Hi everyone, it’s been while since our last Status Update and in that time we’ve been hard at work on a great many things from Sponge itself, to Block19, Ore, State of Sponge and even planning for our Minecon booth!

In development news, we’ve retired mainstream development of 1.8.9 and are now concentrating our efforts on 1.10.2. Our main branches are now bleeding and we’re working to fix tickets and prepare for API 5 release. For your viewing pleasure, here’s a look at our development efforts:

SpongePowered at Minecon 2016

As most of you would know, Minecon is only a month away and we’re pleased to announce that we’ll be running a booth alongside our good friends at MCProHosting. We’re very excited to once more have the opportunity to entertain and inform the awesome Minecraft community, we’re sure it’ll be a blast. Thanks to the superb modelling skills of @Mumfrey, we have a mockup of our current booth design (Liable to change) for everyone to take a look at:

You’ll be seeing plenty of Spongineers there, some will be beaming with excitement, while others will be looking pretty groggy without their usual 18 cups of coffee per day. As things stand, you’ll be seeing the delightful faces of: @Aaron1011, @Dockter, @gabizou, @Grinch, @Me4502, @Mumfrey, @Owexz and @Zidane, as well as plenty of friendly contributors around the place.

You’ll hear plenty more about our plans in the coming weeks, in the meantime we’d love to know how many friendly faces we’ll be seeing around the venue, so let us know if you’re going to come and visit below.

Docs Update

Javadocs links are now everywhere, thanks to some awesome work by 12awsomeman34. We’re awaiting the release of SpongeAPI 5 so we can start adding the new features too, but until then the SpongeDocs will stick to the official Beta release (4.1.0). We’re also debating whether or not to keep the Bukkit-to-Sponge method comparison table, which is becoming less useful as API development progresses.

We still need more contributors - there are conspicuous voids that we cannot fill, such as the permissions API. The pages won’t magically fill themselves, so we’re always on the look-out for people who can explain elements of the SpongeAPI. If you feel confident enough to write a doc, the staff will be delighted to help out. You could even volunteer to become an editor yourself - fame, fortune, glory!

ORE Update

Work on ORE has been progressing smoothly, with most of the bugs now in the process of being ironed out we’ll be further testing the system and getting it ready for production use. As many of the staff will be busy in the leadup to Minecon, we have decided to postpone migration to ORE until after the event in order to ensure a smooth transition process.

If you’d like to take a look at ORE’s current state, you can visit: https://ore-staging.spongepowered.org/

You can also take a look at ORE’s source code here: https://github.com/SpongePowered/Ore

State of Sponge

The next State of Sponge will be hosted on the 29th of October at the usual time of 21:00 UTC. Get ready for an exciting array of Vanilla and Modded fun, with a showcase of the latest Sponge features as well as some exciting community plugins, all livestreamed for your viewing pleasure. The ever-irascible @Zidane will be once more leading our discussion and Q&A session, joined by the rest of the Sponge crew for a delightful [Morning/Afternoon/Evening, depending on your timezone]. We hope to see you all there!