This is Craftbukkit--
This is Forge--
This is also Craftbukkit--
Craftbukkit or Forge? MCPC+ (err.. Cauldron, now, I think?) or BukkitForge?
Here's the lowdown skinny on modded Minecraft. Bukkit is a mod to the vanilla Minecraft server jar Mojang distributes. You know what a mod is, right? Back in the old days you used to have to unzip the Minecraft jar file, drag some files into it (probably Risugami's modloader, as it made things so much simpler) delete the META-INF folder and launch it! Maybe it worked! Usually, it didn't. Not for me, at least. When it did work, if you were installing Risugami's modloader you got a neat little folder you dropped your mods into which hopefully helped resolve class file conflicts and loaded whatever mod you were using.
From what I understand, theoretically you could manually add a mod's class files to Minecraft's .jar and they'd work. But having a modloader mod made it so much easier to fix things when mods started to butt heads. Just delete it from the mod folder, easy-peasy.
That was two, three years ago, though. It's 2014, Risugami's modloader is dead, and we've got Forge and Bukkit doing our heavy lifting for us when it comes to adding new gameplay mechanics and content to Minecraft. The way I see it, though, Bukkit is for mechanics, and Forge is for content. Sure I can use essentials, block loggers, permissions systems and land protection on a server running Craftbukkit, but holy fuck—Tinker's Construct, Natura, Biomes'o'Plenty, Thermal Expansion, Thaumcraft, Portal Guns, Battle Towers! So many new things! So much content!
Let's not pretend for a second that playing on the industry standard Minecraft server makes typical players heave a sigh of longing for a Forge based server instead of wiling away in a lonely singleplayer FTB or Technic platform, or having to play pretend with Bukkit based plugins emulating something they don't look like at all. What ultimately holds this back are two major issues—the asinine developers of Forge and Craftbukkit who refuse to meet somewhere in the middle and make it possible to do Bukkit things in Forge, and Forge things in Bukkit. Secondly, taking into the latter half of the first one regarding Forge in Bukkit which is the other major issue—clientside mods.
When you connect to a Bukkit based server, you're connecting with a (mostly) vanilla client. Maybe you use shaders, optifine, minimaps—whatever, that generally doesn't affect the vanilla game because it's not adding anything that didn't already exist in the vanilla game. Anybody who has Minecraft can connect to a Craftbukkit server as long as it's essentially the same version as the client you're playing with. As we should all know, that's not the case with Forge based servers. That's the reason modpacks and specialized launchers exist so you don't have to run around collecting this mod here and that version there. When you run a Forge based server, you know you're running the risk of alienating a huge player base who are download-phobic and wouldn't touch a non-Mojang launcher with a stick, or think that adding mods means you have to be some super sexy spy hacker. If you run a Forge server, you learn that promotion is king if you have a public facing server. You make a post on /r/mcservers or minecraftforums...thankfully, FTB servers are in sufficiently high-demand. I'd say this is generally because many people use commercial hosts where they can't use a non-standard .jar like MCPC+ or Forge, which leads to a shortage in quality FTB and Technic based servers.
On The Outpost, a player asked me the other day to install the Forge mod, “Smart Moving.” I asked him if it was Forge or Bukkit based and he said he didn't know. I generally don't know how anybody can play without knowing if they're using Forge or not, but that's another issue I'm not delving into. Looked it up, wasn't surprised to see it was Forge based. He kindly asked where to get mods for a Craftbukkit server after I told him it wasn't possible, and I turned him towards dev.bukkit.org.
I think we sing a lot of praises to Bukkit. On the surface, it's a great platform. It requires no client-side mods, it has a very professional development team. Hell—take into consideration Nathan Adams and Erik Broes were hired into Mojang as a lead developers from Bukkit! Unless I'm mistaken, the project is open source as well which I can always get behind. Now, read this little tidbit from a Bukkit developer towards Forge--
You know what? For aa condescending LexManos can be towards people new to Forge, he didn't deserve that. As players and admins--we don't deserve that. The surprise here is that the bottleneck between inter-Forge/Bukkit compatibility is Bukkit's fault. I've heard their side--they want to protect their work and not have to work/hack around their own code they work tirelessly on to make things easier for Forge but LexManos had a very, reasonable request--for Forge to be able to support Bukkit plugins with code that already existed and was already maintained by people who had a better knowledge of how their code worked than Lex or his team did and Bukkit shut him down.
That, my friends, is completely fucking asinine. "The party with the lower hand" what the hell is that supposed to mean? Since when did coding a server become a competition? You know what--thank god for the MCP team who bridged this gap for players and admins to a pretty good extent. I don't entirely know how effective it is for every Bukkit based plugin but it runs essentials, PermissionsBukkit, and Prism which if you're running a multiplayer server, those are the bare minimum requirements you need. Special nod to Prism whose developers actively work on a MCPC+/Cauldron compatible build--that's just decent of them.
So what about the modding API? Well, let me tell you wisecrackers that the idea of Mojang creating a solid API isn't as much a joke as the internet would make you think. If you follow the snapshots, you'd notice that the internal workings of how the game works has been changed so drastically with each snapshot making things easier and easier to change is all the proof you need that Mojang is laying a foundation for the plugin API. Will it be 1.8? Well, nobody's making promises. BUT the more you look at the changes in the snapshots, you'd say that if not 1.8 then probably in the next major release or two. Honestly--I think in a year it will be fiction turning to fact. And there damn well better be a tinkersconstruct:* resource pack to go with it or I'll be fuming.
Resource packs will contain the "mods" which I'm assuming will be new blocks, items, sounds, mobs, worldgen, and textures. Well, hoping is really more what I'm thinking. Will these resource pack plugins be adding and changing class files, and if not then how do we expect this new system to add new content and gameplay the way you'd expect from Blood Magic or Thaumcraft? Or even more alarming, will these new plugins be able to accommodate systems like block loggers and statistics that need databases to run with? As it is now, Minecraft's development is moving more towards the Bukkit way of doing things. So I personally think the answer is--maybe. As for the Forge way of doing things, well, there's developing support for custom models and they even overhauled the inventory system to work differently so that's an even bigger maaaaaybeeee. Sounds like the first great step to seeing Thermal Expansion items in a resource pack eventually. The inventory overhaul was a big step since if anybody's played on a FTB server you know how dependent on custom GUI's many mods are.
I guess when it comes down to it, what I'm getting at is that you can shore up the weaknesses of all Minecraft server platforms, and there's a lot. Spigot for high performance, Mojang's vanilla for ease of use, Craftbukkit for advanced permissions and gameplay, Forge for new content, and MCPC+ for public facing Forge servers. It ultimately comes down to two things--how do you like playing Minecraft, and can you find a server you want to be a part of?
Spoiler
This is Forge--
Spoiler
This is also Craftbukkit--
Spoiler
Craftbukkit or Forge? MCPC+ (err.. Cauldron, now, I think?) or BukkitForge?
Here's the lowdown skinny on modded Minecraft. Bukkit is a mod to the vanilla Minecraft server jar Mojang distributes. You know what a mod is, right? Back in the old days you used to have to unzip the Minecraft jar file, drag some files into it (probably Risugami's modloader, as it made things so much simpler) delete the META-INF folder and launch it! Maybe it worked! Usually, it didn't. Not for me, at least. When it did work, if you were installing Risugami's modloader you got a neat little folder you dropped your mods into which hopefully helped resolve class file conflicts and loaded whatever mod you were using.
From what I understand, theoretically you could manually add a mod's class files to Minecraft's .jar and they'd work. But having a modloader mod made it so much easier to fix things when mods started to butt heads. Just delete it from the mod folder, easy-peasy.
That was two, three years ago, though. It's 2014, Risugami's modloader is dead, and we've got Forge and Bukkit doing our heavy lifting for us when it comes to adding new gameplay mechanics and content to Minecraft. The way I see it, though, Bukkit is for mechanics, and Forge is for content. Sure I can use essentials, block loggers, permissions systems and land protection on a server running Craftbukkit, but holy fuck—Tinker's Construct, Natura, Biomes'o'Plenty, Thermal Expansion, Thaumcraft, Portal Guns, Battle Towers! So many new things! So much content!
Let's not pretend for a second that playing on the industry standard Minecraft server makes typical players heave a sigh of longing for a Forge based server instead of wiling away in a lonely singleplayer FTB or Technic platform, or having to play pretend with Bukkit based plugins emulating something they don't look like at all. What ultimately holds this back are two major issues—the asinine developers of Forge and Craftbukkit who refuse to meet somewhere in the middle and make it possible to do Bukkit things in Forge, and Forge things in Bukkit. Secondly, taking into the latter half of the first one regarding Forge in Bukkit which is the other major issue—clientside mods.
When you connect to a Bukkit based server, you're connecting with a (mostly) vanilla client. Maybe you use shaders, optifine, minimaps—whatever, that generally doesn't affect the vanilla game because it's not adding anything that didn't already exist in the vanilla game. Anybody who has Minecraft can connect to a Craftbukkit server as long as it's essentially the same version as the client you're playing with. As we should all know, that's not the case with Forge based servers. That's the reason modpacks and specialized launchers exist so you don't have to run around collecting this mod here and that version there. When you run a Forge based server, you know you're running the risk of alienating a huge player base who are download-phobic and wouldn't touch a non-Mojang launcher with a stick, or think that adding mods means you have to be some super sexy spy hacker. If you run a Forge server, you learn that promotion is king if you have a public facing server. You make a post on /r/mcservers or minecraftforums...thankfully, FTB servers are in sufficiently high-demand. I'd say this is generally because many people use commercial hosts where they can't use a non-standard .jar like MCPC+ or Forge, which leads to a shortage in quality FTB and Technic based servers.
On The Outpost, a player asked me the other day to install the Forge mod, “Smart Moving.” I asked him if it was Forge or Bukkit based and he said he didn't know. I generally don't know how anybody can play without knowing if they're using Forge or not, but that's another issue I'm not delving into. Looked it up, wasn't surprised to see it was Forge based. He kindly asked where to get mods for a Craftbukkit server after I told him it wasn't possible, and I turned him towards dev.bukkit.org.
I think we sing a lot of praises to Bukkit. On the surface, it's a great platform. It requires no client-side mods, it has a very professional development team. Hell—take into consideration Nathan Adams and Erik Broes were hired into Mojang as a lead developers from Bukkit! Unless I'm mistaken, the project is open source as well which I can always get behind. Now, read this little tidbit from a Bukkit developer towards Forge--
The party with the lower hand, does not have the ability to propose solutions. The work you say is "a simple copy/paste" is no such thing. You are requesting something which takes us hours on end, pouring our sweat and blood into in order to provide the community with a server that is both stable, and expandable. We, the developers, spend hours, days, weeks, every update, using our well constructed tools (re-constructed over time) to provide everyone with the product we deliver.
You say that writing a small script to automatically identify these mappings would be easy, trivial, or any other word. But from actually doing it, it's not. If it were, then we wouldn't be talking here. We wouldn't care cuz it'd be done.
However, I propose a solution, why don't you just spend 10 seconds to send us your mappings file as is, no alterations and see what we do with it. Let us decide if it is easier to write this 'trivial' script you speak of.
I can garente you it won't be.
Your demands will never be answered, in fact, you have been told time and time again, that we will not hand you our work. The manner in which you are constructing yourselves is something that is intolerable of any organization.
You know what? For aa condescending LexManos can be towards people new to Forge, he didn't deserve that. As players and admins--we don't deserve that. The surprise here is that the bottleneck between inter-Forge/Bukkit compatibility is Bukkit's fault. I've heard their side--they want to protect their work and not have to work/hack around their own code they work tirelessly on to make things easier for Forge but LexManos had a very, reasonable request--for Forge to be able to support Bukkit plugins with code that already existed and was already maintained by people who had a better knowledge of how their code worked than Lex or his team did and Bukkit shut him down.
That, my friends, is completely fucking asinine. "The party with the lower hand" what the hell is that supposed to mean? Since when did coding a server become a competition? You know what--thank god for the MCP team who bridged this gap for players and admins to a pretty good extent. I don't entirely know how effective it is for every Bukkit based plugin but it runs essentials, PermissionsBukkit, and Prism which if you're running a multiplayer server, those are the bare minimum requirements you need. Special nod to Prism whose developers actively work on a MCPC+/Cauldron compatible build--that's just decent of them.
So what about the modding API? Well, let me tell you wisecrackers that the idea of Mojang creating a solid API isn't as much a joke as the internet would make you think. If you follow the snapshots, you'd notice that the internal workings of how the game works has been changed so drastically with each snapshot making things easier and easier to change is all the proof you need that Mojang is laying a foundation for the plugin API. Will it be 1.8? Well, nobody's making promises. BUT the more you look at the changes in the snapshots, you'd say that if not 1.8 then probably in the next major release or two. Honestly--I think in a year it will be fiction turning to fact. And there damn well better be a tinkersconstruct:* resource pack to go with it or I'll be fuming.
Resource packs will contain the "mods" which I'm assuming will be new blocks, items, sounds, mobs, worldgen, and textures. Well, hoping is really more what I'm thinking. Will these resource pack plugins be adding and changing class files, and if not then how do we expect this new system to add new content and gameplay the way you'd expect from Blood Magic or Thaumcraft? Or even more alarming, will these new plugins be able to accommodate systems like block loggers and statistics that need databases to run with? As it is now, Minecraft's development is moving more towards the Bukkit way of doing things. So I personally think the answer is--maybe. As for the Forge way of doing things, well, there's developing support for custom models and they even overhauled the inventory system to work differently so that's an even bigger maaaaaybeeee. Sounds like the first great step to seeing Thermal Expansion items in a resource pack eventually. The inventory overhaul was a big step since if anybody's played on a FTB server you know how dependent on custom GUI's many mods are.
I guess when it comes down to it, what I'm getting at is that you can shore up the weaknesses of all Minecraft server platforms, and there's a lot. Spigot for high performance, Mojang's vanilla for ease of use, Craftbukkit for advanced permissions and gameplay, Forge for new content, and MCPC+ for public facing Forge servers. It ultimately comes down to two things--how do you like playing Minecraft, and can you find a server you want to be a part of?