Status Report 8/7/2016

[Vector]

Since Thursday I've been busy taking care of some outstanding requests and server maintenance that has been stalled for awhile. I would like to take the time with this news post to update you guys on some things I think are important to cover.

Recent IDP Update Including Minecraft 1.10.2

There has not been a significant update to Innectis since May 20, 2016 when the new redeem items were added. Recently I returned to working on Innectis and updated the server to Minecraft 1.10.2.

Spigot first updated CraftBukkit to Minecraft 1.10 on June 9, 2016 and then to 1.10.2 on June 25, 2016. There has not been a similar update to Innectis for around 2 months after that.

Sorry for the late update. If you didn't read the previous news post that explained this you can do so here.

Old Tutorial Brought To Main World

On March 22, 2016 we completely reset survival. Since that time there has not been a tutorial since it was still in the old world. On Friday I worked on re-instating that tutorial and got it in full working order.

New Tutorial In Progress

We have been working on a new tutorial to replace the old one. It is much shorter in size to the previous tutorial and should be a lot more straight forward and to the point. Guests don't have to take as long going through it like they had in the old tutorial. This should allow them to start playing normally a lot sooner.

Lot Move Requests

I went ahead and saw the completion of several old lot move requests. I did not get through all of them because there were some requests that I needed more information to handle. I went ahead and mailed all the users who still need their requests fulfilled.

A lot area has been created in the creative world to help structure lot management. Currently there is a lot of mismanagement by creating lots anywhere without any structure or order. All lots moved will be placed in the lot area unless certain conditions exist. Those conditions may be determined by the lot move request.

More players still need their lots moved. If you are one of these players then please log into Innectis and make a staff request (use the /staffrequest command) and indicate which lot by ID to move. If you don't know the lot ID then explain that in the staff request and we can then help you further.

Registrations using reCAPTCHA

I went and replaced the current in-house SMF verification system with google's reCAPTCHA verification service. The current verification service was not a good fit at all and made registering much more difficult.

Comparison of our previous verification method and the new method is shown below:


For more information on reCAPTCHA you can visit google's blog post about it here.

Nether Reset

The nether has been reset again, this time to account for the changes introduced in the Minecraft 1.10 update.

World Edit

Ever since the beginning of Innectis, World Edit (not to be confused with TinyWE which is a sub-set of World Edit) has been used as an admin tool to move, edit and terraform the world, oftentimes requiring much more selection size than TinyWE is capable of. We have often had to work with very large selections.

Historically, we have had numerous issues dealing with large selections and server performance. It was common not to go beyond about 750,000 blocks or so without causing great impact on performance. This would cause people to get kicked off unwillingly as the server was trying to process the World Edit job.

Creating a lot area was a grueling task because it had to be done slowly. If we were not careful then the server would end up restarting and then we might lose work, which has happened many times. It would take us days just to make one since the work involved required careful attention. Obviously it wasn't fun to go through this process.

Over the last year we started using a plugin alongside World Edit that helped a lot with world changes, called AsyncWorldEdit. When testing I found that I could go to around 2 million blocks without too many problems. It still caused some stability issues while it was pasting blocks but not anything like before, when we didn't even use a helper plugin like this.

After the Minecraft 1.9.4 update this plugin was not updated for quite some time. There eventually was an update but for the premium version of the plugin. (We were using the free version.) Because of no update to the free version I had to hunt around for alternatives (since I did not want to pay for the premium version). Someone referred me to a plugin called FastAsyncWorldEdit.

At the time of first using FastAsyncWorldEdit an error prevented me from using this plugin reliably on the server. After trying to figure it out for awhile I eventually gave up and took the plugin off the server. I eventually found out that the plugin had an error on CraftBukkit but worked on Spigot and PaperMC (another server based off of Spigot).

Fast forward to within the last week. I found that the free version of AsyncWorldEdit was updated so I decided to try that again. The settings out of the box caused it to be really slow when working with the world. Playing with the settings didn't work out too well. Thinking it was something that was most affecting my test server I put it on live and tested it out. Sure enough the same issue happened there.

I then went and downloaded the latest version of FastAsyncWorldEdit and tried it out. Sure enough the same error was still there. I eventually went to the owner's IRC channel and posted the error there. The owner of the plugin worked out the problem!

This plugin is way more efficient than AsyncWorldEdit ever was. I can comfortably do block changes in the 18 million range with only minor, if any, issues on the server. Creating a lot area with this plugin only takes a matter of hours, not days.



That's enough news for now.