Brace yourselves, we’ve got a massive Status Update incoming! The Sponge Team has been hard at work across all of our projects, from the core API/Implementation, through to a complete rewrite of both Ore and our new Homepage. Of course, our Docs team has been hard at work updating their guides to account for all these changes.

SpongeWeb

Homepage

Some of you may have noticed that we’ve been working on a new (Work in Progress) Homepage! We’ve completely rewritten the site to improve usability, ease of access and aesthetics. The new site also features our updated Spongie mascot and logos, as part of our effort to standardise the assets across all of our websites. The source code for the website is available on our GitHub and we welcome contributions from the public. Thanks to contributions from awesome people like @jamierocks and @MichaelHillcox , development of the new site has been progressing along at a nice pace and we should hopefully be switching to it as our official homepage in the near future.



Universal Navbar

It’s everywhere, following your every move, it’s our friendly new universal navbar! Thanks to the efforts of @lukegb and @Tzk, we’ve been able to standardise a design to be used across SpongePowered-operated sites. This development greatly improves usability and provides an extensible framework for us to build on in future. There still remains work to be done with ensuring that the formatting is 100% consistent across the sites, though all navbar functionality is now present and working.

Ore

Thanks to the hard work of @windy, Ore has been rewritten using Scala and Play, check the source out on the GitHub Repo or play with our Staging Instance.

Immense progress has been made on the development of Ore, with most of the necessary features now implemented. As of this Status update, Ore now supports:

Project submission

Easy step-by-step process, upload plugin with valid meta file and Ore practically does the rest

Upload multiple iterations of plugin: “versions”

No two version files alike

Release “channels” to represent state of development

JAR or ZIP with plugin JAR in top level permitted

Max file size TBD – input wanted

Project members

Complete synchronization of forums users: If you have a forums account, you have an Ore account.

Can assign different “roles” to members

Owner – Only user who created project, unassignable, complete access

Developer – can create versions, edit pages

Editor – can edit pages

Support – no special privileges right now – ideas?

Pages

Can create up to 10 markdown pages for a project

The home page cannot be deleted and is automatically synced with the project’s forum thread when it’s updated.

Discussion

Forum post automatically created, renamed, updated, and deleted with project

Post to Forum Discussion from Ore

Ore is not done yet however, we still have several more features to be implemented:

Teams: GitHub style organizations for Projects

Moderation tools

Project approval

Competitions

Win cool prizes, collect trophies, get FLARD.

List of awards on user page

Trophy icon next to project when you win

@windy’s call to action:

We need you to help test! I’m sure there are undiscovered bugs / oversights within Ore that simply cannot be found without a larger sample of testers. In addition, we’re looking out for new logos to use for Ore. If you’re good with art, we’d love your help in designing the Ore Logo.

With the current rate of progress, we’re hopeful that Ore will hit 1.0.0-BETA in the near future. Once this occurs, we will begin to encourage developers to transition their Projects from the current temporary Forum Category to their relevant section under Ore.

Development

Sponge API 5.x will no longer target 1.8.9. Sponge API 4.x will remain in LTS as far as bugfixes and optimizations are concerned, however, new additions will not be made unless they are forwards compatible to API 5.0.

Sponge API 5.0 will come with a great many additions and changes that are very specific to Minecraft 1.9 with regards to native support and feature functionality. Unfortunately, these changes will not be backwards compatible with Minecraft 1.8.9.

SpongeVanilla for 1.9 will see new development builds released as 5.0-SNAPSHOT, and new changes will come in the following weeks/month. With the new version, the Cause Tracking system has been rewritten from the ground up, and surely there will be bugs here and there, so reporting them would be preferable on the repository. There are breaking changes that have been made in both the implementation and the API targeting multiworld support, some of the changes involve upgrades made to the world configuration files and player files. Having that said, these changes are NOT backwards compatible and will NOT function on SpongeVanilla/Forge for 1.8.9.

SpongeForge will not see much Minecraft 1.9.x development until Forge has started releasing builds for Minecraft 1.9.3.

We expect that SpongeForge for 1.8.9 will have extended support for the next few months until the modding community has moved towards Minecraft 1.9.3.

####Some existing feature additions made in 1.9:

DataTranslator API changes

Schematic API

Explosion API refactor

####Some planned feature changes for 1.9:

Custom Data Generation

Schematic API expansion

World Creation API refactor to provide more descriptive results (like DataTransactionResults)

Documentation

The jolly crew of the SpongeDocs have been busy introducing many new changes. The Docs now have Versioning - say hello to Docs v4.0.0, with Translations! There’s also a New Header, with Buttons - this extreme niftiness brought to you by Tzk, as part of the greater SpongePowered Theme Harmonisation. There are new pages on Text Templates, Timings, Bans, Flags, Executor Service, Ray Tracing, and more, and a revamp of the Workspace Setup pages. We’re still neck deep in issues and things needing review, so if you have the will and the time, please join us on #spongedocs IRC, or see it all on GitHub.

Plugin Competition

The Sponge Plugin Competition has now closed, we will be awarding winners at this weekend’s State of Sponge X.

Thankyou to everyone who submitted a plugin, we hope you’ve all had fun developing your projects and building upon the Sponge Platform. Remember to keep your development skills in top shape, as we’re hoping to run another Plugin Competition for everyone to demonstrate their work once more!

The State of the Subreddit

Recently the subreddit has undergone some work, with flairs being added, and a new bot (SpongyPowered, because everything else was taken), automagically posting announcements across to the subreddit. On top of this, Me4502 is looking for suggestions and feedback on the changes, as well as a few others that he has in mind. The post on the subreddit is available here

State of Sponge X

Our next State of Sponge is due to be broadcast on the 30th of April at 21:00 UTC. We’ll have plenty of new features to show off from the 1.9 builds of Sponge, a tour through the functionality of Ore, as well as our ever popular Q&A sessions!

The Sponge Community Server will once more be hosting our demonstration session, so please join us on the server as we discuss all things Sponge!

You’ll be able to join us at: http://www.twitch.tv/SpongePowered