[Soaked Up #9] An interview with disconsented, and more!

Sponge
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Today’s Topics:

  • An Interview with disconsented
  • Granite and Sponge
  • Soaked Up Schedule
  • Journalist Applications
  • Quote of the Week
  • Question of the Week

An Interview with disconsented

Where were you before Sponge started?
I was doing user support and administration for Cauldron as well as working on my mod (ANSSRPG).

What’s the story behind your username?
Many years ago I was rather interested in private servers for games. I wasn’t happy with my current handle at the time so I plucked “.Disconsented” out of thing air. Dropped the period and never stopped using it.

Why did you come to Sponge, rather than Spigot, or Trident, etc?
Modded servers, as Sponge (the official implementation) was built on Forge there would be much more of an incentive for mod developers to support it and make use of it. In addition the team behind (Mumfrey, Zidande and even Blood are amazing programmers) puts them ahead IMO.

Who/What inspires you the most?
Bug reports and people making suggestions. Self motivation has always been an issue but I find it easier if somebody else wants it.

What part(s) of Sponge do you think needs the most work?
I would say that Ore needs the most work at this point, and mainly because there are three contributors according to Github.

Why did the chicken cross the road?
He never really was on your side.

Thank you for your time @disconsented !

Granite and Sponge <img src=https://avatars0.githubusercontent.com/u/8727995?v=3&s=200 width=25>

If you may not have noticed, Granite will be joining Sponge as one of the official implementations.

What is Granite?
Granite, sort of like Bukkit (but not Bukkit!), is an implementation of the SpongeAPI on top of the vanilla Minecraft Server. This removes the necessity to install the Forge server for server owners that don’t own modded servers.

Who is Granite made by?
The project owners (from what it says on their Github) are @Jckf, @AzureusNation, and @Voltasalt. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

Why use one over the other?
It’s mainly based on your server’s type and preference. If you want to be able to easily interact plugins with mods, use Sponge, if you don’t have a need for mod support, use Granite. Sponge also has an added benefit of being able to be used on single-player or LAN.

Why wasn’t Granite an official part of Sponge in the first place?
@Zidane might be able to give some input on that.

:clock2: Soaked Up Schedule :clock2:

Now that I’ve cleared some things that I’ve had to do in real life, Soaked Up will be back to its original schedule of every weekend between Saturday and Sunday at 4PM CST.

Time to celebrate! :tada: :tada: :tada:

:pencil2: Journalist Applications :pencil2:

What is the role of a journalist?
A journalist’s role is to contribute topics to the Soaked Up newsletter. Note: Full credit will be given.

Onto the application!

Forum Username:
IRC Nickname:
Why we should accept you:

It’d also be nice if you joined #soakedup on IRC, so we can centralize chat.

:speech_balloon: Quote of the Week :speech_balloon:

Also remember to take a look through his other great poems here!

:question: Question of the Week :question:

What’s your favorite quote from a book or movie?
Reply down below!

Check back every other Saturday/Sunday for a new edition!
If you liked this edition, don’t forget to :heart: it!

Click here to find out how to subscribe.

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Very nice to hear that this will be back on it’s official schedule!

Also to answer the question:
“Victory is secured, not from the throne, but from the front lines.”

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Nice @DotDash! Will apply!

String movieQuote = IMDB.getMovie(Math.random()).getQuote(Math.random()).raw();
plagiarism == null;
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Yes, @voltasalt, @AzureusNation, and myself are currently the main people behind Granite. Although it was initially started by “Avarisc”. Volt and Ash are the main developers, while I’ve mostly been doing system administration :wink:

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Now that we have granite, I think we need a new name for the Sponge forge implementation. It seems to me that Sponge API vs Sponge is very ambiguous, especially to new users. A good example of this is this issue of soaked up. The way it is written is correct, Sponge vs. Granite with Granite and Sponge both implementing the Sponge API but doesn’t that seem a tad confusing, even just adding something small to the name would help with the ambiguity tremendously. The name on the repos and official documentation don’t even need to change, there just needs to be a universal way on the forums / IRC to clearly distinguish the difference between Sponge and Sponge API.

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Do you have a suggestion for how we do that? Particularly one that doesn’t involve changing anything but forums and docs.

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Ah I never saw the tag in this post. I can definitely answer.

Sponge’s roots have always been about compatibility. Remember that Minecraft has two major communities: server (Bukkit/etc) and client (Forge). Typically the two don’t play ball as server admins generally would choose to go with the lesser used but infinitely more content modded server/client or the more limited but stable and popular Bukkit server solution approaches. Sponge desires to break down the walls and bring together these communities in ways that Cauldron was just getting started doing.

Of course, it isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Having effectively two implementations brings about quite a bit of work. For the longest time, our leading tech (known as Mixin by Mumfrey) wasn’t at a point of stability where I could start thinking out of the box (in regards to going multi-platform). Now that we are on the horizon of issuing dev builds to testers, I sat down one day and gave the thought a serious chance. Ultimately, my reasoning for doing it came down to the fact that:

  • Its still Minecraft so the base doesn’t change (which doesn’t involve writing a bunch of new code)
  • A lot of our mixin code doesn’t care that Forge has its claws into the Minecraft codebase. That can be considered “Common”
  • A lot of our CatalogTypes (FuelTypes/etc) would be implemented the same exact way with Forge present or not. That can be considered also “Common”
  • Forge comes with the technology called “FML” (Forge Mod Loader for short). As the name implies, this handles loading mod code into Minecraft. Obviously, if SpongeVanilla lacks FML then that code would need to be written. That can be considered “Vanilla”

Hopefully you can see the difference. From my estimates, the Forge and Vanilla modules of Sponge (which will remain in separate repos) will share most of its code (over 70%, much more than my original estimates). This will remain in its own repo as well (they’ll be much more details on this in a future announcement post). (Back to my original point) While this does mean some extra work, this is negligible due to the additional extra help we acquired when bringing in the Granite team.

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