Evolution of Minecraft and Bukkit in the last few years

Hey guys,

it has been a few years since I last played Minecraft. I've found myself playing again today, and was wondering, what exactly changed? I guess there have to be quite a lot of things. Also, the same question goes for the "Bukkit-World" (Bukkit in general, ...) and simply "Multiplayer Minecraft". Could someone maybe give me a brief explanation (If any of you got time I'm completely fine with a long explanation) of what changed, et cetera?

All that time ago I also loved to create plug-ins for Bukkit-Servers; I guess this scene is still active, and has also changed? Could someone give me some technical insight here?

So I guess my questions are:
- Changes/History of general minecraft, in terms of gameplay
- Technical Insight in the "evolution" of bukkit
- Changes in the "general playstyle" of the multiplayer community (I found A LOT of minigames servers when I scrolled through a few serverlists an hour ago)

Thanks in advance.

Kind regards,
Flyverse

 

@Flyyverse
Changes in general MC: Since a year ago I'm pretty sure Minecraft went from mid-1.6 to 1.8. Or something like that. At the moment I seriously blank out on important things about 1.7--I know there's new flowers for every dye--and 1.8 has to do with bunnies, underwater castles, and I think a couple new potions. I really don't know what back-end stuff changed except a bunch of recent 1.8.x updates were for "security fixes."

That's game stuff, though. With servers and stuff, there was a bunch of drama about the enforcement of Mojang's EULA, which if you didn't already know states that people can't make money off of Mojang's product. Mojang was nice about this though, and gave server owners the opportunity to keep donations flowing by telling them that perks must be "purely cosmetic." (Hub gadgets, pets, disguises, etc.) I'll bet less than 30% of servers actually tried to comply, though that smaller number included the big servers like Hypixel... well I can only speak for Hypixel because that's the only large server I play on.

And lastly there's Microsoft buying Mojang. As far as I'm aware, Mojang is still running mostly how it did before. I'm not on top of Mojang news, so I wouldn't know of many unpopular announcements made, but apparently nothing's been big enough to reach me yet. Still no one knows why Microsoft bought a game that already reached peak sales.

"Evolution" of Bukkit: I can really only call myself an active Bukkit member for the past two years, at least for that time before The Bukkit Crash (as I now like to call it). I'll do my best to bring you up to speed based on what I do know. That knowledge would include the 1.7 update. Apparently Mojang changed so much NMS code that the Bukkit dev team had a super hard time updating CraftBukkit to work with 1.7. When Spigot was the first to release a very broken (but somehow operable) 1.7 build, every server in the Bukkit community flocked over to using that, desperate for something to use while they waited for the Bukkit team to release something. Eventually they did, though, and everything was all happy after that. Until... (dun dun dun!)

Perhaps you heard a little something about the DMCA madness that set the community ablaze. I'll put this in the simplest possible terms I can, for more information there are literally thousands of other posts to read in the forum history. Wolvereness, a great developer of CraftBukkit (I have no idea how much of Bukkit API he developed), one day decided to issue a DMCA against CB, which closed down distribution until licensing issues were solved. From what I've learned (I've done a whole lot of reading...), the simplest way for it to happen was for Mojang to release their Minecraft Server code as open-source, which will probably never happen.

So while CraftBukkit was down, the Bukkit community going into shock, Spigot decides to come to the rescue again. They find some kind of clever way to blow right through the DMCA* and start distributing CB again with (I heard) some rewritten stuff. Most of it, though, had to do with their giving you a handy BuildTools.jar to download and run, which downloads one part of CraftBukkit (I think NMS) from one place, another part of CB (I believe the API and stuff) from another place, and it compiles the two right there on your computer for a ready-to-go CraftBukkit 1.8 build.

Meanwhile, the moment chaos struck, a few lifeboat projects sprung to life. The only one which I'm sure came to life after the DMCA is Sponge, though another popular one is Trident (which existed pre-DMCA). I can't really speak for the rest. Last I checked, one of the lead devs for Trident posted a to-do list; I think they're getting close to a stable build, if they haven't already. Sponge also has some builds out, not sure how well they work, though I'm guessing they're alright based on the little I've read. I believe most of the Bukkit community has split off into these two and Spigot (for those who weren't already at Spigot).

* Lots of people strongly disagree with Spigot's methods of practically ignoring the DMCA. One would argue that the finish product, a working CraftBukkit 1.8 build, is the exact same thing as simply putting it online to download as a whole. In other words, buying a car as a whole, or having the parts shipped to you and watching a mechanic put them together for you--they're both the same thing in the end result.

The multiplayer community: I know I must not be helping too greatly every time I say I can't give some information, and this is another case. I'm not aware how much the multiplayer community changed, if very much at all. For the past couple years and a half I've either buried myself into my own server, or buried myself into my favorite capture the flag server. I do know, however, that minigames are currently all the rave for some Minecrafting kids looking for a good time; I wasn't aware that this was a semi-recent fact.


Anyway, I really appreciate that you don't mind long answers, because... well you get it.

Happy to answer for you.

 

Minecraft has changed from its original form if you look at the majority of servers. I have seen 30 servers in the past month that have the exact same plugins, goal, etc. It has changed for the worse.

Servers nowadays are frequently Factions, because Factions is easy to set up- just install, add kits, add a spawn. But with today's kinds of servers, with their usual kits and plugins, you can find that Factions is actually quite dull and has lost creativity. All you do is build an obsidian base, raid someone else's, get raided, rinse and repeat. The majority of servers are like this now. Factions used to be rarer and was more exiting- design, strategy, and politics were involved, which was actually the initial goal of Factions. With today's competition there is no room for creativity, you must build in the obsidian box in most places, and not waste time on other things because people will likely destroy it. Despite all this, there are still many Pay-To-Win beat 'em up PvP Factions servers out there, and the players are still ignorant of this.

Bukkit in my mind hasn't changed very much, which is a good thing. It has a good community on bukkit.org, and people just make really crazy & amazing stuff from a pile of code.

 

Clarifying on misinformation:

1.7 contained massive internal changes. It took us around a month, and took other projects much longer.

Spigot did not create a 1.7 build. They created a "protocol hack" that allowed users of 1.7 to connect to 1.6 servers. All Spigot did for 1.7 actual was spend a few minutes updating their minor changes to our 1.7 code once we released it, followed by asking for donations for all their "hard work."

Their "clever way" is called "simply ignoring the DMCA takedown" and hiding behind CloudFlare. They didn't rewrite our code, they continue to distribute exactly what received a DMCA takedown on GitHub.

My favorite part of this mess was when Spigot requested the community give them with money to pay for lawyers so they could submit a proper legal response to the DMCA takedown request, as you are supposed to do. They then proceeded to... not submit any counter notice. I can only speculate where the money went.

Please do not refer to their builds as CraftBukkit. It's Spigot, plain and simple. Calling it ours is misleading. We produced a quality product we were proud of, and called it CraftBukkit. We never released a 1.8 build, and what folks are using is not ours. Underneath their modifications is the code I love, but it's not my release, and I receive none of the money they so readily accept over there.

 

@mbaxter, couldn't have said it better myself. Spigot is not this great product. It's the equivalence of buying a pair of beats for $200 when the work put into it is worth $16 (actual numbers BTW). Then they ask you to donate to the cause. They are just theives of the Bukkit team's work whether they will admit it or not. The TridentSDK is the true predecessor to Bukkit. Btw, they released an alpha build today. Go give them a hand in debugging if you can.

 

@mbaxter Thank you very much. That explains things better than my original words.

Cool! I'll go check it out.

 

The protocol hack thing was an experimental way of trying to bridge the phase until a full update, call it risky to use, but it's no way ridiculous, rather smart, without doubt they did some work. Considering the amount of work the Bukkit team put in, it probably is odd that the Bukkit project has not been receiving decent amounts of money. Just complaining about them having a much less work in total man-hours won't be convincing, the projects have been quite a bit different in the way they were run and also concerning the involved manpower, after all the amount of changes the Spigot team has worked into their thing is by no means minor.

The CloudFlare part helped them against DDOS! You're not telling me they have to expose their project to random haters better? As far as i remember, they did not at all ignore the DMCA, their code repositories and Jenkins had been taken down, so far for the DMCA. Then they released a patching tool for applying their changes to an existing server jar, which you needed to have acquired in time to run the patching tool. That's all safe ands sound, it's just not very convenient to use or contribute to. They also did not distribute DMCA'd content, that's actually not correct.

Money went to legal advice on how to proceed - they did proceed and seem to be in a valid state now.

Using Spigot means using Spigot of course. They do have about the only working continuation of the CraftBukkit part of the Bukkit project, though.

Edit: The interesting part should be what the evolution lead to, though.

 

They don't beg like Spigot does. For goodness sakes their homepage has a donate link in the sidebar and it's not really hidden and out of the way.