World NBT Type Definitions

[Offroaders123]

It may be out of the scope of this project, but I thought I'd mention it just to get a little conversation going.

I've been working on a TypeScript NBT library to work with editing world saves, and manipulating any data that it holds anywhere in the save. I'm still working on getting the world format logic set up, but my NBT library is fully functional at this point. It supports big and little endian, and compressed or uncompressed NBT files.

With how I've shaped the data structures that are output by my NBT library, I have the eventual goal of making TypeScript definitions for world save NBT data structures, which could allow for a lot quicker development pace in terms of iteration time, and working between the different world formats.

With this goal in mind, I'd like to use those type definitions to possibly make a world format converter between the different versions, which would be strongly driven by those type definitions. I think if there are definitions for all of the different structures, it would actually make it a fair bit easier to describe the shapes of the actual data inside of our world saves, and it may possibly make it much more easy to debug the shapes of each world format. Say, if the converter were to go between Java, Bedrock, or Legacy Console Edition.

Here's a link to my NBT library, NBTify. It's built using TypeScript and ESM, and it works directly in the browser or Node, out of the box.

I only just found your project tonight, and it already looks very awesome, using functional APIs for Minecraft development has been a dream of mine for a while, and the first sight I saw here looked both very promising and inspiring. These are the kinds of structures I'd like to provide for working with world saves too.

I started working on a demo set of type definitions while finishing up writing this, but it started to get really big. I'm going to demo it out some more, and publish it as a new repo to get some more ideas flowing. Using .d.ts files for demoing API designs is a very helpful way to figure out how you want things to work, before you know how they work internally, would recommend! I will add an update with a reference to the repo once I have it up and running.

For a few more references, I've started working on an NBT editing PWA called Dovetail, which supports all of the formats mentioned above.

Still in the demo/experimental stages, I have some other projects which I am using to explore opening the world formats themselves:

• Gamedata-Parser (Legacy Console GAMEDATA files)
• MCRegionJS (Legacy Console Region files)
• Bedrock-LevelDB (Bedrock Region files)

I haven't looked into Java quite yet (I just have a small local demo), funnily enough because it was the most documented out of them all. So, to make sure that this could be somewhat fairly doable, I wanted to start out with the less-documented, more challenging versions which are a bit more obscured in their format, before thinking the rest would be as straightforward as Java.

[MulverineX]

We currently use prismarine-nbt, if your typing ends up being more polished though I might check it out, thanks for letting me know, if you'd like to discuss further our Discord is a good place for that.