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. Offline

    Crayder

    Huge development!
     
  3. Offline

    Fishrock123

    Crap. This isn't going to end well as closed source. At all.
     
  4. Offline

    Don Redhorse

    well would you have stuck around when your pulls got forcefully rejected because you made a tiny mistake? just take a look at a lot of the reasons why pulls weren't accepted. That plus the good way how questions and feedback was handled.. well we will see..
     
  5. Offline

    Dark_Balor

    Congratz guys ... But what I see is like other, end of bukkit.
    Mojang did it in the last, taking down Bukkit by removing the head ... quite genius idea they add.

    What we need is a new team to replace you and take Bukkit, to continue the adventure, but will you accept it ? (the license yes)
     
    iPhysX and Don Redhorse like this.
  6. Offline

    Don Redhorse

  7. Offline

    fffizzz

    Congratulations to the team. I for one am happy with the announcement. I will say it, that most the people crying about "changes" probably shouldnt be running servers anyway. Ive been with bukkit since the very beginning and its more stable now than its ever been. You can not improve something with out making changes, its a fact of life.
     
  8. Offline

    iPhysX

    Dark_Balor they wouldn't let anyone take over even if they wanted to.

    fffizzz they arent making changes. They are taking it to the slaughterhouse.

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

    hatstand

    That's the fun part about it being open source, isn't it?
     
    iPhysX likes this.
  10. Offline

    troed

    There's no problem with code written by the "core" developers. It's up to others if they wish to relicense or not.

    git blame

    Trivial.

    They don't _promise_ compatibility. That in itself means they will try, though.

    So I'll start by proclaiming that Courier will be ported to the official API, if possible.

    (Actually I'll happily dual license my code to Mojang if they want to incorporate note items into the game itself .. )
     
  11. Offline

    Don Redhorse

    Also I doubt that a lot of developers who did make input to code will allow it after what they did go through. I think @sk69q for sure not
     
  12. Offline

    iPhysX

    troed Courier is awesome. I'll also stick with developing when the time comes...
     
    Zeroth likes this.
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    moose517

    while i think its awesome that bukkit it working with mojang and they really started a legit modding api for devs they are gonna be very limited because they stick to vanilla ways. IMO mojang would be better off working with spout team because they are actually following through with totally custom stuff, not just vanilla content.
     
  14. Offline

    Don Redhorse

    nope, up to bleeding a lot of the pulls where not into the official repository.. most of the time Dinnerbone said thanks so in the commit.

    I honestly doubt that the api will be compatible and that interaction with the community will become better. Proof me wrong.... really... I REALLY wish that you proof me wrong :(
     
  15. Offline

    MonsieurApple

    Sweet! I'm sure this will open up tons of new possibilities for both developers and users.

    Can't wait to see what's next ;)
     
    fffizzz, scar_ and Zeroth like this.
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    samp20

    Personally I thing the minecraft server API will be a huge improvement. Bukkit has always taken it's time to implement the new features (nobody's fault), whereas now the features will be there right with new minecraft versions. It will probably be a while between 1.2 and 1.3 to code everything, although I'm more than happy to wait :)
     
  17. Offline

    Don Redhorse

    well... they also already have a client api... something which isn't there there yet..

    so what will it be.... Mojang stepping on Spout to not release a product which is in official competition to them?

    Or do they let Spout go.. with the problem that when the spout team pull their stuff of hopefully all plugins from bukkit will still work on spout, plus you have full customization on server and client very easily. Biggest joke of all:

    Spoutcraft doesn't support cracked mode...
     
  18. Offline

    xyberviri

    I really love bukkit, if it wasn't for bukkit i would have never really wanted to get involed with learning java, i also would have never known where to start, trying to start with the client side of minecraft is just horrible to get started with, plugins are easy to learn, now i intend to start learning client modding.

    They really should have brough in space toad, eloraam and albaka in addition to the bukkit's team.

    that would have rounded everything off.
     
    Don Redhorse likes this.
  19. Offline

    darkcloud784

    I personally would like you to develop it for spout, although I understand the idea of going with official because its well official. Though I dont think people really understand the disadvatages it has, granted its official but it wasn't designed for larger servers, it wasn't designed for performance nor is/was it designed for being mod freindly. Even with a modding API being designed now, it still will be more difficult due to the fact it will be all closed.

    Spout will be multi-threaded (which is what it should have been in the beginning), it will have a full API covering pretty much everything, and it will be OPEN. Allowing for alot more friendly development.
     
    fahlman likes this.
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    Don Redhorse

    well I guess it will take them more than one month to make a full blown api, make it public, get the community and environment set up, get a lot of plugins before they come even close bukkit.

    Only problem will be that will be the point where they release mc 1.3 which will break bukkit for good.
     
  21. Offline

    Evenprime

    People always wanted a real Modding API from Mojang, now you get one. ;)

    If you feel that it is too limited or not what you want, you can always build another API (like Bukkit once did for vanilla minecraft) on top of it. Or use Spout, but that'll probably take months before it gets released, and even longer to provide the "vanilla" minecraft experience, if they are actually capable of doing it as a plugin to their server (which I doubt).
     
    scar_ likes this.
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    hatstand

    Well, we've got months to see what this turns out to be - Who knows, it might not be the apocalypse. Hopefully we'll get some information on it as development moves forward though.
     
  23. Offline

    Sleaker

    I would like to see Curse drop the Bukkit on their site (except to indicate version releases that plugins can be compatible with) and instead of being a Bukkit specific site necessarily, move to what it should have always been. Minecraft specific without partiality to bukkit stuff (I realize it's run as a bukkit supported site right now).
     
  24. Offline

    aPunch

    Are you sure the new official API will not take as long as Spout to be released?
     
    Stone_Tigris, fahlman and Mukrakiish like this.
  25. Offline

    Kongolan

    In fact when Spout gets his next build out soon, they will become the ruler.
    A official API support should combinate Spouts costum and graphical advantage and bukkits core without limitated by Mojang, else it going to be worst case for us the developers.
     
  26. Offline

    musicin3d

    Here's another positive:
    If bukkit breaks my plugins (and the ones I use), I'll stop developing and playing. If I stop developing and playing, I'll clean more and work more. This doesn't sound too bad. Bukkit, please piss me off! ;)
     
  27. Offline

    lordmarcus

    Multithreading! Multithreading! Multithreading! Multithreading!
    Multithreading! Multithreading! Multithreading! Multithreading!
    Multithreading! Multithreading! Multithreading! Multithreading!
    Multithreading! Multithreading! Multithreading! Multithreading!
     
  28. Offline

    vein_mx

    Congrats Bukkit! Look forward to see what comes out of it =]
     
    Zeroth likes this.
  29. Offline

    Don Redhorse

    Also there is one issue:

    Mojang always said they didn't want to implement stuff from mods because they thought that was copying... so what does it leave us?

    Either they start copying spout or mod features now or they keep it closed source and vanilla or they opensource it.

    A lot of the plugins hook into original deobfuscated minecraft code atm this will be gone if they don't make the api open. And the quality of the bukkit api documentation is quite problematic to see politely, without access to the code I would have failed a lot of the time to figure out why something didn't work.

    So I don't see a lot of good things out of this for the community... except if you want to play sophisticated vanilla style.

    For the developer this move cuts possibilities.
     
    Bone008 likes this.
  30. Offline

    NinjaZidane

    Um....its possible and it IS in progress and works:
    https://github.com/SpoutDev/Spout
    https://github.com/SpoutDev/Vanilla

    Please don't post unless you know what you are talking about.
     
  31. Offline

    Evenprime

    Seeing how (estimated) more than half of the time and energy of writing Bukkit went into working around limitations of the vanilla server and client and the wish not to modify those too much, as it makes the obfuscation/deobfuscation painful, yes, I do believe that it will not take as long as Spout.

    After all, now the Bukkit team can dig right into Minecrafts source code and make changes where they should be made (server and clientside), maybe even modify the Minecraft protocol and make it more useful.
     
    thernztrom and mushroomhostage like this.
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