I got a few questions about what is going to come in beta stages of sponge. First off will there be something which helps sponge not use so much ram? I get the cannot keep up in my server console. I am not using forge or even any plugins because I am testing it out for another server I am making. I hope Sponge can run as well as Spigot and pretty well with forge. When will we ever get rid of the minecraft_server.jar Bukkit didn’t need it. Why can’t we implement minecraft_server.jar into Sponge and hopefully forge servers. Is it to have an alternative or is it just how sponge was built. Will sponge have the ability to be ably to run old version minecraft plugins on future version minecraft servers with only maybe the occasional issue? Will spongeforge always have to have a required build? like build #1209 or something (I know that may not be real). And will sponge ever have a vanilla client build and a SpongeForge which can be a standalone client and server for both sponge and forge? Finally will there ever be a plugins folder for just sponge plugins? These answers will show how I may use sponge in the future and how I will. Sponge as it is in developement raises many questions. I appreciate the responses.
There has already been a few performance fixes in sponge - the major one being entity-activation-range. You can configure it in config/sponge/global.conf.
It is very tricky legally to package both Sponge and Minecraft into one package and distributed by us. Both Forge and SpongeVanilla instead modify the server jar at runtime, resulting in the same performance but with none of the legal grey area. It’s one extra step to download the minecraft server separately.
This is exactly what Sponge is designed to do, just like Bukkit. Be backwards compatible wherever possible. Potentially means that plugins that were designed for 1.8 could still work perfectly with Minecraft 2.5, or whatever they go with.
Yes. We often have to work in compatibility with Forge to ensure that mods get integrated with Sponge. Using a version that’s older or newer than what it was built with could lead to crashes, or even worse, silent failures.
Right now, SpongeVanilla can only be run as a server. This may change in the future, but right now we’re focusing on Serverside stuff.
SpongeForge can run on the client just like any other Forge mod, however it will only do anything when you’re playing in Single player (effectively a local Sponge server), not when you’re on another server.
This has been discussed at length in a few other topics, so I won’t repeat all of that again. OMG, you're getting rid of /plugins?
You can run your Sponge 1.8 plugins on Sponge for 1.8.9 currently as both implement SpongeAPI version 3.x.
The last information i got was that by default everything goes into /mods/ folder, but we’ll make the folder where Sponge searches for plugins configurable.
When running SF on the client you get some extra info on the F3 screen, like information about block owner.