Lua Challenge: the Catastrophes plugin

[xoft]

It has been discussed over and over and there is a belief that Lua is not powerful or performant enough. The Bukkit's Catastrophes plugin ( http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/catastrophes/ ) has been pointed out as an example of something Lua cannot do.

I, on the other hand, believe this should be perfectly doable, so I decided to turn it into a little bit of fun. Let's have a competition!

I call forth all of our Lua plugin developers to try their hand at creating a plugin implementing (at least) one of the catastrophes listed:
- Tornado
- Earthquake
- Volcano
- Tsunami
- Supernova
- Vortex
- own idea
The exact effect of the catastrophe is up to you, if you come up with a creative new catastrophe, even better!

Rules:
- The plugin code must be developed on GitHub
- The code must be under a permissible open-source license (unlicense / public domain preferred)
- You have until 2015-06-28 16:00 CEST (+2 GMT), to deliver
- After the deadline, the entries will be judged on several factors: effect, performance, code clarity, user-friendliness, API usage correctness, corner case resolution, git commit clarity and possibly others. Make this an example you'd show at a work interview (and you just might )
- The community will pick a winner and I will pick my own favorite
- Both winners will get a custom MCS-themed t-shirt from me and will be required to wear those for boasting purposes If the same person wins both the community's and my choice, they will get two t-shirts
- I will neither take part in the competition, nor help anyone with their entry substantially

After the competition, we will combine the entries reasonably into a single plugin and store it under our organization on GitHub. Therefore it would be best if everyone tried to pick a different catastrophe to implement; drop a note here saying which one you're doing. Of course this doesn't mean two people can't do the same, it's meant just as a guide.

EDIT 2015-06-18: Adding submission details.

To submit an entry for this competition, post one single post to the following thread: https://forum.cuberite.org/showthread.php?tid=2017 . Anything that is not a submission post will be deleted from that thread.
You have a single forum post to sell your plugin to me and to the others. Make it count. Provide screenshots. Give us (links to) video. Write an essay, a hymn praising your plugin, compose a theme song for it, I don't care, just give it the best sales pitch you can. You have a single post for this.
Of course you can make a regular "plugin release" thread for your plugin with even more details and descriptions, link to it from your post.

At the deadline I'll close the submission thread (temporarily), compile a list of all entries, throw out those entries that didn't qualify (hopefully there won't be any, check the rules again ) and start a public poll for the community winner. For each entry I'll make a plugin source download of the latest commit within the deadline on the master branch and that will be used for judging.

EDIT 2015-06-22: Extended timeline till 2015-06-28 16:00 CEST (+2 GMT)

[NiLSPACE]

Haha, nice idea ;D

Sadly I don't have allot of time since the end of the school year is coming closer , but I'll try my best.

Who else is joining?

[LO1ZB]

My Lua skills are very basic, but I try anyway.

[tonibm19]

I'll maybe try if I get inspired.
Great idea!

[LogicParrot]

I don't know Lua, sounds like a chance to learn something new. I might join in.

I love the idea!

[tonibm19]

What hardware will it be tested on? I have very crazy ideas which can crash a not powerful comp.

[DiamondToaster]

Wait, a whole month? I got this down. I can usually prototype something working in a few hours, good thing I'm sick home from school today.

[bearbin]

After tomorrow I'll have a try, I have next week off from school.

[NiLSPACE]

I tried the Catastrophes plugin on a local Spigot server, and I got to say that I'm not really impressed. The tornado is just one explosion at the start point, then 10-15 explosions in a 0.5 second time-span in a random direction, and then it's gone. Even my tornado plugin was better :|

Then the tsunami is an explosion at the start, and then just a square area of water above it:


Then the volcano is just some lava around the area:


The supernova is just some TNT that is thrown all over the place. A vortex gets some blocks around the area, and then throws it around, and an earthquake makes some explosions in 2-4 lines.

This should be fairly simple to do

PS:
I wanna do the volcano I'm gonna make it into an actual volcano ^^

[bearbin]

I think I will probably do the tsunami