Development Diary #6 - General Update and Maps!

[Oplegoman]

Development diary #6 - Overall Plan - General Update and Maps!

What we have gotten finished!

Good news! Now that more of us are free to put time into the server and the bungee update, we have made great progress. We have gotten to a point in which we have ensured all plugins work well together. Allow us to break it down to things we have gotten working and believe are complete for you;

• All the chats are working as intended, we have the following channels all set up after a lot of bug-fixing!
  
  • Global
  • Local
  • World
  • Helpop
  • Senior Member
  • Party
  • Clan
• Private messaging works across all servers, if you play with sound you get a "ping" noise to inform you got a message!
• If you @ a player they will get a "ping" in-game and this could be useful, but be warned if it's abused it shall be quickly removed.
• During recent server downtime we copied over Fedgardia to Bungee and are going through the process of setting up all the protections to ensure it's ready for people to spawn in for the first time there!
• Fedgardia's render distance is set to 16! We want people to receive the WOW factor when they first enter the server.
• We have set up the login security for the server! This is fully working and we have enabled some features that we have not used in the past such as being able to reconnect without having to enter a password. This works by creating sessions based upon your IP, so no one else will be able to log in as you! Helps if you keep getting disconnected for silly reasons.
• We got a bunch of other commands to work as we would like, and we are adding, even more, commands to this list slowly!
• We are fixing a ton of permissions and we are getting closer and closer to the end of this process.
• We got our auction plugin finally finished and ready to work! We have a guide coming on how it all works! Thank Thorn and Joelle for putting in the time to write it for us all!
• LWC works as we would want it across the servers it's enabled on.
• We got LogBlock working and we are now tracking many more block changes across all the servers it's required on.
• We can track playtime in a better way, we have /cplaytime and /playtime.
• Jail is now new and improved! If you go AFK your jail time will stop going down, if you log out your jail time will stop! You gotta serve all your time in jail!
• Moderators, for now, have use of /cuff, stops you in your tracks and only allows you to use /msg to talk to them.
• NPCs have been placed at spawn (thanks B!).
• Holograms have been placed at spawn.
• We are updating guides for Bungee around all aspects, we do hope you look forward to reading them.

Maps

As we have now gone through all the good things and the major progress we have made, we need to discuss a big issue which we have put major thought into. Personally, I have lost sleep over it, and that's a very big issue with custom player maps.

Currently, the issue we have is that maps will not transfer across to bungee in any worthwhile way. I have spent hours and hours looking for any information which could allow us to import all the maps correctly and this has not been possible. We are facing the following problems;

• Maps are saved as individual files within the world folder. The data in this folder contains its map location, the scale of the map, its locked state, dimension and colours. This causes the following issues;
  
  • They are individual files, which would make it impossible to quickly transfer maps between servers as we currently do. The map number in one server could be another map but in a different server, and so, it would show a different image.
  • Maps have locational data in them, with moving worlds onto different servers as we have done with a bungee (A.K.A making sentinel a network) the maps will be unable to reference the map locations in flat, therefore breaking all the maps.
• There is little to no information about transferring maps between worlds folders, never mind in the way we would want to transfer maps from a server environment that has been set up with multiverse to that of what we have for bungee. Unfortunately, I am not that knowledgeable on Minecraft NBT tags to be able to spend the 10s of hours required to even attempt to try something that could potentially fail.
• Even if we did transfer them we would still have issues creating new maps and getting them on all the different worlds/servers for people to use them.

We have tried to think of many different solutions on how we could potentially save maps and shall detail some of the ideas we thought about and decided against them for one reason or another;

• Having a flat world on each server just for transferring maps to ensure that we have a copy on each server to bring custom maps to people.
  We thought this world would be only accessible to staff to get copies of the maps for people. We decided against doing this as it would require installing multiverse on all servers creating a larger overhead and complexity. This would mean creating an additional 4 worlds across the required servers, which is would be difficult to maintain and impractical for us.
  
• The potential of sectioning off a large section of Horizon and Kattalox off to be able to place maps. This was more promising but we are not wanting to in a sense trash large sections of the world for this, it is not vanilla play and will be very odd seeing this in the work. This does also add the extra concern of expensive blocks used in maps being transferred into survival.
• Placing the maps outside of the world border, we decided against this due to us extending our world borders, so this one does not make much sense for us either as a long term plan.

We have looked and thought about even more different solutions we could potentially have, and in general, they did range from absurd to totally impractical for a long-term plan, and we could go around in circles with different approaches and plans. We do just need one plan that works for us.

We do in fact have a long term plan for what we would like to do for maps, and this encompasses past maps as well as future maps people create.

• We plan on placing maps on the top of the nether roof in both Horizon and Kattalox, and in the void for Fedgardia, as these are areas that are inaccessible for everyone. We will set up Worldguard permissions for specific players in this region, it will not damage or take up space in the overworld which other ideas would have and allows maps to be better protected. Players will still create the original maps in flat before we paste them on top of the nether roof.
• In each location we will have a specific maps storage building that holds copies of each map to allow admin+ to be able to give maps if they are either lost by the original owner. We will have to refine our idea on how we are going to name maps and ensure there is enough space for them. This is to also ensure maps do not go missing and are easily retrievable for you.
• To save space, maps will be stacked if they are not extremely tall 3d maps, this means it will take up a smaller footprint on the server and gives us a lot of space to be able to paste current maps and future maps.

Potential issues;

• There is one significant downside to this which we have considered but deemed it a necessary one, is that maps cannot be greater than 128 blocks high. This does mean 3d maps are likely to be untransferable unless they are squashed to within the 128 block limit. We are disappointed that it has come to this, but we have to think about what is best for the community as a whole and consider the impact on all aspects of the server.
• No matter the approach we take, if you hold a map in your hand or any inventory and move to a different server, for example going from horizon to Kattalox, the map item will break. This is not a fixable thing and we will have to learn to live with it.
• All maps of your local terrain or builds (A.K.A maps not made in flat) will need to be recreated by yourself again, unfortunately, we will not be able to help with this with us being busy with other aspects of bungee.

Maps is one of the most annoying parts of the transfer and we understand it will be upsetting many players. All the current maps having to be recreated will be a massive undertaking for the staff team. We hope you will work with us on this issue to ensure we get it to a point we are all happy with.


Minecraft 1.17

Mojang in this version has changed a lot for server owners which has annoyed plugin developers and the developers of PaperMC, which the server runs on. The main change which Mojang thought would be best to increase the Java version dependency required to run a Minecraft server from Java 8 to Java 16, we have told it would only be Java 11 until recently. In general, I can imagine if you check your computer you are likely to have an install for Java 8, this has been the long-standing version of java since 2014 with support ending in 2030.

Java 16 is a frustrating version of Java to be on as it's not even a long term supported (LTS) version, support not lasting all that long, its likely that in the year we will have to go to Java 17 to ensure that we are on an LTS version of Java.

This has implications for our server. Given we run on Java 8 and updating java needs to be treated carefully as we can, we will not be able to update to 1.17 before we move to bungee. As we don't want to run the risk, that after updating the server will not start due to missing libraries or dependencies in java. In simple terms, this is like going from a PlayStation 1 and upgrading to a PlayStation 3, 4 or 5 and expecting your original game to work as it's on the same name console, it's true that some games would work but also true that some games would not, this is the same concept for the server.

The good news is that Bungee has been developed on Java 11 until we were informed about the Java 16 dependency, and upgraded to that and with minor changes, it seems that bungee is stable using java 16 and with a little poking our plugins will work as we would like. We also expect 1.17 to be a month or two away ensuring all plugins work for java 16 and are stable for an update.



- Sentinel Staff

[JoeArmageddon]

Thanks a lot to the staff for working so hard!

[Dr_MineStein]

Awesome work you guys are doing, I'm really excited about the logging in thing, I can reconnect without having to put my pass in each time.

We plan on placing maps on the top of the nether roof in both Horizon and Kattalox, and in the void for Fedgardia, as these are areas that are inaccessible for everyone.

I've never tried it personally, but it is actually possible to get to the nether roof fairly easily. It happened multiple times to me, I would fall into lava ocean and die, after doing /back i'd end up at the nether roof, above the area where I last died. This is just for your consideration.

In general, I can imagine if you check your computer you are likely to have an install for Java 8, this has been the long-standing version of java since 2014 with support ending in 2030.

Java 16 is a frustrating version of Java to be on as it's not even a long term supported (LTS) version, support not lasting all that long, its likely that in the year we will have to go to Java 17 to ensure that we are on an LTS version of Java.
 

Yeah man I feel you, MC 1.8.9 doesn't work on Java 16, so it's frustrating when I have to uninstall and re-install Java when I want to switch between MC 1.17 and 1.8. I don;t understand my Mojang has made such changes, especially when J 16 isn't even an LTS version.

[The Carrot]

With a plugin we will be making it so if you ever go up to the nether roof you will be teleported away. Thank you for telling us though!

[TommyFengster]

Hmm /cuff seems like an excellent use for roll-playing a certain fetish.  :/?
What a lovely and helpful addition for the staff team!
Can't wait to apply for mod after this! No, no, no...of course I want to be mod because I want to help staff manage the playerbase and making sure they behave and not some other personal ulterior motive.

I do have a doubt about the joining without logging in, will there be a timer? Most likely I hope.
Because even if it isn't some higher level hacking by IP tracking and whatnot, there are those who have siblings at home, and as you know siblings from the same household often share the same IP, and as you also know siblings can be jerks and can cause problems if they find out how it works.

Sorry to hear about the map art issues, looks like there is going to be some not so fun moments coming with bungee, other than the possible upset  players that did not managed to get their /homes set up in time

Other than that Amazing work guys! Keep at it! :love: xD xD

[Oplegoman]

I do have a doubt about the joining without logging in, will there be a timer? Most likely I hope.
Because even if it isn't some higher level hacking by IP tracking and whatnot, there are those who have siblings at home, and as you know siblings from the same household often share the same IP, and as you also know siblings can be jerks and can cause problems if they find out how it works.

Understand your concerns here, and yes there will be a one minute session window from when you disconnect, so it will make it hard for a player to claim their brother did it or other excuses.

As for the hacking, it may be possible for them to obtain the IP someone is coming from, however this is not useful for them as it is impossible for them to spoof your specific IP to be able to join within the minute you have left. This method is highly secure

[xXCRYMINALXx]

I do have a doubt about the joining without logging in, will there be a timer? Most likely I hope.
Because even if it isn't some higher level hacking by IP tracking and whatnot, there are those who have siblings at home, and as you know siblings from the same household often share the same IP, and as you also know siblings can be jerks and can cause problems if they find out how it works.

I'll touch on this pretty briefly, as Oli already had.

IP spoofing wouldnt allow a two way communication. For example, if I spoofed your address, all the data I send, would be from you, but all data received, would also go to you, so I would never see the server connect, because it would never report back to me, as shown in this majestic text.

[Crym] > [Tommy] >< [Server]