Disclaimer: please don’t panic on this post. We need to see what actually will happen before we come to firm conclusions. I want to give a heads-up here to what lies ahead so people don’t wonder why we don’t update to the latest version.

So Mojang just released a snapshot for the next version and described in the changes list that they changed the way blocks are named.

This is a major issue since a LOT of our code is customized to deal.with the current way. A lot of plugins areas well. If this will happen, all item related stuff will break. That means mainly deposit and shop functions but also other huge things such as per-world inventory and so on.

There are several things that need to happen to deal with this:

• Current, maintained plugins need to be updated, we will have to wait for that (that’s the easy part).
• Unmaintained plugins will have to be fixed or replaced. This is really tricky since the main one, websend, which we use as the one and only interface between Minecraft and my code is one of those. I am not good at all at Java and to deal with such a fundamental change might be impossible for me to deal with.
• Then, all my code will have to change so we can deal with the new methods. This is some work, but might be feasible with some effort, but it will take a while.
• Then, we need to change all the stored information about blocks. For the system to tell you what stuff is in your deposit, it needs tables of data that we at times created together from the wiki information. We have to recreate those tables. Maybe I can write a converter, maybe we have to rebuild it from scratch. Who knows. This can be done as a team effort – hopefully.
• Then we have to change the databases that store such information. This can be tricky, but if done with care should be over quickly. The problem here is if we can maintain the existing data or if the change is so dramatic that everything will be lost. That would mean that all shop stuff, deposits, historical data might disappear. If the changes are more transparent, I might be able to convert it.

So there you go. The issue here is that the update to the new version might take months just to wait for other plugins to update and then again months for me to re-code everything.

The thing that makes all of this so much worse is that I am right now traveling 3-4 days a week and don’t have the time or energy to take care of such massive changes – if they happen. I will be busy likely until at least April like that. Further, my wife is pregnant again and we expect our second kid end of March where I will be busy for the next reason.

So you see where this is heading. If the changes in the Minecraft code are dramatic, we might not upgrade for quite a while unless someone with either Java or PHP knowledge steps in and helps me deal with the workload.

That said, I base all of this on the change log I linked above. Maybe it’s all harmless. Maybe it’s a disaster. We will see. Please be patient.