craftbukkit high level description/concept...

Hello!

Being new to craftbukkit/minecraft (my sons love driving my coding), is there a 'high level' overview/concept document of craftbukkit?

For example, whats different between MCP and craftbukkit, why is the source directory structure organized the way it is? Are all mods to the minecraft source labled? Is there a 'standards' doc which can guide someone making changes so they don't 'break' the 'rules'??

I guess I'm trying to understand where minecraft code ends, and craftbukkit begins, and where and how and why the two connect at various points.

an idea of basic code flow would be nice too, say main loop outline with call to render etc, this I'm sure is really obvious to you who have been using this for awhile, but as a newbie trying to 'get up' on the code base coming from having looked at MCP, its a little confusing.

THanks!
Eric

 

This page may help you to some extent with regards to "Is there a 'standards' doc which can guide someone making changes so they don't 'break' the 'rules'??".
https://github.com/Bukkit/CraftBukkit/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

It includes a flowchart of the PR process. Aside from that, somebody else is probably better suited for your questions.

 

If your goal is to understand the API, there's two big things I do to achieve this. The first is that I just browse the Plugin Requests forum and try making the requested plugin if it's basic. It forces you to look through the documentation and learn how to do something new. The second, is I simply look at the source of other people's plugins to see how they do things. Many plugins are open source, and those that aren't can always be decompiled.

if your goal is to make a PR to improve Craftbukkit, then I recommend you look at the document that lol768 linked you to. If you've got specific questions and best practice questions you can send me a pm here and I'll try to help you out(I'm a PR Handler).

 

Although I agree that open source plugin sis a great way to see how others do it, there are still limitations and references made need to be made if you "borrow" any of that code.

Second, decompiling ARR Plugins (All Rights Reserved) is a great way for lawsuits to occur (not saying that Bukkit Developers would, but if you did that to say, Microsoft Word, I'm sure there may be some trouble waiting for you if you started posting Word's code all over the interwebs, especially since Microsoft can hire lawyers much better than you. )

As a side note, coding in general and looking at the API from inside the IDE is a great way to learn "Hands-On" and I personally prefer it.

 

Bjornke I think the only issue is if you distribute anything with source from those plugins you've decompiled. If I see a plugin that does what I want to do, I decompile to see how they do it, then do what they did, only better. There's so many unnecessarily closed-source plugins on DBO. I'd be happy to hear opinions on why I'm a terrible person though.