Getting ready for public release!

Greeting adventurers!

EliteMobs 7.2.21 has just now been released and should be stable enough for a public release! I will be releasing it on Spigot within the next few days, assuming that the feedback  I get back from people testing it is positive.

After testing around for a while, I am more than confident enough in saying that this is by far the most optimized and low impact EliteMobs has ever been, even compared to the early days when it hardly had any features.

In case you missed it, it is worth mentioning that this update goes beyond just optimizing EliteMobs, and starts introducing better compatibility for other plugins which deal custom damage, be it through custom enchantments or through assigning classes or powers to players. I will be expanding these possibilities in the background as development of the plugin continues.

In the very immediate future, probably starting either this weekend or next week, you will be able to see me streaming development work of EliteMobs on https://www.twitch.tv/magmaguy as I move on to a type of development that is more entertaining to watch. I am going to start out by improving the admin and developer tools for creating minidungeons, and retweaking a number of aspects of existing minidungeons (such as packaging all disguise data for already existing minidungeons so disguises get applied automatically) and expanding on the powers, visual effects and other fun features of the plugin.

Of course, I will also be livestreaming working on the Air Ship minidungeon, January's patreon minidungeon. 69OzCanOfBepis will start working on what will probably be February's minidungeon based on the last poll's result, with the theme being "Ancient Egyptian Oasis". We are already talking about developing a whole new weapon resistances system and new powers for it, so once again it will be a very exciting and unique release!

I also want to point out that I from the next public version on I will be experimenting with a new versioning system to allow me to create quick patches for public versions without having to commit to releasing what I'm working on in the developer version. This is good news for people who want to see quick fixes for the public version without compromising the dev cycle of new features in the developer version.  It's going to take me some taking used to, but I believe that users have a fundamental right to see quick fixes done to the public build without having to download the more experimental dev builds, especially when a significant proportion of users are on hosts which simply do not allow them to use dev builds.

Furthermore, for the sake of not taking 6 months (or more) between public versions, I will be releasing the 7.3 public update in chunks as they are completed. The arena matchmaking system itself will be among the last features of the 7.3 update itself, as it requires a lot of features to be in place and a lot of experimentation. NPCs, powers, visual effects the many new item upgrade systems (like the item unbind NPC) will be introduced first. This is not my preferred way of doing things, but I have to recognize that taking over a year between public updates is just not viable if I want to take EliteMobs to the next level, and it's not something users like seeing either.

I do want to take a moment here to acknowledge the massive increase in support that EliteMobs has seen over the last couple of months. I was honestly a bit afraid that it would just be a Christmas season thing, combined with what was honestly a great Christmas release (in no small part thanks to 69OzCanOfBepis' North Pole Minidungeon), but support has been steadily increasing ever since, and it is hard to put into words how good it feels to see this amount of support for software I've been working on continuously for going on 4 years.

I have hopes that the plugin will keep growing, and I think you'll find I am more than willing to continue putting in the time and effort to make it so; even so, if today was the day we had to call it quits, in my books it would've been a fantastic ride, and one that got more recognition and support than I could've ever dared to ask or hope for.

I hope you'll find that the best is still yet to come.

Happy adventuring,

- MagmaGuy