Kick the Bukkit

[JamminR]

Ok, now that spbogie's coming out of the wood work a bit;

Minecraft.
+Java.
+Lua.
------------
=ULib for Minecraft should kick the MC Bukkit.

Former Gmod popularity among Minecraft players alone would bring a few in to try.
Overall awesomeness once they try would bring in even more.

Just a few quick projects i found for Java/Lua
LuaJava - http://www.keplerproject.org/luajava/index.html#overview
KahLua - http://code.google.com/p/kahlua/
Tons of others.

Anyone?
I'd love to have to learn a new language just to support a new project.
Though, I wouldn't have the time like I did 6 years ago to teach myself at work.
Ahh, the trade off I've done for the upward cost of living I enjoy.

[Megiddo]

Way ahead of you JamminR.

I've spent a good chunk of time researching down this path until I shelved it awaiting the official MC API (which is the full source). It's easy to decompile MC, but a pain to maintain the decompilations from then on.

LuaJava is nice but if I recall correctly, I ran into major issues with the native calls on systems other than windows.

KahLua is actually the one I'm using in the latest version of my shelved tests. I don't remember if I had any major issues with it or not, but I did like how it tried to stay as faithful to the C library as possible.

Two potential problems I saw with such a project:
* Hard to get any user base. Same problem we have with ULib, really. People will see it as a CPU and memory hogging dependency... whether or not that's a reality.
* The shift between Java and a C based language (Lua) is jarring. While this is great for people used to C, most people in the community expect to do things the "Java way". This is in some way related to problem 1.

Something like this is actually why I was working on otlib, which sadly hasn't seen any attention since last year. The goal of otlib was to provide a base admin system that could be used across multiple games (eg, gmod, ns2, and minecraft). That would give admins some consistency if they're running multiple servers as well as simplify our work if we wanted to support multiple games.

[spbogie]

I still find it funny how we both had effectively the same idea right away. I agree that it's not really worth doing until there is an official mod "API". It's enough trouble maintaining ULib/ULX against gmod, and that's a released public interface which is in theory supposed to be stable :/.

I think there's potential for it, especially if we can push the advantages to testing of being able to swap in new code on a live server, and not having to wait for the compiler for every minor change. And as JamminR said, with the strong overlap of the gmod and minecraft player base I think there's added potential to draw more developers over by giving them a familiar language to work with.

otlib sounds interesting, I'll have to look through that a bit to get an idea of where you were going.

P.S. @JamminR, why must you always remember all the crazy ideas we come up with

[Megiddo]

spbogie, mainly otlib is a very-well documented library. Besides utility features, the highlights of what's currently in it are:
*A better way of looking at data. I'd change this to save to JSON in flat-file instead of KeyValues if I were to continue the project...
*Similar access system to current ULib's, but benefits from me now knowing the good and bad points of it. I'd also add hierarchical permissions (IE, root 'ulx' permission, then 'ulx.slap' permission. If 'ulx.slap' is unspecified, permission is taken from 'ulx'), not currently implemented on Git.
*A very skeletal plugin system which would allow reloading semi-complicated code without changing levels like gmod.

[JamminR]

P.S. @JamminR, why must you always remember all the crazy ideas we come up with

Meh, I've wanted a Team Ulysses admin mod for Minecraft ever since I saw the (I now forget its name) precursor to bukkit.
I mean, really, sure, administration would be great, but, /maul spawning 50 aggressive wolves against a player would just be awesome.

One item I just now realized though... bukkit has lots of plugins that only work with bukkit, right? Even though bukkit is kind of a MC hack, the author(s) have apparently written in some nice plugin features.
I've not done my research...thats just speculation/memory.

[MrPresident]

Meh, I've wanted a Team Ulysses admin mod for Minecraft ever since I saw the (I now forget its name) precursor to bukkit.

HMod

Also.. <3 minecraft. I fully support this idea.