Andret Tools System

Where the name comes from

I learned to write plugins on somebody else’s Minecraft server while I was still at school. A friend I met there, Daniel, decided without much discussion that he was going to be my mentor, and it turned out he was right to. He published his own plugins under the prefix dtl - Dandielo Tools Library - and I liked the idea enough to want one of my own.

So: ATS, Andret Tools System. The first plugin to carry it was atsHelp, written for his server, with a good deal of his help.

How it grew

The next server I joined asked for something specific: a kind of parkour that does not let you stop moving. I called it atsSpeedRun, because that is what had been asked for. It turned out to be more useful than that name allowed, so the scope widened, the name went with it, and atsParkour is what survives.

The rest accumulated the way these things do. Each plugin needed to parse commands, check permissions and reject bad arguments, and each one grew the same tangle of conditionals to do it. That is what atsArguments is for: annotate the handler method, declare what the arguments must look like and who is allowed to run it, and delete the tangle. Every other module sits on top of it, and atsCompanion exists to make writing against it bearable inside the IDE.

What is published

Four plugins are on SpigotMC: atsHelp, atsExplosivePotion, atsBlockGenerator and atsSignTeleport.

Others exist and run, atsParkour among them, but they still carry bugs I would not want somebody else’s server to meet. They stay off the list until that is fixed, which is a better reason to wait than any deadline.