Where possible (which it currently is for the gold chest), don't break
the centering of the player inventory in the chest formspec because
of the color buttons. Where the color buttons don't fit next to a
perfectly centered player inventory (which doesn't currently occur for
any technic chest), move the player inventory only as much as necessary
to accommodate the color buttons.
Re-register most aspects of default:chest and default:chest_locked,
using the technic chests code, so that the wooden chests fit properly
into the sequence of chest types. This mainly affects the formspec,
which now uses the style of the other chests, rather than the bare style
used by the default mod.
Make the inventory sizes of all the technic chests larger, to provide
a more appreciable benefit from upgrading chests, more in keeping with
the resources spent on the upgrades.
Currently the game engine doesn't handle large forms well. The size
of an inventory slot is fixed relative to the screen height, and a
form that exceeds either screen dimension will extend off the screen,
making parts of it inaccessible. The tallest a form can get and remain
usable is 13 slots, and even that slightly overspills the screen height.
The maximum usable width depends on the screen aspect ratio. For the
narrowest common ratio, 5:4, the widest a form can usably get is 15 slots,
again slightly overspilling. Combined with the layout of the chest forms,
this implies a maximum practical chest inventory size of 15x7 (= 105),
slightly smaller than the largest Minecraft chests.
To provide roughly equal size steps in the five upgrades from wooden
chest (staying at 8x4 = 32) to mithril chest, the steps need to be of
about 15 slots instead of the former 4. The new sizes are:
wooden 8x4 32
iron 9x5 45
copper 12x5 60
silver 12x6 72
gold 15x6 90
mithril 15x7 105
To make upgrading from the old chest sizes to the new sizes more
convenient, the inventory size is now set not only upon chest construction
but also when accepting form input, at the same time as rewriting
the formspec. So after upgrading the technic mod, viewing an existing
chest upgrades it to the new size. The first time a pre-existing chest
is viewed its form will have the old dimensions, looking broken due
to the inventory background image now having the new number of slots.
The second time it is viewed the form will have the new dimensions,
and the full new number of slots will be usable.
When using the form to edit a chest label, apply the edited label whenever the
form is submitted with the text field included, rather than only if the form's
specific "finished editing" button is used. This supports the natural use of
<ret> to indicate that text editing is complete, which works with other text
editing forms such as that for signs.