So, I am in the middle of building an automatic hopper/chest shop mall. One thing that comes with having many many items for sale automatically is quantity control. Right now I have out of stock lights which turn on if a machine is out of stock. However, it would be neat to be able to more accurately keep a counting system in place. My first thought was to make a small redstone computer (more compact as in the 1.5 features allow stuff like RAM modules to be much smaller), but routing that many connections from the mall buildings into the basement computer would be impossible.
Then I thought of something interesting. What if there was a plugin that would send a single byte of data to another server IP address and port upon a specific block switching it's redstone powered state from off (0) to on (1 or higher).
The concept is this, the user places a block with a sign on it. That block for the most part is going to not be charged to any power level by redstone. The block then gets a sign placed on it. This sign would have the following (on each line):
A number from 0 to 255
IP Address (123.123.123.123)
Port: 12345
Line 4 is ignored
When a block with a sign such as the above is activated by redstone meaning it goes from having a power level of 0 to having a power level of greater than 0, then the plugin sends a single byte of data to the IP:Port provided. This isn't data sent to another minecraft server, but to any program the person who placed the sign may have made. In my case, if I there was to be a plugin like this, I would have an item server to keep track of the item counts of all of my chest shops, and it would listen for the numbers coming from the opticraft server when that block gets activated by a machine.
Will this ever be implemented opticraft, oh I'm sure not. I just wanna see what people think of the concept.
