This document will try to answer some questions about the merging of the Velocity and PaperMC projects.
As documented back in September, I (Tux) have had limited time to truly focus on Velocity and have not been able to work on Minecraft projects full-time since the beginning of the year. This has impacted my ability to work on Velocity, and combined with the infrastructure being fragile, the team decided that a mutually beneficial merger of Velocity into the PaperMC umbrella was the best path forward.
PaperMC is the umbrella organization that now comprises of four projects:
- Paper is a fork of Spigot with Spigot plugin compatibility, while offering much better performance.
- Waterfall is a fork of BungeeCord with BungeeCord plugin compatibility, that was originally created by the author of the Velocity project (Tux).
- Starlight is a mod that rewrites the entirety of the Minecraft lighting engine. It is included in Paper and is also available for Forge and Fabric.
- Velocity, now a part of PaperMC, is a next-generation Minecraft proxy focused on scalability and flexibility.
The PaperMC and Velocity projects have had a close working relationship since the very beginning. The merge only formalizes our close relationship.
All that we have announced is that the Velocity project is now a part of PaperMC. The goals and project members haven't changed. Tux and Five join the PaperMC project as maintainers of Velocity.
Over the next few weeks, the Velocity project will be integrated into PaperMC's infrastructure. The transition should be complete by the time Minecraft 1.18 is released at the end of the year. You will soon be downloading Velocity from the PaperMC website, Velocity's repositories will be a part of the PaperMC GitHub organization, and you will be able to contribute to the upkeep of the Velocity and PaperMC projects by contributing to the Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors for PaperMC. Of course, if you want to contribute for Velocity directly, you can give to Tux's GitHub Sponsors page.
The PaperMC team intends to deprecate Waterfall. Waterfall has been for the past few years been in maintenance mode, with users starting new servers encouraged to use Velocity instead. The transition to Velocity will be gradual, over the course of a few Minecraft releases, and Waterfall and Velocity will be maintained side-by-side during this time. We will announce at a later time what the timeline is for Waterfall's deprecation.
This is actually a good thing so there wont be 69 implementations of the same thing