Interop: can a foreign plugin block join an electric network as a producer/consumer node?

[def9a2a4]

tl;dr: I maintain a plugin that also does automation stuff, would love a way to allow players to convert power from one to the other.

I maintain Mechanism (repo), a loosely Create mod inspired rotational-mechanics plugin. It's also automation-focused, but the niche is more "large visually cool machines" (lets you build big doors, hoists, minecart contraptions, etc) than the deep progression and actual balance that Pylon gives. (It was also the death of slimefun that made me decide to build Mechanism)

Becoming a Rebar addon probably isn't an option for me, as I understand the API is not yet stable. The goal is just to add, on my end, a converter block that bridges Pylon's electricity and Mechanism's rotational power.

I read the electricity internals doc. Your network models power as a continuous flow in watts (producer / consumer / acceptor /
connector nodes), not as discrete joule buffers. Mechanism's rotation network is similar: continuous power, passive sources, and consumers. So, the bridge I want is just a node on each side, maybe one block for Pylon->Mechanism and a different one for Mechanism->Pylon.

Questions

1. Where does electricity live right now? I checked pylonmc/rebar and pylonmc/pylon on master and see fluid and logistics packages but no electricity package, even though the doc was updated this month. Is it on an unmerged branch / mid-refactor? Is the doc's node model current?
2. When it lands, will there be a public path for a foreign block to register producer/consumer/acceptor nodes on an electric network, callable via soft-dependency without implementing RebarAddon? Something like the SimpleElectricRebarBlock abstraction the doc describes, but usable from outside the addon system.
3. To connect wires, the doc mentions ports (the interaction-entity representation of a node). Would a foreign block be able to create/own a port, or is that addon-internal?
4. If none of this is exposed for foreign plugins yet, is it something you'd consider, or would you rather I wait until the addon API stabilizes and do it "properly" then?

I understand Pylon is still in development and things are moving quickly, just trying to understand whether this is something I can do now or if I should wait for the API to stabilize. Thanks for all the work on Pylon, it's incredible stuff!

[LordIdra]

Thanks for the kind words - I think some of these are @Seggan questions but I can answer some:

1 - Electricity is still in development and has not been merged into master yet - see #971 and pylonmc/rebar#711

2/3 - This is a tricky question. Most things in Rebar require you to implement RebarAddon. But now that you've mentioned it this is actually really bad for interop since you can't conditionally implement an interface. I think it would potentially be worth changing RebarAddon to be internal and just have your plugin call registerWithRebar with the required information

4 - I would wait until the addon API stabilises - electricity is not finalised and we have recently have overhauled several parts of Rebar so stuff is still changing a lot

[Seggan]

To expand on Idra's answers:

2 - check out how our tests module does it, the electric network/node stuff doesn't require becoming a Rebar addon/block

3 - the port system currently has no API surface, it's just a bunch of internal methods calling each other with a bunch of fragile mutable exposed state. I do plan to rewrite it (I consider the wiring code to be in my top 10 worst code I ever wrote), so I'll definitely look into doing a proper port API like we have to fluid points

4- yeah wait at least until the electricity PR has been merged, and even then I'd wait until stabilization. I will definitely consider your use case in my PR tho, thank you for the feedback ❤️

[def9a2a4]

Thank you for the advice! I will definitely look into it further once the PR is merged, looking forward to it!

I think it would potentially be worth changing RebarAddon to be internal and just have your plugin call registerWithRebar with the required information

I personally would be a fan of this -- having plugins be able to soft-depend would be great!

If anyone has other suggestions for integration between the two plugins, I'm very open to ideas -- electricity <--> rotation power was just the first thing that came to mind. Mechanism also has a (very primitive) fluids system, so maybe I'll look into that

[Seggan]

I've pushed said wire/port rewrite to the PR, check out ElectricPortEntity and WireEntity