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

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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
    [​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

    hatstand

    And no rent.
     
    Sayshal likes this.
  3. Offline

    Smex

    Get real.
     
    fahlman likes this.
  4. Offline

    woox2k

    Yeah but furniture will be staying in the old house and new one does not have any yet... people will have hard time getting used to hang around in the empty house (and ofc they dont want to take old stuff with them)
     
  5. Offline

    Mukrakiish

    Pure gold. +1 for you.
     
  6. Offline

    Evenprime

    But for now, both houses belong to them so they can live in the old house while they buy furniture for the new house. How far are people willing to take this metaphor?
     
    Meduax and Puremin0rez like this.
  7. Offline

    hatstand

    A horribly long way.
     
  8. Offline

    aehoooo

    No its not.
    You do not upgrade a opensourced projet to a closed source one. You create a different one.
    This idea of "bukkit is just changing name, everybody who use it will just use the new one" is wrong, this idea is what they are making all the comunity believe with the post.
     
  9. Offline

    Sayshal

    enough with the analogies.

    Also I noticed Afforess liked this post so I'm going to address him aswell.

    How is your spout server mod working? Is it 100% done? Why isn't it working 100% like it should?
    All those questions are retorical by the way. My point is that with this new "house", the heads of bukkit can finally paint the walls and get customized furniture. They'll be working with Mojang to make servers easier to run, faster to run. Who knows? Maybe bukkit can help Mojang with some bugs? lag issues? Not only this, but this means the grey-area between updates and bukkit updates will dissapear. I, as a server owner will no longer have to wait 2 1/2 months for bukkit to get stable. It'll happen at the same time. You are all failing to see that this is a great opportunity to "refresh" the politics, the drama, the hatred from the community. Bukkit is not going anywhere, their simply changing their brand, and a bit of how they operate.
     
    xorvious likes this.
  10. Offline

    WackyWocky

    Suddenly, the sun came out, lighting up my dark cave I live in and call a room. The computer screen reflecting the beautiful outer world with its nature and social abilities. I stood up and started walking to join this wonderful world of- BUKKIT JOINED MOJANG!!!!!! *jumps back in chair* HELL YEAH, I'M STAYING RIIIIGHT HERE!!!! *cue ominous music, and darkened skies with lightning*
     
  11. Offline

    iPhysX

    Sayshal and hatstand like this.
  12. Offline

    Celtic Minstrel

    Why would you assume that plugins have to be completely rewritten from scratch? In actual fact it's most likely that plugin authors will be able to reuse most of their code.

    They may have removed author tags, but the information about who contributed what is still there through the repository. Just load up any source file on github and click the "blame" link.

    Only potentially. The authors of those APIs could still give permission for them to be used. (To be honest though the services API was kinda useless.)

    Which is in itself a record of who wrote the code.

    Quite frankly this is a pretty stupid thing to say. Why would Mojang be hiring these people if they didn't want them to have genuine input into the codebase?
     
  13. Offline

    SheepSteve

    Congratulations! I hope this brings the bukkit team many more years of work (the good kind) and a greater community experience! Cheers!
     
    Sayshal likes this.
  14. Offline

    Mukrakiish

    All "code" based hooplah aside...how exactly is joing in with Mojang, pulling an ol' switcheroo for plugin devs with the R5 change around, the left over loose ends and other politics that have never been resolved vis The Staff/Communication/Drama/Etc going to change with them getting jobs and more hardware?

    Honestly, I'm asking. I'm not trying to be rude...but I really don't see how that will get fixed with them getting jobs. (Good on them by the way for achieving a payroll through the love of a hobby btw...)
     
  15. Offline

    hatstand

    I wouldn't say useless as much as under-utilised. It had potential, it just never used much (or at all) beyond Vault.
     
  16. Offline

    Don Redhorse

    You just said:

    And I replied that they didn't think this through? Honestly I would really like to get hired just like this, not knowing what I will do, which amount of payment I get etc....

    So if that is true what EvilSeph posted he is one of the luckiest people in the universe...

    And I can't just believe that there weren't any talks how they go forward, if yes I must admit that some rules of business practice don't exist for mojang..

    But I need to agree to one thing... there is only OTHERS posting in here... nobody of the people from the bukkit team... they prefer to stay in the back... like always.... a good sign of community leadership.
     
  17. Offline

    woox2k

    Will ansver directly... you really think that the head devs will help updating Bukkit until Minecraft API is ready and filled up with plugins ?
    Not really and that means at one point we have to choose between users who have updated clients and outdated bukkit what holds all important plugins for us (server admins)
     
  18. Offline

    Celtic Minstrel

    It didn't effectively solve the problem it was made to solve. To use a service, you still need the classfile for that service, and that generally means you need the plugin providing that service. If there were a central repository of service interfaces for people to implement (like what Vault could have been but isn't), then it might have been useful.
     
  19. Offline

    Sayshal

    They'll be working with the creators, which in general will help them. The communication alone will help. I've never programmed a plugin, but I know it's goddamn tough some/most of the time. I'm not just referring to the jobs, that's just an awesome accomplishment.

    I guess what I'm having trouble saying is this:
    I love Bukkit, I love Spout, I love Mojang and I love MineCraft. Even though this is a giant, rough, clumsy step, it's a step in the right direction. Instead of Bukkit having to "cross their fingers" that Mojang will give them a heads up, or even access to the stuff they need. They WILL have that access, so every time jeb_ tweets his ass off about flying ninja creeper-killing squids, Bukkit can get started on adding the features/API's etc to the multiplayer version.
     
  20. Offline

    samp20

    Don Redhorse For all we know they could be having a meeting right now.
     
  21. Offline

    woox2k

    Yes ofc eventually it will be work out just fine, but it's long way there and well many of the servers do not make it... (probably mine too that's why i am most displeased here)
     
    Sayshal likes this.
  22. Offline

    Sayshal

    They already said they'll be updating to 1.2 comfortably.
    I totally understand what you're trying to say, and as a server admin I'm a bit worried too. But this is a good thing in the long run.
     
  23. Offline

    Zeroth

    So I know that the Spout devs have talked about "BukkitBridge," some system for loading Bukkit plugins into Spout.

    This makes me thing that it would be really simple to create a Bukkit plugin loader with the new server API so that you could have backwards compatibility with multiple versions of craftbukkit!

    Fear not, community, for there is always a solution. The only thing that this merger can bring is good!

    [EDIT] As a server plugin dev, I really hate the idea that my users would need to download a client mod for extra functionality. Thats why I have stuck with Bukkit, and thats why I am excited for the added possibilities that an official API would bring to the client experience!!
     
    Bjourk, jwnordquist and troed like this.
  24. Offline

    troed


    ... in jeb's own words:

    "We will, however, help bukkit to be compatible with 1.2, to avoid having a long gap while you wait for the official Minecraft server to catch up."

    In my book, that's something positive.
     
  25. Offline

    Sayshal

    Okay so the moving van took a left at Albuquerque, last time I checked it'll be here soon enough. Unfortunately like anything transfered through life, things will be damaged. Like that damn lamp.. I loved that lamp.
     
  26. Offline

    TheNoobWar

    Congratulations guys! You deserve it, I can't wait to hear news about the mod api, I've been slowing turning away from minecraft, but these big news made me stay for a little longer.
     
    Sayshal likes this.
  27. Offline

    Evenprime

    (That's why I hate metaphors, it's hard to map them to what they should represent after some time)
    They already announced that Bukkit will work as long as it has to. Therefore there'll always be a cozy place for people to live in for Bukkit team, plugin devs and server admins.
     
    Sayshal and iPhysX like this.
  28. Offline

    woox2k


    Lets just hope that jeb is not Notch and after 1.2 we have more bukkit updates, because we all know it takes way longer for devs creating working API from scratch! (and ofc plugins to make it worth for server admins if there is no bridges)
     
  29. Offline

    Sayshal

    They may not be able to copy code but considering they've already made an API for so many parts of Minecraft, redoing that (maybe even better/faster/easier) should take less time.
     
  30. Offline

    Marlamin

    You are taking things out of context and putting words into my mouth, I said talks technicalities, not that there were no talks at all. Sure, they should have fleshed it out a bit more before announcing this, but I don't see what difference it makes if it was announced now or in a month.
     
  31. Offline

    Kane

    The big question is any of you actually planning on moving :)?
     
    scar_ and iPhysX like this.
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