[Mod] Gutenberg [gutenberg]

[duane]

This just lets you create books with actual books in them that you can read in game. Why would you want to do that? No idea. I just thought it was cool.

You should be able to download any Project Gutenberg text (as a .txt file), save it to your mods/gutenberg/books/ directory, and it will be available in the game. [You must be sure to give it a file name containing only letters, numbers, underscores, and periods, or the mod will not recognize it.] There is no special formatting, and images are not supported.

Note: The mod will create a cache file for each page of each book every time you start the game. This takes so little time on my ten-year-old laptop that I don't notice, but it could be an issue for someone. If you don't like your world directory cluttered, you may create a subdirectory in it called 'book_cache'. Cache files will be placed there instead.



The source is available on github.

Code: LGPL2, textures: n/a

Mod dependencies: default

Download: https://github.com/duane-r/gutenberg/archive/master.zip

Recipes:

Combine the following to produce a random gutenberg book:
Paper, [empty], [empty]
[empty], Paper, [empty]
[empty], [empty], Paper

[duane]

None so far.

[D00Med]

That's a really cool idea!

[azekill_DIABLO]

what is the difference with ingame books?

[DS-minetest]

well, Gutenberg invented the printing press, books got written before, too.
so i suggest to rename the mod or create a way to duplicate the books, like a printing press node
Edit: i saw, you cant rewrite the books, its ok, nice idea, but noone will use it to read a real-life book with that lag, i now understand the name, because this website is called Gutenberg project

[TheReaperKing]

So I imagine this would read any epub format books not just from that site, and is epub the only file type it reads? I was thinking this would be great because the kids could write their own books and I'd convert it to epub and we could put them in :) Or even for a game make like a journal or something. It looks great!

[twoelk]

cool!

if I get the source right you can only load *.txt files and there is no formating beyond plain ascii of a txt file?
I had hoped for at least a subset of markdown (*.md)
I don,t know if a mod should be able to access content outside of the world folder but having the files in the "minetest-0.4.14\doc" folder as default content might be usefull - or at least fun.

I have been filling a minetest wiki with content for my roman map, maybe serving information with this mod is better or at least easier. I can imagine this usefull for teachers, though some more in-text navigation tools might be usefull for larger texts. Maybe you can find a way to generate a chapter list and only load one chapter at a time.

I will certainly test this thingy, I got several gigaloads of Gutenberg downloads I can throw at this ;-P

[Aftermoth]

You have just earned the cookie of your choice for spreading the word of Project Gutenberg to a new audience.

(You will have to get it yourself, though. This post only certifies your entitlement to said cookie without reservations.)

[duane]

Thanks for the comments everyone. I have rewritten the code to cache each page of each book in the world directory. Now only the requested page (eighteen lines) is read with each page turn. None of the text is permanently cached in memory.

what is the difference with ingame books?

You have to write the in-game books yourself.

its ok, nice idea, but noone will use it to read a real-life book with that lag

Pages are now cached individually, so both the memory use and lag are minimal, unless your connection can't handle eighteen lines of text.

So I imagine this would read any epub format books not just from that site, and is epub the only file type it reads?

It only reads text files.

[TheReaperKing]

Once again, another awesome creation from Duane :)

[Don]

+1

[azekill_DIABLO]

+1

[FreeLikeGNU]

A great book choice to demo! In case you might not know, this book was the basis for the movie John Carter, which is terribly underrated and I personally recommend it as well. You may also not know that I caught myself trying to click on the page advance button in Duane's screenshot because I like the story so much.

[duane]

A great book choice to demo! In case you might not know, this book was the basis for the movie John Carter, which is terribly underrated and I personally recommend it as well. You may also not know that I caught myself trying to click on the page advance button in Duane's screenshot because I like the story so much.

+10

This was the first novel I ever read, long, long ago, and the reason I was never caught without a novel amongst my school books in all the years that followed.

[twoelk]

This is fun ;-P

one minor problems so far when importing original files from the Gutenberg project seems to be that some files have a dash or minus character in the name which crashes minetest at start if the gutenberg mod is activated.

Similarly the mod not only checks for information about titel and author but expects these and thus does not load the world if it does not find something like

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

Title: Minetest Readme file

Author: The Minetest Development Team



in the file.

The attached file contains the menu_lua_api.txt, lua_api.txt, README.txt and world_format.txt of the stable Minetest 0.4.14 release with the needed author and title lines in case somebody would like to have them at hand in-game. Just unzip them to the books folder of the gutenberg mod.

[duane]

one minor problems so far when importing original files from the Gutenberg project seems to be that some files have a dash or minus character in the name which crashes minetest at start if the gutenberg mod is activated.

Similarly the mod not only checks for information about titel and author but expects these and thus does not load the world if it does not find something like

Your phone or window isn't wide enough to display the code box. If it's a phone, try rotating it to landscape mode.

Code: Select all

Title: Minetest Readme file

Author: The Minetest Development Team



in the file.

Ok, I've added a check for legal file names and a note to name the downloaded files carefully. It will now default to the file name for a title and 'Unknown' for the author, if it can't parse them.

[TheReaperKing]

Not sure how easy it'd be, but what if it could handle images too? Maybe it'd be a separate mod but I was thinking it'd be cool for treasure maps and such and maybe the book cover.

[Milan*]

woooo \o/ nice!

[hajo]

create books .. that you can read in game. ..
download any Project Gutenberg text (as a .txt file),
save it to your mods/gutenberg/books/ directory,
and it will be available in the game. ..
There is no special formatting, and images are not supported.

Recipe .. to produce a random gutenberg book:
Paper, [empty], [empty]
[empty], Paper, [empty]
[empty], [empty], Paper

A 'random' book from the textfiles stored in .\mods\gutenberg\books.
If there is only the book that comes with the mod-download,
every book you craft will be the same, "princess_of_mars".

Is there a way to re-roll books ?


It would be nice to have some more buttons,
eg. to skip +/-10 pages, or jump to the start of the next/prev chapter.

Nevertheless, this is impressive.

[TheReaperKing]

I'm interested in having my students write the .txt files and add their books to the game especially to create city/town libraries. Is there a way to make it non random?

[duane]

I'm interested in having my students write the .txt files and add their books to the game especially to create city/town libraries. Is there a way to make it non random?

I suppose that would be possible, if you could create a formspec that gave you a menu of titles to choose from, but I've no idea how to do that. I've been copying my formspecs from other projects.