Minetest-WorldEditAdditions/.docs/specs/WorldEditAdditionsSchematic_v1.md

WorldEditAdditions Schematic File Format

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• Current version: v1-DRAFT

This file format specification describes the format of WorldEditAdditions schematic files. The words MUST, MAY, SHALL, MUST NOT, etc that are used in this document are defined as in RFC 2119.

Explanations and descriptions have both a technical description and a formal BNF description. Where the two differ, the formal BNF will always take precedence.

Purpose

The WorldEditAdditions Schematic file format is designed to store schematics of structures in the Minetest world in an efficient text-based format. It is also designed to store just the changes from one copy of the world to another (deltas).

The rationale behind this format are as follows:

1. No other Minetest schematic format is capable of optionally storing changesets.
2. The WorldEdit format (alternative A) is space-inefficient.
3. No simple text-based format exists for storing Minetest schematics at this time, so the best of the authors' knowledge.

File extension

The file extension for WorldEditAdditions Schematic files MUST be .weaschem. Implementers SHOULD NOT choose to also parse files without this file extension.

Compression

WorldEditAdditions Schematics MAY be gzip-compressed. In such cases, the file extension MUST be .weaschem.gz. Implementers MUST transparently decompress them and parse them as normal.

Terms

Minetest

The voxel-based sandbox building game Minetest.

Deltas

The differences between a given region of the world at a given time and the same region some time later.

Schematic origin

The origin of the schematic itself. This is always (0, 0, 0). Any schematic generated from the main Minetest world MUST be translated such that the negative X, Y, and Z corner of the defined region to be converted to a schematic is (0, 0, 0) in the generated schematic file.

Offset

An offset, expressed as a Vector3, that MUST be applied to a schematic upon loading it back into the world, though implementers MAY offer an option to disable this (but applying the offset MUST be enabled by default).

BNF

Backus-Naur form. Used to formally describe the file format.

JSON Schema

The description of the format of a JSON object. See also: https://json-schema.org/.

\n

Stands for the ASCII character new line U+0A. Wherever this symbol appears, substitute with this character.

Overview

The format can be divided into 4 sequential parts:

1. Magic bytes: The string WEASCHEM\n is always the beginning of the file.
2. Header: Contains metadata about the schematic.
3. ID map: The map of node ids to their respective node names.
4. Data tables: The actual data itself.

As an example:

WEASCHEM
<json_header_here>
<id_map_here>
<data_table_data>
<data_table_param1>

....where text in the form <abc> are placeholders. More formally:

<weaschem> ::= <magic_bytes> <header> <nl> <id_map> <nl> <data_table_list>

<nl> ::= "\n"

<magic_bytes> ::= WEASCHEM <nl>

<data_table_list> ::= <data_table>
	| <data_table> <nl> <data_table_list>

The non-terminal tokens <header>, <id_map>, and <data_table> are defined below.

Header

The header of the file contains all the metadata about the schematic required to restore it into the world. The header is defined as a JSON object on a single line, followed by a new line (\n):

{"foo":"bar"}\n

This JSON object follows the following JSON schema:

{
	"$schema": "https://json-schema.org/draft/2020-12/schema",
	"title": "Header",
	"description": "The header that contains the schematic's metadata.",
	"type": "object",
	"properties": {
		"name": {
			"description": "The human-readable display name of the schematic.",
			"type": "string"
		},
		"description": {
			"description": "A short description of the schematic.",
			"type": "string"
		},
		"offset": {
			"description": "The offset to place the schematic at in the world, relative to the schematic origin, which is always (0, 0, 0).",
			"$ref": "#/$defs/Vector3"
		},
		"size": {
			"description": "The size of the schematic, INDEXED from 0.",
			"$ref": "#/$defs/Vector3"
		},
		"type": {
			"description": "The type of schematic this is. Valid values: full, delta.",
			"type": "string",
			"pattern": "^(?:full|delta)$"
		},
		"generator": {
			"description": "The name and version of the software that generated this schematic.",
			"type": "string"
		}
	},
	"required": [ "name", "size", "offset", "type", "generator" ],
	"$defs": {
		"Vector3": {
			"properties": {
				"x": {
					"description": "The x co-ordinate of the Vector3.",
					"type": "integer",
				},
				"y": {
					"description": "The y co-ordinate of the Vector3.",
					"type": "integer",
				},
				"z": {
					"description": "The z co-ordinate of the Vector3.",
					"type": "integer",
				}
			}
		}
	}
}

A specific example of a header JSON object is noted below. This example is pretty-printed for convenience, but in the real file format it is stored compacted - i.e. all on one line with no pretty-printed whitespace.

{
	"name": "A castle",
	"description": "A grand fairy tale-style castle with multiple towers.",
	"size": { "x": 50, "y": 25, "z": 75 },
	"offset": { "x": 3, "y": 0, "z": 5 },
	"type": "full",
	"generator": "WorldEditAdditions v1.14"
}

Positioning

TODO: Describe schematic pos1/pos2 positioning here.