[CC] Cannon mail system

[Anonymous]

Not sure if I should post this on the CC forums or here, but I’ma start here.

I made a mail system in-game and I’d like to showcase it now. 🙂

Backstory
I was playing with some friends on a CC (ComputerCraft) only server, and I got the idea of making a mail system so we could send private messages (even tho you can with the in-game chat, but that isn’t as fun is it?). Now at this stage we were very poor (in-game) and barely had enough food to survive, and since the “recent” change to CC where the recipe for the wireless modems now contains an ender pearl, I needed to come up with some other ways of sending mail.
I stumbled upon the OpenBlocks item cannon, and got so fascinated that I wanted to make a mail system based on the item cannon ^^. The initial structure I imagined is more or less the one I settled with, and is actually pretty similar to real life snailmail systems.

Logic
The core of this system is the mail tower. This is where all letters go through. When you write a letter, the data gets printed onto a floppy disc that is then shot with an item cannon to the tower, that reads the floppy disc, prints out the data onto a peice of paper that it sends to the selected receivers, and then sends the floppy disc back to the sender, ready to be written upon again.

Each player has their own mailbox, which is (as seen in the image above) made out of a computer for writing the letters, a discdrive to write the data, an item cannon to launch the disc to the mail HQ/tower, a hopper to pickup the returned items, and a chest to be the mailbox inventory.

Here’s a visual of how the mail system works:

Screenshots

The computer at the mailbox got a nice GUI where you can write your mail with ease.

The mail content (message & subject) gets wrapped to fit the size of the printed page. While writing you can tap “Preview” to breifly show what the letter would look like if you were to send it as is.

When done writing your message, you tap “Send” and the item cannon shoots it out towards the HQ.

Up at the mail tower, a hopper collects the disc, reads what’s on, prints a page, and gives the items to respective item cannon.

The inside of the mail tower. Not so pretty, but with limited resources I focused on getting it to work. (The beauty went into the GUI anyways ^^ )

The letter arrives in the form of a CC printed page.

And this is what the printed page looks like. Pretty fly for a mail system if you ask me 😉

Source
So this project was done to fit the world and may not be optimal for an application you may have, but if you wish to try set it up, or try to improve it, or just read to understand, here’s the code:

(I made this with an API structure, for the sake of the workflow. I.e. there’s multiple files even for just one computer)

[Mailbox]
pastebin get mskhRPQQ main
pastebin get hfzDu9X4 gui
pastebin get rMHP8XFK mail
pastebin get aLadzGLk util

[Mailtower]
pastebin get YjD6AJ0B main
pastebin get k6Lb3z9D inv
pastebin get 4UTvL6W1 mail
pastebin get WN13ywiu util

Note to self: start using turtlescripts…

[JohnMegacycle]

This is absolutely and is another reminder to me as to why you should really have your own YouTube series. You are certainly one of the most creative players that I’ve ever met and I’m glad to have had you on the MotleyCraft crew. ^_^

[Author]

Posts