Good work. You could even knock up a bukkit dev account for yourself now
or use mine tho mines not setup for plugins.
If it was darkstar specific, a duration more than radius would make more sense. Although a radius working like the firenova spell would be epic.. the amount of accidental damage could be an issue
The original Darkstars were mining drones of a sort, which drill down below. That was why if you had a bunch of then over your head... brick constipation would ensue.
So something like, /darkstorm PULSE DURATION
so for example to have it fire every 2 seconds for 30 seconds
/darkstorm 2 30
Wouldnt necessarily be a /command - it could be a sign on a lapiz or emerald block or such was just using that as an example.
Lots of other ways to do it. Obviously the old stick functionality cant be used as that conflicts with both magicspells and movecraft. But Im sure there is some other way we can do it. Something crazy like holding a lapiz block instead or similar.
But anyway, get the basic functionality nailed tight. Which if you have working storms already should be about there.
Keep that code base stored seperately. Then make a copy and start adding the crazy/epic stuff. Current minecraft allows all sorts of crazy effects like smoke, particles, ambient sound effects etc. How cool would it be if we had some way of "painting" a target and then the plugin generates a bunch of visual and sound effects, followed by say a fleet of darkstarts appearing overhead and "warming up" with appropriate scary sounds then commencing fire. etc...
At the very least we could "leak" details of a newly discovered planet... and find the darkstars got there first.. maybe make a temp spawn there - and hammer it
But I am way ahead of myself here.
Lot of room to grow there. But we should get basic fuctionality bug free first.
Basic functionality was the powered lapiz block lightning strike. If you look under my old tower next to sams castle in the basement is an old lighting trap still wired up (look for a dark corridor with stone plates on the floor and look inside roof/wall)
The second functionality was the "storm" wands which cant be sticks at the moment, but could be lapiz too perhaps. That was what the plugin originally did alone.
and sounds like you have added the third function which is /command targeting of players
... now that could have been fun in the days of op nagging...