Importing Commands into MCStacker (Patreon)

August was a big month for development of MCStacker. I finally got around to creating a command parser and amazingly it works (at least for well formed commands). What this means is that now you can paste a command into the window and it will be loaded into the form. This is really handy for long and complex commands that you need to edit. 

Currently it supports summon, give, entitydata, setblock and fill commands. There are a few little issues and limitations that might affect some people which I'll discuss below.

Some commands containing JSON which Minecraft happily accepts may not necessarily  parse into MCStacker. If the JSON code is doubly escaped then it should be fine. I made sure that saved written_books on the old MCStacker is now outputting the JSON properly. I made a change on that last week. So if you have any saved written_books on that site, they will now import into new MCStacker properly.

In a summon command if HandDropChances appears before HandItems in a command they will not load in. It's a technical issue that I'll fix at some stage. It also affects ArmorItems and ArmorDropChances.  

There are no limits on recursion currently but this can be problematic if you were to import a massive entity stack. For example if you tried to import in a stack of command block minecarts from my mural generator page, MCStacker will attempt to process it but your browser would later crash from a lack of memory.  

entitydata commands are required to have the 'type' of entity set in the target selector. This is so that the form specific to that entity is loaded. For example a command that looks like the following will work: /entitydata @e[type=zombie] {IsBaby:1b}

 but this wont: 

/entitydata @e {IsBaby:1b}

In general commands should be well-formed and free from unnecessary spaces or new lines. The parser does it's best to read the command in, but it can't read your mind if the syntax is wrong.  

I'm sure there's plenty of bugs lurking in this update and I'm also sure they'll be a few edge cases where things might not work properly. As always I'm happy to take a look at it and fix things. Let me know if you have any issues. I will work on better error messages and exception handling so that usability is improved.

This month, I'm going to start working on the login system so that commands can be saved and shared. Just like on the original MCStacker.