the terminology of this needs improvement, but...
the basic concept here is that 'type' data will persist on an itemstack, while 'state' data will not.
Type data consists of things like:
- Colour
- Coral type
- Wet/dry (sponges)
- Live/dead (coral)
- Wood type
State data consists of things like:
- Facing
- Axis
- Powered/unpowered
- Open/closed
In the past, with the old system, this information was separated by way of getStateBitmask(). This solution was fraught with problems, but achieved the basic goal: removing unwanted block properties from items.
This commit completely revamps the way that blocks are represented in memory at runtime.
Instead of being represented by legacy Mojang block IDs and metadata, which are dated, limited and unchangeable, we now use custom PM block IDs, which are generated from VanillaBlocks.
This means we have full control of how they are assigned, which opens the doors to finally addressing inconsistencies like glazed terracotta, stripped logs handling, etc.
To represent state, BlockDataReader and BlockDataWriter have been introduced, and are used by blocks with state information to pack said information into a binary form that can be stored on a chunk at runtime.
Conceptually it's pretty similar to legacy metadata, but the actual format shares no resemblance whatsoever to legacy metadata, and is fully controlled by PM.
This means that the 'state data' may change in serialization format at any time, so it should **NOT** be stored on disk or in a config.
In the future, this will be improved using more auto-generated code and attributes, instead of hand-baked decodeState() and encodeState(). For now, this opens the gateway to a significant expansion of features.
It's not ideal, but it's a big step forwards.
VanillaBlocks isn't guaranteed to be a complete record. For example, I've considered moving chemistry blocks to a separate EducationBlocks registry.
In such a case, the blocks are still expected to serialize correctly, but they won't be in VanillaBlocks.
this does come at a performance cost, but is necessary for metadata expansion.
we finally concede that this is not going to happen without BC breaks, however small they might be ...
