We're Almost Done! + More Extrillius Info

Hey guys,

In the last post, I talked about what's going to happen to your player data and such as we switch from MCFun Central to Extrillius, and our estimated release date for it. In this post, I'm going to tell you a bit more.

The release of Extrillius has been delayed. We had a hard time setting up BungeeCord and getting the servers to run smoothly with BungeeCord. It also took a while to go through each server and import the data from MCFun Central so that you wouldn't lose anything, and get all the plugins and configure them just the way we like it. The good news is that we don't have a lot of things left to do. Here's the to-do list I made myself:

• Setup automatic backups/restarts
• Finish permissions on each server
• Download CraftConomy on each server and set it up with MySQL
• Finish donation ranks/setup Buycraft

Most of these things are very simple, but they're just time consuming, since we have to do it for all 11 servers. The only things that will take a while to do are the permissions and the Buycraft ranks. For the permission, we have to change it slightly on each server, since each server has at least one different plugin than the rest. We need to change it so that you don't have permission to use Build It on Parkour (you can't anyway since you're on a different server, what I mean is remove it from the file) and vice versa. The donation ranks will also take a while because we need everyone to agree with the ranks. Most of them are my decision, but something that we haven't put out publicly yet is that I don't own all the servers -- 3 of our servers are owned by our staff members, just so that we get a better feel of ownership and to cut costs for me (after all, I did pay for most of the servers myself). In our agreement, we decided that even though I am the owner, if you pay for an Extrillius server, you still have full ownership of the server and get to choose your staff members on there. That's why I appear as owner on most of the servers, but appear as head-admin on the survival server, and admin on the factions server. I appear as owner on the Skyblock server because I am co-owner. The only requirement is that I have full access to the control panel at all times. Since whoever pays for the server gets full ownership of the server, they also get to decide what donation ranks they should have on their server. We've had a few small conflicts with this, but in the end, we will have some great and underpriced donation ranks for you.

Setting automatic backups and restarts is pretty simple -- all I have to do is go to the Scheduled Tasks option on the control panel of each server and configure it to back up and restart over a certain period of time. It just takes a while when I have to do it for all of the servers.

One thing, if you're great at making observations, is that we are not going to use Essentials's economy system in Extrillius. Why is this? Because Essentials Economy doesn't support SQL databases, and that means you can't have a global account on each server. On MCFun Central, you could, for example, get some money in parkour, and spend it in the mall or spend it on a KitPvP kit. We want to bring that experience with us to Extrillius, and we also want you to keep the money you had on MCFun Central, so when you spend your $6,000 on a KitPvP kit, it takes it out of your account on all the servers. Fortunately, CraftConomy has recently been updated so it works perfectly, and it has full MySQL/SQLLite support. It's also easy to convert the data from Essentials. Once again, downloading the plugin and entering the MySQL credentials isn't difficult in itself. The difficult part is doing it on all of the servers.

Now, I'd like to add some info that either we figured out later or that I forgot to mention in the first Extrillius update post.

All of your player data is going to be transferred over. That means that all your Parkour data is still here, all your creative plots are still here, and all your money will still be here. The only thing that won't be transferred over are your nicknames. As part of the donation packages, you can pay $5 to set your own nickname anywhere in any server, along with some other nice perks. It wouldn't be fair if you could pay in-game money for something that you had to pay real money for. That's essentially getting it for free, and we want to keep our difference between in-game money and real money. The good news with this is that you will get the permission to set your own nickname, which means you don't have to find a staff member to pay in-game money to set it for you and then change it later, you can just change it to whatever you want. Of course, this comes with a responsibility, so if you set your nickname to something offensive or provocative, we will take away your permission to set nicknames, even if you paid the $5 for them.

There are 3 minigames so far that we know will not be released along with the release of the server: Skywars, factions, and Prison. The reason for Skywars and Prison is that we are not nearly skilled enough to build some decent maps. We would have to hire someone. Unfortunately, with the (around) $70-80 that I have to pay every month for these servers, and another $40 for the hub build, we don't have enough money to pay our builder friend Messi10noah for multiple Prison maps and 5 skywars maps. The rest of the staff can't pitch in, and I don't have the money to pay for it. They will both be released next month.

The reason for Factions is that Factions is one of the servers that our staff pays for. This means that he is the one who orders the server. Unfortunately, he has not been online recently due to a major family issue. This means he has not been able to order the server, which means that we have not been able to set it up. Our Factions supporter and head-admin taterntot515 has been offline for about 3 weeks now, and we don't know when he will be back online to support the server. Therefore, the release of Factions is unknown. If I could, I definitely would buy the server myself, but in addition to not having enough money to pay for yet another server, taterntot515 knows a lot more about Factions than I do, so he would be perfect for setting it up and managing it and whatnot.

So, overall, we all really want Extrillius to be up by next week, but we can't make any promises. I'll let you know this week about the status of the development as the release date comes nearer and nearer.

~ Matthew

EDIT: I forgot to mention that in the post that I posted on December 28th, I said that the new Extrillius hub would take about 2-3 weeks to be completed -- that's not true. Our awesome builder, Messi10noah, finished it in about a day and a half. It's currently being used in the private beta version of Extrillius.

EDIT 1/18/15: All that is left is the permissions and donations. The scheduled tasks and the Craftconomy global setup are both complete.