[Mod] Treasurer [0.2.0] [treasurer]

doxygen_spammer
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Re: [Mod] Treasurer [0.2.0] [treasurer]

by doxygen_spammer » Post

I considered to use this instead of dungeon_loot from Minetest Game, to offer compatibility with other games.
On a closer look it doesn’t seem to be a good idea, because:
  • While dungeon_loot is from Minetest Game, it is actually present in numerous games.
  • treasurer is only compatible with Mesecraft, because for no other game any loot spawner mods exist on ContentDB.
If there were loot spawner mods for treasurer, I could make use of these advantages:
  • Official API including rudimentary documentation.¹
  • More generic concept than dungeon_loot.
  • Concept of “preciousness”.
I think the modpack treasurer has to provide at least one fallback treasure spawning mod.
Otherwise, mods depending of this mod still have the burden to provide own treasure spawning code, to make sure the mod is not unusable—just what treasurer aims to avoid.
A fallback mod could either spawn treasure chests in a very simple and stupid way, or offer a trading block that exchanges treasures by random other treasures of similar “preciousness”.

So I conclude treasurer is currently ususable. Is this assesment correct?

¹) Yes, there is 15kB worth of documentation, but it is poorly structured. “Too long, didn’t read.”

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Wuzzy
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Re: [Mod] Treasurer [0.2.0] [treasurer]

by Wuzzy » Post

Thank you that you care about my ancient mods. :D

I gave up on Treasurer. I think it's overengineered and just too inconvenient to use in practice, especially for players. This whole TSM and TRM and even TRMP stuff ... it's not nice to players.

I still think the architecture is more or less sound, and it works, but it's just not pragmatic for the actual use case. I wanted to do a super-generic treasure system that you could just throw at any game, and it was mainly invented because MTG had no treasure system back then. The treasurer mod is older than dungeon_loot.

But today, I think it is better to just have every game itself implement its own treasure system instead, that way, the system can better adapt to the game's needs. MCL2 has its own treasure system. Repixture, too. I didn't even consider adding treasurer to these, that's how much I've abandoned this mod, lol.

dungeon_loot is fine for MTG, and it wasn't intended to be ripped out of MTG anyway.

Treasurer *is* actually usable, it's just annoying to use.

An example use case is this:

* Start with MTG
* Add tsm_pyramids
* Add trmp_minetest_game
* Add treasurer
* Play

Now you have pyramids with Minetest Game treasures. The idea of the TRMs is that other mods could register their items as possible treasures so they get distributed through the world without needing to know the mods. It works, but it's annoying and probably confusing for the player to use, especially since the whole concept requires a TON of mods to be added, even if the only purpose of the mod is to register treasures. :-/ (fun fact: tsm_pyramids still has treasures without the treasurer mod, just different ones)

It was by design that treasurer does NOT come with a fallback TSM. Because it is meant to be game-agnostic, so there is just no way for Treasurer to know how to "spawn treasures by default". It just knows nothing about the game. If it did, it would be no longer game-agnostic.

Today, I no longer really recommend to use this mod, I haven't even uploaded it to ContentDB. Consider this mod abandoned. Especially the fact that this mod never reached version 1.0.0 should be telling.

My advice to game and mod authors is to roll their own treasure system or use the treasure system of the game.

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snoopy
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Re: [Mod] Treasurer [0.2.0] [treasurer]

by snoopy » Post

Wuzzy wrote:
Tue Nov 29, 2022 20:08
Today, I no longer really recommend to use this mod, I haven't even uploaded it to ContentDB. Consider this mod abandoned.
@Wuzzy - You are aware there is a ContentDB entry of this mod available till today?

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