Admin Gates

Some gates only an admin can load. They reach every player or the whole world: a chat line to everyone, the time of day, the list of players. This branch teaches them. Every page in it needs admin to load.

Needs admin to load: the examples here use Broadcast Chat Message.

Contents

• Code
• Run
• Under the Hood
• Finding the culprit
• A debug line
• Modify
• Make
• Good to Know

button Held -> chip ring
chip sign -> decal Text

Code

@left in ring: exec
var rings: int = 0
@right out sign = "Rings: ${rings.Value}"

on ring {
  rings += 1
  BroadcastChatMessage("The bell has rung ${rings} times")
}

A bell that counts its rings on a sign and tells the whole server about each one. BroadcastChatMessage sends one chat line that every player sees.

You paste this in a world you host. A friend pastes the same file on a server where they are not an admin. What does each of you see when the bell rings?

Run

1. Compile the chip and paste it in-game, in a world you host. Place a Button and a brick with a Text Decal.
2. Wire the Button’s Held to ring, and sign to the Text Decal’s Text.
3. Press the button. The sign counts, and a chat line appears for everyone.

A player without admin rights who pastes it sees the paste report blocked bricks: the Broadcast Chat Message gate is missing, and its wires cannot connect. Only the admin gates are missing. The rest of the chip loads.

Under the Hood

Open the chip. The handler’s chain is the button, an Increment Variable for rings, a Get Variable that reads the new count, then Broadcast Chat Message with a Format String feeding its Message.

For a player who could not load the broadcast gate, the chain has a gap. The increment comes before the gap, so the sign should still count. Swap the two lines in the handler and the gap comes first: nothing after it runs, and the sign stays at 0.

The game marks each gate as admin or not. These Wirescript calls compile to an admin gate:

Not admin, and used all through the other branches: Clock, zone events, ShowChatMessage and ShowStatusMessage to one player, GetDisplayName, GetUserId, HasRole, reading the environment, personal custom events, fillFromZonePlayers, GetInputs and GetAim.

Finding the culprit

When a paste reports blocked bricks, look for these gates first. Open the chip as an admin and find them by name, or search the compiled program. The compiler prints it with wirescript compile bell.ws --dump-ir (or just ir bell.ws), one gate per line, by class name:

  %9 = Exec_Gamemode_BroadcastChatMessage(Exec: %7.ExecOut, Message: %8) : ...

Search for ChatCommand, Event_Gamemode_, Broadcast, FillArrayFromPlayers, FindPlayer, GetFromEntity and SetEnvironmentProperty, which cover most cases. The full list of class names is in docs/admin-gates.json in the compiler’s repository, and the Learn pages are checked against it: a page not marked admin that compiles to one of them fails the check.

A debug line

Is It Working? showed how to watch a circuit with a debug pin. A chat line is another way to watch one. Put a BroadcastChatMessage in a handler, and each run prints the values it read.

@left in pressed: exec
@left in armed: bool
var count: int = 0

on pressed {
  BroadcastChatMessage("pressed: armed=${armed} count=${count}")
  if armed {
    count += 1
  }
}

No line when you press means the trigger is the problem, not the steps. Remove the line before you share the chip, or it stops a non-admin from loading it.

Modify

1. Move the broadcast above rings += 1. Nothing changes for you. For a non-admin, it is now the first step and nothing after it runs.
2. Make the bell work for everyone: remove the broadcast and keep only the sign. The chip has no admin gates left.
3. Tell only the player who rang. The Button’s Character output says who pressed it: wire it to a @left in ringer: character pin and replace the broadcast with ringer.ShowChatMessage(...), which is not admin.

Make

Take a circuit from another branch, add a debug line to every handler, and use it to find which handler runs first when two fire on the same press. Then remove them all and compile again to check the chip has no admin gate left.

Good to Know

• A player without admin rights cannot load an admin gate. The rest of the chip loads, so the circuit half works instead of failing outright.
• A chain stops at the first missing gate. Put admin-only steps last in a handler when the rest should still work without them.
• In a world you host, you are the admin.
• Reading the environment, a player’s name or their role is not admin. Writing the environment, reaching every player, and the player events are.

See Broadcast Messaging in the reference.

Next: World Control.