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

    [​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

    Fishrock123

    Cool. Um.. wow! Congratz!

    I really hope you guys help Mojang go a bit towards the way of CraftBukkit++ though. Mojang's code is terribly inefficient.

    EDIT: Closed source hate will ensue. IS ensuing.
    This better be darn good. Looks like I might have to prepare to transfer my projects to spout.
    Edit: Does this mean Bukkit is going to die.. now? Nevermind, support up to 1.2, apparently.

    Edit: See Dinnerbone's FAQ.
     
  3. Offline

    Kainzo

    (Bukkit started in 2010!) Right?

    Grats btw
     
  4. Offline

    Delocaz

    Oh shit!
     
    garrett2smart87 likes this.
  5. Offline

    Vaupell

    This is exciting news.

    Looking forward to some products ;) (maybe some testing)
     
    mapkbelgor and TheHox like this.
  6. Offline

    MRDRMUFN

    Nice, now we need better ways to prevent cheating on servers that doesnt cause issues for respectable players
     
    kernet and TheHox like this.
  7. Offline

    DylanP

    So, Bukkit will no longer be working on Bukkit, but instead be working on the Minecraft API?
     
  8. Offline

    Marlamin

    Cool cool cool. I see many good things in the future.
     
  9. Offline

    Royalgamer06

    F* cking epic!
     
    Kerrtastic likes this.
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    Firestar

    wow, amazing news!
     
  11. Offline

    Wahrheit

    Cheers for the Multiplay shoutout, I appreciate that and I'm sure our higher ups do as well. :)

    This bodes well for Ronaru, looking forward to the future!
     
  12. Offline

    Credomane

    You mean 2010? Otherwise I squeezed an entire year into 2 months.

    Awesome to hear that Mojang turned to you guys for the official API!

    My questions is your API going to be the server side only? Or are you going to also handle the client side too? Would be awesome to have both sides of Minecraft share a modding API. Even if a client mod was incompatible for use on the server. Learning one API for both server AND client as opposed to the current one API for server and several almost API for the client.
     
  13. Offline

    thernztrom

    Wow, thats awesome news! Huge congratz! :D
     
  14. Offline

    Cory_

    Awesome! Congrats Bukkit! - I'm one of many knew this was going to eventually happen.
     
  15. Offline

    Kainzo

    It was corrected :p
     
  16. Offline

    TnT

    Extremely exciting news EvilSeph. Congratulations to EvilSeph, Tahg, Grum and Dinnerbone. Your hard work has truly paid off.
     
    slipcor likes this.
  17. Offline

    Chipmunk9998

    Wow, this was unexpected! Congrats! =D
     
  18. Offline

    iffa

    Meh, looks like my way of congratulating didn't work. I'm outta here
     
  19. Offline

    plumblum

    First congratulations to the entire #bukkit team :) hosting a server without you guys would have been like having a stick shoved 3 feet up your ass.

    2nd. what changes can we expect from this ? or will it continue on as it has done.
    and just in case, im fine if things will continue as they have done :) bukkit is just that good.
     
  20. Offline

    Credomane

    I saw that after my post went through. I apparently took a long time to read the article. It went from no replies and 6 views to many of each.
     
  21. Offline

    xGhOsTkiLLeRx

    'gratz!

    Wow, bukkit joins mojang <3
     
  22. Offline

    ivmoriginal

    Congratulations. One small step for minecraft, and one big step for minecraft's future.

    P.S Does that mean you get paid now :)
     
  23. Offline

    WayGroovy

    Yes, that seems to be the only portion of the conversation that is unclear. Are you like, Mojang employees, a contractor team, individual third party contractors, or other?

    In any event, congratulations, and I continue to look forward to the future of minecraft.
     
    Avarice likes this.
  24. Offline

    Sleaker

    please correct me if I'm wrong on any of these points but it seems like re-creation of a Fresh Server API into the official minecraft spells a few things:

    A) Bukkit as an alternative server mod will stop getting updates
    B) Due to official source not being GPL, Bukkit will be unable to pull current code into official source
    C) Due to official source not being Open any form of community involvement (such as bleeding) will not exist

    Now these are just observations based on the current situation. While I think it's great that the Bukkit team is being added to mojang and I congratulate you guys for your work, it seems like there are some very specific concerns that would prevent it from being community oriented and which ends certain aspects of community support and involvement as a lot of developers have come to know.

    Do we just stop issuing pull requests onto bukkit and/or helping support it since it's most likely getting phased away?

    These are some legitimate concerns that I think need to be addressed so we know what the future is about, especially after all this talk about improving community involvement in bukkit updates and such.
     
  25. Offline

    Sayshal

    Sleaker has a point.

    Not only that, but if support up to 1.2, what about 1.3? Will you truly be able to essentially re-create bukkit under the name "MineCraft API" in 2-3 months? If not what happens then? Will we have a "blackout" of bukkit while you guys work on the MineCraft API.

    Once again I am so excited about this news, but have some concerns.
     
  26. How is this going to affect the ModLoader/Minecraft Forge modding community? Almost every solid client (+server/bukkit ported) mod has been built using these and have done so for two years now. Are you going to incorporate and build upon the ML/MCF (hell, even Spout) APIs or are you going to be developing something completely new? The reason I ask is that I can see the modding community fracturing and losing a great deal of good devs and mods through this transition, as there are dozens, if not hundreds, of gigantic mods (such as IndustrialCraft 2, BuildCraft, RedPower, Aether, etc) that have grown and matured into solid expansions of the core game using these existing tools.

    Mind, an official Mojang client/server beast that incorporates ML/MCF client/server modding and a Spout-esque download/update mechanism would be the best thing ever!

    That aside, congratulations guys! This has felt inevitable for quite some time now <3
     
  27. Offline

    LEOcab

    Oh, my. Mr. EvilSeph , you and your Bukkit team comrades have my deepest gratitude and congratulations. I would hug you if I could. Minecraft is a big part of my life (foreveralone.jpg) and so is my server. It wouldn't be that way right now hadn't it been for you guys and your excellent product, Bukkit. I joined the family back in the days of b715 and I've loved it ever since then. Thank you Bukkit. You truly deserve to work with Notch. [diamond]
     
    Monopol likes this.
  28. Offline

    Shortee

    Awesome guys! Thx to both teams!
     
    TheHox likes this.
  29. Offline

    chaseoes

    I think server owners, developers, and everyone in this community have two words to say to the Bukkit administration and staff:

    Thank you. Without you guys here to watch over us, the community would have never gotten to the stage it's at now. We've had a rough few months (mostly drama-filled ones) with the release of BukkitDev, addition of new staff, etc. - but I see a bright future for Bukkit and the community as a whole.
     
    Jandalf, EarlyLegend, tyzoid and 2 others like this.
  30. Congrats on a job well done. I have a similar question to Credomane:

    Will you be looking into adapting the client code to support the remote installation of extra third party content, like that of the SSP mods the Aether or Fossil / Archaeology?

    Additionally I want to ask if this means that the servers we currently have and don't want to loose will be compatible with the upcoming Minecraft Modding API?

    the Aether: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic...s-crystal-trees-enchanted-grass-white-apples/

    Fossils / Archaeology: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/446117-110fossil-archeology-v59sspmuti-language/
     
    TheHox likes this.
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