CraftBook

New blog

News is now posted here: http://minecraftnews.sk89q.com/

CraftBook 3.0-alpha2

Read the included CHANGELOG.txt file:

https://github.com/downloads/sk89q/craftbook/craftbook-3.0-alpha2.zip

It works for Minecraft 1.4 and the latest Bukkit.

About an update…

An update will be coming. The reason I haven’t released one is because while there are ICs implemented, they don’t check permissions when you create them yet, so that means anyone can use any IC. That is a potential problem.

CraftBook isn’t done yet is because I need an entire two days devoted to finishing CraftBook. I could literally finish everything if I were able to find that amount of time. However, as you can imagine, trying to schedule two entire free days is a tad difficult.

Yes, the project does have a number of developers, but no one else wants to do the significant work related to the core code. That means that it’s still left to me. I do enjoy and appreciate the work done by the other team members, but at the same time, the important code needs to be written, and no one else seems to be willing to do it.

The project is by no means dead, but I haven’t been playing with redstone or minecarts as much lately, so motivation doesn’t come by as easily. How development time gets swung around depends largely on my Minecraft server, and lately we’ve been playing hard survival and redstone isn’t as critical, and laying hundreds of minecart track by hand is just a silly waste of time (as we see it). We do have a separate creative survival now though, so all hope is not lost. Some of the other integrated circuit and minecart plugins are pretty badly written, so uh, surely those are not ever going on my server. (Speaking of which, there’s a competing plugin that is based off really old CraftBook code — the code is old for a reason — it was written for a dated Minecraft server modification [hMod], and it is largely full of huge ugly and inefficient hacks).

P.S. The version of CraftBook in GitHub is fully updated for Minecraft 1.4. It runs fine, but it has that permissions issue mentioned above. You can find copies of CraftBook in IRC on irc.esper.net in #craftbook

CraftBook and recent builds of Bukkit

Right now, using the latest version of Bukkit with CraftBook means that some features will not work and CraftBook will print errors on load. We are aware of this and we will be addressing this ASAP.

ICs and their status

We do have working integrated circuits. Some versions are floating around with some ICs converted. We still have about 30 or 40 ICs to chew through, but we’re getting there! There will be clocks, monostables, mob spawners, and more.

If you want to try test versions, you can ask around in #craftbook on irc.esper.net. You need an IRC client to connect, but you can also use Espernet’s online IRC page. If you come, try to not be too demanding!

Where are my ICs?!

So here’s where we are with ICs:

• We are changing how they are done (from hMod) so that we can do really complicated ICs, something that wasn’t possible due to limitations in hMod. This is requiring some time to think through. This is an internal change so you’ll still be making ICs the same as you used to.
• To do ICs really well, we need some features in Bukkit, features that don’t exist yet or are that we are now getting put into Bukkit. Expect some Bukkit updates just for CraftBook! (Note: A recent Bukkit update has broken the vast majority of plugins; just a warning.)
• Hopefully ICs can be released towards the end of this week.

As for minecarts, work on that should come afterwards. fullwall has already done a bit, but we still have a bit to go. It’s also not really possible to do all of our minecart features well at the moment, so we’ll be updating Bukkit so that it’s possible to do efficient minecart features!

From the CraftBook team.

Upcoming alpha 2 release

Alpha 2 is probably coming Thursday (PST) or Friday. It’ll have more mechanics and more minecart features. ICs may also come also, or may come in alpha 3 (which may also come not too long after alpha 2).