Bukkit: The Next Chapter

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

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  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

    Gravity

    The current Bukkit API will be used for many months (and is still being heavily updated every day, check github) until the new API is out. There is a reason that Mojang picked Bukkit to work with, and that's because they like what they have been doing here with the Bukkit project. That means you can expect that when the new API comes it will contain all things good about Bukkit, and hopefully will have fixed a ton of issues we have. So yes, to answer your question there will be a new API but I'm positive that as soon as a new global API for Minecraft comes out everyone will start hopping to it and updating code, writing new plugins, experimenting, all that good stuff. I don't think you will have an issue finding plugins.

    You will not be able to "convert" plugins over, only the devs can do that, but like I said I'm sure it will be a very quick process once this is all in place; I for one will be jumping at the opportunity to support a global API, and I know a lot of other authors will be too. As allways your worlds and stuff is easily copied over to a new server, so no worries about that.

    I don't know how you got "dead" from anywhere in that post, he even said "while bukkit.org will remain a community for modders." There will, of course, be a new API, but this site, community, etc., will not just die.

    And finally, I fail to see how this is viewed as an act of selfishness, Mojang doesn't need an API; by definition it is purely something that is meant for others to use, not for them. They are aquiring Bukkit because they believe it is the most mature and well-managed project out there, and are hoping to give all users of Minecraft SMP the same experience that we have here using Bukkit, and more! Mojang is not just doing things out of greed... It's quite the opposite here, this is a gesture to the community and probably isn't even what is "best for them"

    Hope that answered some of your questions.
     
    slipcor and troed like this.
  3. Offline

    Boktor

    Will there be a place where we can follow progress on the new API?
     
  4. Offline

    Toxic__Waste

    thats a good question

    and yes h31 does answer some

    I just a person that always thinks if its not broke dont fix it and it seems to me that bukkit was doing fine with out mojang

    If there is a money aspect to this i do understand that.. bukkit has done good work

    Im a lil pissed at spoutcraft been reading over there and they all saying bukkit is dead and anyone running bukkit will have the worst months of their minecraft lives coming up this is a quote from their form labeled the same chapter

    Essentially, the Bukkit project is a zombie. It's not quite dead, but everyone knows it will be. It's living off the brains of others, since the team is gone. And one day, someone is going to kill Bukkit. Probably Mojang, because technically CraftBukkit is illegal.

    the link
    http://forums.spout.org/threads/spout-the-same-chapter.1495/

    hope they are wrong but since you said its not dead ill take your word for it
     
  5. Offline

    Gravity

    Right now only people who decide to use bukkit to host their servers get to experience the system we have, that is to say the plugin system and the fantastic API. There's an entire world out there that has no idea what an API is, what plugins are, or how you can install and use them on a server.

    Plus, the Bukkit team will also be doing a lot to change how Minecraft works and make it better, Jeb has said that they are planning to break down the barrier between plugins and mods, and have a nice API to do it with. There's already a list of bugs that dinnerbone has fixed in Minecraft itself from his time with Mojang, so I think it's safe to say that there is a large problem here (the modding scene, the seperation of mods and plugins, incompatibility EVERYWHERE) and a lot of things that are "broke" that the Bukkit team can certaintly make much, much better.

    The entire team has done this for a long, long time now without any pay whatsoever outside of donations, which is used to keep the project running. I doubt you can really accuse them of doing this for the money, it has never and will never be about that.

    And of course we have all read that excerpt from the spout forums, I'd advise you to just look around the community, the github for bukkit, the bug tracker, anything you can find and decide for yourself if the project is dead (or shows signs of dying), rather than reading something from a post that, in my eyes, is purposefully attempting to take a stab at the bukkit team and community because of rising conflict. I should hope that you are not relying on just my words telling you that the project is not dead, I mean for god's sake just look around everything going on here and TELL me the project is dead...
     
  6. Offline

    Toxic__Waste

    i do like the way the plugins were updated this time around from 1.1 to 1.2 the major plugins were updated alomost as fast as bukkit
     
  7. Offline

    Major

    Why are you here if you dislike the project so much?

    Also, don't blame your own incompetence on Bukkit. If you'd taken the sensible precaution of backing up your maps, you wouldn't have such a problem.
     
  8. Offline

    s15c

    I'm kind of sitting here wondering what this means... and it's not the super best news IMO-
    I'll have to wait for the plugin dev's to update everything, I'll have to reinstall, reconfigure, redo permissions, and at that point I'll basically be right back where we are now. I'm not a huge fan of spending five hours clicking, dragging, and

    I mean, exciting happy happy that Bukkit joined Mojang, but I can't help but think that this won't really change how the features work or what it looks like to ignorant noobs, which is more or less all I care about.
     
  9. Offline

    Abe Froeman

    Hey Evil -

    Frozen linked me to this and I just wanted to pop over and congratulate you. You've done a wonderful job here and I'm proud of you. Stop by and say hi when you get a chance.

    Take care,
    Abe
     
  10. Offline

    Frogging101

    Will this new thing be open source?
     
  11. Offline

    agafaba

    All this huffing and puffing kind of reminds me of when superperms came out.
     
    andrewpo and MCTSS like this.
  12. Offline

    cybertron742

    Woo Great job bukkit and mojang well done!!
     
  13. Offline

    --GJ--

    Zombies! In the forums!

    [zombie][zombie][zombie][zombie][zombie][zombie][zombie][zombie]
     
  14. Nope, it will be part of Minecraft so I can't see how this can be open source. (And I'm farly sure I've read a "no" somewhere in this thread before to that question)
     
  15. Offline

    AndyLaw

    Congratulations !!! :)
    Very exciting and interesting. I hope it would be able to test same products :) Hope to see it soon and one more time congrats ;)
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page