Introducing Flint!

A little over a year ago, I started a project called MGLib. MGLib was a library essentially designed to serve as a generic backend for Bukkit minigame plugins, making it easier for developers to make their own gamemodes without having to go through the tedium of writing all the arena, round, and player management code that needs to be there every single time. (Indeed, having a unified backend proved to be efficient; a basic spleef plugin could be written in ~8 KB of code.) My inspiration for the project was another plugin of mine called TTT, whose core engine was desparately in need of an…

Out with the Old

Java 6 was released in 2006. It is now 2015. It has been 9 years since the release of Java 6. Therefore, I feel it's time to bump the version I compile my software against.

Let's look at Java 7. Java 7 was released in 2011 and has since been succeeded by Java 8. It will reach its end-of-life after April of this year, which is exactly when I intend to switch to using it as a standard. It's a little backwards, but there's not really much more I can do while Java 8 has less than a 50% market share.

So in summary: starting in May, all future releases of my software, plugins, games, whatever, will…

The Bukkit Fiasco, Part II

As you may be aware, the Bukkit project recently went through some massive internal issues and changes. Sadly, not two weeks later, the continuation of it is at stake again. This time, the cause is a DMCA takedown notice submitted by Wesley "Wolvereness" Wolfe. In this post, I'm going to try to explain exactly what's going on, and speculate what will happen. Note that this dispute is very much in a legal gray area, and so nothing is certain at the moment. Again: do not take anything in this post as fact.

The dispute began early Thursday morning when dl.bukkit.org was suddenly made unavailable.…

The Bukkit Fiasco

I woke up this morning to quite a surprise. I hopped out of bed, eager for a Minecraft 1.8 pre-release, only to be greeted by a tweet from Dinnerbone which stated:

Confused, I dug a little deeper, and found a post made to the Bukkit Forums by none other than EvilSeph himself. At the time, the post had already been heavily edited, and after flipping back and forth between the post and the Twitter feeds of Dinnerbone and Jeb, I was able to basically deduce that…

Overriding Bukkit's PlayerDeathEvent

Recently, I made a major change to one of MGLib's subsystems to fix a semi-rare bug. Said bug occurred often enough to make it a point of concern, but just rare enough to make it difficult to determine the cause or really anything about it. I couldn't figure out why it was happening, and to this day, I still don't know.

I suppose I should elaborate on what the bug was. MGLib has a feature where it can override the vanilla Bukkit PlayerDeathEvent (which is ordinarily uncancellable) and instead call its own custom event so that the player effectively stays alive and the minigame using MGLib can…

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