Network Cabling API

I'm suggesting a modding API that would allow two things:

1. Custom cable devices.
As in, an API to allow mods to define their own wired modem-like devices that sit on the cables and perform functions other than being a peripheral, while giving the device access to the wired network of computers and peripherals. Also, there could be a style of device that is just an ordinary peripheral sitting in the cable block for the sake of aesthetics and compactness.
2. Custom cables
An API that would enable mod devs to define custom connections to the network. For example, AE2 could make a computercraft network p2p tunnel. Or a dev could make a custom cable that's FMP compliant.

These wouldn't add to the game directly, but they would open the doors for new and interesting ideas, enabling players to create networks that are much more interesting, capable, and (most importantly) fun to build.

I think that ComputerCraft generally needs to have its API expanded. The only things you can really do is add peripherals and modify turtle permissions, which is two things out of many. And even these features are pretty limited. Coincidentally I started working on an extended CC API today (GitHub repo) which will hopefully allow stuff like this until the official API does.

I think this would be wonderful, however we wouldn't have proper multi-part support (custom parts sit in same block as the cable) as the way it is currently written is just not expandable. However it might be possible to just to write an entire custom network implementing dan200.computercraft.shared.peripheral.modem.INetwork but that might be overkill :)/>

SquidDev, on 08 April 2015 - 08:34 AM said:

I think this would be wonderful, however we wouldn't have proper multi-part support (custom parts sit in same block as the cable) as the way it is currently written is just not expandable. However it might be possible to just to write an entire custom network implementing dan200.computercraft.shared.peripheral.modem.INetwork but that might be overkill :)/>/>

That's actually what I meant =P Someone could make an entire custom network implementing FMP. And that'd be cool as cool.

It would be really nice to get some custom support for cables such as having Ender IO network conduits. This could be a potential solution to the big request for multi part cables.