Sponge Status Update - 3rd February 2016

Sponge Status Update - 3rd February 2016
@Owexz wrote:

Since our last update, the Sponge Beta release has had a chance to propagate in the wild world, to much acclaim. The explosion of activity around Sponge is something we really appreciate, and we'd like to ask you to help beat the drums louder. Sponge Servers can do amazing things, and we need to spread the word. Try out a Sponge Server for yourself, show your friends, talk about it on Reddit, MCF, and anywhere else you like. If it's your cup of tea, make a video using Sponge and your favorite mods. Make plugins, write mods, and send letters to your local Head of State!

We also highly encourage everyone to join our community, feel free to make an account on our Forums, or join us on IRC if you have any questions that need answering!

We’re enthusiastic about how well the entire Sponge ecosystem has been developing since Beta, and we have you, our wonderful community, to thank!

Downloads

SpongeForge Beta | SpongeVanilla Beta | SpongeAPI Beta


If you need help setting up Sponge, check out the Documentation here:
https://docs.spongepowered.org/en/server/getting-started/installation.html

Disclaimer

Latest Builds are the bleeding edge of Sponge Development and can be experimental and/or unstable. If choosing to migrate existing worlds, WE HIGHLY RECOMMEND DOING A BACKUP FIRST. Additionally, we recommend performing frequent backups of the server in order to minimize any potential damage caused by bugs.

Latest builds are meant to be used to test plugins in a development environment or to try out experimental features and/or bug fixes. ** If you want to ensure a stable server, please use the declared Recommended builds instead.** When we believe a particular build is stable enough for general use, we will promote it as a Recommended Build. We are not responsible for any permanent damage done to your server, software, and/or it’s data.

Sponge Community Server


If you have the itch to try out Sponge, join our awesome Sponge Community Server. Now showcasing SpongeVanilla, the plucky little implementation that can, Iit’s stacked with plugins and just waiting for you to test it. The spawn world is the waterfall shown on SoS8. Visit //demo.spongepowered.org:25565// to play.

We’re also running SpongeForge in parallel on port 25575 with several mods installed to show off the capability of the SpongeForge platform. The SCS Team has put together a Technic Modpack to make it easy for you to hop on and test things out! So feel free to hop on and play around, suggest new mods to try out and have a good time.

Development


We have had a great initial beta release, and a great run with 1.8 as a software base. However, as everyone should know by now, the latest release that we can possibly keep up to date to is Minecraft 1.8.9. As we've seen over the last few weeks, a lot of Forge mods have already started the release of alpha/dev builds of their mods for 1.8.9. As such, SpongeForge and SpongeVanilla have been targeting 1.8.9 for some time now. The main changes have been the security updates from Mojang, and, as per usual, some optimizations have been included. Since the move, we will NOT be back porting any implementation updates or bug fixes to the 1.8 versions of the implementations.

It is very important to note, however, that we do have plans to have versioned support to a certain extent, to be introduced as we approach full stable release builds. As mentioned during the Beta release announcement, the API is strictly following SemVer. Because of this, when we have the ability to produce backwards compatible bug fixes and updates, previous versions of the API implementations will be released accordingly. However, new features will always target the next minor release of the API. Currently, SpongeForge and SpongeVanilla are targeting SpongeAPI 3.1-SNAPSHOT.

We have plans to release SpongeAPI 4.0 within the next few weeks. Some of the larger breaking changes include:

• Persistence API rewrite
  • DataFormat API that allows completing the bridge of a DataView being serialized and deserialized to/from any file format, including: NBT, JSON, and HOCON.
  • Since they are CatalogTyped, they can be registered by plugins as well.
• GameProfileProperty API
  • A new API for dealing with GameProfile specific properties that are attached to a player's GameProfile
  • Necessary addition for more API's
• SpawnCause API refactor and revision for improved plugin usage
• Minor additions of ListData and other Collection related DataManipulators have been added, and thusly heavily refactored the few abstraction layers in the Data API

When Minecraft 1.9 drops, we know that a few breaking changes in the API will be necessary to remain in tandem with the feature set provided by Minecraft. With this in mind, we aim for SpongeAPI 4.0 to be released by the time Minecraft 1.9 is out, if not earlier.

Documentation


There has been much done in the past few weeks, thanks to the diligent staff a great swathe of recent additions and amendments have cleared. There is a table of Bukkit -> Sponge classes now in development, which we hope will help plugin developers get a head start. We also salute our newest member, @12Awsomeman34, and welcome him to castle SPAMalot.
We still seek docs detailing Items, Permissions, Scoreboards, and a few other outstanding API areas; if you can help us out, please join #spongedocs and sing FLARD until a staff member contacts you.
Now that Sponge has a versioning system, the Docs need to do the same. Here is how we plan to handle this situation:
We aim to have the master Docs support the current release version of SpongeAPI.
There will be a need for older versions of the SpongeDocs to be hosted, in addition to the current API version. We can only offer limited support to users of older Sponge versions, but we will try to arrange for older Docs to be made into a Static branch and hosted separately.
PRs and documentation relating to newer versions than the Docs address will be put on hold until that API version is released. We still appreciate the help, but we do not have the staff resources for maintaining multiple branches.

Web


Thanks to the hard work of @lukegb and @gratimax, Ore has received much more attention recently, however we’re still looking for much more assistance in developing this major project. If you have web development experience, especially with Python and Django, or design experience, we’d love to talk to you about how you can pitch in and lend a hand with Ore! Just hop on Espernet IRC and join #spongedocs or PM @lukegb on the forums.

Ore is staged at https://ore-staging.spongepowered.org/, so please hop on, test it, and report any bugs to the issue tracker.

State of Sponge IX


The next iteration of the long running Sci-Fi Comedy Drama Series State of Sponge is scheduled to air on Saturday the 27th of February at 21:00 UTC! Thanks to the awesome work of the SCS team, we’ll be able to demonstrate the capabilities of both SpongeVanilla and SpongeForge in Vanilla and Modded configurations. Tune in to check out the cool new features and ask the Sponge Team any questions you might have!

You’ll be able to join us at: http://www.twitch.tv/SpongePowered
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