What is my interest in all this except that I'm really into cool gaming ideas? Well, Minecraft is written in Java and it is easy to write plugins. Currently there is no official support for mods or plugins, although there probably will be in the future. However, there is lots of unofficial mods and the most promising server side mod seems to be Bukkit which supports plugins. Their wiki includes descriptions how to setup your workspace and how to write a plugin. The best way to learn is probably to take a look at the source of one of the many existing plugins.

There is a sample project available called SamplePlugin which you can use to get started quickly. I have added a simple maven profile that makes it even easier to get started:

git clone https://github.com/jankronquist/SamplePlugin.git
cd SamplePlugin
mvn package -Pstart-server


Happy hacking!

This weekend I was unpacking two of the last boxes in my new apartment and I finally found my old Amiga 1200. Since it have been stored in the attic for a couple of years and in before that it was stored in the cellar, I decided that it was time to check if it was still working. It took me a quite some time to configure the TV(!) to correctly show the display, but everything else worked like a charm. It had not been booted for over 10 years!

Anyway I found the source code in some random folder, created an LHA archive, found an old floppy disk and using an USB floppy drive I managed to transfer the archive to my PC. Some facts:

• The code had not been touched since march 1995
• It is more than 12 000 lines of (more or less) undocumented assembly code mostly in a single file
• The labels are things like s, s2, fl, bid, cnl2 and so on
• We didn't use a version control system. Instead all files were transfered on floppy disk between our computers

Yet we were still able to create a fun computer game that worked on all the different versions of the Amiga hardware. With todays powerful hardware, different programming languages, good IDEs and the large number of frameworks I simply don't know where to start. Why is that?

Perhaps the fact that we were very focused on what we wanted to do and not interested in how, we were able to overcome the complexity and simply get it done.