Minecraft, Python, and nerdery

A little over a month ago, I was finally pulled into the rapidly growingthing that is Minecraft. Like many of you, I ended up happily breaking blocks and constructing crude huts and castles into the wee hours of the night.

As is the case with many other things I enjoy, I found myself wondering “What Python nerdery can I get into with Minecraft?” Much like the Minecraft client, the server is written in Java, which is not something I play with for fun. After some Googling around, I stumbled across the Bravo project, an effort to write a custom Minecraft server in Python. “Bingo!”

Bravo is built on top of Twisted and is aimed at being a much more efficient, extendable alternative to the “Notchian” official server. Development is still pretty early, but it is already just about suitable for those who wanting to run creative servers.

Lending a hand

One thing I immediately found out about the Bravo community is that they are immensely patient and helpful with any questions or ideas. I lurk on their IRC channel (#Bravo on Freenode), and have been very impressed so far. For these and other reasons, I can strongly recommend this project for Pythonistas looking for a way to apply their talents to one of their hobbies (Minecraft!).

The Bravo issue tracker has all kinds of stuff in it waiting to be implemented, or fixed up. A lot of these are not extremely difficult, and the maintainer has been great handling pull requests and providing good feedback.

If you’re not sure where to start, or have questions, the IRC room (#Bravo on FreeNode) is great.

tl;dr version

Bravo is a custom Minecraft server written in Python. It is early in development, but is already suitable for creative stuff. The community is friendly, and you should consider perusing their issue tracker.

Source: https://github.com/MostAwesomeDude/bravo

Docs: http://www.docs.bravoserver.org/index.html

IRC: #Bravo on FreeNode

New IMC and IRC extensions for Evennia MUD server

Evennia, the Twisted+Django MUD server, has just finished bringing inshiny new support for IRC and IMC (Inter-mud communication) as of revision 1456. This allows users to bind a local game channel to a remote IRC or IMC room. Evennia transparently sends/receives messages between the game server and the remote IRC/IMC server, while the players are able to talk over said channel just like they would a normal one.

It is even possible to bridge an IRC room to an IMC channel, with the Evennia server acting as a hub for messages. The next step for any eager takers may be to create a Jabber extension (any takers?).

If you’re curious, feel free to drop by #evennia on FreeNode to pester the developers.

Evennia gets Southy

The Django-based Evennia MUD Server took another great step forwardtoday in adding support for the excellent South migration app. This should knock down another barrier for those considering beginning development on their own games. The kinds of schema changes from this point forward should be fully covered by the South migrations that we provide.

For those that aren’t familiar with Evennia, it is the first well-established MUD server built with Django (perhaps the first, period). This makes game development extremely simple, and gives us a lot of power to webbify games (take a look at the included web-based client, for an example). Twisted handles our network layer, and some scheduling. Another unique thing (as far as MUDs go) is that there is actually a good bit of documentation.

Django for EVE Online Development

For anyone who plays EVE Online, I have a proposition for you. Myselfand a few nerdy corpmates have been working on the django-eve projects, which are a collection of Django apps for EVE Online. We’re looking at trying to get more people involved with the project, whether it be providing feedback, patches, or joining up with us longer term.

Our eventual goal as a corporation would be to use these various open-source components to assemble some public-facing, paid (in in-game currency) services that would fund our addictions. If you are interested in joining a/the Django EVE developers corp, send me a buzz and take a look at our corporate website (not a whole lot to see).

If you’d like to talk in-game, buzz me as Ilyk Halibut or Grant Blackman.