Ninja is Fixed! + KitPvP Blue Map? + Extrillius Hub!

Hey guys,

It's been a while since I've actually made a normal post for the servers. This is a 75% normal post -- one that does not involve Extrillius and hubs and holidays and stuff like that.

If you've been on the server since August, you've probably noticed that there was a new kit that nobody really noticed in KitPvP: Ninja. Ninja was supposed to come with black Protection III armor and a wooden sword with Sharpness I. What!?

First off, Ninja didn't even work because KingKits refused to make the armor black when I created the kit. Even after recreating, the armor was still an ugly brown, which that in itself kind of ruined the kit. Next, even Squid is stronger than Sharpness I. I kept on saying "I'll get to it" but I never did, so for a while there was just this kit that was $100 and not worth it.

However, this Christmas, I tried recreating it, and KingKits started to cooperate. Here are a few screenshots of Ninja:

As you can see, the sword comes with Sharpness II, which is pretty effective but not worth more than $100, and Knockback III (have fun with that!) The armor is finally black and has Protection III. Do you think it's worth it?

Let's move on from Ninja to another KitPvP topic: The Blue Map. What do you think of this idea? A lot of our staff (and some default players) have been asking us to create a blue map. That means we would have the red map, the green map, and the blue map! What would the blue map's design be? Tell us! We want your ideas!

Now there's one more thing I want to talk about: The new hub.

After we switch to Extrillius, we obviously want a new hub. The one we have right now was just slapped together by a few of our staff members (including me), and since our goal is to make Extrillius as professional as possible, and the current MCFun Central hub is far from professional. We have hired someone named Noah10messi to build the new hub. He just started today and it already looks like this:

You can already tell it's gonna look GREAT. That being said, I found him a little late, and to get the most out of this build will take him 2-3 weeks. Until then, we will have a basic hub in Extrillius.

Remember that we begin the switching process on January 2nd, and we all can't wait!

~ Matthew

Christmas + Extrillius Release Date!

Hey guys,

Merry Christmas! I have some big news about the servers!

Let's start with the Christmas update. If you join MCFun Central, you will notice that the spawn is decorated almost as heavily as the 1 year anniversary. But this time, there's no holograms (A.K.A. LAG GENERATORS). The spawn is covered with snow, the beacon lights changed from blue and green to red and green, and Santa is even driving a sleigh with his two reindeers (the others died, but I'll resurrect them when I get the chance).

Now, let's talk about something a lot more important: Extrillius.

We've always been saying "yeah, it's coming soon!" But that's getting annoying, right? That's why we are going to cut the crap and actually switch. That's right!

Now, let me set set something straight: I tricked you in the title. We don't actually have a full release date for Extrillius. What we do have is a date for when we are going to privately switch to the network. What we need to do after that is set everything up and make sure everything is working the way we want it with these new network servers and stuff. There's a lot of background work that goes into that, and because of this, I don't even have an estimate for when we are fully going to go public. However, we are buying the servers on January 2nd. Make your own estimates.

I'm glad I finally succeeded in making a shorter blog post. What did you get for Christmas? What have you done so far today? What do you plan to do for the rest of today? Hopefully joining MCFun Central is part of your plan!

~ Matthew

1 Year Anniversary!

On December 9th, 2013, I decided to create a minigames server. I had nothing planned at all. The only thing I wanted to do was to start a server. Today, we are on the verge of becoming a big network full of many different minigames.

I just want to say how grateful I am to have this server and our partner servers. Even though not many people join the servers, it has been an amazing journey and I cannot express how great I feel about this.

If you go into the spawn now, we've added some amazing things for you!
1) 1 Year Anniversary! in big rainbow letters
2) Signs at /warp anniversary
3) A few quadrillion holograms that say 1 Year!!!
4) Added lag (because of the damn holograms)

Unfortunately, I have some homework that I need to get to today, but starting Friday and continuing up until Sunday night, we will celebrate the 1 year anniversary by doubling everything you earn (e.g. gold parkour reward = $40, Diamond = 200, Emerald = $1000, $20 per kill in KitPvP) <--- all lovely stuff, and we are also going to make all donation packages half-off ($500,000 ingame = $5, KitPvP Wizard = $2.50).

k i have to do homework now bye and join the server and make your clients crash!

All Bugs Fixed! + MCFun Building Plaza is Rising Again

Hey guys,

I plan to make this a quick blog post, but we'll see how things go.

I'd like to start off by saying that every bug that was mentioned 2 posts ago that had to do with our recent update to Spigot 1.7.10 is now fixed! We first fixed the Citizens plugin, which was mentioned in the last post, by downloading a snapshot provided by the Citizens development team that supported a 1.7.10 jar. Since it isn't a stable build, you may notice some glitches going on with the Citizens skins sometimes on the server, but overall it still works and we're happy.

The second plugin we fixed was the HolographicDisplays plugin. If you read the last post, you will see that our "fix" for holograms was to just switch our hologram plugin from HoloAPI to HolographicDisplays because HolographicDisplays supposedly offered support for a 1.7.10 jar, and it did, but the problem was 1.8. No holograms would appear. To substitute for the holograms were some flying horses up in the sky where the holograms would normally be. Fortunately, the developer of HolographicDisplays is an active developer (unlike many other developers on Bukkit, some who still haven't updated their plugin from 1.5.2) and, along with releasing a fully 1.8-compatible HolographicDisplays plugin, released a patch for 1.7.10. The patch was made a while before 1.8, but I mentioned in the last post that this patch required you to hack your Spigot server with a protocol hack. With the 1.8 release, the only other plugin now required besides the patch (the patch is a plugin that you can download from BukGetPlugins or using Installer) is ProtocolLib (not the ProtocolLib hack!). So, long story short, after downloading the updated patch and ProtocolLib, holograms look nice and pretty on both clients!

The last small, but super annoying "bug" that I had was that with the same code in the Essentials config and the book.txt, the book worked normally and you could read it just fine on 1.7.10, but when you opened it in 1.8, it said *Invalid Book Tag*.  The only thing that I knew was that there's a difference between the way books store data in 1.8 vs. 1.7. I've been searching since our Spigot 1.7.10 update for a fix to this, and nothing worked, until today. A lot of people said to add an author to your book and you should be set. I tried that, and it didn't work. This morning, I found out that 1.8 doesn't like Essentials book with a space in the title. The title of the info book was MCFun Central - Info. MCFun Building Plaza's info book is called Info+. So I tried to change the title of the book to Info+ and added a lore just for fun, and the info book now works! So basically just make sure you have at least 3 NBT tags on your info book (title, author, book) and that there's no space in your book title.

One more quick thing before I wrap up, MCFun Building Plaza has been updated to full 1.8 and everything appears to be going great! Players love the 1.8 update and MCFun Building Plaza has seen a lot of players recently. The owners of MCFun Building Plaza are also all set for the switch to Extrillius! Unfortunately, because of this, the server is still whitelisted and they don't plan to take the whitelist off until the Extrillius switch. However, that's not such a big problem. We still want to do some plugin work and make the town and spawn and stuff look pretty so that when we switch, you don't spawn in a world of nothingness.

Alright, that's about it for today! The development and planning of Extrillius is coming along very nicely, and we all can't wait to make the switch!

Just a side note: Citizens has also released a dev build for a 1.8 jar (that means FULL 1.8). If you want support for that, download Citizens 2.0.14-SNAPSHOT and upload it to your server. If your server runs a 1.7.10 jar, steer clear from 2.0.14 because Citizens will break due to that fact that it is 1.8. Stay at version 2.0.13-SNAPSHOT.

Spigot News + Full 1.8?

Hey guys,

It's been about a week now since MCFun Central updated its server jar from Bukkit to Spigot. We did this because Spigot was exactly like Bukkit and just as easy to use, but it offered expanded support for large servers with many worlds and plugins (that perfectly describes MCFun Central). As you remember if you read the last post, we ran into a few problems upon updating to Spigot 1.7.10 (with added support for 1.8, but not the 1.8 blocks). The first problem was that the Citizens plugin broke because it didn't support a 1.7.10 jar. Fortunately, the developers who made Citizens were hard at work making this, and they had a hidden but publicly released Citizens 1.7.10 dev build. If you are running your own server on a 1.7.10 jar (this does not mean Bukkit or Spigot 1.7.9, check your jar) and Citizens doesn't work, update your Citizens plugin manually by downloading the Citizens 1.7.10 dev build from their Jenkins website and Citizens will work again: http://ci.citizensnpcs.co/job/Citizens2/1168/

The other problem we ran into was that our hologram plugin, HologramAPI was secretly broken (A.K.A. it appeared green when you typed /plugins, but you were unable to make holograms and no holograms showed up) for the same reason: it did not offer support for a 1.7.10 jar. Fortunately, another plugin called HolographicDisplays did offer 1.7.10 support.

However, the hologram problem still isn't completely fixed. You are able to create and view holograms when your Minecraft client is on 1.7.10, but when your Minecraft client is on 1.8, the only thing you can see if you look up and look closely is horses up in the sky with the holograms going through them. So they don't really appear. There is a fix for this but that involves downloading a ProtocolLib hack, and I don't want to do that. I'd rather wait for one of the plugins to update with 1.7.10 jar support.

Overall, things have been going really well on MCFun Central after the update to Spigot.

We also have one question that we want to ask you: what do you think of full 1.8 support on MCFun Central? Just a side note, this would mean that the only way you'd be able to access MCFun Central would be if you had a 1.8 client, but it would also mean that everything on the server would be about 1.8, so you would have support for 1.8 blocks as well. What do you think? Tell us on Twitter @MCFunCentral or in the comments!

~ Matthew

1.8 Compatibility, Spigot, and a KitPvP Update!

Hey guys,

MCFun Central has gone through a lot of changes tonight.

Tonight, we switched our plugin API from Bukkit to Spigot. The reason for switching was that back in September, Bukkit, Spigot, and Cauldron went down due to money riots and stuff like that. Eventually, Spigot and Cauldron went back up, but Bukkit never did. This means that no new plugins and updates were released since September because none of the staff was on to check the plugins for bugs.

The other reason was that, since MCFun Central was a little unstable and big, if we wanted to change even the slightest thing with a plugin and that plugin didn't offer the option to reload its config separately, we would have to do a manual restart of the server, which took about 1 minute. It was very inconvenient. Since Spigot is designed to help reduce lag and server performance, I thought it would be a good idea to take advantage of these features and put them onto MCFun Central. And some more good news was that since Spigot is basically just an improved Bukkit, most plugins transfer right over from Bukkit to Spigot!

However, upon switching to Spigot, I immediately noticed some problems. The first problem was that our NPC plugin, Citizens, was broken. After doing some research, I found out that since Spigot supports both 1.7 and 1.8 (I'll get to that later), and the latest version of Citizens was not supported with 1.8, it didn't know what to do and broke. Unfortunately, there's nothing we can do about it. We will just have to hope for some kind of update to Citizens or an alternative to come as a direct Spigot resource. Sorry about this. Temporarily, we will use heads to visualize our staff members at /warp staff, and if you previously had an NPC on your server, you will have to use /head as a replacement for your NPC.

The other problem that I ran into was that HoloAPI, our newly-installed hologram management plugins, was not working in a very weird way. When you typed /plugins, nothing seemed wrong. The plugin was shown in green. However, all of the existing holograms on the server were gone. When I tried to recreate them, the commands worked, up until the creation of the hologram. It would just do nothing.

I was getting some strange errors related to the plugin in my console, event though none appeared in-game, so I tried the Spigot forums. Conveniently, I got multiple replies within 2 minutes of my question. What I found out was that HoloAPI had not yet been updated to support 1.8, just like Citizens, but instead of literally breaking, it kind of broke itself in a weird way that took some time to notice.

Fortunately, I also found out from the Spigot forums that there was an alternative to HoloAPI called HolographicDisplays. I installed it and found out that I actually kind of like it more than HoloAPI.

Long story short, we now have Holograms again, and a new hologram plugin.

Now, on to the KitPvP updates. What happened with KitPvP? If you go on the red map and look really closely, you'll notice how obvious it is: fall damage is now disabled in KitPvP. That means that instead of falling into a pool of water, you can just jump down from the spawn and not take fall damage. However, you still take damage from anything else.

At first, I set it so that instead of water, there was a certain area that you could fall in and not take fall damage. But then I realized that there was no harm in disabling fall damage for the whole KitPvP red map, so that's what I did. You'll notice that if you go on top of a tree or something and jump off, you will not take fall damage. I will post a tutorial on how I did this this weekend on my channel, TechieGaming, as well as a full review of Spigot and a comparison of Spigot vs. Bukkit.

Since MCFun Central is a big server, I probably didn't catch some bugs with Spigot that exist. If you find ANY abnormalities when playing on the server that you didn't experience before today, please report them immediately to us. You can report to us directly on Twitter @MCFunCentral, post a comment on this blog, or email us at mcfuncentral@gmail.com.

That was a long post. We hope you enjoy these changes!

UPDATE 11/20/14: I have been made aware of a few bugs involving 1.8:
1) The info book in /kit starter shows *Invalid Book Tag* but shows the book like normal on 1.7.9/1.7.10

2) Holograms don't show in 1.8, but if you look closely enough, you can see the holograms 100 blocks up inside some invincible horses (that's actually true)

Let us know if you find any more bugs!

Holograms, 1.8 News, and New Staff Board!

Hey guys,

A lot of things have happened on MCFun Central since my last post, which was pretty recent. However, they do not need a lot of explaining, so this is going to be a fairly short blog post.

First off, we now have holograms in the spawn! It's not a big change, but it's still pretty noticeable.

If you paid close attention to the spawn before Sunday night, you probably noticed that there were signs on the ground indicating the minigames. These holograms replace those signs, and they look a lot cooler!

On to the second news: a new /warp staff! Our newly promoted admin, Allison (yoshisrawesome) pointed out that we needed a new warp staff. The current one at the time was much like the old spawn (which you can see by typing /warp oldspawn): just a quartz box. Since we made the new spawn back in March with the intention of making it intriguing and not just a lame quartz box, we decided to do the same with the new /warp staff. Check it out:

All of this was Allison's idea, including the design for the build. She built literally everything you see here (except the dome, that was done by WorldEdit and me (we make a good team)). We don't plan on changing this anytime soon.

There's one last thing that has been brought to my attention that I wanted to talk about: MCFun Central and 1.8.

As you may notice, MCFun Central still runs the 1.7.9/1.7.10 Bukkit jar. If you know your APIs, you'll know why MCFun Central isn't on 1.8 at the mention of "Bukkit." In case you don't know, let me talk a little about it.

If you've been playing Minecraft recently, you probably know about the sort-of riots at Bukkit (and Spigot, since Spigot is a variation of Bukkit). The developers at Bukkit and Spigot were working for free and thought it was a volunteer job, and they found out a few weeks ago that actually Mojang was paying some developers to make plugins, so really, money was flying. This resulted in almost everyone quitting plugin development at Bukkit and Spigot and therefore, nobody was there to update and test the API for 1.8. Since MCFun Central is entirely dependent on Bukkit, I don't want to risk breaking or losing all of our plugins by switching to another API. Therefore, MCFun Central is stuck on 1.7.9/1.7.10 until either Bukkit developers start developing again, or once the new Sponge API comes out. The reason I am waiting for the Sponge API to come out is because they mentioned in their forums that the API will be able to run previous Bukkit plugins, so the plugins we already have won't break. By the looks of the homepage and the forums, it looks like the Sponge API will be released in the near future. That being said, it shouldn't be too long before MCFun Central is updated to 1.8 with a new API!

A lot of things have happened. Come and check them out now!