Hey everyone. Sorry I've been so absent, but life has been keeping me away from the computer recently. I'm attempting to reply to all the interesting points raised in this thread.
I fucking LOVE flying.
In the end I am indifferent to starting fresh, my main concern is to bring people to the server. New or not.
We can just reset the spawn far away, in a currently unexplored area. That would make a complete restart unnecessary.
However, we do need to allow for new landscape generation, given the upcoming updates.
Simply moving the spawnpoint elsewhere would mean an even larger world, which my poor server might not like. It needs to keep a lot of chunks in memory all the time as is (because of minecarts, etc). There is also a limit to how big the ramdisk the world is on can get, although we're not close to it yet.
I wouldn't mind a more creative based server, the thought of resource collecting kills any thought of trying to build something big.
We could certainly make a creative-mode world, and probably even connect it with the adventure mode one. I think if we do go with a separate build world, it would be silly not to put it in creative mode.
Galantti and I had a quick talk with Quicky yesterday and came to a bit of a conclusion.
Most likely the current map will be kept and new areas "discovered" once the updates are out. Spawn will be set at the new location. That local will also favour creative building. Connections by train, portal and nether allow so visit the "old" realm.
I'm personally very much in favour of a tightly knit city of awesome. Spend half my time just walking around the cities we have now.
I too think the current map is too spread out. We can easily limit things if we do make a new world/area, but the current space is so massive that I'm not sure there would be much point on the current world. I have a couple ideas for how to keep the cool stuff from our current world, even if we do move primarily to a new one, which I will outline at the end of this massive quotefest.
More than anything super group projects would be great. With all the amazing stuff we have it would be foolish to start a new server. If we wanted to we could just move everything into the middle of nowhere and connect that to the current map. It's the biggest map size of any game. More than anything we need to build up the main island. There is a ton of space to expand the city itself on the main island. And at some point we could probably link the two major cities (and the upcoming town.)
With more people I think it would be easy to do this, that being said it'll take a decent push to get it off the ground. But the idea of having a massive open server stands out amongst other themed minecraft servers.
I think this could tie in really well to that video series. If we keep this going, I imagine we could get a pretty fucking decent viewership and from that a lot more people on the servers (hopefully not too many griefers.) I would totally be down to contribute the video series.
I haven't been on recently, but at least when I was active, everything seemed so spread out as to be unmanageable. There were a few cool things, but it was all so far apart that it was never really fun to explore the stuff. I'm definitely interested in making the server more open, although at some point we'd have to look at more powerful hardware (Minecraft in general, and the server in particular, is surprisingly resource intensive). That's assuming it actually became popular of course
Since new terrain will need to be generated in order to see the features of the 1.8 update, I think it might make more sense to start relatively fresh.
The needing improvements:
- Multiplayer servers are pretty glitchy in this pre-release... hopefully it'll be better when it's released
- Lack of NPC mobs, but the villages and other structures are created
- Spawning in water? It seems to always make spawn in the water, both solo and multi
About your issues (numbered for ease of replying)
- We won't be updating until we've worked out the direction we want to go with things, and Bukkit has released a stable version that works with whatever mods we want to continue using.
- That will be coming in 1.9. 1.8 was released without NPCs for timing reasons (and, I suspect, because they wanted all of us guinea pigs to find this release's load of bugs before they add even more stuff).
- We can set the spawn point/area, so this shouldn't be an issue. I also assume you can still set your spawn point to the most recent bed you woke up in (at least with your solo game).
So after viewing many posts on reddit about how annoying Enderman are I think it makes sense to branch out into two servers. The reason being, does anyone who's put hours into creations really want to run around repairing missing blocks from their buildings?
I imagine at some point there will be a fix (just like the creepers) for this. But at what point does it stop making sense to be neutering all these monsters? A better idea would be to branch into two servers, one server (the current one) would be a build server set on the peaceful (so people don't have to worry about putting a billion torches on stuff they make.) This server would see updates into new versions after everything is stable. The other server would be a survival server that is reset after after update. With the addition of bosses and NPC villages I imagine this game would be closely resemble an RPG, so the point of having custom built stuff doesn't really improve their game experience that much. While I understand it's difficult to have two servers (and potentially split the userbase up) I think this solution makes the most sense. The people that want to build are given a stable place to do so, and the people that want to explore, kill stuff and experience the new features in the survival server.
I think it's going to make sense to separate the building and exploring, at least to some extent. We will make sure mobs (and griefers) don't mess up builds in whatever ends up being the "build" area.
i think cdbob has a point there, peacefull server for building stuff and the other server with the enderman killing all players.
should the new server be whitelisted or normal?
I agree, except that we do not have to actually use separate servers unless we want to (although it might be helpful from a resource-management perspective if we can actually keep them on different machines). Each server can have as many worlds as we want, and we can link them with portals or warps as we see fit. We haven't added anything except for the netherworld to our current server, because it's so spread out already that we didn't want to further fracture the community.
Will the build server be creative?
I think it should be. The build server/area will at least have hostile mobs disabled and building damage mitigated, but I see no reason not to use full creative mode if there are separate worlds. If we decide to have a specific area devoted to builds, we can make some sort of "filling station" that dispenses free blocks (possibly making them disappear when you leave the build area or something).
I did a test earlier with 1.8, and we cannot upgrade from 1.7.3 without some world repairs. We need to "square up" the map and remove the un-generated spots due to how the terrain generator functions in the newer version.
If everyone would walk/fly/warp around to fill in the holes during their free-time, we will be able to have a cleaner move to 1.8/1.9 later on.
Ugh, now the map is even
bigger. Whatever, it's only 1.3GB right now.
I am walking around some holes right now (0478x0472) which had a nice mountain peak that I claimed in the name of the Goat. Would be easier to fly and getting rid of the night
Another vote for creative mode!
I can enable creative mode (or at least flying and peaceful) if there are no objections.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. Let's all figure out how to move forward, and I will do my best to make it happen.
Edit:
I've set up a 1.8 test server. All I did was take my old test-server directory, download a copy of the latest unstable Bukkit build, delete the map, and start it, so some (all?) mods might be broken/funny/killing-your-cat. You can access it at minecraft.finalgear.com:52476. There is no whitelist.
Edit 2:
I realized I never actually said what my suggestion was, so here it is:
We have the ability to copy-paste whole areas of the world from one place to another, so why don't we just set up the current world as a secondary (no changes allowed) world, accessible from a portal, and import the buildings people really want to the main worlds. I think we should have two primary worlds: an adventure world that is open to all, has mobs, etc, no free resources, etc., and a creative-mode world where people get infinite blocks, can fly, no damage, etc. All the bells and whistles. This world would also be open to all, (I suppose), but would not allow changes except from trusted users. We could even have "ownership" of different land areas, where only the owner or designated builders can change stuff in that area. Occasionally, we could import a building into the adventure game if a majority approved a vote.
By separating the build area from the adventure world, we could serve both the types that just want to make pretty things without all that silly mining and running from Creepers, and the ones who want to be in a battle against the mobs, making fortresses, finding gold, crafting, etc. People could move freely between the two worlds, but only at a designated portal, and inventories would not transfer over. I think the server could easily handle two worlds of a more modest size, even with the added overhead of additional players, and we could eventually retire the original world once the most interesting things had been moved.
Thoughts?