[PC Game] Minecraft HF server info and game discussion

Dave · May 12, 2011

Just a note:

As part of our ongoing effort to ensure our customers receive the best possible service from Multiplay, we will be changing the operating system behind your service.

This is the first step for us to begin bringing you exclusive all-new Minecraft only features for your service in the coming months.

Unfortunately, this means that you will experience a small outage whilst we perform this migration. Other than this downtime, you will not experience any change in your service.

Your IP address, current server configuration, world data and all associated backups will all be retained. Any voice comms services you have as part of your Minecraft subscription will also be unaffected.

Outage Window

Affected MH Number: 40,982
Window Start: 09:00 BST (UTC+1) 14th May 2011
Window End: 21:00 BST (UTC+1) 14th May 2011

Your service will be unavailable for approximately 4 hours during this outage window.

Many thanks for your patience in this matter,

--The Multiplay Gameservers Team

figmentPez · May 12, 2011

Well, Notch is making a few people unhappy:

From my changelist: "* Fixed minecarts next to each other causing extreme velocities (sorry!)"
Oh, and I also nerfed boat/water elevators. It's still possible to do, it's just quite a bit slower. #muoahaha
Also, removing creepers, making all blocks spherical, and limiting the map height to 7.
* Made booster tracks speedier

GasBandit · May 12, 2011

I had a feeling when he said 1.6 was primarily bug fixes, that friction boosters would be going away. Fortunately craftbook keeps our gold block boosters working.

figmentPez · May 12, 2011

GasBandit said:
I had a feeling when he said 1.6 was primarily bug fixes, that friction boosters would be going away. Fortunately craftbook keeps our gold block boosters working.

Yeah, I don't play single-player anymore, so I guess it won't effect me much, but I really hope booster tracks are much more effective. A Minecraft world is a huge place, and there needs to be a quick way to get around in a vanilla game. Walking around slowly in Minecraft is like grinding XP in old school RPGs. Some people may think tedious busy-work makes them hardcore, but really it's just wasting time.

GasBandit · May 12, 2011

figmentPez said:
Yeah, I don't play single-player anymore, so I guess it won't effect me much, but I really hope booster tracks are much more effective. A Minecraft world is a huge place, and there needs to be a quick way to get around in a vanilla game. Walking around slowly in Minecraft is like grinding XP in old school RPGs. Some people may think tedious busy-work makes them hardcore, but really it's just wasting time.

Another tweet from notch says he's increasing powered rail speed as well in 1.6.

Eriol · May 13, 2011

So did the downtime go in early then? I'm asking, because I'm pretty sure it's not the 14th in that timezone, and yet the server's down.

Just checking.

Bones · May 13, 2011

yep must have done it early

GasBandit · May 13, 2011

Here's what they supplied me on the news feed:

FreeBSD Upgrades
May 12 2011 15:40:01 by liv3d
With more than 50% of machines running Minecraft now fully converted to FreeBSD, we plan on having this complete by end of Saturday!
The following machines are currently pending awaiting completion:

Thursday:

lax8, lax9, ldn3, ldn4, ldn5, ldn14, ldn15, ldn16, ldn17

Friday:
blade46, chgbld01, chgbld02, chgbld03, ldn1, ldn2, ldn10, ldn11, ldn12, ldn13, ldn18, ldn19, ldn21, ldn6, ldn7, ldn8, sa3, sa4, sa6, sa7, sa8

Saturday:
amsbld09, se4, se5, se6, tor03, tor04, tor05

Once this upgrade is complete it will allow us to move forward in offering more options for our Minecraft customers

Our server, incidentally, is on SA4.
Added at: 13:14
Give it a try now, should be up I think.

PatrThom · May 13, 2011

FreeBSD was the first OS I tried to use for my server (because of its excellent ability to handle lots of network traffic*, and because it is most similar to OS X/Unix, which I have some familiarity), but I had such a headache trying to get the 'real' Java installed.

--Patrick
*No, I don't fully understand the article, but it sure sounds impressive.

strawman · May 13, 2011

The BSD operating systems are awesome, but you really have to love operating systems to make using them worthwhile. I know a few people that use them as their desktop, but most I know like them for server usage.

drifter · May 13, 2011

Anyone know a user named hidd4n? Wouldn't bother mentioning it, except I've never seen'em before and he/she seemed to have build permission. Just wondering if the changeover to Canary has all player permissions set to true, or however it works.

GasBandit · May 14, 2011

I checked, and build permissions should still be locked by default for new people... and hidd4n isn't in the user list. So, to be cautious, I put it on the blacklist. Are you sure he had build permissions? the logs show he was only on once for 13 seconds...

drifter · May 14, 2011

Not positive, but their name was in yellow, not white, and I thought color indicates player status?

PatrThom · May 15, 2011

Could possibly be an account attached to one of the mods. It's sometimes the practice (from what I understand) for a modmaker to have his/her mod grant "baked-in" permissions automatically to his/her account, and they will sometimes drop by to check in on how their mod is being used.

Some Googlin' might be in order.

--Patrick

strawman · May 15, 2011

But if Microsoft put baked in accounts into their windows OS, those same mods would be crying bloody murder. It's funny how people change their tune about security when they are considering invasive actions, rather than thinking about it from the customer's perspective.

GasBandit · May 15, 2011

drifter said:
Not positive, but their name was in yellow, not white, and I thought color indicates player status?

If they had build permissions, their name would have been in green (or red if they had mod/admin rights). I think yellow is just for the login text.

It could just be somebody trying to get to their own minecraft server and typed in the port wrong. I've done that myself.

drifter · May 15, 2011

I built an Asian-influenced fortress

I built a dragon's head

I built a flying boat

I built a flying fortress dragon boat!

Inspiration from this image source:

Not very accurate, but I'm pretty happy with it. It actually started out as a speed challenge, where I was trying to complete it (the exterior shell, anyway) in one evening... yeah, not so much.

Oh yeah, also gonna build a TNT cannon in the mouf.

twitchmoss · May 15, 2011

you sir, are awesome.

and you scare the living shit out of me.

PatrThom · May 15, 2011

You've all seen the Studio Ghibli Worlds vid, right?

--Patrick*
*Video not done by me. Too busy retrieving jaw from ankle area.

drifter · May 15, 2011

Just saw that tonight. Right when I think I've done something cool, the internet comes along and shows who's got the bigger pimp hand

By the way, the world is available for download if you want to look around: only 7 Mb.

There's a small surprise inside Totoro!

TwoBit · May 16, 2011

Holy crap, that's a fuckin' rad dragon boat thingy.

I'm a little jealous up in this.

I'm really impressed with the Studio Ghibli Worlds. How many man hours were wasted?

drifter · May 16, 2011

Hey eriol, this is the thing I was talking about:

Eriol · May 16, 2011

Given my Computer Engineering degree, I can actually conceptualize how it's done. It's not THAT complex, but it is very well-done, and that's worth just as much in many ways.

Think of the display as a single line of lights that "walk" across, and then stack 5 of them on top of each other. He needed to get one layer "working" with only being 2 blocks thick, build 4 more of them, and make sure that they don't interfere vertically (that'd be the hard part IMO).

Very nice.

figmentPez · May 17, 2011

Kurtz tweets "Straub has tried minecraft and likes it. I want him to experience multiplayer. Can anyone recommend a server where we can build a castle?"

Should we offer? :awesome:

Raidrinn · May 17, 2011

figmentPez said:
Kurtz tweets "Straub has tried minecraft and likes it. I want him to experience multiplayer. Can anyone recommend a server where we can build a castle?"

Should we offer?

I seem to remember hearing somewhere that Kurtz is a hack

That would be interesting though.

GasBandit · May 17, 2011

I've been trying to upload a new cartograph picture, but I'm not having much luck... for some reason, my own site (gasbanditry.com) doesn't seem to want to resolve for me but it's up for everybody else :Leyla:

noaxark · May 18, 2011

GasBandit said:
I've been trying to upload a new cartograph picture, but I'm not having much luck... for some reason, my own site (gasbanditry.com) doesn't seem to want to resolve for me but it's up for everybody else

Should you want to, you have upload permissions for the archive on my site through your gmail account. Nice get all the renders in one place imo.

Just click sign in at the bottom. As long as you keep the size under 20mb, it should work like a charm.

GasBandit · May 18, 2011

noaxark said:
Should you want to, you have upload permissions for the archive on my site through your gmail account. Nice get all the renders in one place imo.

Just click sign in at the bottom. As long as you keep the size under 20mb, it should work like a charm.

Ah, THAT must be why that didn't work. heh.
Added at: 09:37

Final few FreeBSD Upgrades
May 17 2011 09:37:58 by liv3d
With the majority of machines migrated over to FreeBSD, we're currently working on the last few which our DC techs where unable to do last week

The machines being updated are:

ldn6

ldn7

ldn8

sa3

sa4

sa6

sa7

sa8

We expect the downtime on these machines to be minimal & will be updating Clanforge News with more information.

noaxark · May 19, 2011

GasBandit said:
Ah, THAT must be why that didn't work. heh.
Added at: 09:37

I'd render something myself, but I can't see any backups all of a sudden :S

A tip regarding compression, though: I run a photoshop droplet and optipng from the batch script I use to render, so the output is compressed automatically after Cartographer is done. Quite handy.

For example:

Code:

copy world8_isometric_north.png world8_isometric_north1.png
CG_destroy "c:\time\cartographg\world8_isometric_north.png"
taskkill /IM Photoshop.exe
optipng world8_isometric_north.png
optipng world8_isometric_north1.png
ren world8_isometric_north.png %date%-256.png
ren world8_isometric_north1.png %date%.png

Note that the droplet (CG_destroy.exe) seems to require absolute paths with quotes.

GasBandit · May 19, 2011

noaxark said:
I'd render something myself, but I can't see any backups all of a sudden :S

That's strange. You're right. All of a sudden, all our backups are gone. Hrm.
Added at: 11:05
Aaand I just ran another backup and it didn't show up.
Added at: 11:10
Submitted a ticket about the missing backups.

strawman · May 19, 2011

I'm sending a trouble ticket.

Support techs love trouble tickets.

PatrThom · May 19, 2011

They're not being created with a leading period, are they? "._backup"?

--Patrick

GasBandit · May 19, 2011

PatrThom said:
They're not being created with a leading period, are they? "._backup"?

--Patrick

Are they now? I don't know. Were they previously? No.
Added at: 14:18
Well, a "long way off" isn't so long any more it seems. 1.6 to hit next week sometime. Goodbye friction boosters, hello handheld maps.

Though, naturally, it'll probably be another week or so after that before the server will be updated to 1.6. -however long it takes canary to get updated.
Added at: 14:26
I'M TRIPPIN BALLS, MAN!

GasBandit · May 19, 2011

Also in the works: Sky dimension.

Bones · May 19, 2011

so we should assume some sort of flight or grappling hook system will be coming into play? i mean you could built bridges but thats nuts!

[PC Game] Minecraft HF server info and game discussion

TwoBit

Raidrinn

noaxark

noaxark