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Monday, May 23, 2016
Sunday, January 11, 2015
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:
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.
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.
Thursday, January 1, 2015
2015 + Extrillius is Almost Here!
Hey everyone!
2015 is finally here! Happy new year! Its hard to believe that a little more than a year ago, MCFun Central was still a private server being built. Now look where we are.
In this post, I want to give a final status update on Extrillius and what's going to happen for the next week.
Tomorrow is the big day. We're going to be buying and beginning the setup of all the Extrillius servers: Prison, Skywars, Skyblock, Creative, Survival, KitPvP, Factions, Parkour, Color Shuffle, and Build It. We also will have Boson X, but that is not going to be released along with the network because it requires a custom plugin that is still in development.
The bill for MCFun Central is due on the 9th of every month. That means you probably won't notice much of a difference while we are in this process; you will still be able to play on MCFun Central until January 9th. If, for some reason, the setup process exceeds the 9th, there will be a short period where you won't be able to play on any servers. I don't know the policy on MCProHosting for changing servers, but I'll live chat them. What I do know is that nothing will be lost. All your player data and all the server data for the games that already exist will not be lost. That means all that hard-earned money will not be lost, and all your favorite parkour and KitPvP maps will still be there. Who needs the extra work when everything we already have is fine? That also takes part of the bulk of the bunch of servers that we have to set up off of us.
Next, let's talk about changes to the way the server will function. Since Extrillius is a network, you will notice a difference in the overall performance of the server. Right now, we have different worlds for each server. That means we have to stuff all of our plugins on the one server and make sure that they don't interfere. This closes some opportunities for better plugins, because some plugins depend on your server being dedicated to that one game, or whatever the plugin is for. Now that we're a network, we can reopen the doors to getting those plugins. There will be little to no other worlds on each server, and we won't have 40 plugins. Unfortunately, because we can only afford small servers, we will have a low player capacity. Many of you know that we use MCProHosting as our server hoster. Their small plan (the one that we are buying) only has 18 player slots max. That means we won't have a bunch of players on each server. But don't worry -- as soon as each server fills up, we will upgrade it to unlimited slots!
Another thing that will change is the donation packages. If you've ever typed /buy, you'll notice that there are only 2 packages: KitPvP Wizard, and $500,000. On Extrillius, not only will we have 6 packages for the whole server, we will use various packages for each minigame.
We're all really excited for Extrillius, and we hope you are too! We have high hopes for this year. Happy new year! We'll make another blog post as soon as Extrillius is live!
Sunday, December 28, 2014
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
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
Thursday, December 25, 2014
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
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
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
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!
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!
Sunday, December 7, 2014
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.
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.
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