I fully understand that people would want to be able to pause a hardcore game and I would like to enable it. The question is how. There are issues of practicability and also of effort required to do it. So here are the options:

1. You can exit the deathlands when you are in the spawn-area. There would not be a portal (since I cannot rebuild it every week) but a command that checks where you are. Effort: Small. Practicability: Limited. You would have to come back to the center each time.
2. You can exit the deathlands wherever, by command. When you re-enter, it will teleport you back to the place you were. Effort: I am not even sure it’s possible. There is a risk that it would teleport you always to the surface. I can try surely and see how it works. Also, this version would require to check for your health. I don’t want people to bail on a fight. Practicability: 100% – if possible.

So what I will do now is to implement version 1) since version 2) would require 1) to be in place anyhow (i.e. a command). Let’s see how that works and then see if version 2) is needed and possible.

I just finished the first version of a new game on the server. Thanks to stephdeg for the proposal!

Hardcore Game!

What does it do?

• You play minecraft – as vanilla as it gets – and try to survive as long as possible.
• You are in a separate world (deathlands) and cannot take anything back to the empire etc. This is about survival, not building.
• You cannot leave the world once entered. You can log off the server and log back on, but the only way out is to die.
• PVP is on, except for a 200×200 square at spawn.
• If you die, you are out, and cannot go back until game restart.
• One game lasts a week. At a certain day of the week, the map is deleted, your inventory is gone, your score is reset.
• You make points by committing diamond blocks. One diamond block is worth 100 points. If you commit a block, it’s gone and you get the score credited.
• The person with the highest score at the end of the week wins the round.

What will come?

• We can decide on more blocks that can be committed – and their value.
• This is a test to see everything is as expected. Once we confirm, we set a day of the week for the reset.
• A web interface for score tracking

How do you do it?

• Warp to the new world with /hardcore start
• Get the current score with /hardcore score
• Commit a diamond block with /hardcore commit while holding a diamond block
  ATTENTION: This will take ALL diamond blocks out of your inventory!

What can you do?

• Try it, and tell me if everything works
• Make proposals for improvements

• The developer of the disguises plugin finally released a working version, so disguises work again!
• the /who and /where command are fixed!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• bugsy_danny (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• u28ds05 (from DesignerDonator to MasterDonator)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• library_witch713 (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

So I moved the whole site code on to a GitHub repository. Not a public one (yet), but still.

What I started first is to put all the error messages that I receive from the server as issues so that I can start working on them more efficiently.

Next, I want to allow people to collaborate on a more informal base. If people want to take a look at the code, please feel free to ask me and I will add you to the repository. You need to have at least Citizen Status though.

I might make the whole thing public one day, who knows?

Our Minecart plugin is making problems and crashed the server a couple of times. I have disabled it until we are able to fix this.

There are now more updates to the 2D map:

• When a user leaves or enters a world, the menu icon for the user is now correctly updated, not only the icon on the map loction
• The whole top-menu was redesigned, now with drop-downs and integrated usericons
• The spawn-finder has been redesigned and the animation is now neater
• The user-finder now shakes the icon so it’s better visible when it’s not on the center of the map

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• darthandrew1 (from CitizenDonator to ArchitectDonator)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

• darthandrew1 is kindly helping me to fix some of the HTML and the CSS on the website. First improvements are some fixes you won’t see so much and small improvements on the text readability of the 2D map. This is still in progress and we will see more stuff later
• I found a nice way how to make the lot selection on the settler test a bit more visible.
• Hunger games are open for testing again. Please try and tell me if something does not work as expected. Trophies won’t be given out so far.
• I fixed a quite serious bug where users could take the settler test twice and get two lots in the empire as settlers. I notified the 7-8 users who have several lots now and asked them to tell me which one they want to abandon. If I do not get a reply from them, I will remove them from one of the lots manually.

Please stop building on top of the nether. I am trying to find a way to prevent it, but it’s proving difficult. Please stop going there or even building something.

• There is now a “Mark all read” button on the website mail interface.
• The /dis command now enabled disguises again.
• You can now authorize your Teamspeak client to be able to speak with the “/teamspeak auth” command. See the Teamspeak page for details.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• stephdeg (from DesignerDonatorPlus to MasterDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• masterspock (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I have managed to fix the teamspeak text chat with the friendly help of the plugin developer. You can now enter the teamspeak channel “In-Game chat” and everything that you type in text-chat window can be seen in-game, and all global chat can be seen in that window, too!

Ok, Some more fixes here, will update as they come in:

1. You can now properly read multi-line emails that have been composed online also in-game. Before it would only show the first line, now it shows the complete text. There are still some hickups with quotes and so on, but the text is readable.
2. I also started fixing the Hunger games. It’s quite complicated since I cannot get info from the game reliably when a user dies. Still working on it!

So here are updates for recent fixes:

1. I identified another issue where usernames on the blog would not be updated according to their username changes. This has been fixed now. Once a user with a changed username logs into the server, the website username should be updated correctly
2. I investigated the teamspeak server and found that there were some misconfigurations which resulted from the last time we moved the server from the old provider to the current one. This has been fixed now and I was able to re-install the website widget which makes you see the teamspeak users on the website. On top of that, I installed a plugin that allows you to see who logs in to the teamspeak server in-game. I am still working on getting text-chat working between the teamspeak server and the game, but there are some config issues. I contacted the plugin author and hope to get a reply soon to fix this. I hope we can get more people then to use teamspeak.
3. I updated the Server info page since the Hardware/hosting info was outdated, thanks Sleeping_owl for the hint!
4. I fixed the URL in the /settler command, it was outdated, thanks darthandrew1 for the hint!
5. /find dark_oak_wood and several others (leaves etc) should now be fixed, thanks library_witch713 and sehrgut42 for the hint!

[Disclaimer: This is a fairly technical post about the management of this server. It does not affect gameplay, so no need to read this for your game experience]

I have been working the last 2 days on optimizing the server performance. I installed some months ago a server monitoring tool to better understand how the resources of the server work. This mostly is balanced between Memory, processor capacity and hard disk read/write speed. There are some settings I can change to shift load on the server between memory and hard disk writes for example.

Then, on Monday, I investigated the above tool and found that I can add specific reports for our database system (MySQL). On top of this, I am now observing a more detailed status report provided my the server and observe if I can weed out any poor performance. This showed me that the basic configuration that the server was installed with by default was quite bad for the current usage that we have and that some of the queries that we are doing on the database might not be optimized properly. So here is the monitor tool chart during the last 24 hours when I started to adjust the configuration of the database server:

What you can see on the left end of the chart is that the red and pink line (Buffer usage) were at 100% and the cyan line (cache usage) was at zero. So that means that I did not use at all or completely exhausted some of the resources that the server provides to reduce its work load. If there is no available cache for example, each query that is performed several times needs to be re-executed from scratch instead of simple remembering the result somewhere and re-using that.

So since the first time when the chart starts changing (around 10:00 am yesterday) I re-configured the database config several times (each with a restart of the database and minecraft server) and tried to apply generous cache and other resource settings. Once I am happy with the result based on the detailed status report, I can again reduce the memory and so on provided to give more to other processes (like the web server, the minecraft server etc).

For example, originally I had a maximum number of connections to the server of 300 (green line), a quota which was utilized most of the time around 70% and sometimes even fully exhausted (which basically stopped the minecraft server from working) to 600, which might be too many (now the usage is only around 10%). So I avoided the server rejecting connections because of the limit. The usage of connections might be reduced or increased by the change of other config settings however. So I rather run with excess resources until I removed all the alerts the server is giving me, and once I am happy with the result, I can reduce that limit to a reasonable amount.

The biggest work however will be to find out the most inefficient queries to the database that the server is doing and fix those.

So I hope you understand if I need to restart the server in the coming days a couple of times since every time I change the database config, I need to shutdown the minecraft server, too.