Collect Everything! Bedrock Add-On Version 1.2.0

What changed?

You want the long answer or the short answer?

tl;dr answer

• Collection Browser uses pages instead of continuous scrolling
• Collection Browser shows a checkmark overlay on items you have collected
• Collection Browser shows the current difficulty setting

The Real Answer

A user on Discord reported "idk if I'm the only one having this issue with this addon. the normal actionform ui wont show when I have this addon enabled". I took a look at my server_form.json file and it was obvious why. The Collection Browser replaced all vanilla long_forms, but only when we launch it. When anyone else tries to launch a vanilla long_form, they would just get a blank screen.

The fix was simple (or so I thought). I could just follow this tutorial and call it a day! I even pushed out a release "fixing" it... then I realized something terrible. What I had done had restored the vanilla form behavior, but at the cost of the Collection Browser taking about 60 seconds to load! 😱

The reason why only the Collection Browser and not other forms were suddenly slow became apparent, and I found myself in a fit of rage. On Bedrock JSON UI Server Forms, EVERY form that exists will be rendered, whether or not it ends up being visible. So my Collection Browser form, which had over 5000 buttons on it, was also being rendered as a vanilla Action Form, using stack_panel which is not a high-performance control!

I spent a long time trying to get it to work. I tried rewriting the vanilla Action Form to be a grid instead of a stack_panel, but the results ranged from bad to horrifying. I had just about given up hope getting the two forms to not clobber each other when I had an epiphany. If the Collection Browser having tons of buttons is the problem, what if we could make it show less buttons at a time?

So I rewrote the Collection Browser to be a fixed grid, and implemented paging controls in the script so only one page of buttons would be sent to the form at once. This had its own challenges, but when compared with the 5000 button problem, it was a piece of cake!

Along the way, I added a couple things that I have been meaning to do for a while: better "Collected" indicator on collected items, and displaying the current difficulty level on the form.

I hope with these changes it will be much easier to use this add-on with other add-ons that make use of forms and dialogs. I have a few developers I'm onboarding, and a backlog full of awesome new features to implement, so stay tuned for more awesomeness soon!

Thanks for your interest in this add-on!

-Joe Skeen