Minetest cloaking mod

Allows players to cloak and uncloak, inspired by Star Trek's cloaking device.

What is cloaking?

In this instance, cloaking is a way to go invisible and become undetectable by most mods (unless they explicitly want to detect cloaked players, so they can still send chat messages to them).

Why is cloaking so hacky, and where does it send the 'left the game' messages?

Cloaking sends no left the game messages, it leaves that up to the built-in left the game functions. The aim of cloaking is to trick other mods into thinking the player is not in-game, and for this it must be hacky.

Help, it crashes

If it crashes, it is either caused by a mod not liking non-existent players running around, or by a bug in cloaking itself.

How do I use cloaking?

Cloaking adds a modding API and two chatcommands. Both of these require the cloaking privilege to execute, however you can uncloak yourself without any privileges.

• /cloak [victim]: Cloaks yourself, alternatively an unsuspecting victim.
• /uncloak [victim]: Uncloaks yourself, or a victim.
• /cloak_chat <message>: Sends <message> to all online players with the cloaking privilege. You can disable cloaked chat by setting cloaking.enable_cloaked_chat to false in minetest.conf.

How do I download cloaking?

You can either run git clone https://git.minetest.land/luk3yx/cloaking.git, or download a zip or tar.gz file. You will need to rename the downloaded folder to cloaking (if it doesn't already have that name) for it to work properly.

How do I use the API?

Cloaking adds the following functions:

• cloaking.cloak(player): Cloaks a player.
• cloaking.uncloak(player): Uncloaks a player.
• cloaking.get_cloaked_players(): Gets a list of cloaked player names.
• cloaking.get_connected_names(): Gets a list of cloaked and uncloaked player names.
• cloaking.is_cloaked(player): Checks if a player is cloaked.
• cloaking.hide_player(player): Hides a player without cloaking them. If/when minetest.hide_player() gets introduced, this will become an alias for that.
• cloaking.unhide_player(player): Unhides a player previously hidden with cloaking.hide_player().
• cloaking.chat: Cloaked chat API, this is nil if cloaked chat is disabled.
  • cloaking.chat.send(message): Sends a message to cloaked chat.
  • cloaking.chat.prefix: The text (-Cloaked-) that is prepended to cloaked chat messages before they are sent to players.

Any above functions requiring "player" as a parameter also accept a player name, provided the player is online.

It also adds the following functions that ignore cloaked players and can interact with them: cloaking.get_connected_players, cloaking.get_objects_inside_radius and cloaking.get_player_by_name.

If you have made chatcommand work with players that aren't in-game, you can add _allow_while_cloaked = true to the chatcommand definition. If you explicitly don't want your chatcommand working with cloaked players, you can add _disallow_while_cloaked = true to the definition. These modifications do not require that you add cloaking to depends.txt, as when cloaking is not loaded this parameter is simply ignored.

Backported bugfixes

To ensure server stability, the cloaking mod backports the following bugfixes if it determines they are necessary for your server:

• Blocking newlines in chat messages (MT < 5.0.1).
• Prevent saying %2 in chat from crashing the server (MT == 5.1.0).
• Prevent hacked clients from being able to access the inventories of other players (MT < 5.4.0). Note that this fix currently needs testing and does not work on MT 0.4.

If you do not want this for whatever reason (although I do not recommend it), you can disable these backports by adding cloaking.backport_bugfixes = false to your minetest.conf.