OpenComputers scripts

Here, I wanted to list my scripts for the OpenComputers for Minecraft.

To my disappointment, I do not have a Minecraft world at hand now to test the scripts and the world which inspired me to create the scripts in the first place does not exist anymore.

It was fun to work on this, but just coding for myself without a greater value does not make sense to me, despite how much I would love to continue here.

You can build on my work if you like to do so.

Projects

Reactor

Included are a terminal program and a GUI for controlling a reactor and an induction matrix.¹ Like it says in the name, the scripts are for accessing information about a reactor, so that the reactor can be activated on demand. Both versions are the same at their core, with the only difference being that the terminal just displays status information while the GUI also contains buttons to remotely manage the reactor from a computer.

Related branches

The reactor terminal program is finished, however the GUI version rather resembles a library on the master branch at the moment, thus I already uploaded branches for testing an actual reactor control screen.

reactor-button-old

Implements buttons that use an action property to register a click. For that, a function could be called on clicking the button.

local button = buttonAPI.Button()
button.action = function () print("clicked") end

In the end, I did not like the syntax that resulted out of this, hence why I left it as a draft.

ui-elements

Adds various UI elements like lamps or boxes with borders around them and a title at the top.

screen-test

First work-in-progress branch to implement a reactor control screen. Commits from the ui-elements branch are already merged.

I recommend to begin on a new branch when finishing the screen, as the commit history is a bit of a mess.

Drones

There is also a drone branch, as I wanted to experiment with automatic farming drones. Though, this branch is empty so far.

Tasks

While I won't continue to work on this, I had a few ideas for future coding.

Documentation

The programs are small, however the structure is rather complex due to the modularisation. Thus, it would be a good idea to add a documentation, especially for the DrawAPI. To mention a simple example, the width and height argument for drawing a BorderBox (see ui-elements branch) include the border.

Furthermore, the structure of my program allows adding several screens. When running, you can switch between the screens via buttons in a toolbar (see screen-test branch). The current ReactorScreen contains a template for adding a new screen. After this step, the screen would need to be added in the ScreenManager file.

BorderBox

Reduce draw calls of a BorderBox by drawing the border and the inner box with two rectangles. Thereby, the draw calls will decrease from 4 to 2. An example is displayed below:

local function BorderBox(x, y, w, h, text, borderColor)
    -- TODO: make sure width and height is at least 2

    local background = gpu.getBackground()
    Rectangle(x, y, w, h, borderColor)
    Rectangle(x + 1, y + 1, w - 1, h - 1, background)

    Text(x + 2, y, " " .. text .. " ", 0x000000, 0xFFFFFF)
end

Colour API

For colours that are frequently used, an API could be added to make the colours more consistent.

General = {
    White = 0xFFFFFF
    Black = 0x000000
    Grey1 = 0x2F4F4F
}

Debug screen

Add a debug screen if the public variable DEBUG in Program.lua is set to "true".

Bug fixes

Important

When working on the screen-test branch, please keep in mind that there are still bugs present.

I have not worked on this project for a while, so the information written here may be wrong or outdated. You should be careful about the branch you are on when investigating these. I tried to be as descriptive as possible.

• Lamps are not drawn correctly under certain circumstances. Maybe the width and height needs to be adjusted.
• Some buttons are "blinking". I'm not sure if this is due to the rendering not being fast enough (unlikely) or if there is something drawing over the buttons for a split second.
• I have no idea if DrawAPI needs to be imported to Lamp.lua (see ui-elements branch)

See also

Besides my work, there is also a GUI library which I really like and could imagine using in my own scripts called interface by TankNut. All UI elements are handled in a single instance and referenced via a certain name. My current button structure you can find on the screen-test branch would lead to boiler plate code because the properties of a button need to be specified in separate lines. With this framework, the code looks a bit cleaner.

A very basic example of the usage is shown below:

interface.newButton("s1-2","Screen 2",9,1,8,3,screen2,nil,0x00FF00,0x0000FF,1)

while true do
    interface.processClick(x,y)
end

If you want to take inspiration from other people's work, there is a listing of OpenComputers scripts available here, which also contains a few reactor status programs.

Footnotes

1. Reactor from Big Reactors and induction matrix from Mekanism ↩