Mojang enlist the aid of Bukkit to improve Minecraft mod support
Being a Minecraft Bukkit hosting admin I always feel ambivalent when a new Minecraft version is on the way. There's the excitement about all the new features but also the worry about lead time between the official release and the matching Bukkit. Players update to play with all the new toys but can no longer connect to Bukkit servers. The shift to Minecraft 1.2 is going to be especially challenging as it has a huge gameplay change with the doubling of the world height, new AI, and new mobs.
But in the future that will change. Mojang always wanted an official API and their internal attempts have been largely fruitless. They lack the experience and skilled individuals with the spare time to do the job. While Minecraft's current steward, Jens Bergensten (@Jeb_), is capable of doing the work, he can't create add new things to the game and build an API. So Mojang has decided to hire the Bukkit team to build the API for Minecraft. Warren Loo (@EvilSeph) tells how long this has been in the making in this Bukkit Forum post:
Our meeting at Minecon was just the beginning and after having flown us out to Stockholm to get to know each other, it was clear that the potential to do truly great things together was there and we were eager to explore it. After all, we had already been given a direct line to the Minecraft team, the source code and were actively providing Mojang with (exploit) patches and improvements. The next logical step was to figure out the best way to continue working together, perhaps in a more official and intimate capacity. After careful and lengthy consideration, the best course of action became clear. My team and I had already achieved what we wanted to when we started the Bukkit project: provide server admins with the means to easily customise and run their server and provide developers with an easy to use, properly designed API to bring their insane and cool ideas to life. The next obvious step was to make it more official and with news breaking out that Mojang was interested in developing an official Minecraft API, we knew just how to do that.
Now that we have an opportunity to design the official Minecraft API, we intend to make it a suitable replacement for Bukkit, if not a significantly better one, while bukkit.org will remain a community for modders for the foreseeable future.
Jen Bergensten made the announcement in the Mojang Blog:
The plan is to build a fresh server API, and then extend it to support client-side modding (in one way or another). We will try to make it easy for bukkit users to convert if they wish to do so, but backwards compatibility is not guaranteed. We will, however, help bukkit to be compatible with 1.2, to avoid having a long gap while you wait for the official Minecraft server to catch up.
Many of you may ask why we decided to work with bukkit instead of other Minecraft teams, such as Spout or Forge. The reason is that we want more than just modding, and these guys have always had server admins in mind when developing their additions to the game. We hope that this will help the quality of Minecraft multi-player to improve, both for large and private family servers, while still being able to add fun stuff for the bigger audience.
This incredible news should mean that eventually there will be no more waiting for plugin support to catch up with the official release. Server admins will find updates to get smoother in the future.
