Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• alerwrig (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

I just fixed a voting issue where votes were closed when they got enough support but the form would not really reflect that. Users were still able to change their votes and thus we had some closed votes without the needed support. I hope I was able now to fix this. I re-opened the votes with not enough points.

Minecarts should also be fixed (again). Azkedar kindly looked into the code and made sure that accidental loops of spawning minecarts would not crash the server so easily.

In the meantime I am still doing the backups for the server. There were some technical glitches and I had to start over. I found some better ways to manage the server in the future in the process, so at least some good came out of it.

I have now (see last post) found out that the main HD of the server is failing. The hosting company will replace both HDs (main & backup). While I am pretty sure that the second HD is fine, I had to rent a FTP server on their farm to make an additional backup.

I am currently copying all needed data to the backup FTP, then I will ask the hoster to put new HDs into the system, then will have to setup everything again and copy over the data from the backup. Normally the re-setup of the server will take 5 hours, I will most likely need another couple of hours to setup everything again. If the old HD is not too broken, there is a chance that this goes quickly. We will see.

Since it’s getting late here, I will simply let the backup run overnight while I sleep and then try to do the rest tomorrow. Since I never did that before and since I do not know if I will be very busy tomorrow with other stuff and when the hoster actually will be able to replace the HDs, there is not ETA for this yet. The server will be down sometime (including the website), and then hopefully be back up again not too much later. Please check the facebook page for updates and IRC to chat.

Recently my backup process is throwing this error:

rsync: read errors mapping "/home/minecraft/server/bukkit/nether/DIM-1/region/r.2.-1.mca": Input/output error (5)

I cannot copy the file somewhere else. I know it’s not an access rights issue. Unfortunately, I am not 100% sure what to do best. There are 2 processes available that I know of:

1. restart the server (the whole machine) and schedule a disk check on startup. This means a longer downtime. Last time I suspected HD errors (not sure anymore what that was) and tried to do that, the machine would not start up by itself and I had to wait for tech support to go in and restart it.
2. Try to just delete the file and either restore the area from backup or regenerate the area from scratch. The issue with this is that in case there is an issue with the harddisk, we would not know.

Any one with more linux troubleshooting experience who can help how to best approach this?

Please be aware that the IRC channel currently has a misconfiguration and all chat channel s are displayed. Will fix it when I get back home.All fixed now.

I have now fixed IRC, and all the messages should look like in-game. The only thing odd now is that a /me event in-game shows two messages on IRC. Will have to figure this one out.

Also, I came across an issue with minecarts. If you put a pressure plate next to a black wool spawner, it can happen that the cart is spawned, pushes you out of the way, on the pressure plate, spawns a minecart again, pushes you back on the pressure plate etc. Somehow the new limiter is triggered, but it seems still to cause an endless loop that freezes the server. I have now disabled automated spawning until we resolved that issue too.

I have found that the IRC system is quite broken, a lot of in-game messages to not arrive on the IRC channel.

I therefore am researching on other systems that are better supported than the rather old plugin we were using so far. The best maintained plugin seems to have some challenges however, so until I figure out how to make it work properly (I am in contact with the plugin author), the system might be broken.

Please stand by for further information.

Recently we’ve been having a permissions glitch where users suddenly lose all their permissions. They cannot even pick up items or even speak in chat. Resolving the glitch usually involves disconnecting and reconnecting, and hoping it’s fixed. Then you have to go and re join all your chat channels…

I looked at the code for the permissions plugin and I’ve made a guess as to how to fix it, however I can’t make the glitch happen in my tests. So Unc’s agreed to install my patch, and we’ll just have to wait and see if this happens again.

So, if anyone has this glitch happen again as of about an hour prior to this blog post, please reply and let us know :( … On the other hand if we go a while without another glitch, we can assume the patch works and I’ll submit it to the author of our permissions plugin.

Thanks for your help!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• Scarovese (from ArchitectDonator to DesignerDonator)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

While Bukkit has not realeased any 1.7 versions yet, Bukkit‘s competitor, Spigot, has released a (buggy) pre-release version. I am using this currently to generate a new Empire world. Once that is finished, I will look at the world map to judge if the seed is appropriate to be used. If not, I will start from scratch. If it is suitable, I will publish a map image with the lots overlayed so people can get a first impression what their lot will look like in case they reset. One risk is that the current 2D renderer cannot deal with some of the new biomes like mesa etc. We will see how we deal with that.

By the way, I will allow people also to chose a DIFFERENT lot than they have today if they want to abandon their current one (provided that the target lot is unused), on a first-come-first server basis. Details will follow.

Regarding Spigot: Aparently spigot is better to deal with lag on the server and run all the plugins that bukkit can run. So I will make a try to switch to spigot, if that fails, we just stick with bukkit.

I have found that certain few people massively circumvent the the depositbox limits by depositing items for people who have not been on the server since more than a year. Due to that I have now coded a check that blocks users from depositing items for inactive users.

I would encourage everyone to not overstretch the deposit boxes and empty those items deposited for inactive users before they are hit harder measures…

I have selected lot AET_N1 as the future PVP Arena lot. What I need now is:

• A number of Elders and Masters that want to take over the role to administrate builders. I will add those as owners of the lot so that they can add members that in return will help building. DONE!
• We need the arena to be built with a cube-shaped arena so I can enable PvP in there without the spectators being able to kill each other.
• We need a proposal how the process would work. I would suggest something along the lines of the hunger games. If anything of the hunger games does not work for the arena, I need to know so I can adjust it. Otherwise I just try to recycle as much of the hunger games code as possible.
• We need either several fixed locations with coordinates or a field where people can be teleported randomly to. Then I can program a command that people execute to be teleported into the arena.

I have found that whenever someone is north-west of spawn, the server lags significantly.It seems to be around the lots R15-Q16. I have no idea what is causing it. If someone could help finding the source, it would be highly appreciated.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• michellekathryn (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

With 1.7, there will be one massive change in the system: IDs will become names.That means, a stone block, now called “1”, will become “stone”. Since we are running a lot of custom stuff like the shop & deposit relying on numbers, I will have to not only change the code where numbers are used in the code, but also change all the deposits, shops etc.

For example, when you check out items from your deposit, the code checks how much space you have. That depends on which blocks can stack, and how much. So I made a table that lists all the IDs that stack less than 64 items. This will have to be changed to list the new names instead.

So to fix this, I will have to make a translation table that is readable by PHP. The first step in this is that I have an excel sheet that lists all the ID’s, new names and how high they stack.

I have created a shared Excel document where I need this to be done. I would be very happy if you guys help me there and take a look at the Block IDs and the Item IDs and transfer the DEC value to the ID field, Name (without the “minecraft:”) and how high they stack into the sheet.

Having this, I can update the code to be able to accept the new names before the release of 1.7 so that we will be as ready as possible when the new version comes out.

Thanks!

I have now changed the system so that Settlers can become Citizens after 90 days instead of 120. Why?

• We have promotions now. I think that a user can prove in 90 days if he should be Architect or not. If he/she does not, they won’t get promoted anyhow.
• We have the space
• I wanted a method to engage people earlier into the levels. Before, people would be upgraded from Settler to Architect directly from time to time. If it takes 4 months now until someone can be promoted, we need to balance that.
• This is a computer game. Things move fast. We cannot expect the majority of people to stick around for years.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• u28ds05 (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)
• rocky73 (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)
• Big__Papa (from Citizen to Architect)
• inQuish (from ArchitectDonator to DesignerDonator)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• lilroc17 (from MasterDonatorPlus to ElderDonatorPlus)
• Arielia (from Architect to Designer)
• Psychodrea (from DesignerDonatorPlus to MasterDonatorPlus)
• ShadowAgentStorm (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

[Notes:] As you can see from this post, which looks pretty much like the other 2 before, this is automated now. When I look at the voting list, I can see which ones are “done” since they have enough +/- votes, and I can then either “succeed” or “fail” them. I do this for all the proposals in the list, and the program I wrote automatically upgrades the users and posts the text you can see above to the blog.

Since this is the first Elder to be promoted, I can see how all unfinished proposals need more vote points since the vote-requirement has gone up with the number of Elders available. So everyone who was waiting for a proposal can thank lilroc17 for being set back a bit until their proposal can be closed :). However, all the votes that the upgraded users have cast previously now count more, so there is some balance in the system :)