Who wants to assist with an apocalypse plugin?

I’d would like to contribute to this project. Add me on Skype. (Pssst… Its xxmarijnw)

Yours sincerely,

Marijn van Wezel

There is one thing I’ve always looked for in an apocalypse plugin, if you design this I think it should definitely be considered. We all know zombies only break doors. What if they broke more than that? I’ve seen one or two plugins do it in the past but neither worked and the config was VERY confusing, it even had the mobs nerdpoling and skybridging.

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That would be Monster Apocalypse. :)

I’ve never dealt much with world generation besides making simple biome mods in single player. I’ve been talking to another developer and we were considering aether apocalypse. Do you think this is within reach?

Sky-bridging mobs. That’s pretty fantastic.

Looked at it earlier. Amazing map, but I was the only player online.

I honestly have no clue, but I’m more than willing to try. The way I figure it, like getting into cold water, if I don’t jump all at once I’ll spend my whole time with only my tows in.

Haha alright, sounds good.

I’d be interested in contributing

Send me a PM and we can work something out.

So hopefully you don’t mind but I would like to make a couple of suggestions that I am hoping will really help you out with this project. It sounds like you are trying to create a fairly large mod that goes beyond simple plugin into actual system. On top of that from reading this it seems like you are trying to strive for really community driven with this. So I’m hoping that this will not be considered presumptuous of me to make these suggestions.

  1. Design a Project Roadmap: This is going to help you out a lot later on down the road. It gives you a place to start, it helps organize everything, and will provide you with something to refer back to later on. This will help you avoid feature bloat and scope creep when you are adding things and designing this. It can be as fancy or as simple as you like, just as long as it contains basically a manifesto of what you are trying to accomplish; it should at the very least include things such as the goal, features, style conventions. Anything more is great, but this will cover your basics.

  2. Setup a Github Repo: Whether you do it as a personal repository or setup an organization, get the repo setup. This cements the name, gives people a place to view the code and other information, and allows them to follow the progress and/or contribute. Personally for something that will be a fairly strong undertaking such as this sounds I would suggest creating it as an Organization right off the bat. This will allow you to add people to it and give access to your core developers as they emerge easier.

  3. Setup CI: It doesn’t have to be anything fancy to start with, but some sort of continuous integration server is always a good thing. This takes the onus of maintaining builds and doing unit testing off of you. It can also provide a place for downloads of the final artifact. If you don’t know where to start, maybe check out http://heisenbugdev.com I haven’t personally used them but it seems like it could be useful.

  4. Create Project Shell: It doesn’t have to be anything more than just a Readme.md, a License file, and your basic src/main/java//<Plugin.java> file. But this will setup and cement your package name and your namespace for your project. It’s also a basic step that I’m sure you already have done and I didn’t need to mention but I figured I would put it up there anyway.

  5. Setup an Issue Tracker: Trust me, they are worth it. Even if you just use the one built into GitHub, it makes life easier to use a tracker than to try to remember what all is broken and what is fixed and who is fixing what. Set it up, use it, maintain it. It’s probably one of the greatest tools for a developer there is. While it isn’t something that is required, I personally like to get Milestones setup early in my bug tracker. Doesn’t have to be anything really long range, just what you feel needs to be done to get the project rolling and get an initial release out the door. As the project grows, new milestones will appear. Milestones also help when the project is finally live to give users and developers an idea of what is next, and when bug fixes will be in. This gives you concrete goals to work towards and stepping stones to help you go from “Empty Project Shell” to “Project-1.0.0-RELEASE.jar”

  6. Publish Everything: Even if you just use GitHub pages off of your repo, put all of your information up. This will give people a place to start and somewhere to go for information. Put your roadmap up there, put your licensing up, add any documents or pages on contributing to the project, add whatever code you have.

The reason for all of this is it sets you up in advance for success. It’s better to prepare in advance and not need this stuff than to just fly by the seat of your pants and suddenly the project takes off and you are left scrambling. This will also help with recruiting people. It takes it from “Give me your Skype and we will talk about things and stuff might get done” to “If you are interested, here is the info. Feel free to contribute how and where you can”. This will also help in that your core developers will show themselves from the occasionally fringe contributor easily. In the beginning of a project everyone is always gung-ho and might say in a skype call that they are going to be in the project 27 hours a day for 5ever (it’s longer than forever), but that isn’t realistic. This takes away the stress and let’s people set their own pace without making any commitments that they might not know that they can’t keep.

Hopefully some of this is helpful. If it is great, if not well flag it and it will eventually take care of itself. :smile: (I am a developer and systems administrator for a living. A lot of this stuff is just basic project management and core development fundamentals. Just was hoping to be useful)

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May I suggest Jenkins.

Travis CI might also be good - no need to host it yourself.

Thank you, I will keep this in mind when we (forum?) can gather a team of developers.

Yep that’s the one, I couldn’t remember the name from not using it in so long, I tried it out with my server and just couldn’t get the config to work right. Like it had options for a whitelist of breakable blocks but it still didn’t work. I think if it were made, it should have it so zombies break blocks as fast as Steve would using his bare hands. They have close to the same health as us so why not?

I got the config to work. :P what bothered me was that when they broke it, it didn’t display the breaking animation. I know it shows when others break blocks, so why not when zombies break blocks?

It was likely a limitation of the Bukkit API (potentially not being able to send block break data to clients when non-player entities broke it), or it handled block breaks differently (after a set time, it would simply remove the block). The latter probably being more likely, but just guessing either way.

@TheYeti @instanceof Yes, I was waiting for those things to be added. Once that all is up, I’ll try to contribute coding and translation-wise.

Sure ill try currently ive only made one bukkit plugin, but sure why not.

Everyone has gotta start somewhere.

@instanceof I’d love to help with setup, and making of this. Add me on skype:The_Doctors_Life