0.3 Alpha Development Preview

It's the day we've all been waiting for. Within the next several days, we will officially release an alpha of Trident for developers to use.

326 days ago, the first commit was pushed to the Trident repository. 0 days ago, Trident was released.

Please welcome a new, and the first JAR file to be released officially of the Trident project. In it, we have poured our time and effort into creating a Minecraft server, that, not only is completely written from scratch, but is high-performance, stable, and simple.

Before you press the download link, forget about this post, and run your own Trident server, allow me to tell you the story.

Not even a year ago, Bukkit was dying. EvilSeph was leaving, all of Bukkit's staff were resigining, there was trolling, flaming, hope, despair, and a number of people who just wanted to do something about it instead of watch all of it unfold, and boy, did it do exactly that.

I'll put out that I did not exactly start TridentSDK, nor was I there at the start of everything. Essentially, a few of the guys over at Gazamo decided to start this crazy idea of making a Minecraft server - yes, the one with like, 1K obfuscated source files - completely froms scratch. In fact, looking back, there was something along the lines of 18 or 20 developers (not that they really did anything). There have been developers that have come and gone, but what we are left with - myself, Mazen, Mythbusterma, the ever silent Vilsol, and new additions of TigerReborn and Orangelynx - is the TridentSDK Team, and we're here to bring you a fresh addition to the Minecraft software ecosystem.

I know we've made promises, thrown out speculations, predictions of the time left until we can give a download link. We've said January, then Februray, then March, April... Even we didn't know. I've pushed the team, and added TigerReborn within the last week to blast the rest of the bugs left on TRD-26. We've made significant progresses throughout the year, one of the many joys of developing something that often won't work. I vividly remember the first time in our chat - the core team, everyone, was there - we threw in and out edits to the packet scheme... And finally, Mazen joins the server and boom, the player spawns... It was dark, black, and the player did absolutely nothing, that feeling in your gut - the mingling of success and internal happiness that words cannot describe - it was beautiful.

The next month passes, and we are polishing up player KeepAlive... Breakthrough. Mazen comes on the chat one day - CLIENT IS ACCEPTING CHUNK PACKETS. Big things happening like that, it's motivation to keep on going. We got a lot of misconceptions about the clean room nature when we included mojang's authserver code, and we've kept to ourselves and put everything out in one big push. Today is the result of our months and months of hard work. Meet the Trident server.

Be warned: generated worlds look very bad. Placed blocks will not have data, so no colored wool. Basically, for this release, you can join the server, fly around, place blocks, chat, remove blocks, move around, svae and generate worlds and just hang out. Nothing really fancy here. You can drop in your own world instead if you want to in case the generated one looks too bad. Just make sure it is named "world" (yes, we're working on it).

Caveats:
Generated worlds look bad
Getting out of flying is terrible. You need to shift to the ground and then wait a couple of seconds, then release.
Blocks won't have data
No entities other than players
Movement of other players is very buggy
Plugins WON'T WORK. Only some functions are implemented.
You might get bugs

If you find a bug, PLEASE, make sure to post to our bug tracker using the JIRA link in the bar above. You need to register for an account however. You may also post in the Trident Suggestions forum, but it will be closed and moved to JIRA if I find any issues. If you want people to test the server with you,

If you want to see if your issue has been reported, check out JIRA.

VERY VERY IMPORTANT:
This is a Development Preview, alpha. If you run a production server, do not use this JAR. This was made for developers and debuggers alike - you should use it to play with your friends and test Trident. The TridentSDK Team does not accept liability for damages caused by running the provided JAR file.