Mob Manipulation API

####Does this belong in Plugin Discussion? Move it for me if it doesn’t.

I know this has been discussed before, but read this topic out.

Considering that Sponge is able to support Forge servers, as it in itself is a Forge mod, I was wondering about making a temporary external API for all our AI-brainwashing needs. The current plan is to wait for further into Sponge’s; although that release is far from now, and considering how long its going to take, a little experimentation with this wouldn’t hurt.

The concept of the project is to try and create a Forge mod that manages all the AI workings of entities and is accessible by Sponge plugins. With the much larger control a Forge mod has over the server, it will be a whole lot easier to accomplish. No attachments should be made with the code written, as eventually it would get replaced. Again, this is all just experimentation; we can try and see what works versus what doesn’t, taking notes and applying it to the eventual creation of the AI manipulation API in Sponge.

The only downfall of this is, it won’t be able to support SpongeVanilla, as it will be a Forge mod. That isn’t that big, though, is it?

You can discuss possible ways to perform this here, but the main type of response I’d like to see is opinions as to whether we should try this or leave it to the original plan of handling it later.

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Before any decision is made, we need to discuss on what can be done in forge which cannot be done in vanilla. If you had checked out Citizens A.I which is done in Bukkit(Vanilla Server), a lot of features are already possible in vanilla already. I think a better way is to have an API that is shared on both the forge and the vanilla implementation where there are few more features that cannot be done in vanilla being implemented in the forge.

Edit: Ofcourse for experimental build, we can start with the forge implementation.

Of course its better to have it in the API; I know Sponge is able to do it especially when it can overwrite the source code of the game. The thing is though, the plan of the Sponge team is to do the AI API later down the line when Sponge has a release. There’s no problem in waiting, but there isn’t any downfalls to experimenting either.

@Zidane and the team have actually spent some time playing around with AI, and it turns out that making custom AI is actually pretty easy. The hard part is modeling the AI already present in the game in a sane way in the Sponge API. However, it seems like the particular applications that you are thinking of mostly use new AI. In this case, I would say that a proper AI api for these use cases can come rather soon.

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