Bukkit: The Next Chapter

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

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  1. Offline

    EvilSeph

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    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

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    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
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    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. 1) Clarification on "dumb" client api

    2) Will we see a push for multithreading of the server?
     
  3. Offline

    Dinnerbone Bukkit Team Member

    Okay, this is tricky to put into words, and remember that it's just an idea and not official!

    Have you ever played WoW? The "addons" for that are written in lua, and are purely visual. They can't control mobs and make them dance, they don't have to figure out where a player is teleporting to, they won't need to worry about calculating incoming damage from 5 different sources at the same time. But they can represent all of this on screen, they can draw a new UI or create a minimap or replace the chat with a whole new system entirely. This is all stuff that the client should be able to do.

    Let's say you want to implement a rock-climbing mod. You have a server mod that adds the new block ("rocks", I guess), it provides a basic texture of the new rocks and controls how players move up and down it. Then you'd have a client mod that draws the rocks in 3D as opposed to just a flat surface, and animates the players arms moving between the rocks when climbing. The server is all logic, and the client is all visual.

    As far as making the client "dumb"; it would stop guessing everything that happens and creating silly block lag or visual bugs when the server disagrees because of some mods, and will accept the word of the server for everything.

    Does this help at all? If not, let me know and I'll try to clarify whatever you're confused about! I'm also adding this to the FAQ.
     
    efstajas, Boose, Bjourk and 5 others like this.
  4. Offline

    nicatronTg

    Congratulations EvilSeph, Dinnerbone, and everyone involved with the core Bukkit project. You've done a fantastic job so far, and I'm glad to see this turn into a success. Fantastic news!
     
  5. Offline

    27ace27

    Minecraft and bukkit as one?! Pinch me I must be dreaming! Congrats guys! Just one question, will you tweet your progress on the API?
     
  6. Offline

    Dinnerbone Bukkit Team Member

    1. see above
    2. as I said in the FAQ, I'll try my hardest but it's a huge change so no guarantees!
     
  7. Offline

    Jacek

    Minecraft is not going to be single player any more ? The logic stuff needs to be available for SP too.
     
  8. Offline

    dockter

    Hm, Spout Server is already Multi-threaded....
     
    fahlman likes this.
  9. Offline

    troed

    Your fact is factless.
     
  10. Offline

    Dinnerbone Bukkit Team Member

    The new server that they're writing from scratch? That'll be why! :D

    Singleplayer would spawn a small version of a server in the background. Again, I want to stress this, this is just an idea and not official (someone will read this and think otherwise, I'm sure!)

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

    dockter

    Read the license, Minecarft is a commercial product and bukkit source code is open source, hows that for facts?
     
  12. Offline

    TheFluffey

    Will the new settlement's API be compatible with bukkit plugins?
     
  13. Offline

    Dinnerbone Bukkit Team Member

    As I said in the FAQ, we will try to keep as much compatible as possible, but there are no guarantees and you will have to recompile. That said, you won't have to rewrite from scratch either.
     
  14. Offline

    Jacek

    I was hoping you would say that. Notch mentioned that idea a while ago in a tweet / blog post.

    I'm still excited for single player plugins then :D
     
    hammale likes this.
  15. Offline

    Fishrock123

    The R4 / R5 event system is awesome, but it is GPLv3, how will that work? :S I'm afraid we'll loose this great new system. :/
     
    NuclearW likes this.
  16. Offline

    Josvth

    Congratulations!

    Are you going to do something about the way multiplayer works right now? I've read somewhere that normally when you are playing singleplayer you are actually the client and the server at the same time and when playing multi player you are just the client. And that in Minecraft singleplayer and multiplayer are two whole different things. Both having it's own bugs and problems. Is this true?
     
  17. Offline

    samp20

    I'm just wondering, will non minecraft specific API's such as superperms and ServiceManager be included in the new API?

    EDIT: And congratulations, you thoroughly deserve this for all the effort you've put into the bukkit project:D
     
  18. Offline

    dockter

    Yeah, its great, too bad its the end of it. Just really really sucks, wish I hadn't just hired that dev to re-do one of my plugin for the R4/5 event system now, whats the point.
     
  19. Offline

    Milkywayz

    Notch kinda just chills nowadays. He should at least work on a future game, but who knows he could be for all we know, he doesn't have the same transparency he had with minecraft, remember " the word of notch"?, it seems he just makes a game in a few days, plays it, gets bored, scraps it, then repeat.

    You hired a dev to redo your plugin? You realize the changes were extremely easy to fix..

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

    Acrobot

    Congratulations :)
    By the way, will Bukkit still be a modding community?
     
  21. Offline

    Dinnerbone Bukkit Team Member

    Everything will be rewritten. It may be compatible with the current way, which is fine and doesn't breach GPL, but the implementation (which you don't need to worry about) will have changed. Or maybe it will be slightly different if we decide to, but we'll see in the future.

    See my reply just above yours. I'd "like" to merge them into one.

    I don't know, sorry. If they will, they'll be rewritten and there's a chance it will be compatible with what you have already written. And thanks!

    Bukkit is not dead. I said this in the FAQ and I'm saying it again. Bukkit is not dead and will continue to live for many months to come. Do not give up, keep going as normal - please! :)
     
    manniL, sillyrosster and Fishrock123 like this.
  22. Offline

    Jacek

    The point is it will work with R5. I don't see where the confusion is ?
     
  23. Offline

    hammale

    o r u guys actually moving to Sweenden or r u just consultants?
     
  24. Offline

    troed

    There's also no contradiction whatsoever between "commercial" and "open source". In general, I suggest reading up on facts before trying to post them.
     
  25. Offline

    dockter

    My point is this: bukkit's API is basically dead. They are moving to the new Minecraft (*Closed Source*) API, which means this event system R(Anythinghere) means nothing, the plugins wont work.
     
  26. Offline

    Gravity

    Psh, don't be all like "oh everything's done I'll just give up on my plugins" because as soon as the API goes live for Minecraft, server owners EVERYWHERE will want plugins for their servers, never knowing it was possible before. It will be like a kid in a candy shop and you have a chance to get a real good following ;) Done right, this will create an even better situation for everyone, server admins, plugin developers, community members, etc.

    Also, you're going to die someday. So why go on and do anything, right? Just sit there at home all day and sulk? Nah, that's not how things work.

    This isn't NOW it's months down the line.. Giving up like that because someday it wont work isn't a good developer mindset.
     
    Bjourk, Stone_Tigris, Zeroth and 3 others like this.
  27. Offline

    dockter

    You have no idea on commercial vs. open sources licensing. Go design and license software for a few years then come back.
     
  28. Offline

    Dinnerbone Bukkit Team Member

    As I've said just a few posts above yours, bukkit is not dead.
     
  29. Offline

    dockter

    People are not going to continue to develop plugins for an API this is set to be killed off, thinking otherwise is silly.
     
  30. Offline

    Gravity

    Let's not turn this into a hate-fest now..

    It's not being killed off, it's going to be improved tenfold if done properly. And having a solid base to transfer off of will get get you a lot farther than not having one. I know people who have gone from Minecraft SMP direct injection to hMod to Bukkit, this stuff happens all the time, except now you have the same team working on it who know the community, know how things should work, and have Mojang behind them to make sure it gets done.
     
  31. Offline

    dockter

    I think this says it best honestly:

    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.

    What does this mean for Bukkit developers?
    They are going to have to start over in a few months; from scratch. There most likely will be no Bukkit compatibility plugin for the Minecraft API.

    What does this mean for Bukkit Server Admins?
    Remember the hey0 to Bukkit transition? No? Chaos. You will have to start from scratch. All your configs will change. You will need to redo all your permissions. Redo everything. I hope you are one of the few rich servers who could afford full time developer staff. Because you are going to need them.

    This whole bukkit/mojang situation makes me wanna go watch the movie Anti-Trust.

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