From the Original!

Boxel-Client

Boxel-client is a client library for Boxel.

Boxel-client allows your Minecraft plugin to connect to a Boxel server and draw boxelized images to an in-game screen made of blocks.

What does it do?

As described above, Boxel-client transforms data from your Boxel server into blocks so they can be built on a minecraft server.

It handles video (at 20FPS) and websites -- you can use these basic tools to build things like the video call and web browser from our demos.

Voice, calling, ringtones and other features from the demos here are left as an exercise for the user.

(We used Websockets, WebRTC, and Redis PUB/SUB to add those capabilities)

Dependencies

In order to use Boxel-client you'll need to create your own Minecraft plugin. Boxel-client uses the Bukkit API and should be compatible with servers for Minecraft 1.8.

Boxel-client was developed against the open-source GlowStone++ Minecraft server implementation, you are free to use the Bukkit compatible server of your choice.

We recommend installing Glowkit, the Glowstone++ fork of the Bukkit API, following the instructions here.

Installation

Once you've installed your dependencies, installing the Boxel-client library should be as simple as:

git clone git@github.com:VerizonCraft/Boxel-client.git  
cd Boxel-client  
mvn clean install

Add Boxel-client to your project's dependencies and you can use it in your plugin. For example, if you're using Maven, add the following to your pom.xml:

<dependencies>  
        <!-- you should have other dependencies... -->  
        <dependency>  
            <groupId>io.verizoncraft</groupId>  
            <artifactId>boxelclient</artifactId>  
            <version>1.0-SNAPSHOT</version>  
        </dependency> 
</dependencies>

Usage

In order to subscribe to streams and request renders of websites and images, you'll need a Boxel server to communicate with.

You can install and run Boxel by following the instructions here.

Assuming you've got a Boxel server running, you can add the following to your plugin's config.yml:

# the URI for your shared redis server
redis-uri: redis://localhost:6379/0
# the address of your boxel server's WAMP router
boxel-host: ws://localhost:8080/ws 
# the realm for your boxel service
boxel-realm: boxel

Then, drawing video should be as simple as subscribing to a named stream:

public class MyPlugin extends JavaPlugin {
    private BoxelVideoClient mVideoClient;
    public void onEnable() {
      mVideoClient = new BoxelVideoClient(this);
      Location location = new Location(100, 100, 100);
      BukkitTask task = playVideo(location)
    }
    
    public BukkitTask playVideo(Location loc) {
       // stream frames at location from the channel "foo" on a 30/40 screen
       BukkitTask task = mVideoClient.subscribe(location, "foo", 30, 40);
    }
}

Likewise if you wanted to render a website:

   // somewhere in your plugin class 
   BoxelWebClient mWebClient = new BoxelWebClient(this); 
   // assuming you have a location and a player handy...
   mWebClient.load(loc, player, args[0], 30, 40);

Example Plugin

Boxel-client contains an example plugin. The easiest way to use the plugin is to build a shaded jar containing all the dependencies.

git clone git@github.com:VerizonCraft/Boxel-client.git  
cd Boxel-client  
mvn clean package

Copy boxelclient-1.0-SNAPSHOT.jar from target/ to your server's plugins directory. The example plugin provides example commands for streaming frames of video and rendering websites.

Browsing the source here will give you a quick example of how you might use Boxel-client in your own project.

License

This repository and its code are licensed under a BSD 3-Clause license, which can be found here.