The Future of Herobrine on PaperSpigot
Posted: Wed Jul 14, 2021 11:15 pm
by David B
As of the release of Herobrine v2.2.1, PaperSpigot is once again supported by the Herobrine plugin, thus making the original announcement posted here irrelevant. For anyone interested in reading the original text of this announcement, it is available below.
► Show Spoiler
Hello everyone,
I wanted to take a moment to address the Minecraft server administrators among you who make use of the Herobrine plugin. As many of you have discovered, the inaugural release of Herobrine for Spigot 1.17 and 1.17.1 (Herobrine v2.2.0) does not support running the plugin on PaperSpigot. Soon after the release of the update, I received a flood of messages through various platforms asking me about the lack of PaperSpigot support. This surprised me since this change was not new as of this release, and was actually a part of Herobrine v2.1.3 for Spigot 1.16.5 which was released on May 31, 2021. The overwhelming amount of feedback that I received about cutting off PaperSpigot brought two things to my attention:
In case the original post link breaks at some point in the future, here's a copy of that post for archival purposes:
For those who chose to skip over reading the post, it can be summarized as: PaperSpigot makes changes to the Spigot API that cause API calls that Herobrine relies on to break. I don't have the time to spend testing on PaperSpigot and all PaperSpigot forks, and there were way too many garbage bug reports from entitled PaperSpigot users, so I cut PaperSpigot off to make things simpler for me.
Alright, I know that was a lot to take in. The good news is that, with all of this background information out of the way, I can finally get to the point of this announcement: What is the future of Herobrine on PaperSpigot? Last week, my answer would have been "there is no future", but I have received so much feedback asking for PaperSpigot support that I decided that perhaps cutting off the PaperSpigot community is not the best way to handle this. Instead, I should focus on developing a plan that will enable me to bring Herobrine to PaperSpigot while eliminating or at least reducing the impact of problems that I have faced with previous attempts to support PaperSpigot. While the overall plan is still in development, I am pleased to announce the first stage of that plan today with the first experimental release of the Herobrine plugin for PaperSpigot 1.17 and 1.17.1. I should stress that while this will hopefully be received by the PaperSpigot community as positive news, there are several catches to this.
First and foremost, this release is experimental. That means that I do not condone running it on a production server. Additionally, experimental PaperSpigot releases will have the following limitations:
The first experimental release of Herobrine for PaperSpigot is linked below. For this release, the source code is effectively identical to that of the official Herobrine v2.2.0 release. From the little testing that I have done, the plugin appears to function properly on PaperSpigot, however, my past experience with supporting PaperSpigot suggests that obscure issues are often found by server administrators during plugin use that I do not come across in my testing. That is where all of you who choose to participate in testing come in: by trying this release in your own environments and providing feedback to me, I can work towards a stable solution.
To those of you who have contacted me about PaperSpigot support over the last few days: thank you for speaking up. I build Herobrine and other Programmer's World projects in my free time for fun, but when doing so, I want to provide the community with something that they could use. Sometimes, I do not get as much feedback from the community as I would like, and when that happens, I make judgments about project decisions from my own perspective. Sometimes, that perspective is not fully informed due to that lack of feedback, and the end result is something like what happened here. While I stand firmly behind my argument that PaperSpigot is not mature enough for production servers at this time, I do not want to shut out those of you who use it.
~ David
I wanted to take a moment to address the Minecraft server administrators among you who make use of the Herobrine plugin. As many of you have discovered, the inaugural release of Herobrine for Spigot 1.17 and 1.17.1 (Herobrine v2.2.0) does not support running the plugin on PaperSpigot. Soon after the release of the update, I received a flood of messages through various platforms asking me about the lack of PaperSpigot support. This surprised me since this change was not new as of this release, and was actually a part of Herobrine v2.1.3 for Spigot 1.16.5 which was released on May 31, 2021. The overwhelming amount of feedback that I received about cutting off PaperSpigot brought two things to my attention:
- There are quite a few server administrators out there who do not install plugin updates outside of when a new Minecraft version releases. If there were more who did, I would have received this feedback sooner. This is a problem, and I have started thinking about ways to address it. This problem is outside the scope of this announcement, however, so I will be keeping quiet about it for now.
- There are way more server administrators who use PaperSpigot or a PaperSpigot derivative (Purpur, etc.) than I thought. I do not consider this to be a good thing. While I think the work that the PaperSpigot team is doing is awesome, the fact that not all Spigot plugins are compatible with their software suggests to me that their software has not matured enough to be used on production servers as many server admins are apparently doing. The PaperSpigot team is definitely headed in the right direction, but I just do not think they have reached stability yet. That said, I do not like the idea of cutting off certain groups of server admins just because I disagree with their decision.
In case the original post link breaks at some point in the future, here's a copy of that post for archival purposes:
► Show Spoiler
While Paper may provide optimizations to the server, it does so at the cost of API stability. In the past, Paper users have complained about this plugin being unstable. The issues that they hit do not happen on Spigot servers and therefore must be a result of the changes to the code for PaperSpigot.
Since it is impossible for me to test the plugin on PaperSpigot or one of its forks and work around its problems, there is only one solution: block it from running on PaperSpigot.
If I am being honest, I don't want to block PaperSpigot, but I've basically been forced to block it. Without going into details, the ratio between so-called "bug reports" that are just PaperSpigot users being rude & insulting and actual bug reports that could help me get the plugin working properly on PaperSpigot is way out of balance. Whenever I check in on the various platforms I've established for submitting bug reports, there's so much "OMG UR PLUGIN SUCKS AND UR A LOSER" garbage from the PaperSpigot folks that it's become very difficult to process the few reports that I get that are actually useful. Thus, I have decided that the effort is not worth it. I feel sorry about cutting off PaperSpigot for those of you out there who don't deserve to be lumped in with these losers, but unfortunately, without the resources to properly support you, it's better to explicitly prevent the plugin from working than it is to release something that may or may not work for you.
If anyone would like to assist with getting the plugin working on PaperSpigot, please do reach out to me. I'd be happy to talk about it.
Since it is impossible for me to test the plugin on PaperSpigot or one of its forks and work around its problems, there is only one solution: block it from running on PaperSpigot.
If I am being honest, I don't want to block PaperSpigot, but I've basically been forced to block it. Without going into details, the ratio between so-called "bug reports" that are just PaperSpigot users being rude & insulting and actual bug reports that could help me get the plugin working properly on PaperSpigot is way out of balance. Whenever I check in on the various platforms I've established for submitting bug reports, there's so much "OMG UR PLUGIN SUCKS AND UR A LOSER" garbage from the PaperSpigot folks that it's become very difficult to process the few reports that I get that are actually useful. Thus, I have decided that the effort is not worth it. I feel sorry about cutting off PaperSpigot for those of you out there who don't deserve to be lumped in with these losers, but unfortunately, without the resources to properly support you, it's better to explicitly prevent the plugin from working than it is to release something that may or may not work for you.
If anyone would like to assist with getting the plugin working on PaperSpigot, please do reach out to me. I'd be happy to talk about it.
Alright, I know that was a lot to take in. The good news is that, with all of this background information out of the way, I can finally get to the point of this announcement: What is the future of Herobrine on PaperSpigot? Last week, my answer would have been "there is no future", but I have received so much feedback asking for PaperSpigot support that I decided that perhaps cutting off the PaperSpigot community is not the best way to handle this. Instead, I should focus on developing a plan that will enable me to bring Herobrine to PaperSpigot while eliminating or at least reducing the impact of problems that I have faced with previous attempts to support PaperSpigot. While the overall plan is still in development, I am pleased to announce the first stage of that plan today with the first experimental release of the Herobrine plugin for PaperSpigot 1.17 and 1.17.1. I should stress that while this will hopefully be received by the PaperSpigot community as positive news, there are several catches to this.
First and foremost, this release is experimental. That means that I do not condone running it on a production server. Additionally, experimental PaperSpigot releases will have the following limitations:
- Experimental PaperSpigot releases will not be provided on the main Herobrine download page and will only be accessible for download via announcements posted here on the Programmer's World Forums. Downloading these releases will require registering a Programmer's World account.
- The Internal Bug Reporting feature will be nonfunctional. Attempts to use the command will be rejected by the report submission server.
- Download checking is disabled.
- When logging in to the server, all players that are OPs will see the message pictured below. This message cannot be disabled. Untitled0.png
Untitled1.png
As I mentioned previously, I am still developing a long-term plan to support PaperSpigot, and I do not yet know everything that the plan will entail. To some extent, the direction that this plan takes will depend on the success of this experimental release and the feedback that I receive from the community. What I can share about the plan is that the long-term goal is not to build a version of Herobrine intended specifically for PaperSpigot, but rather, to build a version that is compatible with Spigot as well as PaperSpigot. As this plan unfolds, I welcome the community to provide feedback to me on how you all think things are going and what you would recommend to be the next steps.The first experimental release of Herobrine for PaperSpigot is linked below. For this release, the source code is effectively identical to that of the official Herobrine v2.2.0 release. From the little testing that I have done, the plugin appears to function properly on PaperSpigot, however, my past experience with supporting PaperSpigot suggests that obscure issues are often found by server administrators during plugin use that I do not come across in my testing. That is where all of you who choose to participate in testing come in: by trying this release in your own environments and providing feedback to me, I can work towards a stable solution.
To those of you who have contacted me about PaperSpigot support over the last few days: thank you for speaking up. I build Herobrine and other Programmer's World projects in my free time for fun, but when doing so, I want to provide the community with something that they could use. Sometimes, I do not get as much feedback from the community as I would like, and when that happens, I make judgments about project decisions from my own perspective. Sometimes, that perspective is not fully informed due to that lack of feedback, and the end result is something like what happened here. While I stand firmly behind my argument that PaperSpigot is not mature enough for production servers at this time, I do not want to shut out those of you who use it.
~ David
Herobrine 2 for PaperSpigot 1.17 - 1.17.1 - BETA 1.jar