there, here's the change:

https://github.com/NathanWolf/CraftBukkit-Bleeding/commit/67617ff88a213bc0e74e05e84368409d362bce68

I haven't submitted a PR .. yet? I wish I could talk to someone about it before I took that step to avoid the insta-smackdown.

I've been poking around in the CraftBukkit code a bit, trying to see if there's anything "clever" I can do to generally fix my custom item woes. I can definitely see why they are resistant, I didn't realize there was a deep class hierarchy for ItemMeta, just like for Material and Block data.

All of this is going to be a huge headache if Mojang really makes all item types custom. No idea how that's going to work (though I'm guessing we'll still need a "class" framework of some kind for the core behaviors) ... anyway I'm going to stop thinking about it :)

For now I just wanted to share this fun little nugget I found, and have a moment of appreciation for the trials and tribulations of the Bukkit team.

@Override
    public final String toString() {
        return SerializableMeta.classMap.get(getClass()) + "_META:" + serialize(); // TODO: cry
    }

@xs0lidus

I just noticed the documentation in wands.defaults.yml and spells.defaults.yml is out of date- copying the file is not the right thing to do! Sorry. See here for details:

http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/magic/pages/admin-instructions/

The basic issue is the configs are additive- you don't want to copy the defaults, that will do nothing. If an entry doesn't appear in wands.yml, it will just use the entry in wands.defaults.yml.

If you want to disable a wand, add the following to wands.yml:

elder:
  enabled: false

For each wand you want to disable. That's all you need.

However, I would ask - why do you want to do this? Players will not have access to any wands unless you've given them "/wand", and I urge you strongly not to do that. :)