Mod Integration Meta-Issue

[Nerdpie]

Please find below a list of current integrations provided by Plethora. Note, however, that this list may lag behind at times, and the project at https://github.com/SquidDev-CC/plethora/projects/1 should be considered the official version.

Finished mod integrations:

• Applied Energistics 2
• Baubles
• Blockcraftery
• Chicken Bones Multipart (CBMP)
• Chickens
• Forestry
• Hatchery
• IC2
• MCMultipart
• Refined Storage
• RF (Technically an API, not a mod)
• Roost
• Storage Drawers
• Tinker's Construct
• Tesla

Minor integration - Some features are exposed, but many more are possible:

• EnderIO
• Thermal Expansion
• XNet

Packages under org.squiddev.plethora.integration that do not fit cleanly in the above categories:

• ComputerCraft
• JEI
• Plethora
• Vanilla

On Hold - Mod integrations pending further information

• Advanced Rocketry
• RFTools

In Progress - Mod integrations which are currently being worked on

• {Meta} NBT for Entity-Capture Items

Proposed - Mod integrations which have not yet been started

• Astral Sorcery

[Nerdpie]

I am not entirely sold on the wording, arrangement, or formatting, so any feedback would be appreciated. For instance, some of the entries may work better as check-boxes as opposed to regular bullet points. I was also hoping that GitHub's parser would give us a nice short-name for the project link...

[SquidDev]

One thing it strikes me, is that we could do a better job at documenting this on the website. Even if just doing a method dump for each mod and maybe a paragraph explaining the features we expose.

Ideally we could generate the method dumps at build time, but I'm not sure how feasible that'd be - we'd need to have everything on the classpath and running in an deobfuscated environment, and that often ends up being ... tricky.

[Nerdpie]

Edit: Moved to #198

[Nerdpie]

I am considering additional integrations, though I would appreciate input on some of them.

• RFTools Control - An add-on for RFTools which uses a graphical programming interface. Partly, I just want to see if I can make an event-based integration work (it has wireless nodes, and you can trigger processes on other Processors using signals).
• XNet - I'm not sure how much this will benefit us, especially with the move to requiring CC:T, but I may try to implement something similar to OC XNet Driver and the OC integration provided by YNot.
• NuclearCraft - I know that NuclearCraft already has OC support, but I need to double check if it has built-in CC support. This may be better suited as a PR for NC, though.
• Thaumcraft - Some similar issues to the gating discussed for Astral Sorcery. Further, I believe that at least one other mod exposes some degree of TC support for CC; at the minimum, we might define custom aspects for CC:T and Plethora items/entities/blocks.
• Vanilla - Extend the existing integrations to cover a larger range of items, entities, and blocks. For instance, expose the color of a sheep's wool, a villager's trades, entity spawned by a spawn egg, spawner values, etc.

I also intend to work on the RFTools integrations referenced in #158 . Honestly, as I'm working my way through Enigmatica 2: Expert, I am liable to work on integrating all the mods!!1 /meme

Another note: Apparently Ender IO has conduits for OC. While CC conduits would be nice, we should check with the EIO team on implementing it on our end or theirs.

[Nerdpie]

@SquidDev , do we have any guidelines for mod integrations that we simply will not add support for? I ask partly because I could work on extending our vanilla meta-providers, but I want to ensure that I am following your vision for the mod. One restriction that makes sense would be a mod that isn't visible source, let alone open source, as many such mods have clauses in their license/usage against decompilation.

[SquidDev]

@Nerdpie Honestly, not really. My guidelines pretty much boil down to "only allow doing things a player can do" (so computers shouldn't be able to side-step progression trees, get new knowledge, etc..). Plethora very much came from the idea of being able to automate everything with ComputerCraft (hence item transfer being a thing for so long).

Obviously there's a couple of "buts" here - if a mod is rather designed to be played by itself, then limit the integration provided. I'm fairly reluctant to do much Botania integration for instance, as it's very much a vanilla automatable mod (also no-numbers for a computer mod is pretty hard).

Likewise, if being able to automate something ends up being incredibly OP, then I'd try to avoid it. Plethora has enough balance problems as is :p.

Yes, I realise these guidelines are super subjective and vague. I've never really thought about it more than just going on gut instinct :/.

[Nerdpie]

It's enough that I can work with it. Basically mix judgement calls with "don't break balance", and you will let me know if a PR goes too far.