Bukkit: The Next Chapter

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



A big "thank you!" is due for the many sponsors we've had over the life of the project:

Curse
eXophase.com - for hosting the project at the beginning and helping us get off our feet
Unimatrix
Arcdigital
Multiplay - especially Steve Hartland

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.

 

Oh jeez I'm blushing. I'm so excited.

 

Why Does Mine Always say End Of Stream? and lots of errors when i start the server

 

Not that this is the correct thread to ask for help with R6, but you have a plugin that isn't updated. Please post any other questions regarding this in the correct forum/thread.

 

Does this mean that bukkit will not come out with a 1.2 version?

 

well you could donate to plugin developers instead... atm my ratio is 1500 deployed plugins = zero donations... don't know how the ratio of others is... perhaps a little bit higher..

 

There are already devbuilds of Bukkit for 1.2 available (not suitable for production servers yet though) so it's quite obvious that there will be.

 

I doubt that ANY of the moderators had any problems asking for features or additions... when I look into the feedback thread and on other requests it looks different though..

 

I approve of this message.

 

Wait, what? You are not a fan of Mojang, but you are on the staff of BukkitDev, a site which would not even exist if it were not for them? How did that happen?

 

TnT... what happens next with the Bukkit team, the Bukkit community and Mojang is absolutely what my question is about. Look bub, You may hate talking about pushing environments to the client, you may hate that Spouts greater capabilities will be inevitably brought up... but a GMod like pushing environments to the client solution is absolutely desired by us server owners as a majority.

You and the other mods in this forum have done nothing but derailed the subject of pushing to the client at every turn, and frankly been extremely close minded about it when ever its brought up... I point to this thread as an example. But my question still stands. Does the ex-Bukkit team have plans to work on it?

I want to know if I need to switch to Spout. There is months of planning and waiting in between with this.

Bukkit will be dead in the upcoming months. The ex-bukkit team is working on the Minecraft API. No existing plugins will work with it.

We are in for hell.

 

Still going on?

Maybe you haven't noticed,but um...

R5? Really? We are already in R6 right now, heading to R7. THIS is what I fear to happen to the API as well. Promise people a very cool API with all the bells and whistles, and then having to wait another month before it is debugged. Note: less people, less time spent debugging. Even less than it is the case now.

And, TBH, even Minecraft 1.2.2 itself (the client) is buggy. It got a nice auto-lighting fixing feature, but now that a new chunk format got introduced, the lighting in general is even MORE glitched. I want the MC from the beta versions back, where lighting just WORKED and you didn't see dark shadows in every corner and every cave.

No. I still see no future in the API on these facts alone. When you release new versions 'just so you have something' will result in poorly written systems. Something that you cannot have on a program running 24/7 weeks long.

 

Just as an FYI, we're not headed for R7. We're headed for R0 for MC 1.2 - there won't be any more RBs for MC 1.1.

 

there is mc 1.2.3 out with a fix for that I think..

yes.. which means again it looks like that the lastet RB's before a next MC version have issues.. well server crashes caused by plugins who did work before?

but of course that is not bukkits fault... btw.. the fix for that will be in a build for 1.2... so either the plugin developers will update their plugins AGAIN because that bug was introduced AFTER the so breaking R5 or you have to wait and stay on R4.

Also there was thread in the developer forums which did hold information about breaking plugins... that isn't updated anymore... the last one was from Dinnerbone about R5.. but only on the generic stuff, nothing on any of the other changes they did.

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

I might just add a little something to this, as per usual the release version of vanilla is substantially worse performance wise than the Snapshots.

Every Snapshot leading up to 1.2.2 was for me at least running at a consistent 100-290 FPS with all whistles turned up. It was great the chunks loaded fast in SP, noticeably less chunk load lag over 1.1. Then along comes the release, now I don't know what the **** they add to a release that is different then a snapshot but what ever it is slows the engine down to crawl and runs like ****.

Release version tested on fresh world same hardware I now get the same crap I got in 1.1 release version that is 45-80 FPS. Now I hate to bring up spout again as its been flogged to death already by other people here. I choose to run its client for FAIRLY OBVIOUS IMO reasons eg. Client has a slew of better visual controls and sliders it supports custom key binds and macro's and command binds, but most importantly the client runs at a consistent 100-300 FPS and has done so ever since 1.8 all the way thru to 1.1 and I expect NO different from it for 1.2.2.

Now if ANYONE can give me a VALID and REASONABLE reason why I should use vanilla over that kind of improvement then go for it I would really love to hear it, really.


{P.S If you doubt me I can easily make a video or screen cap that F3 using both to prove my point I will even provide a DXDIAG so you can see its the same gear I will have this diagnostic showing next the game window so you can see nothing has been tampered with.}.

Again I am not picking sides still I am just sharing my experiences with BOTH party's. There is a reason many of us do like spout over vanilla and its not because we are evil people who hate change and hate Bukkit and Mojang its quite literally a logical reason that is backed up with clear statistics of performance.

Lets face the real facts we mod because we want to improve the system both performance wise and game play wise, with this valid logic in mind where do you think the community will turn too if our wishes are not met ?, esp if what happens means worse performance and just breaks everything we update and code every second patch.

That is our argument I just don't understand what is so hard for the other fanboys to accept about it, It's is perfectly natural that modders will want to go with what ever performs and caters. You only have to take a brief look thru our modding history to see that every wrapper before has been superseded eventually and when it has we have all moved on.

Again I just want to say this as some people still have TROUBLE READING, a lot of us arguing these things are not evil and out to boycott Bukkit we are simply looking out for our interests and telling Bukkit what we want and need in order for us to stick around.


Edit:
It is worth also noting that SpoutClient would never have existed in the first place if Mojang were listening to the community and fixing the mistakes they made or features that never got implemented and I guess the same is true for every other CUSTOM API that extends Bukkit.

Why would a developer waste their time creating a whole new client or modified event system if the current system covered everything they needed ? after all it is this very same reasoning that brought the birth of Bukkit to being with, if not for the lack of wanted features and events we would all still be using Hmod.

 

You don't need Spout for GUIs. You just need a client and server mod that communicate through a channel.

Strictly speaking, that's not true. If one contributor refuses to give permission, all they have to do is rewrite that section of the code. So, unless you have very large contributions, you wouldn't be blocking anything by not giving permission.

 

Bub? If you want people to listen to what you have to say, take a more respectful tone. Also, I have big dreams for the server to push mods to the client (I have mentioned it previously). Spout having greater capabilities is yet to be seen - they aren't finished yet. I don't think you can save your worlds at this point. However, if they achieve what they hope to, it looks like it will be a good platform. Still, Spout is their own community with their own goals, and not related to the discussion at hand.

Derailed? How so? The topic is Bukkit - the next chapter.

You may be in for hell, but I am not. Speak for yourself.

 

This is by far the smartest move Mojang has made for Minecraft! Thanks for making the admin's job 100x easier Bukkit Team!!

 

THANK YOU BUKKIT TEAM


No really, thanks for killing Bukkit. You at once shove all the developer community right into the open arms of people who actually know how to manage and treat an open source Project.


Unleash the flow!

 

@ledhead900

Wth ? It is true, i just tried spout and i got like 60 fps (i only got 31 with vanilla)

Im surprised why mojang never tried to improve the game's performance. It CAN be improved optifine and spout prooved it.

Back on topic, i'm just hoping that the bukkit plugins will be compatible with mojang's api.

At least, they should try to make it compatible.

 

I want a very good GUI in new hybrid Minekkit Server

 

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Again, if I recall correctly, you can get the SDK and write iOS software for free; you only need to pay for the key that allows you to install it on a non-jailbroken iOS device. That was basically my point when I said the SDK is available for free.

With regards to vanilla performance... I think you can reasonably expect it to improve at this point. They have five developers now to work on that.

 

jasvecht wow best comment ever xD

I didn't know SpoutCRAFT also improved performance...something to keep in mind for me...

 

well i wasnt too... until i tried it out earlier this day and got double fps o:

 

OMG THAT SO COOL HELL YEAH!
I was really surprised when i read that you cooperate with mojang and thats so freaking cool, oh yeah yes jesus goddamn yeah! LMFAO THATS COOOOOOOLL!!!!!!!!

 

I think yes, cause 1.2.3 contains fixes.

 

Well.. That was about time! ;P

 

Can you please look into client integrity verification (maybe as an option for servers to require this) to combat modded / hacked clients. Steam does this for HLDS servers for instance, where servers can elect to only allow either 1) completely vanilla 2) partially modded (legit texture packs only, for instance), or 3) any client mods.

This is one of the biggest things we are constantly fighting on our server. XRAY cheating, etc.

 

Yes, please. Evenprime is stopping development of NoCheat, and this is just a terrible thing to try to battle via plugins in the first place.

 

This doesn't work with a Java-based client - people can easily write modify the client to remove such checks.
Sorry!

 

I must say, this is a lame excuse. Under one thousand persons who try, there are 999 who fail. Blaming Java for this is absurd. I'm sure I don't have to explain you how other clients (e.g. written in C/C++) do crack away such checks.