It has one drawback: The chat commands and the interface as such are not very intuitive.
That's where this mod comes in: It tries to make it far easier by taking into account what I've seen players do when they want to show a moderator which area they want.
In order to see how it works, let's start with crafting the actual markers:
Craft them and place one at each of the four corners of your area. When you place a marker, it will show you how far it is away from the marker you placed before that - useful for measuring distances.
Do not worry about height.
If anything goes wrong, dig the marker and place it again at the same location.
When done, right-click on the last marker you placed. It will show you a menu:
Please enter three values: "This many blocks up: " - this is how far you want your area to stretch into the sky (relative to the marker you clicked on!). Same goes for "and this many blocks down:" - there you can enter a number that's heigh enough to stretch down to the floor of your cellar. "The area shall be named:" - that ought to be obvious. Try to pick a name that describes what you built or intend to build there - perhaps with your player name included.
The above picture shows the filled out formspec. In this case it's a very small area that reaches only 2 blocks into the ground and 6 into the sky - it's a very small tent. You can click on "Buy area" now. Don't worry about the price! Areas do not cost anything (yet).
Finished. The area has been protected for you. You can now dig up the markers and use them for your next area - or let them remain where they are - just do as you like.
But that's not all: You may have forgotten how large your area is, or you want to find out where one is located, who else owns it, add a second owner etc...all of that can be done with chat commands. But there's also a gui for that now. Craft a marker stone:
Place that marker stone somewhere in your protected area and right-click on it. It shows you a menu:
Change owner allows you to give your area to another player who will then own it.
Rename allows to rename the area (change its description).
My areas will give you a list of all areas you own or are subowner of.
Player's areas does the same as My areas - except for the player shown instead of yourshelf.
Add allows you to grant build access to the area to another player. The player will get a subarea of the same size as yours and can dig/build inside it.
Local areas lists all areas that contain the position the marker stone is located at. Since each player that can build there has its own area, there can be more than one. There can also be smaller sub-areas for other purposes (i.e. pieces of land that are part of a town).
Show main area allows you to switch the display to the main area for this region if you're currently displaying a subaera.
List subareas lists the subareas a main area contains.
The commands listed under Admin commands: offer the same functionality as those mentioned above - except that they're shown for all admins/moderators with the areas priv - even if they don't own that particular area.
This is how the area info display looks for areas that are owned by other players.
The compass picture at the bottom shows where you can find the area. In this case, it's 1667 m west and 179 m south of the markers position. If the marker is located inside the areas boundaries, you'll see the top of the marker instead of the compass, and the numbers given will show you how far it is from the marker's location to the borders of the area.
This is a sample area list that shows my areas on VanessaE's survival server:
You can click on each entry and will get a preview of where the area is:
Double-click on an entry to get the area info display known from above.
If the player who owns an area was not considerate enough to place a marker stone, you can get the same functionality with a land title register. It's a tool that you can craft like this:
Wield it and left or right click on a position you want to check. The same menu will open that would open would there have been a marker stone.
Even on old servers, there's plenty of unprotected, unowned land. Clicking on "List all areas" will show you a list of all main areas the server knows about.
Download: https://github.com/Sokomine/markers/archive/master.zip
Browse code: https://github.com/Sokomine/markers
Version: 0.2
Licence: GPLv3
License for pictures: WTFPL (thanks to VanessaE for creating them! And look at the marker stone in HDX.)
Depends on: areas
What needs to be done in the future?
Apart from general feedback and tests with random players, what needs to be added is a way to "pay" for an area. A very simple function for calculating a price is already included. You can edit that function and let it display almost any text. Writing a function that actually charges the requested price is still missing. Mostly that's because it depends a lot on the server itshelf - they all have their own, diffrent monetary system. Giving areas away for free might not be such a good idea as players might spam with it and protect more than what they can use. By default, the size of areas is limited to 1024 m^2 and a height of 100 m. You can change those config values at the start of the init.lua file.
A second semi-graphical display like the compass/marker stone ought to be added that shows how large the area is in each dimension. That might be easier to take in than the text in the area's description. Also information about how high the area is is not displayed yet.
Currently, creating a new area inside your own area creates a new main area instead of a subarea of your area. That's not a big problem in general but could be annoying if areas are charged for (who wants to pay twice?).
Hope this is helpful. Please test it with your players. Ultimately, I hope that Redcrab comes back and installs it on his server (you're allowed to hope, aren't you..?)
