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

    Jushy

    I think this is amazing news.

    But, have a major question about this.And about Bukkit's new plans. Its been a LONG time coming. and this REALLY needs to be addressed. Minecraft still uses insane amounts of bandwidth..the only way i can play AT ALL is with spoutcraft....My ONE and only question with the idea of "making the game into a dumb client and hosting server" Does this mean an improvement to bandwidth usage? or does it mean things will get EVEN WORSE...because i adore minecraft....and im really disliking not being able to play it. even now, I cant update my server. because if i do. i wont be able to play, Nor will many of my friends.

    So, my request. Can you PLEASE incorporate caching into the game?
     
  3. Offline

    pinpanxxi

    great i'm really looking forward to it. This could make minecraft more fun
     
  4. Offline

    bergerkiller

    Page 18:
    Am I a psychic? This just happened during the R5 release of CraftBukkit...this is scary.
     
    Don Redhorse likes this.
  5. Offline

    Sleaker

    eh happened with 1.1 R1/R2 also cause of massive push for bleeding stuff, just like R5. So less like it's something new :-/ just more people notice it cause it's been happening consistently.
     
    Don Redhorse likes this.
  6. Offline

    bergerkiller

    Sleaker luckily build 1988 appears to be stable. Now converting all of my plugins...only 60 errors so I am covered. :)

    And I betcha I reference CraftBukkit everywhere. Noticeable changes:
    They did a fair job at deobfuscating it, but it could be done better...
    It sometimes looks as if they only deobfuscated 50% of a class :)
     
  7. Offline

    Sleaker

    they only deobfuscate what they touch so it's not as hard to update bindings. they get all the bindings apparently (or have stated something similar in the past), so they could de-obfuscate the entire thing, but don't.
     
  8. Offline

    AlbertoTech96

    When will R5 be coming out :)
     
  9. bergerkiller

    Interesting findings. Wasn't chunk.b used to set lightning or was it cunk.a? Will have to look if this breaks any of my plugins
     
  10. Offline

    gorthol

    R6 is already out, check dl.bukkit.org
     
  11. Offline

    bergerkiller

    Lathanael the chunk lighting nibble arrays are still named the same, only the b[] array (block type id array) is now called blocks[].
     
  12. Offline

    jeremytrains

    AWESOME! GO BUKKIT GO! GO BUKKIT GO! GO BUKKIT GO! Nice job!
     
  13. Offline

    HandBananaNOOO

    Help is r6 for 1.1 or 1.2?
     
  14. Offline

    troed

    1.1-R6 is for 1.1 (stable)
    1.2.2-R0.1 is for 1.2.2 (far from stable)
     
  15. Offline

    HandBananaNOOO

    Thanks for quick response troed!
     
  16. Offline

    TnT

    As a community member I will have to disagree with you. I am not dying for a GUI - rather, find them clunky and poorly designed most of the time, but then again, I feel at home in the command line. The warm white on solid black gives me comfort.

    As for everyone else, this thread is always getting derailed by questions about Spout. Spout may be the best thing since sliced bread, but that's not what this topic is about. This topic is about what happens next with the Bukkit team, the Bukkit community and Mojang. Please keep it slightly more focused at least.

    I, personally, have never had a problem asking EvilSeph for features or additions CB. I'll continue to talk to him for a long time to come, as I have no plans of retiring from hosting a server any time soon. I don't see this changing any time soon, whether EvilSeph is a Mojang employee or not.
     
    kavmac, NuclearW, manniL and 4 others like this.
  17. Offline

    HappyGrenades

    Congratulations! When you said big news I was expecting something like We figured out how to add new mobs without need Spout! But this is 1,000,000 times better -no joke.

    So does this mean whenever there is a Minecraft update Plugin devs can imidiatly start working updating their plugins using stable "Builds"* rather than the dev builds? That would be awesome cuz that cuts the lag time between minecraft and server updates by a large amount! :D

    But there is one problem, we can't donate to you guys in specific now, it will go to Minecraft as a whole :(
    -That isn't bad, but then again you guys won't know we are donating it for you...


    *I Don't want to say Builds anymore because when Mincraft had official releases the API will be updated as well, so the Builds will be just what you are working on while other Mojangians are making the new update.
     
  18. Offline

    ledhead900


    Your right about a couple things, But still miss understanding, When the source was to be released anyone could sign up, they just had to agree to a new TOS that waved any rights they had on software created , and you had have had a paid MC account. Imo that's fair, It's not TRUE open source but it was open as far as modding was concerned and for the community needs that is all that mattered.

    I also would agree that things may be better supported now that Bukkit are with Mojang to put it lightly it shouldn't go backwards either way no one knows what will come of this there has been no official word for plans or anything yet, and only time is going to tell where the community will go for modding and servers. I also half agree with Don Redhorse trolling may be required now to get answers but regardless on how we feel about it Bukkit have still been amazing for us in the past we sure they have flaws but I'm more or less just trying to get attention so they hear us and open up a little more to the community.


    Personal Debate With Quote no related to this thread (open)
    . Also with Jailbreaking Its that simple I'm afraid you still need to wait for the site to update its hacks, and it was pretty slow at supporting the newer firmware for Ianything (ipodtouch,iphone) if it ran on IOS you had to first make a backup of your current firmware then if you wanted revert back to it later, say 2 months later apple has new update you want to try it out, you can't, well you can but there is only a LIMITED time window in which apple keeps the hash keys stored in the servers, this means that your old firmware becomes useless if you have not already pre synced you device with Cydia (A special host that stores firmware backups among other things),.

    What you generally would need to do is as soon as an update came or you updated you were about to jailbreak you would use some app on the pc that would load your firmware and it would download the appropriate sha key from apple, Apple does not support any of this btw but its not illegal.

    You would only do this if you had plans to go back to that version as with Apple once a new version has been released in about a week you can no longer downgrade as during the instal process it checks the public key against the key on the server you can work around it but ^ is how u do it. I generally just wait until the jailbreak software supports the new update then I try the new update. With ANDRIOID you don't have on these problems you can up and downgrade as u see fit even modify its kernal making a new OS, APPLE requires you to SIGN UP for the SDK and the way you do this is by paying a one time developers fee of $100-200 for the year or something like that as its not the SDK that is important its the keys you need to signup and pay and once u do that the send you a certificate that is valid for a year u need to sign your app with this or it just wont compile or install on the device.

    Well it won't Install with out a Jailbroken device but then you lose APPLE warranty, any way I think I have made my point about that.


    I actually think Notch is more of a business man a company icon and should prob at least for now sit back away from this title a lot of the decent things came from his employees, and I have yet too see something he made that was not bugged to death. That being said he still likes to design and have his own ideas that fine I suppose.


    Everyone
    Why are we all talking about the new build here, This is a thread about the changes to Bukkit community and the success of Bukkit please go post in the either the plugin dev threads or the general Bukkit discussion thread ;). You say EvilSeph won't ask our opinions or review out concerns but you all quite happy to flood a page or so about a development build for 1.2.

    I'm glad your all talking about and all but please not here. When someone starts a thread I will meet you all there to talk about that build.
     
  19. Offline

    GeekPlaya

    This all seems a bit impulsive.

    They admit that there is a huge boom in activity on the project, yet they are willing to close it off just for affiliation with Mojang, or to look "official". Yes, it will make it easier for them this way, but think of all the thousands of plugins which developers spent their dedicated time into.

    As a teenager, my main income is off of my service which is powered by Bukkit, and this impulsive need to become one with Mojang will mean I have to completely restart the service.

    I am assuming, though, that they will not be using the same formatting/functionality that Bukkit holds, but a new recreated one.

    Just seems a bit too quick. A bigger heads up would've been nice, or at least more details than just leaving us on a cliffhanger like this.
     
  20. Offline

    Technius

    I think everyone is here raging about Bukkit dead and Spout. Bukkit is still being maintained until the new API comes out, and the Bukkit team can now work much more on Bukkit(since they have full time jobs at Mojang). In addition, Dinnerbone said that the client and server would be rewritten so that the server controls the client, and the client only shows the animations. Which means that the client could show GUI's, custom animations(like some mods), custom blocks, custom items, and custom entities. Which in turn could make Spout obsolete. Bukkit dead also doesn't actually mean Bukkit is dead, it's more like Vanilla = Bukkit.
    Code:
    getMojang().hire(BukkitTeam);
    Bukkit bukkit = getBukkit();
    setVanilla(bukkit);
    getMojang().assign(BukkitTeam, getVanilla);
    
    It's a bit too early to see what happens, so let's just wait...

    Edit: GeekPlaya
    Last year, they did say a Mod API would come in January. Now it's March, and I guess it's going to happen.
     
  21. Offline

    GhostHunter

    Whens Bukkit for 1.2.2 come out. Also Cool Story!
     
  22. Offline

    ledhead900

    If that is all true then we would see the best SP mods go SMP as well :), in fact that kind of clears most of concerns.
     
  23. Offline

    Kainzo

    no
     
    Torrent likes this.
  24. Offline

    phrstbrn

    What a well thought out and informative response. I hope to see more insightful posts from you in the future.
     
    Torrent likes this.
  25. Offline

    McJellyGooby

    Congratulations Bukkit team! This is very good news for the future of Minecraft modding.

    Unfortunately for me (and others using SpoutPlugin), the Spout team is sulking over this merger of sorts (kinda childishly, if you ask me). Should I be concerned about my plugins which depend on SpoutPlugin? Will Spout-dependent plugin devs be able to migrate their work to this upcoming glorious API? What are your thoughts on SpoutPlugin's role in this whole mess in the near future?
     
  26. Offline

    LlmDl

    Sup phrstbrn! You missed his "This thread is a tight butthole." post.

    Official API from Mojang announced! Tremendous work Bukkit team, your dedication to SMP is astonishing. Honourable mention going to the Spout guys, your efforts will not go unnoticed.
     
    Inscrutable and Torrent like this.
  27. Offline

    ProHDGaming214

    Minecraft 1.2.2 is out pls update the craftbukkit pls
     
  28. Offline

    eternia16

    You know, it might just be me, but I'm feeling a bit concerned about everything here. I'm afraid that as a server host, a lot of my favourite plugins will break. The plugins where my server basically runs on and I think a lot of people share this concern with me and I personally think its just being uncertain about the upcoming future is what makes a lot of people angry.
    In the end, my concerns are just... I run a great community based on a certain number of plugins and it would break my heart to lose them.
     
  29. Offline

    Sorontar

    Chill out. I have had to test and change Bukkit plugins and settings regularly because
    1) Minecraft changed
    2) Bukkit changed
    3) Plugins changed
    4) Developers changed
    5) My servers changed
    While I might not want to add as much bells and whistles to Minecraft as other server ops, the simple fact is that change happens and we have to be able handle it. While we like to have advance warning of each of these changes, that isn't always possible. This is one of those situations.

    So I ask you all to act like responsible adults (well, those of you that are adult) and wait. When the change arrives, then we can pass judgement on it. Until then, we can just enjoy the latest version of Minecraft (and whatever additions we are presently using).

    Sorontar
     
    hikingmonk and troed like this.
  30. Offline

    troed

    That's always a valid concern, but it has to do whether plugin authors are still maintaining them and not so much what happens in Minecraft/Bukkit.

    Any server owner who relies on plugins has to make sure that they add or remove plugins depending on if they're actively developed or not. What we can do is to push all plugin authors to publish not only the source code but under en open license allowing others to fork them if needed.
     
  31. Offline

    gabizou

    In any case, it's seeming there's many opinions out there as to what the future holds for the entire Minecraft Community. If anything just waiting to see what all the developers come out with and whichever api the plugins providing the features I want for my server will be the api community I'll end up going on with. IF that ends up being the future Mojang API or a Spout API or something completely different (hey, a new community might just pop out at some point), so be it. In all though the main point of this thread should be more for discussing the future of Craftbukkit based servers and congratulating the Bukkit devs for their hard work they've done for us all.

    Here's hoping to a brighter future, whichever route that may be, we shall see in a month or two. In the mean time:

    YAY! Upside down stairs!!! Adding a whole new dimension to architectural building in Minecraft! Also yet another stone brick block! OH and did I forget to add, iron golem npc's!! Hurrah!
     
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