Firstly I’d like to say I’m very excited for the upcoming project and especially that everyone has the opportunity to build something great using proper planning from the beginning.
For me, the sponge project is all about modding minecraft. In my opinion minecraft vanilla is great in a single player environment but what really makes it interesting is the multiplayer. Unfortunately minecraft vanilla doesn’t suit very well to multiplayer due to the non-restricted destruction and creation and difficulty in progressing in a world where your work can so easily be undone. Basic minecraft has huge possibilities but let down by lack of multiplayer gameplay; Bukkit provided an answer for this which was great.
There are some fundamental core additions to the basic game that make it playable and should always be available, with the option to configure / disable.
Admin commands, essentials
A good chat feature
An economy - Trading, Banking, Currency, etc
Grief protection - players owning and trading areas and sub areas
Terrain builder
World edit
The key things I want to say are:
These should not be plugins, they should be core functionality when you start a sponge server
There only needs to be 1 of each of these types of mods which combine all the functionality that has existed in multiple previous plugins.
It would be great to be able to choose these as basic settings on world setup
More specific plugins can then be added in the normal fashion.
It was possible to setup a Bukkit server that achieved all the core elements to great gameplay but now there is an opportunity to effectively start from scratch and include 6 or so core elements into the default setup.
If this is not possible can someone please explain why it cannot be done like this and what the benefits are from having multiple (lesser) plugins attempting to achieve the same thing?
That is the exact reason why they should be plugins. Because guess what,
plugins are configurable and can be disabled by being removed.
And regarding the second point: Competition is good. If they are built in no-one will come up with something new because it will not be adopted by the server owners. Meaning that new innovative ways to do things will never be used, even on smaller servers.
Also, stuff like world edit and grief protection are big things(basically all of the things you mentioned). They are not simple plugins you can make in an hour but take a lot of time to make. By forcing the sponge team to do it, it will only make it take so much longer before sponge will be released.
Since not everyone needs these features having them built-in wouldn’t be nice performance wise. A better solution would be to make official plugins that are surely updated with every release.
Yes, official plugins would be almost the same thing. Having them bundled in the core would only make things slightly easier than adding them manually.
Certainly some core plugins, community developed would be better than lots of smaller ones.
On one hand I can see the point of bundling server management plugins with the Core. On the other hand I worry because this is the rationale Microsoft gives for putting so much stuff in their OS distributions. :\ IMO Sponge should focus on the frameworks to allow plugins to thrive. I am waiting to see the set of decision filters the team will adopt which will help decide what is in Sponge and what is not.
IMO the core of a sponge server should not add any real functionality besides teleports, op, etc. What if perhaps there is a better economy plugin the server owner would like to use, then the cores feature of it would be a waste. I do believe that an added security check similar to AntiCheatPlus would be a great option since it does not add real functionality, but prevents hackers from directly affecting the server. This option could be toggled much similar to Online mode feature.
I would like to see a better system for chat in place. If possible I think ChatColors could be RGBbased along with the 16 Minecraft colors. I don’t know if this is what you meant, but a central economy API (similar to vault) over an actual plugin might be a nice feature to look into, so they server owner can still pick the economy plugin/s that they like. This could offer a better compatibility for plugins involving money.
Sounds like an opportunity for a plugin author, not the Sponge Team. Also, I would think the Sponge Team would have to be cautious about labeling a plugin as an “official plugin”. IMO they should stay neutral in such things and treat all plugins with an even hand.
I was just trying to express my opinion that for essentially core (very commonly used features) such as world edit, world guard, GriefProtection (separating this from world guard as I think it’s implementation is brilliant, however I’m sure a merged plugin combining the best features of both world guard and grief protection would be better), economy, essentials, chat and potentially some form of widely configurable team based plugin. Would all benefit from having 1 very good reliably managed plugin rather than a few not so good ones offering similar features to each other.
When it comes to more specialized / smaller plugins or plugins for specific game types then sure, many people coding away will produce huge flexibility in gameplay but certain things that most server owners would want to use as standard, I feel should be the main focus and receive the most support.
I personally would like to see implementation similar to some other software suites where you download the core and upon downloading check the additional modules you want to include. The additional module options could be ‘recommended’ by sponge in some way as being ‘common’ modules. Potentially any module that met some sort of requirement set could be featured in this initial module select system.
No, Sponge should provide no such features, and there should be no “officially supported core plugin”. It is outside of the scope of the project. Every day, there’s a new guy with a new brilliant idea for how the Sponge project should be bogged down by an array of stupidly specific features “just because”. The failure to grasp the point and scope of the project is mind-bogglingly common, and it’s amazing just how little information people gather before writing their suggestion posts full of “unique” and “brilliant” ideas. Can we please just stop? It’s getting boring…
Edit: Almost forgot the compulsory coffee statement: I want Sponge to brew my coffee in the morning because I want coffee in the morning and Sponge is cool. Qed.