Book Image

Building Minecraft Server Modifications

By : Cody M. Sommer
Book Image

Building Minecraft Server Modifications

By: Cody M. Sommer

Overview of this book

If you have ever played Minecraft on a public server then the chances are that the server was powered by Bukkit. Bukkit plugins allow a server to be modified in more ways than you can imagine. Learning to program your own server mods will allow you to customize the game to your own liking. Building Minecraft Server Modifications is a complete guide that walks you through the creation of Minecraft server mods. From setting up a server, to testing your newly made plugins, this book teaches you everything you need to know. With the help of this book you can start practising for a career in software development or simply create something awesome to play with your friends. This book walks you through installing your own Minecraft server for you and your friends. Once your server is running, it will aid you in modifying the game by programming Bukkit plugins. You will learn how to program simple plugin features such as player commands and permissions. You will also learn more complex features including listening for events, creating a configurable plugin, and utilizing the Bukkit scheduler. All of this will be accomplished while writing your own server mods. You will become familiar with the most important aspects of the Bukkit API. Additional API features will become a breeze to learn after tackling these more complicated tasks.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Building Minecraft Server Modifications
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Which data to save and when


We know what can be saved to file, but what should we save? Writing data to a file uses disk space, so we only want to save what we need to. It is best to think: "What information do I want to still have after the server is shut down?" For example, a banking plugin would want to have the balance of each account. As another example, a PvP arena plugin would not care to have the information of an arena match. More likely, the match should simply be canceled as the server is shutting down. When considering our teleportation plugin, we will want to still have the locations of each warp after the server has shut down.

Our next concern is when to save this information. Writing data to files has the potential to lag a server if it is a large amount of data. Therefore, you want to only save your data when you have to. There are three main options for how often to save your data:

  • Every time the data is modified

  • Periodically, such as every hour

  • When the server/plugin is shut...