I'm a big fan of a lot of the mods currently being ported over and this seems the more creatively active/fertile place to suggest a mod that I would ultimately like for my server rather than for solo. I want to put our TNT to some actual beneficial use while maintaining the game experience. This would be done with Ground Penetrating Radar. Any TNT block placed underneath a stone step (and surrounded on all sides) would take on slightly different properties. This would prevent TNT from losing its current use (the BOOM! part) and add a trigger for when you try to light a stone step on fire with a flint and steel. Instead of taking out the area around it, the world would shake a bit (per normal TNT) and then for a short running timer of say 20 seconds, all stone and dirt blocks below the TNT in a 8 block diameter hemisphere become unbreakable (like with cuboid) glass blocks, before being "undone" at the end of the timer and returning to their original state. This would let the miner step back and see if there are any caves or precious materials immediately around them, without having to stripmine the landscape. Now, although I have some previous programming experience, I don't know Java very well, and thus I don't know if this would create ludicrously heavy processing or not. Thus, I come to the place where the masters dwell. Feel free to tear the idea up, but if anyone has ideas, I'd love to see them. Added a bit of a poll just to see if anyone would be interested in it. Everyone keep up the awesome that is the Bukkit conversions! I look forward to using it with my server.
Not impossible, crazy as hell to do, but not impossible i don't think. As for the shake, I think thats linked to TNT, so probs not possible. Also issues if the server crashed/saved while radar was in action.
It might be a bit easier if you'd make that a redstone button thingy. Or. No. Wait, crap. There's no steponhalfstep event, is there? You'd have to check every movement (in that chunk?) Most likely true. Yes. But. Hm. You could make an sql table radaractive with x and y coordinates of the TNT block and fix it on restart. :3
Main reason I think this kind of thing might be helpful is that it would work serverside and wouldn't require any x-ray client modding. A lot of my users accidentally tunnel into each other's spaces, but if they could prospect a bit first, they wouldn't have to worry about destroying each other's work when its subterranean. My fiance is a geologist, and in all truth, it was her idea. Playing MC with a Geo has been an experience thus far. I hadn't thought about the server crashing issue, however. That could allow for massive expanses to accidentally be turned to glass and left that way. It might require some kind of active process that would be tracking the event independently. I think that is what the sql table reference was that Totem mentioned. Might require an angel process to go through and verify, every time the server started, if one of these events was still incomplete and then fix it. I wish I knew java well enough, I'd just do this myself. But this isn't exactly adding some art and crafting a block or something. More moving parts... bit big for a first attempt at modding the game.
