[REQUEST] Paint area

The API is great! Although having named arguments instead of "paramInt1", "paramInt2", etc. is counter productive... It would be better to have them named so we actually know what they are...

Aside from that, the World Edit script makes it possible to flatten a piece of land, etc., and put grass (well, make the area "green") where there is dirt, however when a player makes a nice slope (in dirt...) with the rake, it is not possible to make that slope "green" (in grass). Would it be possible to have a paint method? Instead of filling the area with data, just change the current blocks data to the specified value?

Something like :

world:paintTerrainInArea(c[1],c[2],c[3],c[4],c[5],c[6],c[7],c[8],c[9],c[10],c[11],c[12], blockID);

Quote from andyzee

Or you can just implement something like getTerrainBlockData(coordinates) etc. and leave paint-like requests to lua scripters =)

The problem with that is that the current implementation will broadcast changes when calling world:setTerrainDataInArea. Providing a way to get block data and modify then would also require exposing the broadcast API, which opens a door to all sorts of flood scripts and such. It is just unwise to do so.

This is similar to the world:placeBlock method, which only allows to place a single block, then broadcast the change to all users and the server. Implementing a script that would fill an entire area of blocks this way would probably saturate the network, or worst.

On the other side, it could be possible to change all that by implementing a queue that would push chunks of modifications automatically, preventing any flood from a user (i.e. would detect and discard when trying to send too much data). Then, world:placeBlocks(...area coords, blockId) and world:getTerrainBlockData(coordinates) could be possible, as modifying the single block data would send modifications into the queue, thus modifying block data in batch would be fine.