RadioBeacon
RadioBeacon - build radio towers, navigate to them using compasses!
Help your players find each other or other places of interest by building radio towers, broadcasting signals to be picked up by anyone within range and the proper equipment.
Works great on "random spawn point" (solitude/apocalypse) themed servers.
Download RadioBeacon 1.3 - released 2012/06/25 for 1.5.2. Works fine with 1.7.
Features
- Uses existing in-game items (iron blocks, bars, compasses)
- No commands or client mods needed
- Antennas continuously transmit, larger antennas transmit further
- Message can be included in transmissions
- Tune compasses to received transmission, navigate to the source
- High-performance and light-weight implementation
- Receive transmissions even if chunk is unloaded
- Antennas are affected by weather
- Relay antennas for retransmitting messages
- Multi-world aware
Usage
Fixed Antenna Towers
Screenshots and photo tutorial
To create a new radio beacon tower, place an iron block next to powered redstone.
The redstone current activates the antenna and it begins broadcasting signals within a three-dimensional spherical range, available to be received by other fixed antennas (simply click the iron block to show the received signals) or mobile radios (compasses held in your hand automatically scan for signals periodically).
Extending Range: To transmit and receive further, place any number of iron bars on top of the iron block.
As you build up, the new antenna radius will be shown to you in the chat area. The antenna tip can be destroyed to decrease the radius, or broken in the middle, and it behaves as you would expect, broadcasting from the highest contiguous iron bar.
Setting Messages: Attach a sign to the side of your fixed antenna base, and the text of the sign will automatically be included in the transmission.
Relay Antennas: Built using a gold block instead of an iron block, relays retransmit messages from nearby antennas. To set a relay message, build a normal antenna within range and set its message. All relays within range will be notified using a special signal. Relays retain their message even if the original antenna is destroyed, so they can be used to add redundancy or extra range.
Weather: Rain decreases the transmission and reception radius. Thundering slightly increases it, but lightning has a chance to strike antennas, causing their destruction.
Mobile Radios
Fixed antennas can receive and transmit, but are limited by their lack of mobility. Compasses serve as mobile radios, allowing for both receiving signals and navigating to their origin.
To receive transmissions, hold a compass in your hand. It will continuously scan and report any nearby signals, their range, and message (if any). Switching to another item will turn off scanning.
To tune into a signal, left- or right-click the compass. The next scan will report which signal you have locked onto, and the compass needle will point in its direction.
If it interferes with other plugins which use compasses, players can turn off their radios using the /toggleradio command.
Tips & Tricks
Enderpearls work very well for maintaining tall antennas. Thrown just right, they will let you teleport inside of the iron bars, without falling, and also help you safely get back down. Other teleportation mechanisms (such as the Bow + Feather Falling enchantment from EnchantMore) can also be helpful, or worst case, you could always pillar up.
If you are worried about lightning strikes (note: the lightning attraction can be tweaked in the configuration, and the damage can be disabled entirely if desired), you can build an additional, taller antenna to act as a sort of "lightning rod" and detract lightning away from your other antennas. Encase the iron block in obsidian or water to contain the explosion damage.
Antennas work great underground. Increase the range in the configuration file and have your players use compasses to locate buried treasure. Or want to encourage highly visible above-ground towers? Set the minimum base antenna Y in the configuration, and lower the radius increase per block.
Playing on a hardcore PvP server and having trouble with people stealing your radio tower iron blocks? Why not rig it with TNT?
You can navigate to antennas on foot of course, but RadioBeacon also works very well with other plugins or mods offering alternative modes of transportation, especially flight:
Screenshot of RadioBeacon being used while landing at an airstrip (Flan's Plane mod)
Configuration
RadioBeacon is highly configurable for a variety of applications. For a full list of configuration options, see Configuration.
Permissions and Commands
Permission nodes:
-
radiobeacon.create (true): Allows you to build new radio beacon antenna towers
-
radiobeacon.addmessage (true): Allows you to add messages to towers by placing signs
-
radiobeacon.reveal (op): Allows you to list the coordinates of all antennas
-
radiobeacon.admin (op): Allows you to save/load/repair antennas
RadioBeacon adds two new commands: /toggleradio for disabling/enabling per-player portable compass radios, and /antennas for fixed radio tower antennas. Players can use /antennas to see the total number of antennas on the server, but no other information. Ops (by default) can see detailed information.
Subcommands:
- /antennas save: Force saving antennas to disk (antennas.yml)
- /antennas load: Force reload from disk
- /antennas check: Compare all antennas against the actual blocks in the world, rebuilding the internal state if necessary. Should not be necessary during normal gameplay, but if blocks are updated without RadioBeacon receiving any events (for example, by editing the world in MCEdit), admins can use this command to repair any affected antennas.
See Also
Servers running RadioBeacon:
Got a server running this plugin? Feel free to post about it below. Also check out this list for other apocalypse servers, which may or may not be running RadioBeacon or related plugins.
Reviews of RadioBeacon:
Other plugins:
-
Cake's Miner Apocalypse - a significant inspiration for RadioBeacon, with a somewhat different realization of radios; also includes many other apocalypse-related features
-
ApocalypseCraft - (notes)
-
RealisticChat - walkie-talkies
I am having the same issue as thekalman, cannot tune radios. The radios only lock onto the nearest signal. Hope this is fixable, we are using the towers for a large Apocalypse adventure map, and players will receive clues as to which signal is the correct one to follow. This necessitates them being able to tune in to the correct signal...
I also can't find a way to set the antennas to Not be destroyed by lightning. It seems that even when all the damage is set to 0, the antenna is still destroyed. I have also tried setting the lightning attraction to 0, and the FixedLightningDamage to both true and false.
I'm considering using this on my server, just tried this, using the 1.2.5 version. It seems that the compass will ONLY lock onto the nearest radio tower, regardless of tuning. As soon as one tower becomes closer than another, the compass switches to the closer tower.
Any ideas?
EDIT:
Appears mobileradio locks onto the strongest signal, regardless of tuning. Kind of annoying (as nearby antennas will have to be built with equal broadcast ability) but it can be worked around.
I like to ask a question :) Does it play nice in chat with Factions?
@morlanius
Yes, the latest version is compatible with 1.2.5. It only uses Bukkit's API (not CraftBukkit) so it should remain compatible during releases, unless there are any major API changes.
Just released RadioBeacon 1.2 with support for configurable radio item (default compass).
"updated for 1.2.3-R0.1, 1.1-R7, and 1.1-R4"
So is this compatable with 1.2.5? it looks really neat and i woud like to run it on my server. but can you change the compass to someting else (or I suppose I could change worldguard to use the watch instead of compass)
mors
My server, Democracraft, is using this plugin to help people find their way back to civilization!
@XRylexX
That's not RadioBeacon but another plugin, likely WorldEdit – you can change its navigation-wand.item in WorldEdit's config to avoid conflicting with RadioBeacon.
@HappyGoUnlucky
Good ideas :). You may be interested in my other plugin CakeMushroom's RealisticChat for live communication, it has a "walkie talkie" feature similar to your suggested /rb msg. RadioBeacon as it is now is more focused on navigational beacons and fixed periodic repeating towers, the architecture does not currently make it easy to add real-time messages – but RadioBeacon and RealisticChat work great together to provide both features. About the encrypted messages, certainly possible, I haven't tried it but you may find this other plugin with encrypted chat and frequencies useful as well: AMChat.
I really like it, but why do we warp around when we hold compasses?
Hey, nice plugin. Thinking of implementing it into our server. It would be nice to see more communication features such as sending messages using the radio mast via basic commands e.i. /rb msg [message] while near the mast and using frequency's to join radio conversations with commands like /rb freq [frequency]. All masts would have a ID or callsign that can be changed using signs. You could host frequency channels and even have encrypted channels that only allow certain callsigns to listen to the messages being sent (sign would be placed on host radio mast stating callsigns that can listen). I'd love to see new features in the plugin.
@Junrall
Maybe, how do you envision they would work? I.e., there would be a permission node for building at normal height and another for higher heights, and if a user without the permission attempted to build higher, the iron bars would pop off? Would something like this be possible using WorldGuard or other region protection plugins? (Not sure if it is, just trying to figure out how this would be implemented.)
@ABCRic
I tried to fix this for 1.1.2 but was unable, sorry. Should be possible, but the problem is how I store the Location in-memory, it is difficult to preserve antennas for non-existant worlds. Could be fixed in the future by changing the antenna data structure, however..
Would you consider adding height permissions?
This would allow server admins to control how high each group can build.
~Thanks~
@mushroomhostage
Could you please change it so it doesn't delete antenna data from non-loaded worlds? I need it to keep that data because I often swap between worlds.
@wingsman2
Added new configuration options in RadioBeacon 1.1.1 to control disabling of compass targeting and signal lock.
@Anciteify
Yes, all distance measurements are in number of blocks (meters).
@ABCRic
Yes, the worlds in antennas.yml must exist, if they're removed or renamed antennas.yml has to be edited.
@WayGroovy
Great ideas, I think its possible, and would be very cool. Not planning on implementing it myself, but @wickersty has some similar ideas for handheld and ham radio communication to integrate with his Mortuus Terra plugin. Possibly could be implemented directly in RadioBeacon, or as a soft dependency on Localchat. Feel free to get in touch with him to exchange ideas and/or checkout the source and start hacking away :)
is meters base by blocks?
I'm loving this plugin, however it seems antenna data is lost when restarting the server with another world. It also throws errors at the start if antennas from non-loaded world are found in the antennas.yml file.
Could it be possible to be able to disable the compass from pointing to the radio its locked to?
Okay, this is awesome. Added to survivocolypse.com.
Question/comment/recommendation?
I would love to see this merged with Localchat http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/localchat/ which has its source on Git. I have zero java experience, but want to learn to do this.
I'd like it if global chat were disabled, unless you were holding a compass/radio, and you couldn't hear global chat unless a compass/radio was in the players hot-bar.
Not sure if this is doable in bukkit, but that would give the handhelds the appearance/feel of shortwave radios.
If only they could consume a consumable on talk use, like redstone dust...
Relays! Wohoooow! <3
Thank you! Making the two mods mesh together seamlessly is in everyone's best interest, I think.
Re Re: Multiple signs. I see the problem now! My initial thought is to just make the message it displays wrap around to the right. The first sign placed is the 'front' and then it displays the messages in order from the front looking right until it gets back to the front. People should figure out pretty quickly when reading their own message that this is the behavior since most people naturally read left to right. Maybe put a mark at the top of the 'front' sign.
I was pondering a problem on my server which was this: How do you make antennas valuable but not stupid rare? The only good answer was to have tiered radio bases. Iron blocks make things really easy in a vanilla world, but I'd like folks to be able to navigate back to their homes. It'd be nice if we could make three or four tiers of bases that each capped the maximum range and then you'd just switch out the base to upgrade your radio. How does that sound?
@Kripsyx
Added several new config options in the 1.0 Release to control tuning.
You can now disable left-clicking (tune up) or right-clicking (tune down), although note that this means you'll only be able to tune in one direction. It automatically wraps-around so this is not a serious problem, but could be cumbersome if you have a large number of signals in range (like those digital clocks you can only adjust in one direction.. argh). So I added another option to require the player to sneak (hold shift) while clicking, you can use instead if you'd like.
Re:multiple signs… definitely could be added, but I haven't figured out a good way to handle destroying/creating multiple signs and updating the message appropriately. Any suggestions/ideas how exactly multiple signs would work?
@BeenCarl
The radio tower base is an iron block, but the antenna blocks above it are iron bars (screenshots). The base and antenna have to be different materials.