About uncovery

Owner & admin of this server.

Server down temporarily [Update]

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…

Sorry for the delays

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!

Changing names (important)

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.

 

Update to the minecart plugin!

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!

Slabs in the nether (and other places)

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.

We have a new (beta) minecart plugin! Thanks floored1585!

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.

Shop Manager history added!

I made a quick add-on to the shop manager due to frequent requests: If you go on the sellers or buyers tab, you can click on any username and get the recent hsitory of all the items the user bought or sold. The layout is not perfect yet, but the data should be correct.

1826 Minecraft account leaked. So far no active users affected – but please check!

A German IT website has found a list of 1826 compromised minecraft accounts – emails + passwords. I have searched and found said list (since they did not mention where to find it) and checked the list against our userbase.
So far only 2 users (who have not been active for years) have been matched with our users. Of course I can check only for users where the email address used to register the minecraft account is the same as the one they used for the server here. So in case you used a different address, please go here and check if your email is in the list.

New Donator perk: Lot expiry protection

I am implementing right now a new perk for donators: For the term that you have ++ donator level, your lots won’t expire. I think it’s very fair that as long as you “pay for it”, you should be able to keep your lots, too.

Update: You can now see how many months a user has left as donator (above 12 months it will just show “More than 1 year”) on their user info page that links from the user directory.

item names issues

You might have seen stuff in the system (deposit, shop) where the name of the item has been missing. This was because of the quite annoying switch in minecraft from item IDs (numbers, 0 for air, 1 for stone etc) to item names (“air”, “stone” etc). Since Mojang decided to move (which in general is a good idea since you can read code easier), there has been some confusions:

  1. I had to change all the code that deals with stuff – which is quite a lot and update all the databases
  2. The new item names have changed over time (“ink_sack” is now “dye” etc).
  3. Websend, one of the major plugins that we use, is using different names (I could not really find out why) so I had to write code that alerts me when there is a name incoming from websend that is unknown and then add that to a translation table.

Because of those issues, the tables (requests, deposit, offers) have started to contain item names that were not recognizable and therefore showed up empty. So I now wrote a function that takes the current names from the minecraft wiki, checks them against the internal code and then finds out if there are any entries in the tables that do not match. Then I get alerts and can fix 100% of all occurrences of the bad names.

So there are still 2 issues remaining:

  1. I did not have the time to check for 100% of all items where websend uses a different name than the standard. I found 50 items and will get an alert each time someone has something in their inventory that was not recognized by the code, so this should fix itself eventually.
  2. If there are new changes in the minecraft code in future versions. I have to run the above check again to make sure everything is OK. If you see any item in the shop that does not have a proper name, please let me know immediately. Otherwise you risk losing the stock of that item.