A bit OT but who are all these people making the mods? It seems really complicated and I'm impressed great developers choose to spend so much time on it. What's the incentive?
I've talked about this a few times, but I was there at the start of Bukkit, and though I haven't touched it for a few years I still think back to it now and then.
The motivation was many faceted, but the basic impetus for most people in the server mod world is that the vanilla server was so inadequate for running a server.
I got involved with a small server, and (quickly! that was a mistake haha) started to help sysadmin the box. I got us on to hMod, which was terrible in many ways but provided a vision for the future - a central, modded server, with plugin points that proffered server admins incredible flexibility configuring their servers.
hMod was run by a single (apparently inexperienced) dev, and the community grew too quickly for him so bukkit was formed.
By this point I had started contributing to hMod, but realised it was a sinking ship and switched my efforts to bukkit. It started as trying to build plugins for our server, but as I started getting commits into the core project it quickly ramped up into full on team participation.
The dev team was really really fun to be a part of. I was on mumble and irc all day talking to the other devs, and would often spend over 8 hours working on code or talking about plans. Upgrades were hectic, and everyone pulled long shifts when they happened.
As time went on and the community grew it became more like a real job, and momentum kept me going for a long time. Eventually I actually got a real job, and my participation waned.
I can't speak for others, but my motivation seemed to be a spectrum that started with scratching an itch end ended with the satisfaction of contributing to a community; the knowledge that your code is being used by thousands, if not millions, of people.
Many people set up servers so they and their real life friends can play in the same world together in real time. That way, you can both work on building a house, or a city or a world.
Larger servers have complex mods that add tremendous functionality to the game. Some may have roleplaying mods, where you can find a role (blacksmith, lumberjack, etc) and participate in the economy. Others may set up a world just for pure creation, a way to make sculptures.
There's a lot Minecraft has been extended to, so there are many reasons you may have to set up a server.
You can either join a server someone else is running, or you can set up your own server.
The Minecraft software had severe limitations around things like "griefing protection" (preventing people causing havoc); charging for stuff (which is one way servers used to raise funds); or minigames.
I used to be into 'modding' when I was sixteen, and the project I worked on turned out quite successful. In fact, some of the core team went on to work for Valve based on this (and later) mods.
Looking back, I suppose it was a bit odd that there was a group of people, most of them quite a bit older than me, who spent large amounts of time working on this project.
From the bits and pieces of personal information that I gathered about my team members, many of them, including the team leader, had 'proper jobs'. One of them actually worked as a lead level designer on a triple-A game.
I got the impression that they spent all this time on the modification because they loved building games, they loved not being constrained by budgets or non-passion related factors, they wanted to build up a portfolio to find a way into the gaming industry, or 'all of the above'. And it worked for some of them.
I'm not sure if this is the case for a majority of 'modders', but I suspect the reasons I mentioned are quite common. If you love developing things, a game is a really great thing to build. It's, ultimately, purely about fun and joy. It doesn't have to be useful. That might be enough for those who work on (boring) useful stuff during the day.
Gosh I miss hacking on GoldSrc. I was 14, running a pirate version of VC++ and spending every damned afternoon working on various mods and the like. I ended up going into web development, but my heart still lies in game dev, so thats what I do in my spare time.
Same here. After taking a detour in my college years I ended up doing web development, but I still miss designing, building and balancing levels and seeing tons of people enjoying the results of my labor! Might get back into it...
Why make any art? For the love of the game. To scratch the itch. People generate ideas all the time, and most of them never go realized... is it any wonder that people contribute to somebody else's project just to see their ideas given form? Same principles as open-source, but without the protection of open-source.
Which, of course, is why modders should be encouraged to use platforms where you retain greater control of the project, which is why I'm a fan of OSS gaming.
The motivation was many faceted, but the basic impetus for most people in the server mod world is that the vanilla server was so inadequate for running a server.
I got involved with a small server, and (quickly! that was a mistake haha) started to help sysadmin the box. I got us on to hMod, which was terrible in many ways but provided a vision for the future - a central, modded server, with plugin points that proffered server admins incredible flexibility configuring their servers.
hMod was run by a single (apparently inexperienced) dev, and the community grew too quickly for him so bukkit was formed.
By this point I had started contributing to hMod, but realised it was a sinking ship and switched my efforts to bukkit. It started as trying to build plugins for our server, but as I started getting commits into the core project it quickly ramped up into full on team participation.
The dev team was really really fun to be a part of. I was on mumble and irc all day talking to the other devs, and would often spend over 8 hours working on code or talking about plans. Upgrades were hectic, and everyone pulled long shifts when they happened.
As time went on and the community grew it became more like a real job, and momentum kept me going for a long time. Eventually I actually got a real job, and my participation waned.
I can't speak for others, but my motivation seemed to be a spectrum that started with scratching an itch end ended with the satisfaction of contributing to a community; the knowledge that your code is being used by thousands, if not millions, of people.