Q+A Minecraft Version 1.0 and super high player count servers

Hi,
I have been running a server for a while thought I would just discuss the following and try to clarify things - since many of you guys out there are probably wondering these things, and a single post probably beats 20 posts of speculation

(as for all the smart a$$ troll replies, I am NOT talking about the prerelease/leaked builds, I mean the promoted/milestone safe to install fully tested bukkit releases.) The fully functional and client compliant "stable" releases are IMO still a week or more away. If you must troll at least be more specific than a general .. "oh you're wrong")

1: OH NO MINECRAFT 1.0 IS OUT I CANT LOG IN MY FAV SERVER - how long until bukkit release a dev build, normally its hours whats taking so long, cry cry etc etc

A: Guys this isn't just an incremental update by notch, where bukkit coders just need an hour or so to flip the version reply and rename a few api references to match the client update, then tweak a few calls to fix glitches where they didnt nail what the client expects, this is a major (ie Milestone) release. Notch held back the little updates, and added quite a lot of stuff to this one in one hit, this is like an entire game compared to the last release. As I write this I would imagine there is at least a half dozen bukkit coders ripping their hair out cause they just realized they may need to do an almost complete rewrite of bukkit here - and another bunch are at mine con or various other cons.. ever tried coding on an Iphone?.. yer i didn't think so.

Bottom line here, the bukkit vs Minecraft 1.0 dev release will be a while, at the very least a few days, more likely a week or two maybe even months(before they nail down everything).

..Well a few days later -
There is a TEST (ie, buggy, unstable experimental) build available which works but from what i've tested is a bit of a quick and dirty one to stop the sooking people so some bits might not be as complete as we would like - see here, and read the build notes for god sake.
http://ci.bukkit.org/job/dev-CraftBukkit/
Dont install anything that is flagged "RED" and backup everything before you update. This breaks a few older plugins, such as blocks on glass, older permissions, older antigrief plugins and so forth. If you crash badly enough it can also currupt your plugin jars. If you start to see "not gzip" errors restore all your plugins from a known good backup. If you see random [severe] errors read the error and work out which plugin went wrong. Never leave any plugin throwing [severe] installed even if it seems to still work in game or other wierd things will happen.


Q: ARGHHH SO NO MULTIPLAYER? ARGHHHH!
[See above, but I still suggest you try playing the new build single player or on the official mojang server.jar for a while so you can try the new stuff how notch intended.]
What I would suggest is put aside your current world file, use notches official server.jar file, op yourself and create a new world as a stop-gap placeholder. This has some advantages (yes really) firstly, you will get SOME SORT of server up and running almost right away. This also allows yourself and your regular players a chance to hop on together and help each other to become familiar with all the new and groovy features of this minecraft release. It may also force a few lazy players to actually earn such acheivements as.. shock horror - creating their first craft table, building a door, making a furnace, turning some sand into glass, mining some ore themself! OH the horror! You cant just nag admins to "give me xx item" for a while.... hey guys guess what if you actually have to work for the stuff you make, amazingly enough its actually MORE fun!

Q: OH GOD BUT the griefiers, wont somebody think of the griefers.
Test or not, all my protection and permission plugins still work on the new dev release. If yours dont, get the latest version of it.
allow me to re-iterate here "a new world as a stop-gap placeholder" in other words, it doesn't matter! Start a PVP war or something.
Notch has the old spawn protection thing, and the actual ops can just clear away any "Griefer" clutter at the spawn by flipping them self to creative mode and throwing some water around.

Q: OH NO BUT I BUILT SOMETHING!
To quote my own server - if you built anything too big, I can copy/paste it to the main server once bukkit has a new build if necessary. Your own [[insert server name here]] admins should have this capability, either with worldedit (in game) or mcedit (offline outside server)


Q: In other news whats this about lag free russian servers with 200+ players
Well apparently if your Vhab who knows everything, yet shares little of this knowledge, presumably there is no such thing as distributed computing, online games dont use instancing and shared computing, because these are incorrect assumptions, you cant use redundant routing, admin tweaks reducing chunk lag don't work, and I presume his proposed answer is simply installing 60gb of ram, ram-disking everything, raid SSD's and multilinking 12 optic fibres to the one IP address.... that and usind BSD and spout I suppose. or he is suggesting the so called russian servers don't exist? Hard to say here. /lots of sarcasm BTW

What I was suggesting was bukkit isnt the only minecraft engine, and it would be pretty easy for some russian hackers to decompile it, port it into something else, code in better multi thread support, and run it on native machine code over a distributed linux cluster.

Next time ill just say that then.


A: Look up beowulf project - ok its not what they use but its likely a similar system.
If you ever look at the world folder its made up of a bunch of region/chunk files. If you have ever worked in games like ultima or guildwars they use something called "distributed processing" or also known as "instancing"
Basically bottom line is, there is no reason why one single machine needs to run the whole world file. If they spread the world around several machines, running linux, and have unlocked the memory limitations by using linux, they can do it quite easily.

There is also a few tweaks admins never bother with, such as higher starting memory allocation, and reduction of server side visual range which can reduce chunks sent to each client by 2/5, without any signifiant obvious visual reduction thanks to the new way minecraft renders distance. (yes done right a server with 1024 upstream should be able to handle up to 9 players before getting too laggy now) some antilag plugins do stuff like strict enforce of only loading visible chunks, and removing/stacking irrelevant mobs/entities and the like. Put it all together and you can get a lot of people in that one server.

Q: Ooh distributed how can i do that.
Unless you have a cluster of linux servers and your own routable IP subnet, not easily, but there are some multiworld derived bukkit plugins that allow you to warp between worlds and areas hosted on different physical minecraft servers. Trade off here is a lot of them either require:
A: client side software for the handling of redirects between servers, combined with server side plugins OR
B: server side connections - the server plugin needs to maintain a direct high speed
connection to the other minecraft server, and the two exchange data common between the two
(eg inventory, ranks, permissions, individual chunks, x/y/z)

Q: but but but...
A: those crazy russians have coders and decompile tools coming out of every oriface, and java by design is highly customisable. It is also possible to port it directly to a more efficient environment, code in stuff java cant do, and compile it down to high efficency code. Bottom line is, Java is basically a toy, Notch is pushing it to its limits as it is; if anyone tried the same thing in any high end programing environment on a real server using a proper compiler, you could do some breathtaking (translation: Epic) server side miracles.

 

Bukkit devs said stage 1 and 2 of the recode has been completed, and that stage 3 will probably be done today.
I don't get your point.

 

Uhm.. what?
I'm guessing you didn't fact check any of this.
I don't know where to being with pointing out your blatantly wrong statements.

 

And who spells mom mum? JESUS.

 

I'm pretty sure enchantments was supported in the CraftBukkit 1.9 builds and The End certainly was. I think your wrong on several of your above points.

 

Yeah the pre-releases and actualy release arent different... at all.. your post is wrong

 

Nah not on the suggested release 1337 - you couldn't even spawn the enchantment table using /item codes yet. A few of us tried just to see what the things looked like.

The End is what we called "Sky Land" got turned into, (but apparenly various people are saying Notch wants to still add in a seperate "Skyland" world - tho if 1.0.0 is meant to be the full release to me that implies not much else is likely to change (but i really hope im wrong there)) I had some forts spawn in 1337 (the things the enderpearls point you at) but they were just empty two story dungeons, no portals. Mind you the non-recommended dev builds, and various plugins may have got some stuff going(apparently the models were available you just couldnt spawn the related items). But I cant speak for those, i wasn't using them.

Most of the English speaking world including UK, Australia, NZ, Canada (who use both).. its just the USA that favours MOM
Around here MOM is more a sound a Toddler/baby would make, while "MUM" is how an older person eg, someones 20 year old daughter might pronounce it when talking to their mother.
But as they say TOMato, TomATO, POTato, pOTATO.

Do you guys just advise on bukkit setups, or you code any plugins of your own too? I didn't see any website for you guys, just your forum post - looks like it would be worthwhile. Something along the lines of SK's wiki site.

I've been playing with the idea myself, put together a couple of pre-setup server configurations, eg light duty server(superlog no sql etc), heavy duty server(full sql antigreif, adventurecraft etc etc), with a download link; with a bunch of manual style pages on using all the various ranks commands the server has. (Mainly cause it would be helpful for staff to learn the ropes, and players to figure out how to play themself without nagging for free items every minute) Only trouble there is its time consuming to write up nice docs. The pre-setup's are easy enough i just copy out of my server everything bar the world and player list, zip it up and put it online somewhere. Its finding time to document it all that is a pain.

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

While you're cutting things from the OP, get rid of everything related to high performance servers.
It's all blatantly wrong and based on incorrect assumptions.

 

LIES. ALL LIES.