Contest copied, new contest active!

I have copied the jungle contest to the city. I would like to ask the elders to help with the required terra-forming, tree-planting and path-building. Please also help contest submitters to re-place missing pictures and other items. You can reach the area with /warp jungle

The new contest is also live, please see the contest page for details! There will be REAL prizes this time!

0
0
  

New Elder IRC commands

There are new IRC Commands for the elders:

/irc mute <player> Mute a player in the IRC chat. This is not a timed mute, please unmute people later! Also this only prevents their chat from appearing in-game, they can still talk in IRC to other players.
/irc ban #uncovery <player> Ban a player from the IRC chat. Please report bans.
/irc reload Attempt to re-connect the IRC bot in case it’s disconnected from the #Uncovery channel. Use with care.
+2
0
  

Jungle contest winners announced!

I have now finally gone through the contest entries and the winners are out. There is only one designer level user and the others are all architects or settlers. So I grouped the designer with the architects. Sleeping_owl also had the overall best entry

Architects:

  1. Vixengold (level up, 2 stack of Diamonds)
  2. patpat211 (2 stack of Diamonds)
  3. scarovese (1 stack of Diamonds)

Settlers

  1. sleeping_owl (level up, 2 stack of Diamonds)
  2. kzr_nvd (2 stack of Diamonds)
  3. kaosrin (1 stack of Diamonds)

Congratz to all winners! I will be copying the entries over to the city, due to the amount of entries however only those with a score of 2 or higher! Contest winnings are already in your deposit boxes!

Once I managed to copy everything over, I will start the new contest.

 

+3
0
  

No 1.5.2 Update yet. Please downgrade!

I tried today to upgrade to 1.5.2, but it mainly failed due to a non-compatible multiverse plugin which runs all our inventories, portals and worlds.

For those who are new to the upgrade process, here is a recent email that I have sent out to someone who asked me to upgrade the server. I know this sounds like a rant, but I want people to understand that upgrading a client is nothing like upgrading a server.

I am aware that people like you who do not know how to downgrade then cannot play. And believe me, the last thing I want is to have an outdated server.

However it’s normally a several hour process. I have to wait for up to 25 plugin authors to update their software, download it, reconfigure several hundred lines of config files and then make several test runs to make sure everything works. However, if you go research plugins like Multiverse, which we need to run all portals, inventories and worlds, you will see that they did not release an official update since November last year. Not to mention the main server software, bukkit, which still failed to release a finished version since 1.4.7.

To make a long story short: I will upgrade as soon as I can. Right now, I cannot. People asking me to do so or even telling me that I should does not help.

You will have to learn how to downgrade, just like everyone else.

If you take even a fraction of the time it would take me to upgrade (which is not even possible right now), to learn how to use google and then to downgrade, you would be able play.

+7
-1
  

New hunger feature: Shrinking worlds!

I enabled a new hunger feature. The game will shrink the world border by one block per minute, to a minimum radius of 20 blocks. This is to prevent a game where 6 people start, a huge map is created and the leftover two get stuck in opposite corners for hours without doing anything to bring the game forward.

The setting of a smaller world border is triggered by people joining, leaving or switching worlds. So if there is no activity on the server beyond the theoretical maximum duration of the game, the world will keep the same size. If there is a lot of activity, it will shrink every minute by one block, if there is less activity, it will shrink in larger jumps. This is to prevent to have too many triggers when the server is busy that might overload the server.

If you are cornered by a shrinkage underground, you should be teleported to the surface. So be aware about the time of the game, and do not corner yourself! It should not kill you however.

This is still up for testing. Please try it out so we can adjust it when necessary.

+3
0
  

New attempt to get rid of the Skylands

I want to try to get rid of the skylands again. Here is the list of users who still have a lot there:

  • blakavalanche
  • hydroflame62
  • colossal92
  • luklukk

If you do not anything from that, tell me (here in a comment or a ticket) and I will reset it. If there is anything on the lot that you would like to transfer over to another lot, please mark it with red wool, send me the coordinates of one corner and the target corner etc so I can reliably, easily copy & paste it. This means no “the building on the lot to emp_a1″ but rather something along the lines of

I marked all 8 corners of a spaceship in lot sky_a1. The lower-right corner is at -100, 10 -150. This corner should be at -200, 20, 300 in lot aet_01, there is a blue wool block in the spot. There is no need to rotate the item.

If you have anything there that you still need and that does not need to involve me for copying, please move it and I will reset the lot then. If there are any other issues, feel free to contact me so we can find a solution. I would be happy to remove the world within the next 2 weeks.

+2
0
  

Aether reset map fixed

I now added walkways to the map that we use to reset aether lots. This means that newly reset lots will have the walkways now, too. Of course there are still some walkways in the current aether that are missing those walkways. If you get one of these lots, you can either build them yourself or ask me, then I will make them.

+3
0
  

Empire lot corrupted & Fixed!

I have for the first time today fixed a single corrupted empire lot. Here is the story:

The server crashed with a quite nasty error message:

net.minecraft.server.v1_5_R2.ReportedException: Loading entity NBT

I do not know where this error comes from or how it is created, but it basically means the map is broken.

I figured it crashed when either Xecaria went /home or when azkedar joined on his empire lot. Not when other people did anything. Their lots also border to each other. So I teleported to the corner between their lots and there, the server crashed again. Bingo.

So I did the following: I reloaded a backup of the empire world from yesterday. I then symlinked the backed up empire to the folder where normally the RAMdisk empire is symlinked to, and restarted the server. I could login on the location in question, so I knew the backup did not have the error.

As a next step, I moved the mint empire world that we copy lots from to reset them when users disappear out of the way and replaced it with the empire backup from yesterday. Then I removed Xecaria as an owner from the lot and inserted an expired user. I shut down the server and told the server to reset expired lots. It replaced the lot then with the backup.

And it worked. I was hoping that Xecaria’s lot emp_o20 had the error so I would not have to reset the other 3 lots in the quadrant too. And luckily it worked. Thanks to Azkedars chunk replacing tool, the lot system, the fact that we aligned lots with chunks and that I discovered the backup issue and fixed it yesterday :)

+6
0
  

Small contest issue, backup processes revised

I recently removed the unsubmitted contest entry from the contest lot so the judging would be easier. I however realized that there was a mistake in the system and so I was not able to refund those items through the deposit system. Trying to reload from backups, I also realized that the backups for the aether world were broken. Somehow the files that were backed up are from December. I do not even know where those came from.

So for those who built but did not submit a contest entry, sorry but the items are gone. Luckily, most of them are only jungle trees and leaves. I will make sure that the actually submitted contest entries are being worked on properly.

So I reviewed the whole backup process. It’s a bit complicated since we have a RAM disk, a worlds folder, a temp synchronization folder and a world that are not backed up (darklands), lots of backend functions and quite a lot of data (several GB). If I want to retrieve something from a11GB backup, the whole think becomes a nightmare. So I split the backup into even more smaller parts now to ensure that we are having quality files and made sure that all the data is actually there and from the right date.

Hope this does not happen again.

+4
0
  

I won a prize :)

This has nothing to do with minecraft, but as you may know, I am a hobby photographer and I won a 3rd place in a photo contest of the largest German computer magazine!

The contest title was “City landscapes”. If you click through the images on the page you will see mine in b&w as the 3rd image (“username a-head”, should be uncovery but the user account there is more than 10 years old…). This is the image that won:

img_1881

I am super-proud since this is the first time I participated in a contest and I am also winning a prize already :) Yay!

+15
0
  

Server upgraded!

I have upgraded the server to 1.5.1, and so far everything seems to be fine. I want to make sure everything works and would like each of you to report any missing/broken things so we can accumulate them here and fix them one by one. There are some things I still have to do, so I will list them right away

  • configure Minecart Mania – since the plugin has been re-written, I have to re-write the quite complex config file so that all the command blocks work as expected.
    There is still a bug with detector rails.
  • enabling trading with new blocks. Please keep the new blocks out of the shop for now
  • change the IRC bot name
  • when going through a nether portal from the nether to the darklands, you will get an error message, but it still works
  • install the heads plugin so you get heads after hunger games
  • remove the “city-nether” world
  • fix the skyblock world portal. Currently the warp points to an empty space
  • If your nether home was set in a place that is now filled with blocks, you might be pushed up above the nether roof. Do not build up there.

Darklands issue

The first darklands we created for the temp server were corrupted. I am unable to find out where and thus unfortunately will have to remove them. The new darklands etc was not long on the server either. Since there was some griefing and other issues, I am of the opinion to simply start fresh is the best thing to do.

 

+8
0