Bukkit

please keep up to data

@piano9uber

http://www.spigotmc.org/

Spigot is a performance-savvy fork of CraftBukkit. It strays away from Bukkit's ideals of doing things as vanilla-like as possible, in order to increase performance. It's quite useful and works amazingly. On the site, there's a chat tab. You can go chat there, feel free to ping me in IRC, under the same name.

@piano9uber

Not a problem. With the tsunamis, there are some helpful developers in #spigot and #bukkitdev (on espernet), so I encourage you to talk to them; CyberTiger in particular on #spigot has some things to say about your plugin that he found rather redundant. Then, once again, there's various developer forums like Bukkit, and maybe even Spigot forums to help out. They're great places to look for detailed help, but they're pretty much the only places I know to get help on something like that. If they honestly can't help you with it, then you'll have to either continue looking into the Bukkit API (or god-forbid, use NMS) or leave it as-is.

Okay, let's begin. This isn't another rant, this is a review of your plugin; so I encourage you to read this all.

Tornadoes... I don't know what to make of them yet. Spawning them via /tornado works, but it's a bit weird. They move rather fast, easily out of your view distance. Either that or they don't last long when spawned.They do indeed create destruction (I'm notably using Spigot to test this). My only criticism, since it works visually just fine, is to maybe slow it down a tiny bit, and maybe it should spawn at your crosshair instead of your current location? Just spouting off ideas. This one is important though, because if you're flying in the air while spawning things, since they spawn in your current location, they appear to not give off as much destruction as they should. They basically float in mid-air that way. This actually applies to basically every natural disaster this plugin includes. They also don't generate much lag, contrary to the front post. This probably depends on the server hardware and machine and a few other factors, but it didn't lag at all on my laptop (which I was also using the client on).

Earthquakes are about as original as you can get them without doing something like Storm, I suppose (and if you want to do such a thing with permission you'd need to talk to Icynene, not me). It basically creates a giant crater that... launched me very, very high up into the air and about 50 blocks away from the explosion. I'm not sure how this simulates an earthquake, because the shaking and ground opening aren't exactly present. Then again, I'm not exactly a person who studies natural disasters, so I can't give very good insight onto this. Except; once again, spawn it at the crosshair instead of your location. This advice will probably go for all the disasters ahead of this. After I tried earthquakes a few times though, it would seem getting blown that high up into the air was a one-time thing, and it didn't happen again; I still got blown up into the air, mind you, but not nearly as high. I do quite like the "cracks" that come from the source of the explosion, though. They fit.

Volcanoes are nice, especially if you start them at the top of a mountain so it looks like an actual volcano, contrary to one stuck in the ground. I mean, yes, it occurs naturally in real life, but it's not really the image people see when they think 'volcano'. It works for this plugin, though, so my only suggestion would be to possibly create an actual mountain, similar to the look of a volcano, but, again, your current design works. I would say to lower the amount of lava thrown out when a volcano explodes (it covers a very large radius), but that's definable in the config, so I can't really say that, now can I? My only other suggestion is, if you were to lower the default amount of lava blobs the volcano throws out upon spawning, perhaps it should continue to erupt and shoot out more occasionally. Otherwise, volcanoes are rather solid.

Tsunamis create a very large blob of water that lag the client when spawning (although that might only be me?). Given your reaction to the previous person who said that, I probably shouldn't encourage a repeat performance. My only words are that it works fine, and remember that #bukkitdev and the forums are there if you need some help with any more advanced stuff to do more than that. My only suggestion is for the water to possibly dissipate over time, so that a giant blob of water isn't sitting there for all eternity. That thing would be a bitch to get rid of without a world editor like MCEdit or WorldEdit, or VoxelSniper, even.

Supernovas, in their default settings, aren't very devastating at all. The initial explosion when someone spawns it, plus the TNT (it appeared to be around 5 or 6, not 50 TNT?) create a crater smaller than an earthquake. Snowballs don't actually spawn, from what I've seen. This may all be an incompatibility with Spigot, though, so I'll test this feature on CraftBukkit as well shortly. I can't really give criticism on this feature since it seems to be more or less partially broken.

Vortexes work correctly and as they should. However, when flinging around things like water and grass, it drops actual grass blocks and water blocks (item ID 8), which is game breaking, in water's case (if you place item Id 8 in the Nether it actually works, and besides, they shouldn't even have those blocks). I would say that their explosion depth isn't particularly big, but that's configurable, and it's likely that low to prevent lag from blocks flinging around a ton of explosions, is it not?

Overall, a decent plugin you've got on your hands. Particularly, here are some things I'd like to point out that regard the plugin as a whole. Firstly, nbatural disaster should spawn at your crosshair, not your current location. If you don't know how to do this, then ask on the forums. You're part of the community, remember. Secondly, the config should be more... well, configurable. Now that you've added the feature to allow natural disasters to naturally spawn, the next logical step would be to make said feature more configurable; specifically, you should be able to define how often a natural disaster would spawn in comparison to others, etc. Lastly, and this ties in with my first suggestion in this paragraph, this is a bug(?). Natural disasters, if spawned via a command, spawn at your location. Because of this, they spawn in mid-air if you're flying, not giving the devastating destruction they should. Because of this, if you don't want to comply with my suggestion to make the disasters spawn at the crosshair, then just make it spawn on the ground below the person who summoned it, so that it would never be in mid-air. These are just my thoughts, feel free to go on your own path. As I said in my post down below, feel free to take my suggestions and reports with a grain of salt, although I feel that these are legitimate suggestions that would be nice to implement.

To wrap up; Do I appreciate the work of a developer who worked hard to get this far? Sure, it's a good plugin and can become even better over time as current features are fine-tuned and new ones are added. Did I come to terms with your attitude yet? Not particularly, although I'd rather let the issue drop.

I'll give this plugin an overview to see what it's made of. I'll edit this post later or create a new one detailing what I like, what I see, any potential bugs, and what should be improved. Feel free to take my opinions with a grain of salt; I honestly don't mean to bash you if that's what it'll appear like at the end of this. If the work is decent, I'll appreciate it, but someone can really show that they appreciate it by spending time showing what they think could be improved. Give me a bit and I'll get back to you.

@piano9uber

I once again don't recall saying I don't like the plugin, but rather, the dev's attitude. I don't get how I'm supposed to 'try' you! :p

@piano9uber

Then please, don't be rude so that I actually care enough to try it and give appreciation. I don't give appreciation to people that act like they don't deserve it.