So FYI, I am on vacation. Since I had to cancel Christmas and New year as well as Chinese New year (Which is a major deal around here), I finally took the chance to go for 2 weeks on vacation, something that I do only every 2-3 years. I will still have some telephone calls on several days for business, but I am sure I will be able to relax a lot during this time.

What does this mean for the server? Not too much. If there is ANY problem or question, just email me as usual. My reply just might take a bit longer and you most likely won’t see me on IRC at all, and I most likely won’t be making any non-urgent fixes for the time.

So this whole post is more to tell you that I did not fall off the edge of the world in case you don’t see me in-game. Have fun minecrafting!

GMail is currently blocking our emails. If you are registering a new account, please use an alternative email if possible. We are working to fix the issue.

[Update] I managed to resolve this a couple of days ago. [/Update]

There are several things that I am working right now and others that I re-discovered as to-dos:

• I have enabled the base process of lot resets. So every day all lots which are up for reset, will be processed as before. The completely re-written process seems to work fine. What is not running yet are lots that have dibs on them. I will work on this process on the coming days to make sure that the dibs process works properly.
• Additional blocks in the lottery – I have made changes to the code that allow additional blocks in the lottery. If you want to see some of the newer blocks in the lottery, please comment below together with the category (See the lottery webpage).
• Fixing blocks, sustainable: I have recurring issues of some blocks not properly working in the shop or deposit. I am trying to build a tool that iterates all the blocks in the system and checks if they are properly configured. This should make the whole thing future-proof when new blocks come out. It’s a bit tricky however.
• Karma & Hunger games: Those two modules have been disabled some time ago and I need to work on them to re-enable them.

Just updated the server to 1.8.3. Not much more to say to that. Good to know we are up to date with the client.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

So we used to have an end world that was connected to our main world, which is the city. However, the issue was, that despite the fact taht your inventory would be cleared, people could drop weapons etc from a creative world city through the portal into the end and then fight the dragon.

So I had to create an end world which is not connected through a standard End portal to the city. Instead it’s the same portal tech as used in the spawn house to get to the other worlds.

The result of this however is that you cannot get out of the end throug the standard portal either. In order for you to get your stuff out, I allowed people to deposit things in the end.

So next time you kill the dragon or want to get your stuff out of the end, simply deposit it and kill yourself.

The biggest piece still missing here is the lot reset. Good news is that I made some significant advances here. That means I have a system running where all the annyoing code changes seem to be done. What I have to do now is to test the different scenarios under which a lot can be reset and what happens if someone put a reservation on it.

As a first step, I will reset those lots that can be reset without acting on reservations, those are the most frequent anyhow and the safest to do.

The whole lot reset process can only run when the server is down. And I need to run tests carefully so I do not need to restore lots from backups and lot ownerships on top of that. So this whole process might take a couple of days. But at least we can see some progress now. Sorry again for the delays. I really had hopes to do this faster. The main issue I had was first of all that now since I am a father, most of my free time at home is spent with the baby. And then, most surplus time in the office was eaten up recently with some urgent project.

While I will be travelling most of march, I hope that I can get some stuff done and that we can see a step by step normalization of the lot reset process.

I have identified an issue in the system coming from the changed usernames: When you are on the website, your username is actually your old username (the one you originally whitelisted with). I wrote code that makes the website display your current minecraft username instead when you post a comment for example.

The issue is that so far every time the website displayed your information, it looked for your original username in the database, not the current one. I went now through the code and tried to fix all the places where it does that.

That’s the first step in fixing the whole issue with changed usernames. Next up (provided that the above worked) is the lot reset. I did already substantial work for a new process to reset the lots. Nothing will change for the users, just the way the code works. I will need to test that however, otherwise I will spend a couple of days reloading stuff from backups :)

I managed to fix User votes (those which give a higher rank to users, not the votes for the server) since they were broken for users that changed their username. If you have not voted yet for someone, please go and try so now.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• library_witch713 (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

There seems to be some chunk issues that I could locate to a specific region of the server. I will try to reload that region from the backup. If that does not help, we might have to revert the whole server for almost a day.

Keep the fingers crossed.

Ok, so I centered the issue around HylandQuids lot. I reset the file around there and could login and teleport to the location, which previously crashed the server. Let’s hope it keeps up and I can go to bed…

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• epic_tacoslapp (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

You most likely have realized that right now a couple of things are broken with the lots: The lot resets do not work, adding people to your lots and some other smaller things.
The issue is that I have been involved in a very important and urgent project at work that is sucking away a lot of my time and attention right now. On top of that, the issues described above are all non-trivial and require to go through a lot of code to fix them properly. So I am not sure when those will be fixed, it won’t take weeks, but I cannot give a certain date at this point.

So sorry, and thanks for your understanding!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• Manica77 (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• TomWicked222 (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Since you can change usernames now, please be aware that this will wipe your inventory, XP and enderchests. If you want to avoid issues, please empty your enderchests and personal inventory before changing the username. Everything else should work fine. If you have troubles in other issues, please submit a ticket.

Floored kindly provided an update:

- Elevator blocks (red wool) functioning.  Now 100% suffocation free, if you remember how MCM worked.
- Empty cart timeout.  Any carts left unattended for over 10 seconds will be towed... Into oblivion.
- Control blocks on curves are working properly.

Please test and give him a hug!

Today I found out that covering areas with slabs to prevent mob spawning causes lag. On a large scale, it can cause so much lag that it uses 50% of the CPU of the whole server. So if you use slabs on a few places to prevent mob spawning, it’s fine. Once you count the places where you use it in the hundreds, or if you cover whole chunks with slabs, you are creating an issue.

The problem comes from the fact that the mobs spawn and de-spawn again on the slabs, as opposed to properly lit areas, where the spawning is prevented before it happens. When the mobs de-spawn, the server has a lineup of mobs to populate the chunk, and it starts from scratch.

So please do not use the slabs as a broad method to prevent mob spawning.

Floored1585 has written a new minecart system from scratch for the server! Yay!

While this is still in beta, there are functions already working perfectly fine. It’s based also on colored wool, so there is no huge difference between what we already have. Also, the general functionality of the individual wool colors will not change too much, but possibly some of the details. So please wait a bit before reconstructing your minecart systems. We also won’t rewrite the documentation before we have something like a “final version”.

What works?

• Black wool: When powered, creates a minecart, picks you up and then waits for you to press a direction key on the keyboard. Will start driving in that direction
• Yellow wool: If you drive over it, it will destroy the minecart you are in and you stay where you are.
• Green wool: Stop where you are until you press a direction key on the keyboard.
• Orange wool: Slows you down while you are over it.

More stuff such as elevators etc will come, please be patient, plugin development is difficult and a lot of testing needs to be done!

What can you do?

• Test the stuff above and comment here if there is unintended behavior.
• Give floored1585 a hug.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• Tyrious (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!