Bringing EssentialsPE support to SimpleWarp

I released SimpleWarp about a year and a half ago. A year after I released it, @LegendsOfMCPE released EssentialsPE. EssentialsPE included a warp feature which was inspired by SimpleWarp (with my permission). This meant that EssentialsPE would register the /warp and /delwarp commands, which would prevent the plugins from working together. I was happy with this as users would either use SimpleWarp or EssentialsPE, they should never need both. However, recently two things have changed which have made me reconsider that decision.

1. With the release SimpleWarp 2.0, a whole bunch of new feature became available. These features can’t be offered to EssentialsPE users.
2. I became the maintainer of EssentialsPE, which made me want to ensure some interoperatbility between the plugins.

Following this, I considered removing warps from EssentialsPE or disabling them when SimpleWarp was installed. I decided against this because I want to remain true the features that @iksaku has written into EssentialsPE. Failing that, I decided to add support for EssentialsPE in SimpleWarp.

Enabling

Their are likely a bunch of ways I could have gone about this, but I settled on a simple and hacky solution. First, the plugin.yml is modified so that SimpleWarp always loads after EssentialsPE (softdepend).

• If a user has enabled essentials-support in their config and have EssentialsPE installed.
  • Find and save the EssentialsPE commands.
  • Unregister them too.
  • Create alternate command objects for /warp and /delwarp, they will act as routers between the two plugins. They extend their coresponding SimpleWarp command.
  • Register other commands like normal.
• If not
  • Register commands like normal and hope for the best.

Running commands

When a command like /addwarp (SimpleWarp) or /setwarp (EssentialsPE) is run, nothing special happens as their is no conflict. However, when we have /warp or /delwarp their needs to be some magic. They both behave the same, so let’s look at /warp.

• Player runs /warp
• Did they specify a warp name?
  • Yes * Is this a SimpleWarp warp? * Yes * Warp them to the SimpleWarp warp. * No * Is this an EssentialsPE warp? (see below) * Yes * Warp them to the EssentialsPE warp. * No * Tell them the warp doesn’t exist.
  • No * Tell them to try again.
• Done.

Explictly specifying EssentialsPE warps

If both plugins have a warp called 1, we will always pick the SimpleWarp one. This isn’t quite fair to EssentialsPE. To combat this, SimpleWarp will warn the user that there is an EssentialsPE warp available. If they want to use it, they can explicitly ask. If it is not available, the command will fail. This is done by prefixing the warp name with ess:. If a user attempts to create a SimpleWarp warp that starts with ess:, they will get a warning message.

Conclusion

Finally EssentialsPE users will be able to try out all the awesome functionality in SimpleWarp without sacraficing their existing warp plugin. I think that plugins should strive to work together, but what I have done here is a bit extreme. When making a plugin it is useful to look around for other plugins that use the same command(s), namespace(s) or plugin name as you.