"Plugin Messages" - Inter-mod communication

Hey guys,

I'm the developer for the forge mod "FlenixCities". The mod, amongst other things, adds a physical economy.

I'm currently trying to add support for bukkit for the servers using MCPC+ or BukkitForge. This means I need to create a bukkit economy to work with my mod.


I've nearly gotten everything working, all I need to do is set up communication between my mod and the bukkit plugin. I've gone for a simple approach of keeping them seperate so I don't need to worry about sync (Think of my bukkit-side economy as the BitCoin to my physical cash) - but I still need to let the other side know how much is in each account.

For example, say my bukkit side has $15. If a player tries to transfer $20 from that to the Forge side, I need to tell Forge to NOT give him the money, because he doesn't really have it.

I asked about this a while back on IRC, before I'd finished the bukkit-side plugin's core, and someone told me about a message packet system which can transmit data cross-platform between bukkit, forge and I believe even basemods and other APIs. However, I can't remember what it was called...

So, does anyone know of an elegant solution for this? Has anyone ever tried anything along these lines?


(Side-note, please don't bother commenting if you're just gonna hate on Forge. Bukkit and Forge offer different things; I'm merely trying to bridge the gap a bit.)

 

Flenix
I believe it has something to do with packets, I haven't really worked with Forge....

 

Couldn't I just edit your mod and give myself free money?
And this:
http://dinnerbone.com/blog/2012/01/13/minecraft-plugin-channels-messaging/

 

That's what it was, thanks

And no - money is stored server-side unless you're playing single player. If it was single player then yes, you could do that - but you can do that for items too, not really something I can prevent.
The mod-side money is stored as NBT data in the root of the server directory - I don't think that's something bukkit can directly read.

 

Technically, a plugin could be made to read it.

 

True, but I'm sure anyone dealing with real money on their servers is going to be pretty picky about which plugins they install.. I know I wouldn't use any that I didn't write myself or at least had source code access to

Your server is only as secure as the most insecure thing you put on it...

(Hi, Flenix!)

 

Hey!
& your post confused me, just to clarify my "real money" is only items. I'm not doing anything with actual real money- BitCoin was just a reference

I know with a lot of work I could make a plugin directly read/write to my money file, but to be honest I prefer the idea of the two seperate but compatible economies. It means I can use all the lovely things bukkit/vault have to offer without having to do very much at all to my mod - as I obviously want the mod to work just fine WITHOUT bukkit too (as the majority of players tend to play single-player in the world of Forge)


Anyway, I'm struggling to find docs on receiving the info. Anyone got any advice? For now I just want to send a simple packet from the mod and get it in the plugin and vice versa, once I've got that I can tweak it as required.