Sponge Status Update - 19th August 2015

General Update

Busy busy busy! The team’s been hard at work since our last Status Update, with lots of changes to the internals and the long-awaited Data API finally making an appearance!

Thanks to all of our awesome Patreon sponsors, as of present we are raising $156 dollars a month. If you would like to donate to help support the SpongePowered project, please do so here: SpongePowered is creating Minecraft Development Platform | Patreon

As always, we’d like to encourage everyone that there are still plenty of opportunities to help out with the project, from the (always in need of assistance) Docs Team, working on Pull Requests to help out our Development Team, to even being generally nice and helpful on the forums.

Development Update

The second major revision of the Data API was merged into SpongeAPI, along with the framework for its implementation. Massive changes were made, and the majority of the existing implementation had to be thrown out. (We apologise for the Inconvenience). Because of this, developers are strongly encouraged to help implement data on this issue:
https://github.com/SpongePowered/SpongeCommon/issues/8.

Several data manipulators have already been implemented, such as HealthData and SkullData. If you’re looking for an example of how to implement a particular type of data, take a look in SpongeCommon for some examples - and if you’re still stuck, feel free to ask around on IRC (#spongedev) or the forums. We’ve already had a ton of work from the community contributing implementations of DataManipulators. If you need specific DataManipulators implemented for your plugin to work, mention it to @gabizou or another developer. We are prioritizing what the community needs first.

Documentation

@Tzk has been promoted to the Docs staff on GitHub in recognition of his continuing assistance. This will be no surprise to many, as he’s been a regular for months :wink:
A reconsideration of part of the Docs structure is contained in the Streamlining Milestone, intended to clean up a few neglected areas and consolidate some scattered pages. This followed some feedback on which Docs pages were most often viewed. Reconsideration of the division of plugin development topics into Basic and Advanced is also under-way, as there are concerns that this entirely artificial break-up of info is not helpful. Debate about alternatives, to aid organisation and readability, is a current concern.
The Pop Quiz is a new pseudo-weekly initiative to spur discussion and collect feedback on a shortlist of three hot topics. We hope it helps isolate tricky issues and paths to resolve them, and generally helps the community keep abreast of current topics.
Finally, as always, we invite developers to help contribute and review the docs - especially when new API features are added. There is a clamour for more information on many features - permissions, data, commands, … Robustly testing Sponge needs as many as possible to comprehend the API, so they can do their best to break it.

State of Sponge VI

As we have been busy working on the internal structure of the Sponge Project, with a great deal of refactors taking up most of our time so far. As such, we feel that a State of Sponge would fail to show off the progression that has been made so far due to the behind-the scenes nature of current development. Hence, we will be delaying SoS VI until the 26th of September.

We are however able to have a general mess around this month with the community on a server, though obviously it would just be for fun. We’d appreciate feedback on whether or not you’d like us to run some kind of event in the stead of SoS, or if we should simply carry on with development.

That’s about it for now, but feel free to ask away if you have any more questions about the project, the team is always keen to inform everyone. :wink:

8 Likes

:wink: I’ll be one of those people, here goes:

OMG!! I am the first the comment. OMG!! I cant wait for State of Sponge. OMG!!

3 Likes

Congratz @tzk, streamliner of docs!

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Thank you for the promotion, i’ll do my best to fulfill that position! :blush:

@Necrodoom
STREAMLINE THE DOCS! :stuck_out_tongue:


regarding the rest of the update:
Sounds good, i hope the money helps getting stuff done too.

1 Like

Been watching from the sidelines and very excited when this gets fully release. Cant wait to spend hours of procrastination building my world with this :stuck_out_tongue: