MC Plugin JustAnimations - 1.18 1.0.2

Create animations for your server! Moving platforms, trees and more

About
JustAnimations is a plugin that lets you animate builds. You can create moving structures, animated cutscenes and even watch videos (See more about this below). With this you can animate all your needs! Falling trees, moving platforms, cutescenes and more!

Coming Soon
You can check out the planned features on our trello board here!

Some of what I have planned will help performance and others make it easier to use. A main priority is optimization and options to help with performance, like only running when players are nearby.

Requirements
This plugin requires some dependencies to run properly:
- WorldEdit for 1.18.2
- PlaceholderAPI (optional)









Features

• Animate builds, plateforms and more!
• Play frames straight from ram (faster) or from files (slower but less ram usage)
• Set how long inbetween each frame
• Edit frames easily!
• Rename your animations!
• Easy to use!
• Play videos as an animation! (See more about this below)
• A nice to use API

Rendering videos
With JustAnimations you can render videos and watch them in your Minecraft server. You can find the tool here. You must have python installed to run it.

Before you render a video you need to change the resolution to how big you want it to appear in the server.



Commands

• /ja create (name) <singlefile/multiplefile> - Creates a new animation with a certain save type (See below)
• /ja delete (name) - Deletes an animation and all the frames
• /ja reload - Reloads the config and all animations
• /ja animation (name) <play/stop> - Plays/stops an animation from playing
• /ja animation (name) addframe <optional:ticks> - Adds a frame to an animation, ticks is how many ticks before the animation switches to this frame
• /ja animation (name) getframe - Gets the current frame number of the animation (Starts at 0)
• /ja animation (name) gotoframe (frame) - Stops and sets the shown frame to the input one
• /ja animation (name) frameselection (frame) - Sets your WorldEdit selection so the selection of the frame. useful for making new frames
• /ja animation (name) convert - Converts the save type to the other one (See more below). Do not use with really big animations, takes an extremely long time and may crash
• /ja animation (name) settings setworld (world name) - Sets the world for the animation to play in
• /ja animation (name) settings togglereverse - Toggles whether the animation should play backwards when it reaches the last frame
• /ja animation (name) settings setdelay (frame) (delay) - Sets the delay for an animation
• /ja animation (name) editframe (frame) - Sets the frame to whatever you have selected as your WorldEdit selection
• /ja animation (name) removeframe (frame) - Deletes the frame

The base permission for these commands is either "justanimations.command" or "justanaimations.admin"

File storage types
There are two ways this plugin stores animation saves. The first is multiple files, this one saves each frame in a different file. The other one is single file, this one stores all the frames in a single file.

Each storage type has different use cases, multiple files is good for larger animations so the plugin does have to read 30mb files each time it needs to grab a frame. Single file is better for smaller animations, it stores each frame in a single file and takes up less storage.

If a large animation is used with single file is may take a long time to load the file and add new frames as it needs to read a large file in order to do this. Converting may also take a while depending on the size.

This can be set per animation.


Load types
There are two ways for the plugin to load frames from, one is from RAM and one is from file.

Each load type has a different use case. The RAM load type is good for usually smaller animations or servers with a decent amount of RAM, this can increase server load time depending on the animation size but greatly increases server performance. The file load type is usually good for larger animations (Like rendered videos, see "Rendering videos") as it loads straight from the files, this can allow instant updating of frames directly from file. The downside of the file load type is it can greatly harm the servers performance as reading files is pretty expensive on the CPU, it shouldnt be too bad unless its a 20fps animation that runs at all times.



API
There is an API for this plugin, at the moment it isn't very big but it will improve along with the plugin.

You can find out how to use it here!



Usage
Here will be a basic example of creating an animation


Step 1:
Run the creation command to create an animation "/ja create (name) <singlefile/multiplefile>


Step 2:
Use the WorldEdit wand or commands to create a region selection then run "/ja animation (name) addframe (ticks)". Do this and change the blocks then run the command again for how many frames you want.


Step 3:
Now you can play the animation with "/ja animation (name) play" and stop it with "/ja animation (name) stop"



FAQ
Q: Does this work with mod/plugin hybrids like magma?
A: It has not been tested but in theory is should


Q: Will you support versions earlier than 1.18?
A: Yes, I plan to support 1.13 and above. 1.12 and below is being thought on but due to some WorldEdit version compatibilities it may not be created and if it is may not be updated too often, There may be a good way to do this so it could happen.