Bukkit missing key items

I think bukkit is missing some key items that it should really be handling. I last spoke about this on the subject of permissions. Now Bukkit has permissions built in permissions, but the problem that was happening with permissions is happening with other areas. I'll bring up the problem again with the latest issue.

iConomy:
Nijikokun(creator of iConomy), has vanished for the past 2 months(by some accounts-but the last Github entry was on Novemeber 15th). iConomy is a plugin that is probably the most universally used plugin. Infact, its the only common economy plugin that all my plugins(that need economy systems) work with. This is scarey for a server owner like me.

If a plugin as important to servers like mine was to vanish that would leave a gap where all the plugins that we rely on would be focusing in different directions for different economy plugins. Basically, I would need a economy plugin that worked with the most critical plugins and some of my plugins would most likely not work with it.

Its happened for those of us that have been on minecraft for over a year with permissions. In the start some plugins you wanted on your server but didnt use the permissions plugin you were using. Some plugin developers thought the community was going in a different direction. It was a chaotic time till bukkit came out with a standard.

Spout (GUI's):
Graphic User Interfaces is another area. Spout is working fine now, but what happens when the spout team get tired of it, or spout development stops? We(server owners) are left scrambling for another GUI that our most critical GUI plugins use.

Summary:
Is it time for the Bukkit team create a standard economy plugin? Is it time for the bukkit team to make a standard GUI plugin?

I say its past time. Bukkit should only develop their own standard when its clear the community is traveling in the direction of a passive type of plugin(Passive types for example, economy, permissions, ect) it and players are expecting this as a standard. My server being a Role Play server, I come from the half of server that need a economy plugin we know is going to be there and plugin developers know have a standard to work on.

Spout is an open-source project, which means anyone can fork it and continue work if the whole team of 9 were to just just suddenly stop working on it. There are no plans to stop anytime soon and we have plenty of things planned.

But to your point about servers needing permissions... they were there. It was an all or nothing permissions system but it was there. So it wasnt such an 'obvious need', you could take your points against a economy standard and apply it to permissions. So we really have to ask why did Bukkit do permissions? Obviously the demand was there and how they justified that they should be involved in it, Im sure was based on more then just demand alone.

I think its logical. You reach a point that its obvious the whole community is in 'need' of a standard for some aspect of server game environment. There are multiple options diluting a standard and cause a rift between plugins or the most popular plugin has work stopped on is. Then you realize at that point, you need to do it.

However with the example of an Economy system; largely economy systems are exclusive to survival/adventure servers. Are there some creative servers that use them? ...ofcourse. But the point is... I don't think that is the point you say 'its not worth making a "bukkit" standard economy'. I think if either game mode creative or survival/adventure have gotten to the point that a base plugin is critical to that play style, it should be considered.

Undoubtedly economies are critical to the life of a successful survival/adventure server. I dare someone to show me a server that consistently has 60+ players on it and does not have an economy(I only dare you cause I haven't found one and I really am curious). I think Bukkits next step for standardization after their permissions effort, would logically lead to economy.

How about a rule that if a plugin is left inactive for a certain period of time, other devs can be permitted to continue it?

*open parenthesis * Nijikokun is working on a JavaSript OS */close parenthesis*

There really is no rule. If it's an open-source project, you are free to fork and get the plugin going again as per the license if there is one. If there isn't, the kind thing to do would be to ask the original author for permission before openly copying their work even if you are trying to revive the project.

Yeah like wulf said... if they didnt write up a license for open source... then you are kinda screwed.

In the interest of opening this discussion up past iConomy, this is a scenario that could happen to any plugin that has monopolized a corner of development. As I mentioned it happened about a year ago with permissions. many people left in limbo till bukkit did what they did.

I think it should be added as a standard API, just like how permissions were done. There's a simple API added into Bukkit, but still leaves it up to other plugins to handle this. I think it would be much better that way, so plugin developers just support Bukkit's standard economy, and let the users choose what plugin they use to handle this. This would mean that developers no longer have to support specific economy plugins, just the economy system as a whole.

Yeah I get your point. The built in minecraft permissions was so bad and so many permissions plugins out there that didnt work with some plugins but did work with other, all while every other game has extremely customizable permissions; was a natural progression to have bukkit with built in permissions that plugins could standardize.

I just believe that there are other aspects that should be standardized for plugin developers as well. Obviously the biggest point of bukkit is that the community can make the plugins. But some plugins have a general usefulness, like economy or a GUI. For myself and others, bukkit picking up plugins that become core to a servers operation makes sense.

Permissions is core, economies are core and GUIs are core. Have servers operated with out permissions, or economy, or GUIs and do they still? Yes, but the successful ones have these things. GUI seems to be one that is largely ignored. you can blame minecraft for not coming with it leaving many players not knowing what they are missing. If you have run a GMod or HL2 server you know the extremely important value of in-game 'pushable' GUIs.

But I would argue that while GUIs are something I believe will be needed for standardization in the future(though should be in there now), economy is something that is needed now.

Good discussion by the way.

How often does that happen? Besides this though, Vault is LGPL and takes pull reqs/consistent development if there are API changes in any of it's hooked plugins or if a new one gets released. EconXP is a prime example, the dev wrote a quick hook for his own plugin into Vault, and it is now supported.

There is incredible incentive for a developer that wants to make a new Econ plugin to add itself to Vault as its probable user-base increases dramatically (I think Vault is now supported in 50+ plugins?) - Which is the first giant hurdle you need to get over to even be considered worthwhile.

Perhaps if there is missing API that we'd like to see we could add it to the Vault interface, then ask plugin developers to provide similar functionality into their specific econ plugin?


As an aside - if metadata gets approved into Bukkit someone could make an economy plugin that just uses the metadata API and bam, Vault is technically not required anymore by using a shared metadata name. Though I still see reasons why it would be necessary or desired (banks, alternative accounts, real money conversions, xp conversion, unified way to handle money)

I forgot to mention - Asking bukkit to put in API is a bad idea, look what we got with permissions. It is not bad, but it is not nearly as advanced as we wanted it to be (no groups, no info/metadata) - If we consider this, an Economy API included in Bukkit will almost certainly be inferior to any system we already have, even if it is just an interface.

So my suggestion is, that since Vault exists, and is being used by more and more plugins, just contribute to it.

I agree with a basic economy system that simply tracks money to a player and sending money to players. You can add Bank mods and what not if you want to get into loans and interest.

No I dont mean a GUI for admins or server owners... I find them annoying and perfer command lines mysefl. I mean one for the end gamer. If you havent played any custom servers that have GUIs like GMod, you probably wouldnt understand. Offering an ingame GUI where users can visually see the options they have from a given plugin enhances game play greatly.

Think of it like this... Imagin there was no inventory window... you type /inventory and a list of stuff you have comes up. I'll bet you cant imagine the game like that. Well the things you know you would miss are usually not as great as the thing you dont know you are missing.

Vendor windows, trade windows, mini-maps with boarders on them, NPC interactive responses in a window, all things that give servers that ability to show the end user what they need.

No you may say "But I dont find Vendor windows, trade windows, mini-maps with boarders on them, usful at all". Well thats you. but having a standard GUI at least gives the plugin developers and end users the option to access them.

@Machete.Panda - so Spout and the SpoutCraft client? cause a GUI requires a custom client, and Bukkit is not doing custom client right now.

If you do want these things they already work with Spout/craft

Thats what Im saying... Bukkit take on a GUI standard that GUI enablers like Spoutcraft can use for the gamer. Only its a given standard that plugin developers can make their GUIs for. This way if someone doesnt have Spoutcraft, they can still get the GUI.

EDIT: also your making my point in your earlier "Vault" comment. It just does what other plugins do. Why isnt there a standard? Just a mess of linking systems together.

On the GUI.... Yes ofcourse thats not how it works(in fact, if you reread what I said, I never said it did currently work like that). Im saying on open source GUI for clients, like Spoutcraft, to work with would be great. Then Spoutcraft and the other client based GUI enablers would have a standard to use and the plugins developers would have a standard GUI they could develop for. Think of it like the HTML of minecraft. A lot of "browsers"(the client software) to choose from on the clients end, and a lot of HTML compilers to choose from on the developers end.

On the Vault/Economy... Yes if the authors worked together to create a single approach, that would be great. But, like the permissions problem so many months ago, it hasn't happened and I doubt it will unless, like so many months ago, a server mod provider does it(bukkit or canary).

So you're saying EconXP, MultiCurrency, and BOSE should all be one economy plugin?

And as far as duplication, I've actively refused to add support for 'yet another economy plugin' -> see cConomy.

EconXP uses the xp system as 'currency' (int only values) - MultiCurrency uses multiple currencies - BOSE is just your normal economy plugin with Bank support.
Then there are those that use 'Physical' items as currencies

You could do it with exchanges rates like MultiCurrency or something similar to this, but it just turns into a mess which is why not many people support MultiCurrency.

The thing is the less simplistic it is, the less people want to develop for it. But if it doesn't have key specific features then it may as well not be made. Economy at it's basic level is just 1 double or int value linked to a player object with multiple plugins modifying the values. It's extremely simplistic.

I think more of the point I'm getting at is, people don't care to have an all-encompassing server-mod that does all of their economy things. If this were the case BOSE/EconXP/etc wouldn't exist and we'd have iCo only

And to illustrate the point, You have MultiVerse, but then the myriad of other world management plugins.

Exactly, we don't need to combine all these economy plugins... we just need a simple base that does key things we do with money every day(Value amount tied to player, give receive). From there the community would handle things like "Banks" with loans and interest, land management, vendor/shop plugins and so on.

This would mean we are not dealing with plugins that might not support the economy tool we use. Bukkit permissions doesnt combine all the permissions plugins that were available at the time into one all encompassing package. But it did provide a base for developers to work from, minus the crazy digging through plugins and that may or may-not work with your permissions plugin.

Except, although built-in, we are creating another standard. When Bukkit added default permissions, we got PermissionsEx and SuperPerms, however, not every plugin switched to support them. I still find plugins (and quite the large quantity) that use Permissions 3, and sometimes even Permissions 2. This built-in economy API will end up the same way.

I don't see this working at all. Basically, you're saying that the Spout(craft) team would only have to write Spoutcraft, and the Spout part would be taken care of by Bukkit.

But writing a replacement client is far, far harder than a Bukkit plugin, and far too much work to do just to be able to put a GUI on a screen. Not to mention you would have to rely on Bukkit to add/fix whatever features you needed. How many alternative clients would you expect to see popup? All asking the user to put in his/her name and password.

The GUI is only a small part of the Spout(craft) project, and there are many plugins that don't even bother with the GUI aspects.

I don't use those plugins, but I'm saying that doing a quick search shows that built-in APIs don't always mean unity.