PseudoKnight

State of the Server – November

It’s been a while since my last State of the Server post back in April. So before I talk about the future, let’s see what you may have missed in the last 7 months.

Survival Updates

New Bavaria by The_Vicar

New Bavaria by The_Vicar

  • New recipes — cracked stone brick, coarse dirt
  • Re-enabled sponge behavior (some shops have them); Drying is not required until 1.8.
  • Disabled block damage from creeper explosions above 62 y
  • Halloween event that included mob head drops and new ridable zombie/skeleton horses
  • Disabled minecart dispenser parking if the dispenser is powered
  • Tilrasmon built the north-south roads in Omega to the borders of the world — a great addition to the transportation infrastructure on that world. I’ve started the work on the east road so that more people can be connected.
  • The coin shop is re-stocked to the brim. Just want to get that out there.

Frog Park Updates

Museum of Modern Art & Pants by froggerooh

Museum of Modern Art & Pants by froggerooh

  • New courses — Jungletree and Nethour
  • New massive last-man-standing PVP game — Showdown — with 14 unique classes to choose from, and 11 new arenas.
  • New minigame by Mortiseraphim and myself — 7 Seconds to Live — where you have seven seconds until you blow up, but you can extend your time by running over ores over several different arenas.
  • New TNT Run minigame created by myself and gothem8. Survive the longest while the floor falls away and explodes.
  • New gigantic modern art museum built almost entirely by froggerooh. It contains several cakes, a couple challenge courses, some secrets, and a pair of pants.
  • New custom spectator mode for PVP games. “/pvp spectate <arena_name>”
  • New explorable structures to discover and get cakes.
  • Countless tweaks and improvements.

I also updated our server support process and rewards to pay for server costs. If you’ve donated in the past, you’ve been upgraded to this new system. This is still a work in progress, but it now adheres to Mojang’s guidelines better.


Looking Towards the Future (ie. When 1.8?)

It looks like the Spigot team is doing the hard work necessary to update Bukkit to 1.8 — a massive undertaking given the extra challenges involved. They have a working build and private testing went well on their servers. However, there isn’t a public build available yet. Once they release something I’ll be testing it against our server setup. Rest assured, it’s a high priority for me. So when will that be? Unless something goes wrong, it should be within this month!

Moving forward we’ll be needing more staff. If you’re at all interested in helping, please read up on how you can contribute.

8 comments on “State of the Server – November

  1. The_Vicar

    Hey! Thanks for posting this picture of New Bavaria. What an honor! It has been great building on this server and I look forward to future builds. There has been a lot of work done on this region since this picture was taken. The inspiration for New Bavaria is a Gothic German look found in Southern Germany and Neuschwanstein Castle. Soon there will be a Matterhorn!!

    1. PseudoKnight Post author

      1.8 will be released this friday. I’ll be working over the weekend to bring it to the server as fast as I can, but there’s a number of known and unknown challenges involved. I’m not sure at this point how many plugins I’ll have to wait for or update myself.

      1. Tilrasmon

        As awesome as 1.8 will be, don’t be messing with this stuff over the holiday weekend unless you really – and I mean really – don’t have anything better to do. We’ve waited this long, a little longer won’t be a problem. Happy Thanksgiving!

        1. PseudoKnight Post author

          Don’t worry. If things happen with family, I’ll be there.

          So the first build came out 2 hours ago and have been doing some initial testing. Not surprisingly there’s a few critical plugin issues. I’ll have to update/address those beginning tomorrow. Given the timing, I can imagine some plugin authors are busy. So we’ll see. I’m going to try and assist a couple of them how I can.

        2. PseudoKnight Post author

          Things are moving along. I have most things working. There’s still issues preventing us from updating, including a Minecraft vanilla bug that corrupts signs with brackets on the first line. (eg. all our [private] signs become disabled)

    1. PseudoKnight Post author

      That’s up to other staff members. I know fredwaffles has done it before. But I don’t have the time to gather them, and when I do have them, they’re too useful to give away. I killed over 100 wither skeletons before I stopped trying.

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