The goal: As many minecraft shop owners have probably noticed, there is no way to permanently place a held item, such as a pickaxe, in the world. If objects like these, compasses, sticks, swords, tools, armor, etc. could be placed, shop displays could be much simpler, and this would mean there would be no need of long lists of signs for objects that cannot be displayed. I searched, and found no plugins that can do this, and I understand it is no easy task. If any developers would like to take it up however, I am confident the mod will become very popular among the community. One method of doing this, besides writing completely new blocks, would be to look at the mobspawners. I don't quite know what I'm talking about, but on the inside of a mobspawner, the mob it spawn's model rotates. If it's possible to make the outer layer of the spawner transparent, maybe it'd be possible to have any model rotating, such as the model of armor held in your hand, etc. It would require some scaling, and the rotating would be a bit annoying, but I just thought this simpler method might work. Thanks for reading this.
...so basically you want something akin to the Shelves mod in SSP, where a new block acts like a chest, and lets you place items to display on shelves.
SurvivalSinglePlayer Shelves Mod is the second last in the opening post here: http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?t=80246
Maybe spawning a dropped item in a glass block could work. But the problem is that players could pick that item up.
That's a good idea, I just think the problem that would present itself would be that the item would later disappear right? To stop players from picking it up, I could just put a second layer of protected glass in front of it however.
Disable the auto pick up around the glass? Also problem of the item despawning can sort of be solved by have them all respawn on a 5 min interval or perhaps a button the customer can press and it cause them to show up.
I'm on it, and it will be _GREAT_ Here's a work in progress-screenshot: What works at the moment: Placing items via rightclick in a glass block Displacing them via rightclick When you rightclick on glass, you can't build. Because of this, when you are sneaking, building is enabled, and the item won't be showcased. You can't pickup the showcased item Protection of the Glass-block and the block below it to prevent items falling down. What's still missing: Persistence - So the showcases will be saved and restored on the next startup. Owning a Showcase - So a showcase can only be removed by the player who created it (useful for shops). When I finish that what is in the "still missing" list, I will release it under the name Showcase. I also give you a work-in-project plugin jar so you can test it
I released it, have a look here: http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/mech-showcase-show-off-your-cool-items-766.17672/ I added user-protection and persistence and I think it's now done. If you find bugs, report them there