Insomnia / Sponge

Since i49, I’ve now attended a number of Insomnia Gaming Festivals, returning as a staff member each time.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of people from Multiplay, but also with the event volunteers. I should have expected as much by now, but the community behind projects is often the most interesting part of the experience. Not to mention getting the chance to meet some really cool people from the Minecraft, Youtube, Twitch and Gaming communities.

I’m already booked to work the next iSeries event, but I’m also helping Multiplay out at the upcoming Minecon. This will be the first time I’ve worked behind the scenes at Minecon, and I’m sure it will be quite a different experience. I’m also assuming I’ll miss out on the cape this time around, as I wont need an attendee ticket to attend the event.

This event is looking to be an interesting one. Last Minecon, we had a stable modding and plugin platform which were seen as ‘semi-legal’, being that Mojang supported the projects and there were no legal challenges. Since then, we have had the DMCA drama with CraftBukkit, leaving Minecraft without a clear solution.

In this absence Sponge, and Spigot have picked up the mantle.

Spigot is running with a (legally interesting) solution based on Bukkit, which has allowed server owners to run almost all their old plugins on 1.8 compatible servers. This is quite a logical choice, with the absence of any other Bukkit compatible platform, being able to continue development in any form, is helping the server owners and helps people maintain interest in Minecraft.

Sponge on the other hand is a complete rewrite. The API is designed to be platform agnostic, but contain all the functionality that is expected of a modern API. When Bukkit was originally created Minecraft was in a different place, and that has meant to try and stay up to date the Bukkit API has evolved, but some design decisions simply couldn’t be modified this late in the game. Sponge is built on the idea that we take everything learned from Forge and Bukkit, and produce a single API which provides everything we need. The initial implementation is a forge mod, with a few other implementations on the cards. The real result of this is that if you create a Sponge plugin, the plugin will work: on Servers (modded and unmodded), on Single player, and on Open LAN games. We finally have a fully supported solution that will allow plugins and mods to live happily on the same platform with reduced barrier to entry. Future goals also include things like custom interfaces and API support for client side modding.

Currently Spigot has the most the server community supporting it, and Sponge has most of the development community. This however is mostly due to the fact Sponge is not quite ready to replace Bukkit, but this should change in the near future. Once Sponge is out, I think we’ll see a lot of interest from the server admin community, as this could lead to a lot more flexibility when it comes to game modes. Then the game is a battle of inertia.

A few people have questioned why I’ve not released an official release of Essentials thus far, and this is due to some legal advise I received early in the DMCA situation. I’m not blocking the development of Essentials for Spigot in any way, but not personally taking part at this time.