SE Game On!

Dan Rasmussen

14:33

@RonanForman @Fredy31 If one of you want to download my video I've compressed it all to 3gb and put the clips here: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/832464/MC/GO%21UH1.7z
Feel free to edit it how you like and put it on YouTube, or else I can try to get around to it tonight.

Peter Grace

16:26

@RonanForman CHAOS is willing to fund a minecraft server out of their budget, I think the next step is for there to be a meta discussion about which path we'd want to go. I've been told that any involvement I have with this is considered personal time; SE's support will be financial-only.

3

James

@PeterGrace WooT :)

aww, they wont pay you for playing with games??

Peter Grace

haha, nope.

Ronan Forman

@PeterGrace That is absolutely amazing, you guys are the best company ever.

Peter Grace

Haha, thank you. It's a great place to work.

What I was considering was I'd buy a vps from my provider and expense it and set it up

but realistically, it's what the community wants to do. If you guys want to go with something like servercraft, I don't think there'd be a problem with that, but I think going the vps method would be more agile given the different-maps-at-different-times stuff.

James

This is where I run screaming in the other direction

I, am just a programmer :)

Ronan Forman

16:30

So what access do we have to this server?

Is it a physical box that we can have access to or what?

Peter Grace

Well, SE is committing only to pay for it

Ronan Forman

Oh, I see.

James

Someone cover @PeterGrace's eyes while I convince @RonanForman that we need a $250,000/month server :D

Peter Grace

If I were to get the virtual private server and we went that route, then I'd allow ssh access to whoever the community decided should have that access.

OrigamiRobot

@RonanForman It looks like we tell them what we want, and they get it for us. Within reason of course.

Peter Grace

16:33

Hahaha, $50/month I think is a safe target.

More expensive and I think Lauren will need to be the one speaking to it

James

hostedgameservers.com/game_server/minecraft

Ronan Forman

I see. I think this is where I stop understanding things then.

Tim Stone

I think that's how much I pay for the existing one.

Peter Grace

she's probably at lunch right now but I might be able to get her to come chat about it.

James

But you guys know I am biased, they do $2 a slot, so that would be a 25 slot server.

Tim Stone

16:35

Yeah, $50 + a few dollars for bandwidth

Peter Grace

If we went the vps route where I fired up a VPS and we went from there, we'd have very wide latitude on what could be done on it. The only gotcha is I'd want to restrict root access for my personal sanity

James

Might also be worthwhile to talk to Paul Soares Jr.. I am not sure which hosting company he went with but reportedly his server can handle a large amount of connections.

@PeterGrace I can not even remotely think why anyone would need root access to run a minecraft server

Peter Grace

I think the next step is for you guys, as a community, to decide exactly what you want from the server, and then I'll be able to help say whether it's feasible.

James

Do you have a VPS hosting company in mind?

Peter Grace

@James well, some people like to "poke around" with stuff.

Ronan Forman

16:36

I think it may be best to not have a dedicated minecraft server, we do do other games remember.

Peter Grace

@James I have a special relationship with voxel; I can get VPS's with a 50% discount.

James

Let em install linux on an old 486 they have laying around :D

Ronan Forman

Okay then I'll start a meta, $50 budget.

James

voxel.net? (cause if I do a search for Voxel I am going to get a lot of development related links as I research voxels a lot :D)

Peter Grace

yes, voxel.net

OrigamiRobot

16:37

@RonanForman I agree, but games have different requirements.

Peter Grace

they're the guys who host imgur and some other big sites

@RonanForman you might want to wait on the budget until Lauren weighs in; I told her $50 based on my idea, but that number might be different if the community opts for something else.

James

@OrigamiRobot servers, dedicated servers, usually have the same requirements regardless of game.

Ronan Forman

@PeterGrace I won't mention a budget then.

Peter Grace

@RonanForman that's probably best for the moment; when Lauren's back from lunch I'll ask her to weigh in on the meta post.

OrigamiRobot

@James I mean our choice might not be able to support ALL the games.

Peter Grace

16:39

Are you wanting to do more than Minecraft on this server?

because that definitely adjusts the requirements a bit

Ronan Forman

@OrigamiRobot I'm just saying we don't want to block ourselves in.

Block. See what I did there.

Peter Grace

heh. heh.

OrigamiRobot

@RonanForman I know. I said I agree.

Peter Grace

Meanwhile, I run this server so feel free to come play: minestatus.net/13244-blocktown

OrigamiRobot

I just wanted to point out that having a server doesn't mean we can do everything on it.

James

16:41

@PeterGrace voxel does seem a bit expensive, flat server starts at 230/mo? single core 10gb of storage cloud system looks ok but the RAM is fairly low for game servers.

Ronan Forman

@PeterGrace We play MC and LoL as regular game on!s, (LoL doesn't need a server) but we occasionally play other games, and some of them need servers (see: killing floor, L4D, TF2)

James

Haha, Blocktown is a minecraft server? I thought you guys were talking about a game called Blocktown :D

Peter Grace

Nope.

OrigamiRobot

But Minecraft is easily the most popular of those.

Peter Grace

at the moment we're waiting for 1.2.4 to stabilize and Towny to get updated before we regen the map again

Marco Ceppi

16:42

@RonanForman the TF2 server is still up and can be re-factored to run KF or L4D

Peter Grace

that's why if you spawn in everything's just sort of a hodgepodge.

@James blocktown.org is run on a voxel VoxCLOUD instance.

normal retail for that would be about $80 a month

$80-90 a month

Ronan Forman

@MarcoCeppi They don't require much/any intervention, so they can quite happily stay put right?

Peter Grace

you could probably go with someone like linode, but I think they have a policy against running minecraft since it's so resource-intensive.

Marco Ceppi

@RonanForman yeah, I run the TF2 one 24/7

Peter Grace

Minecraft is an incredibly poorly written piece of software.

Marco Ceppi

16:44

A few things live on that server, TF2 and Mumble

James

I am just concerned over memory usage with the whole Multiverse idea for spawning the arenas.

Marco Ceppi

L4D and KF are setup on there as well, just off

James

@PeterGrace Yes yes very much yes! it makes me cry at night.. into my pillow... :(

Peter Grace

@James I was figuring it might be wiser to instead have seperate minecraft instances where we turn one off and turn the other on for events.

i.e., when an event comes up we jump on and issue the shutdown command on the "free play" instance and then fire up the "special arena" instance.

Marco Ceppi

@RonanForman for that server I'd be happy to give out SSH access and write a few scripts for easy management to a few trusted G.SE users

James

16:45

@PeterGrace Yeah that would make more sense. What is the speak usage of blocktown? can it handle 10people well? I see the cap is 20 but that is the default I think of any server

@MarcoCeppi l4d 1 or 2? :)

Peter Grace

@James we get about 15 people at once during peak time without lag.

Marco Ceppi

@James both are on there

James

@PeterGrace Awesome :)

@MarcoCeppi Kewl, I must remember that.. I like me some l4d2 :)

Tim Stone

@James The existing community server is only running on a 1GB Rackspace CentOS 5.5 cloud server...not sure if there have been any performance issues or not, though.

Peter Grace

I wonder how many people we'd wind up getting from gaming.se to come play.

James

16:47

@PeterGrace We had 11 signed up for last sunday's event 9 played. Lag was a factor

Peter Grace

At blocktown, we run with 2gb of ram; 1024 is dedicated to minecraft, and the other 1024 is used as memory filesystem, shared with the server

so what we do is, we run the server maps in ramdisk so that the loading of chunks is ultra-fast. Buttery smooth.

James

@PeterGrace Very nice setup

makes-notes

Peter Grace

Thanks, it works pretty well

Marco Ceppi

@PeterGrace what about when a server reboot occurs?

Peter Grace

It's the same setup I'd provide for you guys if you wanted to get a vps

@MarcoCeppi Why would a server need to be rebooted?

Marco Ceppi

16:48

Is there any write-to-disk that occurs?

Peter Grace

@MarcoCeppi there's a crontab that saves the server to disk every 30 minutes.

Marco Ceppi

What happens when someone trips on a cord in the datacenter*

James

@MarcoCeppi They get fired :D

Peter Grace

we have 30 minute rollback in production and daily backups for revert

Marco Ceppi

^ That's what I was getting at :)

Peter Grace

16:49

(blocktown does, I mean)

Ronan Forman

0

Q: SE are funding a server for 'community building'

CHAOS have graciously going to fund a server for use by the communtiy for Game on! and LPing purposes. (Please note they really don't have to do this, so don't try pushing for the extra bandwidth/RAM.) They are only funding this, so we need to decide how we are going to manage this. First we ne...

Marco Ceppi

right

cool

Tim Stone

This is why I wish I had an actual sysadmin at work who knew what they were doing. sighs

James

@PeterGrace How many cores does Blocktown have?

Peter Grace

@TimStone aww, just tell him to read my blog posts.

@James two. It doesn't matter though; minecraft is singlethreaded.

@James that's also why plugins can lag the server, if you've ever heard about that.

James

16:51

@PeterGrace The mods we write may not be ;)

Haha

Tim Stone

@PeterGrace Well, I would, but I'd just rather not be responsible for 500 different aspects of the technical development. ;)

James

Yeah @RonanForman found out earlier my border gen command can pause a server when giving a HUGE radius :D

Peter Grace

@James just be realistic; if the server is singlethreaded then you could run into threadsafe issues

James

@PeterGrace Bukkit actually gives nice read access for most data that is thread safe from the APIs I have seen in it already.

The arena generation will have to do something threaded or it will lag the server to disconnect everyone

Especially as we get more ambitious with our generation designs.

Peter Grace

cool. I'm gonna go grab some lunch, but CHAOS has been notified of your meta post and if Lauren gets a chance, she'll pop in here and talk about it too. I'm not sure what their official process is for money-giving-out, it's not something I'm usually involved in. Jin just asked me to be involved since he knew I run blocktown.

James

16:56

I am checking out blocktown atm :)

Peter Grace

cool, I'll jump on and promote you

@James whats your minecraft account name?

James

Crysyn

Peter Grace

obviously, follow the rules and no griefing :)

back later, lunch time.

Ronan Forman

17:12

Ooh, featured

James

Not sure about Voxel.. I found it somewhat laggy even though I showed full ping bars.. and your connect was always at 1 bar @RonanForman

Dan Rasmussen

@PeterGrace I'm pretty sure bukkit plugins run separate threads of some sort. Not sure how, but I've heard talk of it. My Pail Server Manager says my bukkit server's running 25 threads.

Peter Grace

17:32

@James It's whatever you guys want, to be honest. I was just willing to put it on my account to get the steep discount

James

@PeterGrace We found out the hardware how much fair PvP in minecraft depends upon connection speed

Thats why its a concern is all

Peter Grace

well, if you get a server that's close to you, it'll be farther for someone else

voxel's in the most connected colocation facility on the east coast, their bandwidth isn't the issue.

Marco Ceppi

It should probably be in the EU

Dan Rasmussen

@MarcoCeppi I think East Coast would be the best compromise

@PeterGrace I'm liking blocktown. What do I need to do to become a member?

James

Could just be the crappy connection I have at the office here.. but technically @RonanForman is closer to the east coast than I am and his speed was worse.

Dan Rasmussen

17:35

I know the rules say no asking for promotions. =P

Peter Grace

@DanRasmussen agree to abide by the rules.

Dan Rasmussen

@PeterGrace I do. =P

Marco Ceppi

I'm on the East Coast and I've found that EU people feel chop on the East Coast servers

Peter Grace

@DanRasmussen haha, no promotions to admin. You can be a member, no worries. What's your minecraft name?

Dan Rasmussen

@PeterGrace cyclotis04

James

17:36

Haha, Beware the people on the server @DanRasmussen!! They will want to give you tours of -everything- :D

Ronan Forman

@PeterGrace I'm Nanor by the way.

Peter Grace

OK, I put you in Member as well

James

@MarcoCeppi Yeah that is what we were seeing I think.

Peter Grace

The two guys playing now are young kids

Marco Ceppi

I feel like the majority of the people who Game On are EU based

Ronan Forman

17:38

@MarcoCeppi Are they?

Marco Ceppi

feels like*

Ronan Forman

I'm pretty sure it's just me

James

WEll maybe we should change that ! :D

Dan Rasmussen

@James Yeah I got tours. =P

James

I couldnt place @Fredy's accent.

I think MrSmooth is from Down Under?

We were pretty spread out yesterday

Ronan Forman

17:39

@James French Canadian.

James

@RonanForman Ahh.. Montreal? :)

Peter Grace

BlockTown will be installing Towny once 1.2.4 is engaged; if you guys haven't seen it before, Towny lets people form actual towns with mayors, and be part of nations, etc.

Ronan Forman

Quebec.

Peter Grace

We're really excited about it because prior to it, we had to manually use WorldGuard to setup town restrictions

but towny lets the mayor change those settings for us

James

@PeterGrace Town restrictions?

Dan Rasmussen

17:40

@PeterGrace How do you do map updates? I noticed on your live map you have a lot of weird borders from what I'm assuming is generator changes

James

And I finally found a mountain to try and hallow out, but I see near a ravine there are some torches so I think I have to run father way from the spawn point :)

Peter Grace

@DanRasmussen We actually had the same map for several months. We opted as a server to reset the map because the map datafiles were crossing 1gb so were getting unwieldy to cache in ram.

@DanRasmussen once the datafiles are bigger than ram, things will get slow since the server will start using swapfile to store the files

Dan Rasmussen

@PeterGrace Fun. =]

Peter Grace

@James yeah, town restrictions like who can build where; you'd acquire plots from the mayor and you'd be able to build in your plot but not grief other people's plots.

James

Ahh

Dan Rasmussen

17:43

I've read about Towny. Never used it though.

Peter Grace

Blocktown (the actual town) had manual plots; we'd ask new players which plot they wanted and manually assigned it to them

Towny will allow that process to be done by users rather than admins

James

hehe, my minecraft servers are always vanilla.. I ran my first adventure map and my first mod ... this past week on one of em :)

Peter Grace

Yeah.. I seldom get time to play/admin on blocktown anymore with my commute coupled with my re-addiction to WoW

Dan Rasmussen

@james Yeah WoW took up a lot of my life a while ago... had to give it up. Now Minecraft fills that hole. Lol

James

@DanRasmussen Haha, Minecraft is eevil, look how late it kept us up last night working on the arena stuff

Dan Rasmussen

17:46

@James Nah - that's just development stuff in general for me, not Minecraft .Lol

James

True True.. The source code to the plugin so far is in the github account btw

Peter Grace

I wrote a plugin to allow users to buy sunlight; depends on Register.

java's not my usual language but it was fun to fire up an environment.

Dan Rasmussen

@PeterGrace Buy sunlight?

Peter Grace

When the sun goes down, users can use some of their in-game money to buy daytime again

so that monsters don't spawn, etc.

James

@PeterGrace I dislike Java, but its the only option for minecraft modding

Peter Grace

17:49

I'm meh on Java. Before I moved into systems administration, I was a software developer, so I've programmed in a lot of languages. After awhile you just "program" in whatever language works for that task.

James

@PeterGrace Interesting idea.. If you were 2min into the night would you need 3 min of sunlight to get 1 min of daylight back?

Dan Rasmussen

@PeterGrace Can't Essential's do that with signs?

Peter Grace

Yes, but that requires Essentials economy, I think.

Dan Rasmussen

Ah, yeah. What econ mod do you use?

Peter Grace

We also use chestshops, I'm trying to remember why we needed iConomy specifically, but some plugin we used required iConomy.

OK, gotta go to my kid's easter program at school, back in a bit.

James

17:54

Cya :)

Ronan Forman

People aren't actually answering the questions in that meta post, they're just saying they'd like to do an undefined job.

James

@RonanForman I put up a comment to hopefully bring it to people's attention that running the server on a day to day basis isnt the main point to be considering

I am also working up an answer :)

Ronan Forman

@James Good.

James

I do have a meeting to go to as well

Arg

Ronan Forman

@James The post can wait.

Wipqozn

18:01

@RonanForman You only made the meta post an hour ago.

Ronan Forman

@Wipqozn I know, but I did say "Once we figure out what access it requires" so that kinda implies not yet.

James

Yay, on hold for the meeting

Wipqozn

@RonanForman Yeah, but people are simply letting you know that they would be willing to lend a hand with that. I'm working on a meta post myself, but it takes more time to think about "What do I want to this server to be for?" than "Do I know enough about servers to help / would I be willing?"

In anycase, as I'm going to outline in my meta post, I don't think we should dedicate it to one game. I think that would be a waste.

Ronan Forman

@Wipqozn Yeah, 'spose.

Marco Ceppi

18:14

You run in to weird issues if you start trying to do multi-game setups on the servers

TF2 and MC on the same server don't play nicely, as an example

Wipqozn

@MarcoCeppi Yeah, I'm aware.

Marco Ceppi

Well, MC doesn't play nice with really anything.

Wipqozn

I just meant that we should avoid purchasing a server which only host one game.

Such as just buying a Minecraft server.

I think purchasing a server which we could use to host what whatever we want would be better, although still only host one game at a time. We'd probably have one game we'd run most of the time (like Minecraft), but then we would take that down for events.

Marco Ceppi

I agree, but it's hard to encompass requirements for all the possible games you might want to play on a server. It's easy to say "This server needs to run minecraft really well" than to tune a server for more general optimization 2-cents

nods

James

rage most uesless meeting -evar-

@MarcoCeppi This is the main problem

Marco Ceppi

18:18

#blamejava

James

As @PeterGrace mentioned earlier (Is he realted to @GraceNote?) Minecraft is not a nicely coded piece of software.

Ronan Forman

@James How many times did the work synergism get mentioned?

Wipqozn

On more than one occasion and the community has gotten really into a game, like with Terreria, and needed someone to host it. IT would be great to have a server we could offer to people in situations like that.

James

A system we would want to target to run Minecraft LPs and GameOns is not directly relational to other game systems.

@RonanForman Haha, None :)

Ronan Forman

Arg! This world is full of ocean, start again!

Marco Ceppi

18:20

@Wipqozn I agree, in that case it shouldn't be too difficult to re-factor the server for that game, but there's a chance that tweaks for the primary game on that server would have an adverse affect on the new game you're trying to run

Wipqozn

@MarcoCeppi Yeah, very true.

Marco Ceppi

Just something to keep in mind

I wonder if it would be better to instead have something a little more cloudy to host this stuff

Ronan Forman

We're getting a server funded by CHAOS, have your say in shaping what we get!

3

Wipqozn

@RonanForman haha, I was just starting to type up that myself.

Make a post in The Bridge too @RonanForman, and ask someone to pin it for you.

Ronan Forman

Great minds think alike, and by that logic so do stupid ones.

No one's in at the moment.

James

18:26

@Wipqozn Thats another pointing the problem though. Terraria servers require HUGE amounts of RAM.

Marco Ceppi

@RonanForman I can do it

Ronan Forman

@MarcoCeppi Are you going to?

Marco Ceppi

Sorry, I pinned it but it didn't stick

Ronan Forman

@MarcoCeppi Cheers.

Peter Grace

19:19

@James Haha, nope, not related to @GraceNote.

James

@PeterGrace well ya never know :)

Peter Grace

It was a possibility, I'll give ya that. Names somewhat similar, but GraceNote's real name isn't Grace :)

Ronan Forman

Although it is unisex.

James

@PeterGrace Stranger things have happened

now I am torn

Do I post on Meta during lunch, or check out more Blocktown :)

Ronan Forman

@James Need some sticky tape?

James

19:24

@RonanForman Does it have a dark and a light side and bind the universe together?

Ronan Forman

@James Nah, just the regular kind.

James

@RonanForman Ill pass then. Thanks for the offer though :D

Would love to know why I keep getting pinged for old messages..

I am starting to think its just cause I am sitting in multiple rooms

Ronan Forman

Anyway, I say meta.

Dan Rasmussen

19:54

@PeterGrace Can I bother you with a few easy Blocktown questions here? (My forum account is waiting for activation. =P )

Peter Grace

sure

what's shakin

Dan Rasmussen

I'm curious why /delhome and /warp (the command that lists warp points) aren't available to members?

Peter Grace

they should be; it's possible that perms got wedged up when we swapped plugin versions.

Dan Rasmussen

Gotcha. Listing warps isn't too essential (most of them are broken anyways.)

But I'd like to be able to remove old homes from my list. =P

Peter Grace

yup

Dan Rasmussen

19:57

Also, any way you would support nicknames on the server?

Peter Grace

15:57:17 [INFO] Permission "essentials.delhome" added to Member !

Dan Rasmussen

I chose my minecraft username before there was any multiplayer... Lol

Peter Grace

I thought nicknames were already supported

Dan Rasmussen

Maybe I just missed it (or it wasn't listed.)

Yeah - /nick [name] says I don't have access

Peter Grace

checking out what's going on

I'm going to hold off on enabling nicknames till I talk to the other admin

he might have disabled them for some reason

since we do get quite a bit of traffic we get a lot of griefers, it's possible he didn't want them to try to impersonate other people.

16:01:39 [INFO] Permission "essentials.warp.list" added to Member !

Dan Rasmussen

20:01

Yeah I thought that might be it. Maybe allow it for VIPs and allow Admins nick other people? (So I can be given a nick but can't set it myself.)

Peter Grace

I haven't really used nicknames; is there an easy way to find out a user's real name?

Dan Rasmussen

yeah - /realname

so if my nickname was dan just type /realname dan

Peter Grace

then I figure nicknames are fine

Dan Rasmussen

i think /info dan also works

also, it prepends some character to nicknames, so you can identify them easily

like "~Dan" or "#Dan"

Peter Grace

You can try the nick command now

Dan Rasmussen

20:06

@PeterGrace forums.bukkit.org/threads/…

@PeterGrace Don't forget to allow /realname too, unless you want only ops to use it.

Peter Grace

I'll check that ChatManager link in a little bit after this meeting

Dan Rasmussen

Sounds good.

Peter Grace

21:01

wahoo, I love when my DSL dies for no reason

James

22:38

Well that was disappointing

Dan Rasmussen

22:56

@James ?

James

@DanRasmussen Spent all that time hallowing out my home, those two guys thought it looked like a good place for a stair case.

Dan Rasmussen

...what sort of staircase..?

James

@DanRasmussen One all the way down to bedrock

Or atleast pretty close, hehe

Dan Rasmussen

Ah that sort.

Lol

James

I do have to wonder about servers where you need mods to keep people from being dicks :)

Dan Rasmussen

22:58

Yeah, I'm waiting til we either get Towny, or I find someplace far enough away that it's hard to find.

They're just young.

James

I think Ill just stick to my own servers :)

Dan Rasmussen

I think the one got upset at me for using the bad word "crap" when I fell into lava...

I wasn't sure tho. I didn't press. Lol

James

Yeah

I tried SOO hard not to laugh!

Dan Rasmussen

I did censor myself... That's not what I said in my head. Lol

James

Yeah

Since I got banned from chat for an hour one day for quoting south park. I watch what I say very much on here :)

Dan Rasmussen

23:01

On chat here?

James

Specifically the bridge, but yeah :)

Dan Rasmussen

Lol

James

I am very much resisting the urge to work on the plugin

Dan Rasmussen

Haha, why so?

James

Cause its more fun than looking through 2 years worth of source code to try and find a data list that no one else seems to want to watse the energy one finding

Dan Rasmussen

23:03

Still at work I take it?

James

Aye

1.5 more hours

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