Bravo is a elegant, speedy, and extensible implementation of the Minecraft Alpha/Beta protocol. Only the server side is implemented. Bravo also has a few tools useful for examining the wire protocols and disk formats in Minecraft.
- Console
- Login and handshake
- Geometry ("chunk") transfer
- Location updates
- Passage of time (day/night)
- Block construction and deconstruction
- Entities
- Players
- Pickups
- Tiles
- Chests
- Signs
- Lighting
- Save controls
- Server-side inventories
- Pluggable architecture
- Authentication
- Offline
- Online
- Commands
- Inventory control
- Teleports
- Time of day
- Geometry generation
- Erosion
- Simplex noise, 2D and 3D
- Water table
- Seasons
- Spring
- Winter
- Physics
- Sand, gravel
- Water, lava
- Chat commands
- IP ban list
- More plugins for chat
- More plugins for admin
- More terrain generators
- Metadata (redstone/minecarts)
- hey0/llama features
- MOTD and /motd
- /lighter
- /compass
- And whatever else we can think of!
Bravo currently requires Python 2.6 or any newer Python 2.x. It is known to work on CPython and PyPy. (PyPy support is currently on hiatus and will return when numpy support returns to PyPy.)
Bravo ships with a standard setup.py. You will need setuptools/distribute, but most distributions already provide it for you. Bravo depends on the following external libraries from PyPI:
- construct, version 2.03 or later
- numpy
- Twisted, version 10.1 or later
For IRC support, Twisted Words is required; it is usually called python-twisted-words or twisted-words in package managers.
For IC support, Twisted 10.2 is required.
For web service support, Twisted 11.0 is required and the Twisted Web package must be installed; it is generally called python-twisted-web or twisted-web.
Important: Bravo's installation process is currently broken. Until this notice is removed, please don't install, just run directly from the git checkout. It's easier and runs just as well.
Debian and its derivatives, like Ubuntu, have Numpy and Twisted in their package managers.
$ sudo aptitude install python-numpy python-twisted
If you are tight on space, you can install only part of Twisted.
$ sudo aptitude install python-numpy python-twisted-core python-twisted-bin python-twisted-conch
You will need Ubuntu 10.10, for Twisted 10.1. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is not suitable, unless the Twisted 10.1 package from Ubuntu 10.10 is installed.
Numpy and Twisted can be installed from the standard Fedora repository.
$ sudo yum install numpy python-twisted python-twisted-conch
Gentoo doesn't (yet) carry a Construct new enough for Bravo, but it does have Numpy and Twisted.
# emerge numpy twisted twisted-conch
If, for some reason, you are installing to a very raw or unmanaged place, and you want to ensure that everything is built from the latest source available on PyPI, we highly recommend pip for installing Bravo, since it handles all dependencies for you.
$ pip install Bravo
Bravo can also optionally use Ampoule to offload some of its inner calculations to a separate process, improving server response times. Ampoule will be automatically detected and is completely optional.
$ pip install ampoule
Bravo includes a twistd plugin, so it's quite easy to run. Just copy bravo.ini.example to bravo.ini, and put it in one of these locations:
- /etc/bravo/
- ~/.bravo/
- Your working directory
And then run the TAC to start Bravo!
$ twistd -ny bravo.tac
Alternatively, a Twisted plugin is provided as well:
$ twistd -n bravo
Contributing is easy! Just send me your code. Diffs are appreciated, in git format; Github pull requests are excellent.
Things to consider:
- I will be rather merciless about your code during review, especially if it adds lots of new features.
- Some things are better off outside of the main tree, especially if they are moving very fast compared to Bravo itself.
- Unit tests are necessary for new code, especially feature-laden code. If your code is absolutely not testable, it's not really going to be very fun to maintain. See the above point.
- Bravo is MIT/X11. Your contributions will be under that same license. If this isn't acceptable, then your code cannot be merged. This is really the only hard condition.
- Why are you doing this? What's wrong with the official Alpha server?
- Plenty. The biggest architectural mistake is the choice of dozens of threads instead of NIO and an asynchronous event-driven model, but there are other problems as well.
- Are you implying that the official Alpha server is bad?
- Yes. As previous versions of this FAQ have stated, Notch is a cool guy, but the official server is bad.
- Are you going to make an open-source client? That would be awesome!
- The server is free, but the client is not. Accordingly, we are not pursuing an open-source client at this time. If you want to play Alpha, you should pay for it. There's already enough Minecraft piracy going on; we don't feel like being part of the problem. That said, Bravo's packet parser and networking tools could be used in a client; the license permits it, after all.
- Where did the docs go?
- We contribute to the Minecraft Collective's wiki at http://mc.kev009.com/wiki/ now, since it allows us to share data faster. All general Minecraft data goes to that wiki. Bravo-specific docs are shipped in ReST form, and a processed Sphinx version is available online at http://www.docs.bravoserver.org/.
- Why did you make design decision <X>?
- There's an entire page dedicated to this in the documentation. Look at docs/philosophy.rst or http://www.docs.bravoserver.org/philosophy.html.
- It doesn't install? Okay, maybe it installed, but I'm having issues!
On Freenode IRC (irc.freenode.net), #bravo is dedicated to Bravo development and assistance, and #mcdevs is a more general channel for all custom Minecraft development. You can generally get help from those channels. If you think you have found a bug, you can directly report it on the Github issue tracker as well.
Please, please, please read the installation instructions first, as well as the comments in bravo.ini.example. I did not type them out so that they could be ignored. :3
- I have an error involving construct!
- Install Construct.
- I have an error involving JSON!
- If you update to a newer Bravo, you won't need JSON support.
- I have an error involving IRC/AMP/ListOf/endpoints!
- Your Twisted is too old. You really do need Twisted 10.1 or newer.
- Who are you guys, anyway?
- Corbin Simpson (MostAwesomeDude) is the main coder. Derrick Dymock (Ac-town) is the visionary and provider of network traffic dumps. Ben Kero and Mark Harris are the reluctant testers and bug-reporters. The Minecraft Coalition has been an invaluable forum for discussion.
Bravo is made available under the following terms, commonly known as the MIT/X11 license. Contributions from third parties are also under this license.
Copyright (c) 2010 Corbin Simpson et al.
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
The NBT handling code (bravo/nbt.py) is from Thomas Woolford's fantastic NBT library, located at http://github.com/twoolie/NBT, and is used here under the terms of the MIT/X11 license.
Exocet is provided verbatim from W. Allen Short, hosted at https://launchpad.net/exocet, and is used here under the terms of the MIT/X11 license.