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.
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1.7 release coming – what will happen?
As usual, before upgrades, here is an announcement about what will happen:
- The server will continue to run as-is until we can upgrade to 1.7
- We will upgrade to 1.7 as soon as Bukkit and the minimum required plugins (websend, worldguard, permissionsEX, worldborder, multiverse, essentials etc, etc) are stable enough to actually let us upgrade. This might take a long while this time, maybe 2-3 months, who knows – I don’t.
- We will not start a temporary 1.7 server this time.
- The Darklands will be reset on upgrade. Items left there will be deleted on upgrade. Feel free to disassemble it and store it somewhere safe so that it can be used to rebuild things in the new darklands.
- We will create a new Empire map that will be used to reset expired and empty lots during upgrade. Occupied lots will be untouched. Users will have a 1-off option to reset some or all lots they own to the new map. I will post an image of the new empire map so that users will have a better idea how their lot will look like in case they get a reset.
- I will do my best to upgrade deposits, shop contents and so on to the new data structure in 1.7. This might result to a closure of those functions for a certain time after upgrade, depending on how complicated it will be and how much time I have during the days the upgrade is possible.
New Contest format
Leading the server into new year, I would like to start a new contest format. Why?
As you know, I have been notoriously late in closing contests and announcing new ones. This has caused a lot of contest entries to be erased since users expired before the contest was closed. Further, upgrades of great people have been delayed of this and have been existing only far-and-between. I think we fixed the upgrade issue with the new voting system, the question is now how we can continue to run the contests so we do not lose it as a great thing on the server.
So the issue why it took me so long is the following: I needed to go on the server and rate 20+ entries. Since I want to take this seriously and give everyone a fair chance (my rating power is higher than normal users), I wanted to take time for this, which I usually do not have. I cannot not do it from work, since my internet connection is not fast enough there. So I stated to procrastinate it, with the outcome well known. Further, moving the contest entries back to the city took quite some time always because I had to find a location for each single building and copy-paste the items over. Only that would take me 3-4 hours.
So the proposal is to change as follows:
- Shorter contests. The time to build something should be max 6-8 weeks. We often took 3 months from the get-go and then more due to delayed closure.
- No more votes from me. If I do not need to vote, no issue for me to delay.
- I will try to copy landscape to the contest area from the beginning so that people can prepare what they build to fit into the landscape from the beginning. We can build roads already during the contest. I am not sure if this works, but will try.
- Winnings will be Steam items contributed by users as promised before. On top of that, winners will get a proposal vote from me. I usually did not vote on proposals, but for contests wins, you will get a proposal from my side which is worth 16 points – provided that you did not get promoted in the last 2 months. On top of that of course diamonds etc as we had it.
So my question is what you guys think about that. Please comment.
Misc News
- PVP Arena: I occupied now the lot below the contest area in the Aether. We will make it a PVP zone and create a secure drop-in area so that people can go into any arena w/o being spawn-killed. It might take a day or two but this will be a community action. I most likely will give ownership to elders and then they can assign people to help there.
- With Arena: The arena is too easy right now. Hiding from the wither is not hard enough. We should get together with some users and come up with a new design for the wither arena. So I created a forum post where we can discuss this.
- Contest: I have closed the contest now and will be giving out the prices by today. People who have been recently upgraded won’t be upgraded again. Sorry again about the delay in this. I expedited the upgrade voting so more people could get upgraded ASAP instead of waiting on the contest. I will make another post about the future of the contests soon.
Today’s upgrades
Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:
- michellekathryn (from Citizen to Architect)
Congratz and thanks to all voters!
Help Request for 1.7 preparation
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!
New method to request a ban
I have now programmed the following command:
/mod banrequest <user> [reason]
If some user is massively violating rules, you can request a ban with this command. An email with the latest logfile will be sent to an admin for action. Do not abuse this! This command can be used by users level Settler and upwards.
Citizen upgrade moved from 120 to 90 days!
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.
Today’s upgrades
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!
Today’s upgrades
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 :)
Missing votes now displayed on login and server status
I have now made a setup that shows you all the users you did not vote on yet when you login to the server and on the server status section of the frontpage.
Please make sure you vote on as many as possible proposals, thanks!
Recent Permissions issues
I am getting increasing reports about permission glitches. I am afraid I do not know where theses are coming from. I can only assume that it is caused by a bug in the permissions software. I will install a dev build and see if that fixes it. If you are submitting tickets (please continue to do so) please submit the exact time (with time in the format “-4” etc) AND a screenshot so I can track down the logfile and see if there are any clues there.
Enchanted books work now in deposit & shop!
The websend plugin author now reacted to my support request and sent me an updated version of the plugin so now Enchanted books can be traded through our systems!
Deposit limits revised
I have realized that we never gave additional deposit slots to designers, and now amended it. So Designers get 1 slot more now and subsequently all levels above also get one slot more. Please see the table at the end of this page for more information. Thanks kidcodiwise to point this one out.
Today’s upgrades
Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:
- comeelio (from ArchitectDonator to DesignerDonator)
- underbridge (from Architect to Designer)
- kod (from ArchitectDonator to DesignerDonator)
Congratz and thanks to all voters!
Today’s upgrades
Please see the latest upgrades from the voting system:
- JoBilly (from Architect to Designer)
- sleepystrangekid (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)
- Sleeping_Owl (from ArchitectDonatorPlus to DesignerDonatorPlus)
- MakerOfWorld (from Citizen to Architect)
Congratz and thanks to all voters!
Deposit fixed
I overlooked something in the system when I fixed the databases (see post further down) which broke depositing items. This has now been fixed. Please immediately report anything else that does not seem to be working.
User upgrades – possible issue
Currently, the voting on a user is closed once we have enough positive votes to get the required points together. However, if someone (let’s say an Elder) comes along to see a vote that he would disagree to, they cannot veto it anymore since the voting was already closed.
How would we resolve this issue? There are 2 ways:
- We do not care. First come, first serve. If nobody is around before we get the + votes in, that’s their problem, even if a vote is closed after 1 hour already because it got enough + votes.
- We make a minimum time a vote has to be open before it can be closed. That could be a week, a month or whatever else we think is reasonable.
I would prefer the second method, with a standard wait of 7 dates from the proposal. Opinions?
More news…
Here are some more news:
- baronmanfred was upgraded to Architect (congratz!)
- ueddy was upgraded to Architect (congratz!)
- I have reviewed larger portions of the code. There was an inconsistency in how the code would switch between databases and if some actions were done in one database and then in another, the code would sometimes not switch properly and then fail to find the correct tables. I now went through every single database query in the code and changed the process of database selection everywhere to avoid this issue. This should reduce the amount of random errors and result in an overall more stable system.
More on enchanted books
I have upgraded the plugin again which is controlling all our custom plugins (among others shop & deposit) with the hope to enable enchanted books to be traded. Unfortunately. while the plugin now properly detects enchantments on books, it does not list the level of enchantment correctly yet. I contacted the author regarding this. Once we get the next version of the plugin, I hope this (last) bug will be fixed.