Feather: A High-performance, Open-source Minecraft Server in Rust
Getting started on the journey of the Feather project, an open-source, high-performance Minecraft server written in Rust. This GitHub project aims to create an efficient, multi-language Minecraft server that is powered by Rust, showcasing the capabilities of this versatile language and serving the Minecraft gaming community simultaneously.
Project Overview:
Feather is a standalone Minecraft server with an emphasis on performance and flexibility. It aims to address the lack of alternative, efficient Minecraft servers. With an innovative approach, it's designed to serve demanding Minecraft players who are not satisfied with the performance of Java-based servers. The target audience ranges from developers and Minecraft enthusiasts who want to explore Raspberry Pi serving to hardcore gamers needing a high-performing backend.
Project Features:
Feather hosts a myriad of valuable features like multi-threaded chunk loading and networking, an ECS architecture, and support for the latest Minecraft version. The project's primary solution is to promote better performance, and these features directly contribute to it. The multi-threaded chunk loading helps to load game parts simultaneously, diminishing lag time. The ECS architecture ensures higher speed and efficiency. For instance, a player can apply modifications using WorldEdit without slowing down the game.
Technology Stack:
The project utilizes Rust, renowned for its speed and memory safety, promoting both better performance and security. The decision of choosing Rust reflects the goal of creating a Minecraft server that can handle demanding tasks efficiently. Feather also uses multiple libraries, like specs for its ECS architecture, tokio for asynchronous I/O, and many more.
Project Structure and Architecture:
Feather's project structure is divided into several crates, including feather-server, holding the server logic, feather-protocol encode/decode methods, and feather-api for communication between plugins. Feather employs the Entity Component System (ECS) architectural principle, widely acknowledged in game development for its flexibility and ability to individualize game entities.
Contribution Guidelines:
Feather encourages contributions from the open-source community. The Feather team outlined contribution guidelines that cover the basics of submitting issues and pull requests. The project encourages potential contributors to join Feather's Discord server for coordination and open discussions. There is no fixed coding standard; however, the Feather team maintains certain conventions for consistency purposes. All contributions should be well documented.
