Gloss

Server polish and display suite: holograms, menus, scoreboards, tablist, emoji chat, chat bubbles, damage indicators and display-backed drops — in one plugin.

Features

• Holograms — TextDisplay-based floating text with per-player placeholder rendering, hotloadable JSON files, native display scaling and full command management.
• Scoreboards — JSON-defined sidebars with primary/world defaults, permission-gated boards and per-group defaults.
• Tablist — configurable header/footer and per-group player list names.
• Emoji — :emoji: and trigger replacement in chat with tab completion and per-emoji permissions.
• Chat bubbles — messages float above the speaker's head, stack, and fly away as they expire.
• Damage indicators — floating damage and healing numbers measured from actual applied health deltas, with exact Paper critical-hit conditions and a hot-reloading JSON profile for formats, continuous ballistic motion, spin, scale, fade, limits and per-viewer filters.
• Menus and previews — packet-only holographic menus, persistent world panels and look-at container previews.
• Dropped items — configurable labels plus optional display-backed block and item models while the native item remains authoritative.
• Animations — frame-based text animations usable in any hologram, board or tablist line via |animation.<id>|.
• MOTD — randomized, color-filtered server list MOTD.

Rendered text supports bounded {{ ... }} expressions with native player.* and server.* values. PlaceholderAPI remains optional: papi(...) and papiNumber(...) use it when installed, while the standard player and server keys resolve from Gloss itself when it is absent.

Container-preview discovery uses a fair, deduplicated queue capped at ten players per tick. Open previews keep entity-tick target tracking, while stationary viewers are added through a 100-tick fallback sweep.

Requirements

• A 26.1.2 – 26.2 server: Paper, Purpur, Leaf, Folia, Canvas or Spigot.
• Java 25.
• Optional: PlaceholderAPI (placeholders in any rendered line), Vault (permission-group tablist names and default boards).

Commands

/gloss (aliases gl, glo, gg) is the root; /hologram (holo, h) and /board (sb, bd) jump straight into their subtrees. Run /gloss help in game for the full paged menu.

Building

./gradlew build       # full gate: tests + spigot-compatibility compile + shaded jar
./gradlew shadowJar   # just the plugin jar

Java 25 is required. The local VolmLib sibling checkout is resolved automatically as a composite build; pass -PuseLocalVolmLib=false to resolve it remotely instead.

Data layout

Gloss never creates a folder it has nothing to put in. Only the commented gloss.toml, the sparse language.yml message override, and the shipped defaults of enabled features exist after a first boot; every other folder appears the moment something is written into it, and stays gone otherwise.

plugins/Gloss/
├── gloss.toml                       language, metrics and global runtime controls; always
├── language.yml                     sparse message overrides only; always
├── tablist.json                     shipped default, while tablist is enabled
├── motd.json                        shipped default, while motd is enabled (off by default)
├── boards/<id>.json                 2 shipped defaults, while boards are enabled
├── emoji/<id>.json                  shipped defaults, while emoji is enabled
├── animations/<id>.json             10 shipped defaults, while animations are enabled
├── bubbles/<id>.json                shipped default, while chat bubbles are enabled
├── damage-indicators/default.json   shipped default, while damage indicators are enabled
├── real-drops/default.json          shipped default, while real drops are enabled
├── previews/<name>.json             14 shipped defaults, while container previews are enabled
├── holograms/<id>.json              on the first hologram
├── menus/default.json               shipped starter menu, while menus are enabled
├── menus/<path>.json                additional authored menus
├── images/<path>                    when an operator drops an image in
├── panels/<path>.json               on the first panel
├── editor-sync-transactions/        during an editor sync publication
├── editor-sync-backups/<id>/        on the first completed editor sync publication
└── import-backups/<timestamp>/      on a legacy data import that has something to migrate

Configuration, localization and content documents hotload — edit them on disk and the change applies in game without a restart. Deleting a folder is safe: Gloss reads what is there and recreates only what it writes. panels/ is the one exception and reloads through /gloss panel reload.