I was sitting in #essentials and the user braydenhull was complaining about his world files being so large. We talked about using hard limits and then he said something like " I wish the world would just wrap around so when a user hits a hard limit they are taken to the opposite part of the maps edge. So I thought this might be possible with hard limits and teleportation. I'm not sure if you can get the opposite side of the worlds position at the hard limit though? So when a user walks to the edge of the map they are teleported to the opposite side of the map on the same axis. Hopefully that makes sense. This should give the user a feeling of the world being round.
Now I have to stop lurking and actually post for once. Well, anyway for the server I help run we use Backup 1.4a to make a world backup every hour due to some limitations in Big Brother itself that wouldn't allow us to completely rely on it, as a result I left it unattended and back then at least the world was absolutely tiny and took no time to backup and took no space either. However just earlier I went to go take a manual backup of all the plugin configs etc. however came to realise the server was absolutely packed with about 73GB worth of backups. (I stupidly left BackupPlugin's default maximum amount at 1440.) So of course I cleaned out the file and reset the limit so it won't get that big. Most of the world is just where people have walked in one direction and not stopped, when I look at the map on our online map viewer, most of it is just vacant. The use of the land itself is very bad, we can't enforce it by banning people for walking to 10,000 blocks, nor can we really enforce it any other way than just completely blocking them from going that far away. I didn't suggest any teleportation however what could be done is an automatically generated wall that won't let them past, or they could die, get knocked back, etc. It is well and truly possible I'm sure to have a plugin that just kills players or kicks them with absurd reasons for going past certain parts of the map, however I have not heard of such a plugin yet. I am no developer unfortunately or I'd experiment with this myself however I'm sure it won't be a very tough task to make a plugin that would stop people from going past certain points causing more of the world to unnecessarily generate. There are legitimate reasons for people to be very far from spawn, however as I'm sure some of you can understand, there are also administrative headaches and when you end up with a fairly large world size it is frustrating. Thanks and much praise for anyone who does attempt to create such a plugin.
Have you tried any of these yet? And regarding the teleporting: should be possible, but it won't be a smooth ride and the terrain wouldn't match either. I think the invisible wall thing + message would be more elegant. <smartass>Wrapping the world using teleporting north/south and east/west wouldn't create the effect of a spherical world, but of a toroid (donut).</smartass>
It shouldn't be too hard to mirror the terrain on one side of the world to the other (although it may be intensive if realtime updating occurs), the only (minor) issues I can see with doing that would be the transition would still be jarring, and I'm not entirely sure if there's an effective/efficient way to mirror entities across the world.
