11-16-2012, 08:04 AM
Current gameplay in MCServer is nigh-non-existent, so matching 1.4.4 is too much of a milestone. We don't even have a proper basic survival gameplay - hunger's missing, feeding's unknown (it seems implemented, but untested - without hunger); weapons and armor are not working; hell, even monsters don't cause damage as they should. I'm swamped in such "trivial" areas such as waking up physics simulators on chunk load (so that water will start flowing when the terrain is generated).
And we definitely can't just freeze the protocol and do no updates - if we're behind, we lose potential users and the rare potential programmers who come and test the server from time to time. I don't think I would have joined the project if it were two protocol versions behind the current vanilla release.
As for the non-programmers, there's only very little they could do. Filling up the block and item type IDs, recipes etc. is one thing. Preparing some structures which the generator will be later able to include is another (this project on b-paradise.eu server is underway, not too many contributors, though), although it is still too far in the future.
I was pretty impressed with your ability to produce working plugins even under the constantly changing API; we could really use this kind of help - the API is incomplete, sometimes doesn't work as intended, full of obsolete stuff and under-documented, a few suggestions or a cleanup there would be great. But that needs someone who actually writes plugins.
And we definitely can't just freeze the protocol and do no updates - if we're behind, we lose potential users and the rare potential programmers who come and test the server from time to time. I don't think I would have joined the project if it were two protocol versions behind the current vanilla release.
As for the non-programmers, there's only very little they could do. Filling up the block and item type IDs, recipes etc. is one thing. Preparing some structures which the generator will be later able to include is another (this project on b-paradise.eu server is underway, not too many contributors, though), although it is still too far in the future.
I was pretty impressed with your ability to produce working plugins even under the constantly changing API; we could really use this kind of help - the API is incomplete, sometimes doesn't work as intended, full of obsolete stuff and under-documented, a few suggestions or a cleanup there would be great. But that needs someone who actually writes plugins.