So some more new stuff:

1. I have fixed the RegionbreedLimit plugin, a.k.a. headcount. The issue here was that the plugin itself was broken for 1.13. Once I fixed that, I found out it conflicts somehow with the ModifyWorld plugin which regulates who cannot do some things in a world (like Guests cannot do anything in Darklands despite that there is no region that prevents them). When I tried to update Modifyworld to the latest minecraft version, I realized it depends on PermissionsEX (those two used to be a bundle from the same developer), which is managing all our Permissions. I had to update that as well. So once I tried to update that one, I basically failed. This let me to believe that I need to find an updated verison, which also failed. So I started looking into new plugins and quickly realized that this will be much more complicated so I went back and managed a way how to update ModifyWorld without updating PermissionsEX. That make RegionBreedLimit work again, but I somehow could not fix Iron Golems from being able to be built. So I had to change the debug-code in RegionBreedLimit, found that the name of that mob changed from villager_golem to iron_golem, and now (for now) this is fixed and works again. Yay!
2. I am still running into stuff in the deposit/store stock that was not properly updated in the database to 1.13. I am updating all of those things as they pop up in alerts on my screen. So there might still be some instances of stuff failing when you retrieve it from the deposit, please let me know ASAP if that happens.
3. [Update] I also managed now to fix Voting. I still need to make sure that all the rewards work, from a plugin point of view, the functionality is back. [/update]
   

Ok so a long list of Updates here:

1. I found an issue how glass was fixed. I renamed it from “glass” with a color info separated into “black_glass”, the correct should be “black_stained_glass”. I fixed that now. I still have to do that for the failed transactions that users reported
2. Concrete was not fixed, but only one user had it, it was all light gray and this was also fixed.
3. Potions were not yet fixed, and those are now also correct
4. I have fixed a long list of items that were not yet renamed in the deposits, former transactions and shop stocks to the correct, current version.
5. Wood planks and wood slabs where misnamed and have been fixed (jungle_wood_planks vs. jungle_planks)
   

What is not yet fixed?

1. Kits. All /kit commands are still broken, this will follow soon
2. The old darklands is of course still there, that will have to be moved
3. The online shop does not show yet new blocks. I am working on automatically get all the icons from an external service, but there are some issues outstanding. If I can fix this, I will get it from there, otherwise we have to continue with the old method and manually update each icon.
4. I have yet to fix the regionbreed limit. By itself, it works, but it depends on 2 outdated plugins which break the regionbreed limit which I so far failed to fix. This is also the reason why we have iron golems around.
5. Voting is still broken as well.
   

Please let me know if there is anything that does not work apart from the list above.

This is a daily update on the status of the work done behind the scenes.
Our webserver is completely open source, hosted on GitHub. You can help improve the server by fixing issues here.

• Issues Closed:
  • Issue No. 326, Items probably missing from the /shop

I am quite busy since the start of the weekend so I have not been able to improve the shop/deposit issues.

I have made some inroads fixing other plugins as they are abandoned or outdated, but it’s Abit of a chain reaction to fix one and then another one throws an error that then needs to be fixed as well. I still hope that I can solve most of the issues this week.

So, first some good news:

First of all, I found an updated version of EssentialsX which is doing a lot of stuff on the server, and that one now includes a translator between the old item names and the new items names. That means that the deposit and shop should be working now since the inconsistencies between the items will be resolved automatically – where it matters most, at least. So Shop & deposit are re-enabled, please try it out. If you run into issues let me know immediately, in 99% I can give you a refund.

That means that if you withdraw from your deposit, you will get your stuff, properly. The only hickup here is that if you have a “noteblock” (ver 1.12 naming) and deposit a new note_block (1.13 naming), it won’t allow you to put it in the same deposit slot. You will have to withdraw the old ones and re-deposit all of them. I have a list here of suspected items that we will work on together (wait for another post here) to fix that issue as well.

Second, it seems that Websend is working nicely so far. I have not seen anything that would raise concerns.

Third, there are still some things that still need to be fixed:

• Voting does not give you anything, the plugin is outdated. I need to find a new one, I guess other servers have the same problem so there must be something around.
  
• Even if it was not outdated, the list of items you can receive as rewards still relies on 1.12 item names and needs to be updated
• The regionbreed limit / headcounts seems to be broken and needs to be fixed. Please don’t abuse that.
• We still need to move the new darklands over to the server, but I guess that will happen earliest next week.

Hey all!

so I have managed to fix a major portion of the Websend plugin just now with the help of some people over at the spigot forum.

What was fixed was the main communication between the website and minecraft, so now we can run minecraft commands again from the website. So announcements about new website posts but also the scheduled darkland changes etc seem to work fine again.

If you are online in the game and some commands do not work (apart from shop/deposit) please comment on the latest update progress post here on the website!

So good news and bad news:

Good news is that I made some progress in getting the store/deposit back to work. I was able to create a preliminary list of items that need to be updated due to changes from 1.12 to 1.13. There are some items that are not automatically assignable for the conversion of 82 items. In order to shorten that list I will run that 82 item list against the actual database to find the items that are actually present in the system and then write a manual block conversion list for the leftovers.

Bad news is that Websend seems to be broken in much moreplaces than previously thought. This is extremely frustrating since my Java knowledge and my knowledge about this plugin is just miserable. So all I do takes 10x longer than with the stuff I wrote myself. Right now I managed to find out how to add much more detailed debug info into Websend so that I can track down better where errors are generated. This has led me to this issue here.

I hope that someone at spigot can help me how to solve this.

If you know any Java, please look into the above issue. I can use any help I can get.

So I made a lot of progress behind the scenes to make sure we are up and running properly with 1.13. I managed to figure out how to build websend properly with all updated dependencies and without it being 40MB large. This is some java technicalities but it’s quite important in order to be able to work on plugins and to keep them up to date in the future. As a consequence, I was able to simplify the code in the websend plugin a bit as well. This removed some unnecessary error messages.

The next step will be to convert the stock & deposit to 1.13 blocks without losing anything. I will have to find a safe way to do it since it will be quite hard to find out if I messed up something in a subtle way. I hope I can make some progress there today.

Ok, so I managed to get the shop up and running. Luckily I found some new resources some weeks ago which allow us to generate the list of all available items automatically from an external source.

The tricky part is now that there are tons of items still in the store with the old format that need to be updated. Withdrawing these items will returns the wrong stuff to you. Therefore I first have to write an update process for these items before we can re-enable to the store and deposit.

Still, all I have to do now is write a transfer-code and then we can re-enable the store again. This might be happening within the next 12-18 hours.

I am not sure if I can re-enable voting until then.

So there are good news, but we are not there yet.

I have managed to get the server running now, but there are still inconsistencies in the item names from 1.12 to 1.13. So shop and deposit as well as voting is off now.

I have figure out how to fix these (except voting, there seem to be additional complexities), I still need to do so however.

Once that is done, we can enable shop & deposit, but I have seen other errors of currently unknown source that I need to identify and fix as well.

The whole thing might be a bit complicated and last for a couple of days until all is back to normal. I would recommend everyone to just stick to the temp server right now as the main server will have frequent reboots without warnings for the time being. The remaining bugs might further affect game consistency.

I am still trying to fix websend instead of reverting the server, which seems more productive at this point. Here is the current progress if you are interested in the technical details:

Dear all,

I am working right now on trying to upgrade websend to 1.13.x but I am running into issues with the compiler. If you want to help, please take a look at the Java source: https://github.com/uncovery/Websend and let me know if you are able to make it run.

The current issue I am facing seems more generically related to Java, but I am not knowledgeable enough to solve this:

Thanks!

So I did the first upgrade test and realized that Websend breaks as soon as someone has an enchanted item in the inventory. I am checking right now if I can fix this on the quick, otherwise we have to go back to 1.12 for a while.

Main server remains down for the time being, will report back with the progress.

Guys, I just did some preliminary upgrade testing. What I did was created a new (mint) world/server and added all the plugins that we are currently using with more or less empty configs to it to see if any of them create errors. After upgrading all those which would not work to current updated 1.13 versions and… it worked! I could login and run websend commands etc. Tghi

That means that we are ready for phase 2:

This means that I would take a backup of the current server and upgrade it to 1.13.2, try again with full plugin configurations. If that works as well, we are ready to upgrade. Right now, I am quite positive that this will work nicely.

Fingers crossed!

Just to keep everyone up to date, I wanted to let you know that the Spigot software that runs our server has now reached a development status where no more serious issues with world conversions are to be expected. This means that we can start testing upgrading the server. The current running server will be so far unaffected. I will be basically making a copy of the server, test the new spigot version and see what breaks. Once I have a list of plugins/code that needs to be updated, we will work through it and then prepare for the main server upgrade. I hope that we will see the actual upgrade sometime in November.

After my warning in the last post, we still have excessive lag on the server. I went around and found a massive villager breeding station and took action by deleting the region file it was in. The area removed is 512,0,0 to 1023,255,511.

If you have any other industrial breeding/farming equipment, I’d recommend to remove it, if I find it I will delete the region file again.

Sorry if someone else’s work got caught in this action. It’s the only thing I can do – except for closing down and deleting the temp server completely. Let’s not let it come to that.

Let me please remind you that the temp server is NOT there so that you can build all the things that the main server does not allow you so that you can stockpile resources for the upgrade.

Dear all,

the temp server is running at a very very high CPU load. Please make sure that you don’t overdo it with farms, redstone etc. The same rules as for the main server are valid for the temp server. Just the fact that we don’t have plugins to prevent you from doing excessive stuff, does not mean it’s allowed.

If I need to go around to find laggy stuff, I won’t hesitate to just reset the whole area. If I find out who did it, bans might happen as well.

So please be considerate of the other folks on the server and stick to the rules!

As reported before, the map format of minecraft changed considerably with 1.13. This broke the tool that we use to reset lots. As you can imagine, the ability to reset lots is one of the core functionalities of this server. Other servers provide only flatlands-style lots to users. On the contrary, we have always provided users with real-world lots in the empire and kingdom with the option to reset it when a new user comes in.

This functionality is a key component of the “vanilla-style” immersion of the server and the preservation of a natural looking environment was always a key driver for the server look & feel.

So since 1.13 was breaking the tool that we were using from the start to accomplish this feature, I was on the lookout for people who would be able to help us to port the tool to 1.13. Unfortunately, despite many, many people who had done small steps in continuing to develop the tool in the early days (2015…), there was only one person making recent contributions to it.

I contacted that person and luckily got a fast reply, but in the end this person did not work on the recent changes (yet). So I gave up to look for current editors and returned to contact Azkedar, the user who helped us so kindly to originally extend the external tool to dramatically simplify the lot reset process.

Azkedar was so kind to immediately respond to my query and essentially come back within no less than 50 hours with a new, working version of the tool that enables us to reset lots in 1.13.

I cannot thank him enough for the fast contribution to this issue. Without this, we would be stuck in 1.12 for the time being. And while, yes, there are even today servers that are stuck on version 1.8, I always took pride and a lot of effort in keeping up with recent versions and attracting users with the latest features instead of hoping that people would somehow not think that new blocks are important for the sake of sticking to the same server.

So in other words, as soon as Spigot gets upgraded reliably to 1.13, we are good to go along for the most important parts of the server functionality.

We will still have to see if Websend (used for the majority of user commands) is any issue, but the base server mechanics will continue working!

Yay!

So there are some more news regarding the 1.13 upgrade of the main server:

• The 2D map is actively being worked on, it looks like we will have a working version once we upgrade our server
• The 3D map as well
• Spigot might have a stable version in the next 2-3 weeks as per estimates.
• No news on the lot reset process yet. This is key, I will try to find alternative tools here in the meantime or fix the current one.

Dear all, we just upgraded the server from 1.13 to 1.13.1! Please make sure that you upgrade your client in case you cannot connect.