Debug Renderer API

[williambl]

This is an API for Debug Renderers (DebugRenderer)

Motivation

Vanilla provides a few Debug Renderers, ~all of which are disabled:

• pathfinding viewer
• water debug
• chunk borders
• heightmap viewer
• brain debug
• etc.

The DebugRenderer class provides various utility methods, and custom Debug Renderers can be created by implementing DebugRenderer.Renderer.

I've been using this occasionally in fabric mods, just by bridging the SimpleDebugRenderer to a WorldRenderEvents.Last and then conditionally registering that depending on a public static final boolean. This isn't ideal. In addition, turning on the vanilla Debug Renderers has to be done either with mixins or manually running them in a render event.

Many vanilla Debug Renderers require extra data to be sent by the server: these are sent through custom payload packets (see the IDs in CustomPayloadS2CPacket which start with minecraft:debug/). These are sent in various static methods in DebugInfoSender. However, most of these methods have their contents stripped out.

Content

Therefore I am making a Debug Renderer API, which adds the following:

• DebugFeature class, with methods:

Identifier id();
// whether it needs to be enabled on the server in order to render on client
boolean needsServer();
// is enabled locally
boolean isEnabled();
// used on server
boolean isEnabledOnServerAndClient(ServerPlayerEntity player);
@ClientOnly
boolean isEnabledOnServerAndClient();
@ClientOnly
boolean shouldRender();

• Debug Feature registry/factory (common-side), to which IDs can be added (+ a boolean which determines if it needs to be enabled on both client and server to render), and it creates a DebugFeature. (DebugFeature myDebugFeature = DebugFeatureRegistry.register(new Identifier("my_mod:test"), true))
• Debug Renderer registry (DebugRendererRegistry.register(myDebugFeature, MyDebugRenderer::new))
• Debug Features are enabled/disabled individually with a command /debug enable x:x, and on client with a client command /debug_client enable x:x
• Debug Renderers only run if the corresponding Feature is enabled (and, if the feature requires that it is enabled on the server too, it checks that)
• We register Debug Features for each of the vanilla Debug Renderers
• We re-implement the missing methods in DebugInfoSender, checking that the corresponding Debug Feature is active on server and only sending the packets to clients with it also active

[williambl]

Some vanilla debug renderers enabled with this API:

[williambl]

Other than re-implementing some missing MC methods, this is now fully functional.

[Redfan2]

What is the state of this?

[OroArmor]

Definitely stalled, but I was looking into it recently and it seems fairly interesting and not too bad to update