Over the past year I’ve been playing Minecraft off and on. The game is pretty simple: you play in a 3D cuboid-world, where everything is a cube with a few smaller exceptions. It’s essentially a lego-like 3D world. Since I like to play with friends, I started hosting my own server which I made public and advertised on Reddit: I did not expect this many people to consistently show up on my server. After a few days I installed CraftBukkit, a more manageable server software base for Minecraft, but I still found all existing plugins not stable nor feature complete (I had to install 5+ plugins to get all the features I wanted). Since I know Java, and I like to do small side projects for a few days, I started programming BasicBukkit last week and now have a stable release version this week!

BasicBukkit: A starting point for a simple Bukkit-based (CraftBukkit) Minecraft server. Implements many of the commonly used mods into a centralized code base and unified plugin file.

My goal was to learn the Bukkit library for Minecraft and learn more about creating stand-alone jar files that load dynamically server-side. Also, I wanted to create a mod that was truly stand-alone that didn’t have any large (i.e. ProtectionMod? or SQL) dependencies. The resulting mod is a single jar file that produces all files necessary for managing a simple SMP / Creative Minecraft server.

Learn more by reading our commands list: Commands. I’ve now implemented roughly 40 commands and are still adding many more! Want to setup your own server? Read the installation notes and configuration on the Configuration page. An active test server can be found at nint22.dyndns.org:25565 (Default port)

One big learning experience I’ve had with this project is that users tend to dislike writing bug reports, or even reporting bugs: period. It’s very frustrating for me to track bugs on this project – so I’ve taken an extreme and pushed myself to do massive testing with this, much much more than I normally do. Because I’ve now seen three servers in the wild using my code, but only one non-developer writing up bug reports, I know I have to persue higher quality by doing heavy testing msyef, though this takes away quite a bit of my developer time (unless the bug is small to fix, which actually has increased by programming speed!).

I wonder how large companies with large developer groups do debugging and manage user error reports. I know from my experience at Microsoft, bugs are taken very seriously, but I’ve only worked with internal testing. I’ve never seen how managers manage incoming user-reported bugs. I know Google has this very neat crash-reporting library that I want to integrate with existing code, but I can’t imagine that gets users to write many more comments other than “it crashed”.