Bukkit: The Next Chapter

Discussion in 'Bukkit News' started by EvilSeph, Feb 28, 2012.

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  1. Offline

    EvilSeph

    [​IMG]

    What follows is a written account of Bukkit's story. If you'd rather know what the big news is, skip to the bottom. However, we'd appreciate it if you read through our entire story as it gives us an opportunity to show appreciation and give thanks to the many people, groups and companies that helped us throughout our adventure.

    When we started up Bukkit in December of 2010, we decided we wanted to do things right. Right from the beginning we wanted to be sure we were bringing about a positive change to Minecraft, one that Mojang themselves would approve of. To that end, we set up a meeting with Mojang to get a feel for their opinions on our project and make sure we weren't doing anything they didn't like. The gist of the meeting was that Mojang "liked what we were doing" but not how we had to go about doing things. Unfortunately, we both knew that we had no alternatives, so we continued along - albeit now with the reassurance that our project would most likely not be shut down any time in the future. We decided to create Bukkit to provide the Minecraft community with better tools to manage and extend their server, but our ultimate goal has always been to give the Minecraft community what it needed and wanted to make our favourite game even more enjoyable and being able to do so in an official capacity is our dream.

    Shortly after the launch of Bukkit, after I had posted an innocent announcement to get developers interested in Bukkit, our project exploded with activity. While I had anticipated developer interest and had planned for such, the added interest from the community as a whole was simply overwhelming. So much so that it had begun to put a strain on my dedicated server and actually was pushing it to the point of hardware failure. Luckily, it was around this time that Curse approached us and offered to set-up a temporary Amazon EC2 instance while they purchased new servers for our use. Unfortunately, the Amazon EC2 instance also could not keep up with the demand and was proving to be too costly. So, we asked around for help and Multiplay's Steve Hartland put us on one of their boxes free of charge while we waited for new servers to be purchased and delivered.

    One of the goals of the Bukkit project, or maybe just my personal goal, was to solve what I felt was a big problem within the Minecraft community: it was largely impossible for someone new to Minecraft to discover the unlimited potential of Minecraft modding. Not only would they have to deal with unwieldy and clunky forums, but there was also no central place for sharing your work. In answer to this problem, we endeavoured to create a new service dubbed Fill which we hoped would address all the needs of the community but were unable to gain any ground. We were simply not experienced enough to run something of this magnitude nor did we have the resources to pull it off. One day we were discussing the idea of Fill and our desire to provide a central download solution for the modding community and the WoW players on the team brought up Curse and the success they've had with WoWAce. At that point it all came together, not only did Curse have the resources to pull off something as large as we were envisioning in Fill, but they had the success, experience and scalable software with WoWAce to do so. With that, it was clear to everyone that Curse was the best route to take and dev.bukkit.org was born.

    When news broke out about Mojang organising a Minecon, the entire community was alight with excitement and anticipation. Even today, I still find the sheer dedication from the fans unbelievable and overwhelming. Though we were also excited about Minecon, there was no way we would be able to go since Bukkit is an open source, free project. Much to our surprise, though, Curse had other plans in mind. They decided to fly us over, cover our tickets and accommodation, host us in their booth and setup a panel for us. I've never met a company that cares more about gaming than Curse: when the possibility of their supporting the Bukkit project first came up, we were all blown away. Curse wanted to throw themselves behind our project. They wanted to provide us with the support and resources we needed to continue functioning, no questions asked and their desire to send us to Minecon further reinforced this opinion we had of them. Thanks to their support, we were able to go to Minecon, have a great time and put together a panel filled with our fans, as well as sneak off to a secret meeting with Mojang.

    Back in December of last year, my team and I were invited to Stockholm, Sweden by Mojang to discuss the future of Minecraft - and most importantly the future of Minecraft modding and the official Minecraft modding API. Having just recently met in Minecon, we mostly knew what to expect but were blown away by Mojang's hospitality and the surreality of actually being in Stockholm with them. Not only were we able to visit the Mojang HQ but we were also given the opportunity to be part of the launch of Cobalt (which was simply fantastic) and got to meet the entire team of talented individuals at Mojang. We spent the majority of our time with Mojang shooting ideas back and forth and getting a taste of what was to come and how we might be able to become involved.

    Which leads me to today. Our meeting at Minecon was just the beginning and after having flown us out to Stockholm to get to know each other, it was clear that the potential to do truly great things together was there and we were eager to explore it. After all, we had already been given a direct line to the Minecraft team, the source code and were actively providing Mojang with (exploit) patches and improvements. The next logical step was to figure out the best way to continue working together, perhaps in a more official and intimate capacity. After careful and lengthy consideration, the best course of action became clear. My team and I had already achieved what we wanted to when we started the Bukkit project: provide server admins with the means to easily customise and run their server and provide developers with an easy to use, properly designed API to bring their insane and cool ideas to life. The next obvious step was to make it more official and with news breaking out that Mojang was interested in developing an official Minecraft API, we knew just how to do that.

    I am extremely pleased and proud to announce that, as of today, the Bukkit team has joined Mojang. When discussing the possibility of a modding API publicly, Mojang was concerned that they would be unable to provide the community with a suitable and powerful enough solution and we honestly feel that our experience building Bukkit will help them do so. Thanks to our work with Bukkit, we have a years worth of experience, failures and lessons to help us develop a proper modding API and intend to do whatever it takes to produce one that satisfies the needs of the community. Now that we have an opportunity to design the official Minecraft API, we intend to make it a suitable replacement for Bukkit, if not a significantly better one, while bukkit.org will remain a community for modders for the foreseeable future.

    Official announcement from Mojang with more information: http://mojang.com

    [​IMG]

    A big "thank you!" is due for the many sponsors we've had over the life of the project:
    [​IMG]
    Curse
    eXophase.com - for hosting the project at the beginning and helping us get off our feet
    Unimatrix
    Arcdigital
    Multiplay - especially Steve Hartland
    [​IMG]
    AllGamer - especially Clinton and Scott
    Our Staff who work tirelessly and thanklessly to keep everything in order
    and, of course, Mojang for giving us a chance, taking us seriously and supporting what we’re doing.

    And to you, our community and our family: thanks for sticking by us through thick and thin, we really would not be where we are today without you.
     
    jflory7, Acharige, iiHeroo and 88 others like this.
  2. Offline

    KakusCraft

    a question.

    Will bukkit team continues to work on bukkit, or they will leave bukkit and get paid jobs at Mojang ?

    EDIT : *sigh

    so we will later see bukkit under the name of "minecraft API" ?

    i'm just hoping that there would not be disaster like the transition from hMod to Bukkit..
     
  3. Offline

    troed

    notch:
    If you want to claim that notch won't keep his promise that's up to you, but it sounds like simple FUD.
     
    Bronski and Sayshal like this.
  4. Offline

    ItsHarry

    DAMN NATURE! Congratulations !!!
     
  5. Gratulations!! You've done that very very good so far! Good luck furthermore :))
     
  6. Offline

    SephraelX

    We're wandering off-topic here so I'll say my bit and then leave it at that so as not to derail things further.

    The fact that Spout authenticates with Mojang's system is irrelevant. Look, I'm refraining from passing judgment on you or any other developer here, but the sort of behaviour I see on the Spout side (from this thread, and its twin on the Spout forums) is pretty reminiscent of 20-somethings that have not spent a lot of time educating themselves about the current state of law in regards to software development.

    As soon as you start to mess with the Minecraft client, up to and including receiving data from it and more importantly sending data to it, you are dealing with copyrighted material as it is a proprietary format. I can't speak to the specific copyright acts outside of North America, but this is grounds for action under the DMCA including takedown requests - that your server operators, not Spout developers - will be receiving stateside should Mojang choose to pursue that course of action.

    Mojang may very well continue with their approach of "No condemnation, but not condoning" insofar as this goes, but it's pretty much the height of arrogance to claim that the legal threat is "laughably small" in the very thread that those who will be developing Mojang's API have made the announcement, let alone the veiled claim that Spout will supercede Minecraft by the nature of its development philosophy.

    Basically, if Spout devs are going to make a product that is essentially in competition with Mojang's own software, by using Mojang's own software, it's probably best if they dial down the hubris and not poke sticks in people's eyes.

    Think more along the lines of Scapegaming, against whom Blizzard was awarded $83m in damages over collecting $3m dollars in micro-transactions. The fact that many server operators currently augment their ability to host the game by offering perks for "donations" (and thereby no longer being donations because of quid pro quo) certainly opens themselves to the same hazards.
     
    GoalieGuy6 and troed like this.
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    pacmanjones

    Not exactly the same because the API will likely be closed source.
     
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    Sleaker

    I think the logical disconnect is the lack of knowledge that indicates past-precedent where a company has actually done something similar to this. From what I've seen, and previously said the only time a server/software has come under fire for reversing the protocol has been A) For-Profit servers for MMOs. or B) Software that encroaches on the name of Registered Trademarks.
    Scapegaming is a different issue, mojang doesn't run a paid server service, WoW is just that. So I don't think there's a correlation here. I think it's much more like the Wargus/Stargus issue which only needed a rename.

    Bringing it back to the topic. Mojang announced 1.2 for tomorrow. Hopefully Bukkit has R5 + 1.2 ready to push 'simultaneously' as has been alluded to in various posts.
     
  9. Offline

    Don Redhorse

    and I thought R5 was for 1.1 what an idiot I am... oh no... I was told it would be for 1.1 and released before 1.2..

    so I just hope that:
    a) R5 doesn't have any bugs
    b) 1.2 will come in a good state, WHENEVER it is ready!!!! so NOT soon, like most of the people in the forum will ask for.
     
  10. Ahh, fudgeruckers. I still count about 20 plugins broke on my server from R5 builds.
     
  11. Offline

    pswayne

    So all my hard work setting up my bukkit server will go down the pan will it? all the hours i've spent setting up the plugins with the permissions all gonna disappear? im assuming, but will this mean i have to restart everything up again? or willl there be a way to transfere everything bukkit over to the official API server? will it be that easy? lets hope so! coz i won't wanna lose my server world!

    Congrats anyways, this is great news! finally we'll be able to keep all things minecraft in one area....
     
  12. Offline

    Lunar Delta

    This is horrible news. I really don't see any good coming from this at all. Hell, I still haven't even begun to fix all of the R5 plugin breaks on my server, and now this. Bleh.
     
    Afforess likes this.
  13. Offline

    ACStache

    pswayne Lunar Delta
    see Dinnerbone's FAQ (link)
    Bukkit is going to be around/updated until the Official MC API is on it's feet. Don't panic :p
     
  14. Offline

    Don Redhorse

    well that doesn't help them now as plugins aren't working... mbaxter to the batcave
     
    Sayshal and iPhysX like this.
  15. Offline

    mbaxter ʇıʞʞnq ɐ sɐɥ ı

    Oh hardly, first user is just worried about changing to the new API and is covered by ACStache's post.

    Second user admits to not having started on resolving things, when they've had plenty of time.


    Again, the transition when it happens will not be painful.
     
    Sayshal and iPhysX like this.
  16. Offline

    Sayshal

  17. True and i did even correct myself in the very same post... sorry. But as you said LIKELY, we do not know it yet.
     
  18. Offline

    TnT

    R5 is for 1.1. If its a RB for 1.2 it would be called 1.2-R1
    You play Minecraft right? Have you ever played a version "without any bugs"? I sure haven't, but the team here does their best to extensively test everything they can and resolve any bugs that show up.
    There will be a dev build for 1.2 very soon, similar to how there has been a dev build out for 1.1, 1.9, 1.8, 1.7, etc, before it. The RB may take awhile, but that is also normal.
     
    troed likes this.
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    Sayshal

    TnT
    +1

    I'm excited for this whole ordeal. Do you think they'll come up with a name for this new mojang + bukkit team thing? Because I don't want to put in my server description "Mojang API Server", "Bukkit Server" or "SpoutCraft Server" sound more... Y'know.
     
  20. Offline

    KakusCraft

    lmao spoutcraft or bukkit servers are still sound decent though..

    "Mojang API Server" just doesent sounds right... :/
     
  21. Offline

    Tulonsae

    Congrats to the Bukkit Dev team.

    On another note, now I know that Mojang has someone smart looking at the Mojang future. This was a good move for the company.
     
  22. Offline

    Tanite

    It's a MAPI Server! :p
     
    Technius, Don Redhorse and Meduax like this.
  23. Offline

    Don Redhorse

    oh well...

    let's correct that statement than:

    a) a R5 without any gamebreaking bugs and exploits... which shouldn't happen as R5 would be a recommended build which is tested or?
    b) I know that the RB will take a while, that is what I said and I have all the time to wait. Not like others which will start NOW to say where the RB is for 1.2... ok perhaps not now but soon.

    and to a) with the amount of pulls happening just now I wonder how we will see:

    Because even when all the pulls have been tested you didn't test them all together. Perhaps they should just drop the RB and call it
    and just start with 1.2-R1-Snapshot, as I won't really see a lot of people updating to R5 to update to 1.2-R1 just a week or two later.

    But this is a negative view about the things.... so let's just hope that I'm wrong, and probably I am, because chances are that everything will be well... but relying on luck is a tricky thing.
    oh yeah... and I just know that some people will now again complain about my arrogant "snide" and bickering (?) remarks on IRC..

    and I just hope Sleaker didn't post in front of me, or anybody else who I already posted behind several times..
     
  24. Offline

    TnT

    Actually, they are. A candidate is chosen, and tested. If a test fails, it is fixed and the next build is tested. Wash rinse repeat until all tests are successful. Can some bugs be missed, of course. Are they often game breaking? Very rarely.

    The whole reason R5 is being pushed is so server admins have the most recent RB possible to sit on until 1.2-R1 comes out. I have no problem doing that even if they come out one day apart.
     
  25. Offline

    Don Redhorse

    well it will be Minecraft... you will not have to have anything special in your server name because it will be build in. That is the whole idea behind the thing Mojang does, implementing an api INTO the minecraft server, not needing something on top or something different.

    and it will not be a mojang + bukkit team thing it will be a mojang thing... the bukkit team (at least 4 people of it) are now mojang employees.

    This will be very good for the average admin which is having a normal server but it will highly depend on how full featured and thoroughly documented the new API will become for the more diverse servers out there. ATM bukkit in itself is not feature complete, mainly because they did have to work with obfuscated code and create a wrapper around the original code.

    So that could change now if mojang intends to allow this, as it will turn minecraft into something totally different as it is now. It also will strongly depend on the developer ecosystem which needs to be created now, as mojang doesn't have anything right now, they don't even have their own forums.

    And again... this also requires the API to be fully documented or released together with the code.. which will be a change to the bukkit team. It requires wiki articles, full documentation of all public methods and the behavior of them. As a developer you need to know that a method will return a 0 if a chunk isn't loaded, so there must be a way to learn that WITHOUT running into NPE's or bugs in your own plugin because of this.

    A very good example of the work ahead for mojang is this: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Category:Modding as a starting page, this https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Threads for an example of the work to document it and this for something like a method https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Env_projectedtexture

    I just searched those now so there will be better examples I guess.

    They have to recreate the "bukkit" ecosystem from scratch and if they don't open source it they will have to put even more work in.

    Of course there will always be developers who will bite the bullet and code with limited functionality provided (as it was the case with bukkit in the beginning) in the early releases but people will have to wait some time till mojang will reach the same level as bukkit.

    Also you should keep in mind that they will have to decide how to go ahead with the client...
    • will they release a feature complete minecraft server api and than change the internals of the server to support a customizable client
    • will they release a feature complete minecraft server api, and use a similar approach for the client, but make the "plugin" independent, so players need to install them themself
    • will they rewrite code at the same time in the server and the client to support the full experience of a customizable server.
    All this is for mojang to think through, decide and implement.
    I hope that THIS post is not arrogant or anything like people say about me... this is the essence of my view about the things as they are without any snide remarks (at least I hope)

    I know, I was even one of those requesting it... but I was requesting an RB which was tested for more than a day and not only with automated testing. A lot of the bugs come out later.

    But the discussion is a circle, I totally understand the bukkit side of things and you probably understand my side, but we are not discussing, which is a shame.

    Oh my god... they finally changed wikipedia..... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion , I was really wondering why discussion was always pointing to political debate... at least now it is pointing to Conversation... well..

    so it would be nice if you try the same I did in my other post, drop any pink glasses or anger against certain people and read, and perhaps reply to my post in a personal way.

    EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: May 24, 2016
  26. Offline

    TnT

    I was not implying automated testing. There is a team of individuals who test the builds. This all happens after the automated testing (unit tests) that are built in (as much as can be).
     
  27. Offline

    Celtic Minstrel

    Inventory events will be in R5.

    Yes, Spout's inventory events were essentially a fork off the same branch that is now in Bukkit, though it has changed quite a bit since Spout forked it.

    Not necessarily. That's really up to Notch and Mojang. It could, yes. But it's not guaranteed, and we already have evidence that it probably won't happen.

    You could call it a vanilla server, couldn't you?
     
  28. Offline

    rymate1234

  29. Offline

    Daoud

    Amazing news, cant wait to see what is conjured up :).
     
  30. Offline

    kamild1996

    Afforess and elias79 like this.
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