This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.
By the way our server code is Open Source. You can help improving it here.
Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:
Congratz and thanks to all voters!
This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.
By the way our server code is Open Source. You can help improving it here.
This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.
By the way our server code is Open Source. You can help improving it here.
This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.
By the way our code is Open Source. You can help improving it here.
This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.
By the way our code is Open Source. You can help improving it here.
This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.
Uncovery Minecraft has been around for about 5 years now and over the time about 14’500 Users registered on the server. The server has been whitelisted most of the time and we tried to run a “Almost vanilla” type of environment.
Today, I made all the code behind the server open-source, licensed under the GPL. That means that you can take copies of the code as you like, modify and reuse it as long as you publish the results under the same license. Please see details of the license here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html
A quick overview of the system:
Uncovery Minecraft is comprised of a wordpress frontend, a spigot server and a various tools and integrations to other servers and services such as IRC, Teamspeak, XMPP, GitHub and many more. The code is written to 70% in PHP, the rest is JS and CSS. The interface between PHP and the minecraft server runs through Websend (http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/websend/).
It’s a complex system. The code is more than 30’000 lines of code.
The core feature of Uncovery Minecraft is several fully-automated and self-administering services that would otherwise take time from admins to resolve:
There are other features such as a custom PHP based plugin system that includes many games, an internal email system and many more tools to make the admin life easier or the player life more diverse.
Essentially Uncovery Minecraft can be run completely unattended except for bug fixing.
The fact that the server goes open source does not mean of course that the code is in a status where you can download a convenient installation package and install it on your server. This will have to be done over time.
You can find the code repository here https://github.com/uncovery/uncovery_me
So I would like to invite anyone who is interested in this to take a look at the code and help make it more usable by the general community.
Thanks!
Uncovery
Dear all,
I have contemplated about making the server code open source – under the GPL which would prevent commercial usage.
Why would I give access to anyone?
Well, first of all, I have given access to the code to other people in the past. I have somewhat tried to “guard” it by giving access to very few selected people only however. There was a success rate of about 50% of people actually contributing valuable code to the server.
Why give access to everyone?
There is a huge difference between having to ask for access, talking with me why one is capable of dealing with it or just being able to go somewhere and take a look. I have contributed over the years to many open source PHP projects simply because I did not have to ask anyone if I could participate in the project.
Would not someone copy Uncovery 1:1?
Theoretically yes, practically no. Running this server is more than just the code. It’s a bit the same issue as two people having the same camera, they would not WANT to take the exact same photo. The server represents how I want to run it, and that is expressed in the code – partly. A lot of other things are in the rules and the dynamics of the settings, and what features we use. Another server admin might not want to have the users be upgraded by voting and so on.
Further, the code being open source does not mean that there is an easy way to replicate it 1:1 since there is (currently) no installation package of any kind. There is a lot of work needed for someone to be able to use the code as it is for their own server.
The main reason
I want to get more people involved in the code and the future or the server. If there are other server admins which want to learn from the code (it’s not that great of a quality in my opinion, but they can still learn from my mistakes :) or help making it better in any way, I think we all can benefit from that.
Comments welcome!
Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:
Congratz and thanks to all voters!
Today Teamspeak clients were found to have a bug that is quite dangerous. The latest client version does not have this bug anymore. I have followed the instructions from Teamspeak and locked out older clients from the server.
I wanted to give a quick status update since I have not been online a lot in the recent weeks.
So first of all, everything is fine. I am however very busy with my job and need to travel almost every second week and I have telephone calls almost every 2nd evening with Europe. Together with a 1 year old kid it just takes a lot of time. On top of that, there is nothing really urgent with the server right now so I am just not around a lot. I am fixing the one or other thing in the background, but there is not a lot of new developments right now. I have not worked on my other programming projects for 4-6 weeks either, so it’s not really a preference issue, it’s just lack of time.
Since I spent most of my time coding so far to make sure that the server can run without me being there 24/7, I do not think this is a big issue so far. If there is any issue, just let me know through the normal channels and I will see what I can do to fix it.
This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.
This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.
This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.
As you have probably realized, the user icons were broken repeatedly over the last weeks. I was using an external service to get the icons. I now re-wrote the system to get them directly from Mojang themselves. The advantage is that the old service provided default icons when something did not work. When going directly to Mojang, I can check when a single user’s skin was updated the last time, compare that to the date of the skin on the server here and only update if it actually changed.
We will be downloading skins for users who join us the first time as soon as they login and everyone else once a day to keep the requests to Mojang at a reasonable level. Also, we currently do not (yet) render the overlays like helmets and so on. This might come later.
We have a new server list to vote on: minecraft-servers-list.org
Some bug creeped into the voting system. If you voted for a user recently, please check if the vote registered. If not, please vote again.
This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.
This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes. You can see the complete status here.