Developer experience

Item building and comparisons

Creating complex ItemStack instances is a long and unpleasant process. That’s why the GDK provides the GDKItems class in the fr.noradrenalin.gdk.utils (Java) package.

This utility provides already built items like “previous” and “next” arrows in inventories UI, as well as the dark background item for these inventory views.

It provides an ItemStack Builder class that you can use the same way you would with other ItemBuilders :

val item = GDKItems.Builder(Material.IRON_SWORD, 1, "${ChatColor.AQUA}Super sword")
    .addSafeEnchant(Enchantment.DURABILITY, 1)
    .setDurability((Material.IRON_SWORD.maxDurability - 3).toShort())
    .addItemFlags(ItemFlag.HIDE_ATTRIBUTES)
    .build();

Which would build this item :

It also provides a compare function to check if two ItemStack matches. This function returns a boolean and has multiple prototypes :

• compare(lhs: ItemStack?, rhs: ItemStack?): Boolean
• compare(lhs: ItemStack?, rhs: ItemStack?, compareAmount: Boolean = false): Boolean

As you can see, by default, the compare function ignores the amount of items in the ItemStack. This behavior allows to count quantities of items matching a certain item “signature”

GDK Constants and conversions

In order to help with the DX (developer experience), the GDK contains predefined constants and conversion tools to avoid using brain power on these cases.

Time, Delays and duration

In the fr.noradrenalin.gdk.utils package you’ll find multiple utilities including GDKConstants.kt and GDKConversions.kt.

GDKConstants.kt exposes the TaskDelay object which contains constants such as ONE_TICK_DELAY, ONE_SECOND_DELAY and so on. It also provides a after(Duration) function to compute the duration in game ticks.

Here is an example to better understand :

MyGameTask().runTaskLater(.., GDKConstants.TaskDelay.ONE_TICK_DELAY)
MyGameTask().runTaskLater(.., GDKConstants.TaskDelay.ONE_SECOND_DELAY)
MyGameTask().runTaskLater(.., GDKConstants.TaskDelay.after(Duration.ofMinutes(2)))

It also exposes the TaskPeriod object which contains constants to define task cycles with better semantic as well, see by yourself :

MyGameTask().runTaskTimer(.., .., GDKConstants.TaskPeriod.EVERY_TICK)
MyGameTask().runTaskTimer(.., .., GDKConstants.TaskPeriod.EVERY_SECOND)
MyGameTask().runTaskTimer(.., .., GDKConstants.TaskPeriod.every(Duration.ofMinutes(5)))

Text alignment

As of now (1.8.8), Bukkit/Spigot/PaperMC do not provide anything to make developers life easier regarding text alignment in places like ItemStack#lore attribute, or anything that has text, really.

The GDK provides a GDKText utility in the fr.noradrenalin.gdk.utils package, which provides a way to create text that follows an alignment. As of now, every Minecraft text is left aligned by default. Center aligned text feels off (yes, this GDK’s development is opinionated). Then which one is missing ? “Alignment : Justify” :

// By default, it provides a list of String since Minecraft's items lore is stored as such.
val justifiedTextLines: List<String> =
    GDKText.Alignment
        .justify("This is an example of text justification.", 16) // 16 is the max Width allowed
/*
Which would output the following list :
[
    "This    is    an",
    "example  of text",
    "justification.  ",
]
*/

// However, if you want to get a basic String output, you can simply do this
val justifiedText: String =
    GDKText.Alignment
        .justify("This is an example of text justification.", 16)
        .joinToString("\n")

/*
Which would output the following string :

"This    is    an\nexample  of text\njustification.  "
*/