We have now, thanks to the devious maliciousness of your overlord, dictator, master torturer and all-around evil guy “Uncovery”, with the help of the code-twister, head-chopper and eye-gouger “Azkedar”, a new scheduled day for the Darklands: Freaky Frydays!

(Yeah I know, Halloween is over, but who cares?)

On Freaky Frydays, there will be sunlight in the darklands! Yay! Yay? Well we know all that sunlight is bad for you. It burns your skin. Literally. No, I mean it. It will set it on fire. Immediately. So either you carry a bucket of water with you to cool your feet, fill your inventory with fire protection potion or you carry around seeds and bonemeal to plant a tree wherever you set your foot since only standing in water, using those potions or standing in the shadow will prevent you from burning to a crispy treat for zombies.

The good news is, Zombies are also affected by the sun. Yeah, I know, they always were. Other mobs are not. Ouch. The whole thing will become active next week!

To recap, here is the complete weekly schedule for the Darklands as a reminder which can also be found in the world descriptions:

Darklands Schedule:

• Hungry Wednesdays: Autoheal is disabled. Eating will not heal you.
• Freaky Frydays: It’s daylight in the Darklands, but the sun will burn you! Seek shadow, water or a fire resistance potion!
• Bloody Sundays: PVP is ON in the Darklands!

Here are some information that might have dropped between the cracks during the upgrade to 1.7.2:

• Minecart mania is currently disabled. The plugin was not updated yet for 1.7.2
• Same for Mob disguises
• When you press TAB on your keyboard, you can see who is on IRC too.
• You can now send private messages (like /msg or /tell) between IRC and the game. In IRC, just do a .msg <user>, when you are in-game, use /irc msg <user>
• I have set the server’s time zone now to Hong Kong (where I live) timezone. That’s why the server restarts now later than before. Also, daily events (like the changing darklands settings such as PVP) now follow Hong Kong timezone.

If you have an empire lot from version 1.6.4 (or older), you should have just received an email. If not, please go to this page, read it well and fill out the form, thanks!

IMPORTANT UPDATE: If you want to reset your lot, but are not ready, please just chose “keep”. You can chose to reset it anytime in the future. From the 16th of December on, once you select “reset”, it will be reset at the next restart of the server. Only moving lots will be processed by ranks.

Also, you can see the progress of lot resets on this page.

I sat down tonight to update the mapper’s biome and blocks files. It seems I got quite far except for some tree edges and some other random rare spots, no idea why. So the majority of new blocks should now render correctly. and the new biomes should too.

If anyone is into this kind of stuff, the mapper can be found here and the files I created here.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• poke0523 (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

• Unmute command works again
• Podzol is now in the shop
• All new blocks should trade fine in the shop. Not sure about new enchantments.
• There is a new command /ci ( = clear inventory) for the flatlands only.
• /lag is now /tps instead.

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• XMagnumX (from MasterDonatorPlus to ElderDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

The new acacia and dark oak saplings are now in the shop!

I have now upgraded to 1.7.2. There are still some unpredictable half-crashes that I will try to fix over the coming days. Please do not try too crazy stuff. If the server acts up too much, we will have to do a complete pre-upgrade reset. We have backups of everything, so no need to worry, but I would encourage all of you not put too much effort into building the coming days since there are still some crashes possible.

On this server, you can store items in different location:

• Chests
• Ender Chests
• User inventory
• Worlds (as blocks)
• Deposit
• Shop

The safest storage places are: Chests & Worlds, Deposits and Shops. Most likely to be damaged are your own inventory and enderchests since they are managed by a plugin. In case of a hard server crash & reboot, those plugins sometimes fail to write the data to the disk and the contents of the user inventory and/or enderchests might be lost. Since I cannot track changes in those inventories, there are no refunds possible. So please do not store all your important belongings in enderchests or carry them around with you. If you need to move stuff, do so in smaller fractions to prevent a total loss in case of a crash. It’s not that we have a lot of crashes, but they happen sometimes.

(I added this text to the “lag” section of the website.)

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• SeanB6243 (from Citizen to Architect)
• Puttmutt (from Citizen to Architect)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:

• InSanCen (from CitizenDonatorPlus to ArchitectDonatorPlus)

Congratz and thanks to all voters!

Disclaimer: This is just a small rant about what I worked on the last 2 days. If you are busy, no need to read.

Ok, so you all hopefully read yesterdays blogpost in which I announced to move to chunk-sized maps. Well actually that was wrongly put, since chunks are only 16×16 blocks large, I actually meant to move to file-sized maps, and one file covers 512×512 blocks.

And the whole thing fell apart the further I progressed with it. First of all, all went great. I managed to find a nice and simple way to place all the generated files on the page with simple CSS and little code. Life was good. Then I wanted to move on to do the same for the heatmaps. The issue is that I had to then render the heatmap for each 512×512 block of each map.

But everything was different looking all of a sudden. I thought at first that the method that I used to translate in-game coordinates (-1000 -> + 1000 around a center) to screen coordinates (0 in the top corner to 2000 in the left/bottom) did not work for single files since the coordinates there start anywhere in the map. Working on that one for 2-3 hours I finally figured out that if you calculate a heatmap for a single 512-sized block, the spot with 1 hit would have the same color intensity as for another block with 100 hits, if that was simply the maximum for each block. Only if you generated a whole world at once,  you would be able to see where in the world the highest hits were. Ideally we should render ALL worlds into one file just to see where the balance is between worlds. So I found that I had to assemble the files of each map back together to a single file in order to create a heatmap. On top of that, since we are having individual lot images on each user’s page, we needed a whole world map. Otherwise, if a lot is split between two files, we would have issues there.

So I tried to make a program that would re-assemble the file-based images into one single image. For that you scan a world directory, list up all the files and tell a small program to arrange them in a 10×10 pattern That worked for some worlds but did not work for others. The issue was that we had more worldfiles per world than 10 by 10. Some rows or lines in the grid would have more files outside the borders. Teleporting and other issues sometimes generate single-block items outside of the borders and those made the map assembly a mess. So I had to first go to each world, check and remove excessive files, then make a list of the good files to make sure no unwanted files messed up everything. Now I was able to have complete maps, crop those again since the world as we set the border does not end at the file end either, render heat maps out of them, cut it again in lot-sized pieces for the user pages, and done.

So in the end we are back to single-file 2D maps, but they still use the better rendering engine, and we have heatmaps again. Yay!

I have been working so far with a 2D map engine (c10t) which has become outdated with 1.7.2. It was already outdated with 1.6.4, I had to install a whole host of complicated programs, compile the source myself etc to get it to work, but I have given up now. The new renderer that I am using is working fine, and I can make new blocks appear on the map (the ones that are currently pink in the new empire map) by simply editing a text file. It also looks much better.

The difference is that the new renderer does not create one single file, but one per chunk. I have to use another program then to re-assemble the file, which works only if the file has an exact known size & dimension, which is a bit of an issue because I have to do trial-and error for each map that I want to make with this tool. If due to some error a chunk is created outside the map (this happens sometimes), the whole system breaks down and I have to trim the map of excessive chunks, and re-generate it. It’s annoying.

So the current 2D map is generated by having a background image (the one map image) and overlay it with the lot squares. What I will do now is to create chunk squares, have background images in them from the new map function and overlay those with the lot squares. I hope I find an elegant way to do this. The good thing will be that there will not anymore be a 3MB file in a single download like for the kingdom but instead several smaller files to download. This will speed things up a bit hopefully, and I can skip the map assembly tool, so there will be less code to maintain. You will know I managed to pull that off once all other maps look like the empire map.

I have now tested for the first time if it is working fine to take the old empire and fill all empty lots with data from the new empire. From what I can see this worked fine, so I generated a map from it. You can now see the new empire map with the currently existing lots. on the 2D map.

I have now installed the latest build of 1.7.2 and for a test installed all plugins that we are currently running. Of course some of them failed (such as minecart mania, mob disguises and a couple small ones), but none of the important ones that we need to run the server. What does that mean?

First of all, the fact that plugins do not crash during the start does not mean that they work 100%. There will be more testing needed for that. I assume that the forums of the individual plugins will soon be filled with comments in case something breaks.

Regarding the upgrade, I want to wait some time until there is some form of stabilization in the bukkit development process. As of now, there are frequent new builds, and while there are right now no open critical bugs, that does not mean that there are no new ones coming. I want to see how often new developer releases are being added, wait until it slows down and at least wait until this weekend with the upgrade. Also, many plugins that deal with blocks currently will not work properly with the new blocks of 1.7.2. So they will disappear into a void in case we try to trade them, and sometimes those new blocks also fail for protection against griefing.

Since the upgrade will involve the reset of the darklands (thanks to tbrewda who found a seed with mesa canyons at spawn!) and all the empire lot resets, I do not want to make an upgrade and then realize later that a bug messed something up. With this upgrade, it’s a major work to manage it, and I do not want to have to do it twice.

But I guess the big message is the following: If you want to reset your lot or pick a new one, now is the time to look at the map make a choice. I will introduce a process where you can submit requests for a different lot. And in this case it would be also the time to dismantle your belongings and stock them into chests.

I have tried around with a couple of seeds for the new empire while working with the first 1.7.2 dev builds and found one that has very little ocean and a nice balance of biomes. Please see the new map with the overlay of the current lots here. The pink stuff are trees and flowers that are new in 1.7.2, the renderer cannot handle them properly. The brown area around lot C25 is just dirt without grass.

Regarding the lot resets:

1. You will be able to reset any of your lots in empire. It will then look like the lots on the new map. You will lose ALL items on the reset lots, chests and so on. I will allow additional deposit storage during the reset time to help people move who only have one lot.
2. You will be able to chose a completely new lot (on the new map, has to be empty, not the old map). If 2 people want the same lot, we will make a clear hierarchy of choice by rank, donators included. That means that a Master will have their pick above Designers, and DesignerDonator above Designers and so on. If 2 people of the same rank want the same lot, we roll the dice.
3. You will be able to simply keep your lot and nothing will change otherwise.
4. All empty lots will reset too.
5. Strongholds and other locations with special mob spawn patterns (please read this here for more info) coming from the old/current empire will change the spawning to normal terrain features. Dungeons from the new empire will maintain their spawning behavior.
6. Yes, we will have breaks in the world and strange cut-off mountains etc, but we have those already now. Look at Lot EMP_S14 for example. We will not be able to avoid this. We can only allow people to reset their lot on world generator changes to try to reduce the impact.
7. No, I do not know yet when we will update. I will tell you when I am working on the upgrade. I will do so as soon as there is some more stable build of bukkit and when i know that all the important plugins are working.