Heya! I’m Andrew, the lead developer of Velocity, a brand new Minecraft server proxy. Velocity is the next-generation Minecraft server proxy built specifically for enhanced server support and scalability whilst not compromising flexibility.
Velocity is now in its first stable release and has been tested against Paper, Sponge, and Minecraft Forge. It is being used in production networks today with upwards of a thousand players.
We already feature reduced overhead and increased throughput compared to BungeeCord and Waterfall.
Wait… so why do we need another proxy?
I was the founder of the Waterfall project. I’m sure most of you are familiar with Waterfall given that it is the best-supported proxy for Sponge and Forge at the moment. If you’re unfamiliar, Waterfall is a fork of BungeeCord that adds many new features and enhancements, notably enhanced support for Forge.
I left the Waterfall project in 2017 (but was inactive before then). Since then, I realized that BungeeCord’s design has numerous flaws that can only be solved by a total rewrite.
But technical concerns were not the only factors driving the decision to create Velocity. md_5, the author of BungeeCord, has been extremely hostile to Forge mod support, and has indicated he plans to not support Forge beyond Minecraft 1.13. The Velocity project, on the other hand, wishes to encourage the growth of modded Minecraft, and plans to support Forge for Minecraft 1.13 and above.
What’s in it for me?
If you’ve worked with the BungeeCord or Sponge APIs, you’ll feel right at home! Velocity’s API is designed on lines similar to Sponge’s.
Excellent Forge support (1.8-1.12.2). Velocity does not rewrite packets to replace entity IDs, and does not do any “magic” to allow Forge to be compatible with the proxy (unlike with BungeeCord) - everything is native. (Please note that some mods are not compatible with Velocity’s method of server switching - these are issues with the mods, not Velocity.)
Full support for Minecraft 1.8 through 1.15.2.
A number of performance enhancements currently not available in BungeeCord or Waterfall.
I didn’t see anything in the documentation about how to communicate with Velocity from a Sponge plugin. Will you be continuing to use a plugin message API? If so, will it use Sponge’s indexed channel format, will it respond to requests to Bungee’s API, and will you be providing your own Sponge library to wrap it?
I haven’t decided on how servers are going to communicate with the Velocity proxy programatically (aside from a bridge using the Velocity plugin API). We support the BungeeCord plugin messaging channel through a plugin but this isn’t going to be the official way to access the API from the server.
We invite you to try out Velocity today and see how you like it. We’re open to suggestions, and our 1.0.0 release is only the beginning of bigger things. Large networks with hundreds of players are using Velocity today, and we want yours to use it, too!
I just discovered this proxy. I love the similarities in the Velocity API to Sponge’s API. I’m glad we have competition in the proxy space that isn’t just different forks of one software.
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