schemconvert

Authors: A S lewis

Contributors: Gael-de-Sailly

License: LGPL 2.1

This mod reads one or more minetest schematics (.mts files). It also accepts schematics as Lua tables.

Then, it does any or all of the following things:

• Displays the contents of the schematic in the chat window/debug file
• Swaps nodes in the schematic (e.g. swaps default:stone for mymod:rock)
• Saves the schematic as a .mts and/or .lua file

Thus, this mod is useful for the following purposes:

• Updating nodes, when .mts schematics are copied from one mod to another
• A general-purpose Lua > .mts > Lua schematic converter

This mod has no gameplay value, and is only useful for developers. It has been tested on Minetest 5.4.1. It has not been tested on MS Windows.

Importing schematics

Open the the init.lua file in your preferred text editor. There are some flags there that can be modified to change the mod's behaviour. (Since this mod is for developers, we assume you don't need the crutch of reading from a settingtypes.txt file).

There are two ways to import schematics.

Firstly, .mts schematics should be copied into the folder called input. Files in this folder are never modified or overwritten.

Unfortunately, there is no easy way for Lua to get a list of files from a folder; therefore we have to write the list ourselves in files.txt. This should contain one file per line. Empty lines and lines starting with the # character are ignored.

There is a shortcut: if a file called test.mts exists, it will be loaded, regardless of whether it is mentioned in files.txt.

Secondly, Lua tables can be copy-pasted into the schematics.lua file.

You can find some examples of schematics in the form of Lua tables in minetest-game, in the file schematic-tables.txt. If you like, you could copy-paste the whole of that file into schematics.lua. Don't forget to change the function calls from mts_save() to schemconvert.add_schem().

Setting up node conversion

Next, the convert.csv file provides a list of nodes to convert. Once again, empty lines and lines starting with the # character are ignored.

Lines should be in the format:

    original_node_name|converted_node_name

For example

    default:stone|mymod:rock
    default:cobble|othermod:rubble

It is not necessary for either mod to be loaded; schemconvert deals with simple strings, it does not check whether the nodes default:stone or mymod:rock actually exist in the game.

How to use

Start the game (with schemconvert enabled). Converted files are written to the output folder.

You can check the results of your work by changing the flags (as described above) to write the original and/or converted files as .lua files, so the changes can be inspected visually.

Comparable mods

saveschems, by paramat and sofar

Converts lua tables to .mts files

schemedit, by Wuzzy

Allows players to edit and export schematics in-game

mtsedit, by bzt

An interactive MTS editor with GUI, and batch mode capabilities