Hi
I’ve got some questions about Sponge and the Sponge implementations and hope to get them answered.
These three are the implementations I know. Did I miss any?
Is Glowstone still in active development? The latest commit at Github was more than a month ago.
Which one do you think has the best performance?
Does Sponge have any advantages regarding to Granite if you do not want to force your users to use mods?
Why is there not so much cooperation? There are already builds of an as I got it well-working implementation (Granite), but it seems to me that nobody really cares for that and few people know it. I got that there was the suggestion of a faked download link so that the number of noobs asking for where to download Sponge decreases - what about links to Granite’s downloads as long as there is no Sponge release?
Is there a way that you can allow Vanilla clients to join a Sponge server that uses client-side features as it was for example using CB+Spoutcraft? We used to create optional stuff for our server that made it more beautiful and user-friendly for players (like GUIs for our custom Factions) but weren’t really required.
Thx for reading.
Granite most likely will, as it is injected straight into the vanilla server. But it will likely be close between Sponge and Granite, as I’m not sure of how Glowstone will turn out.
What do I mean - What I know is that Sponge is built on top of Forge. Therefore it is able to do nice things that are needed if you want to setup a server with mod support. If you do not want to force players to use mods or if you do not need anything but Vanilla’s features, then you do not need mod support. In this case, Granite should be your choice. But, I wanted to know whether there are other advantages than the obvious ones, like for example (see question number 3) better performance because of additions like Spigot has etc.
Mod territory - ya I know, but what I wanted to know was how strict Sponge handles Vanilla clients. If there is only a simple thing that would require a client mod (like the Factions GUI I mentioned) but does not affect game play at all, it does not make any sense to block Vanilla clients only because of that.
There have been plans to allow “lite” client side modding, akin to Spoutcraft (in fact, @Zidane and myself are from Spout.). This would allow you to add custom blocks and GUIs, though it will require the users to install Sponge on their client. However, nothing is set in cobblestone at this time.
Most of this has already been well discussed, so I’ll just handle #5.
Granite is not an official implementation of Sponge, it is being developed by a third party. We are on friendly terms with the Granite developers (waves to @AzureusNation), and there are negotiations to try to bring the teams closer together. However, their approach to Sponge is fundamentally different from the Forge coremod implementation being developed in-house, and this may lead to some significant differences later in development. As we have no control over the development of Granite, we can’t vouch for the product in the same way as Sponge (coremod). Nor can we offer support for users of Granite, which is probably the biggest sticking point.
Feel free to give Granite a whirl, we even mention it in the Docs and provide a link to their forum. HTH.
