Well, I guess rather than loving Sponge I should’ve said I love the idea and the plans of sponge. I also love the idea of all these developers who I known and trust and used their plugins/mods/anything else for years getting together to make it so it brings me great hope for the project. And you can already compare Sponge to to Rainbow in the following ways:
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What each project is trying to accomplish and their approaches to it. Sponge runs off forge and Rainbow is a custom jar for example.
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Rainbow’s current Plugin following vs Sponge’s plugin following. Many Bukkit plugin devs are already planning on porting their old plugins over to Sponge and I doubt they’ll change their minds in a matter of a month when the api gets to the state where porting can begin. Compared to Rainbow, it seems like most of the plugins are new and rainbow specific. (Rainbow Chest, Rainbowcord, etc) Yes they haven’t been ported yet but it’s a valid point to make.
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Again, devs can compare rainbows current api to Sponge’s api and give their pros and cons. Yes Sponge’s isnt ready yet but enough info about it is out there to give dev’s a good idea how it’ll work and handle.
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Legality. Yes it’s already been debated and we know your stand on it. But still some users may feel better developing for Sponge since it doesn’t supply any minecraft assets along with it unlike Rainbow and, especially after the buyout, they may feel like it has a better chance of surviving. Plus, microsoft already said they wont disrupt mods and forge is one of the most popular modding apis. For microsoft to dmca forge would be one of the most foolish things they could do.
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Trust. Most people here including myself have used many of the dev’s projects before whether they were plugins or an entire modding api. With that amount of use comes an obvious trust and many believe that they’ll deliver on at least a decent project. And with Rainbow, not many people knows these “new devs” or even the core development team. So some may not want to go over based on that alone. While some others may want to give you a chance. Or maybe even someone could vouch for you having used one of the dev’s plugin’s in the past. There’s more to the projects than just the code. There’s also the reputation of the devs and if people will be willing to take a chance to follow them.
There you go. Just five ways you can compare they two without having to play them. And even if you had to play them, it doesn’t matter what matters is how decent the api is and how many devs will use it.Vanilla Rainbow should play the same as Vanilla Sponge so to compare them at their base playability would be foolosh.
Yes you are growing but so is Sponge. Just not in ways you may see yet. I will withhold judgement on which one is truly better than the other until several months pass after Sponge comes out and the plugins begin being ported but comparing the two and deciding which one you’ll go for is perfectly reasonable because rainbow, like sponge, is still early in it’s life. It may be out now and have plugins for it but, as you said, it’s being updated every day and hasn’t reached it’s fullest potential yet.
Edit: added another point
Edit 2: corrected some typos