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One more quick map post

51 Trillion Squares ARBT [Admin]Posted on by

I hit a little bit of a snag with regard to maybe bringing the browser interactive tool to the site – namely that the javascript is still looking for huge files instead of the reasonably sized cropped one. Stay tuned for alternate ideas. Anyway, one more map, this time an enlargement of our densely packed spawn area: Since on the previous two maps it was near impossible to label everything in the spawn area, I decided to crop it down just to Spawn and the area around it. There is… a lot here, some of which I didn’t recognize/remember, and … continue

More Maps

51 Trillion Squares ARBT [Admin]Posted on by

When we last left your fearless leader, I was gleefully sorting through oodles of generated maps of ARBTServer and squeeing about finally having a world map after waiting a year and a half. I haven’t budged much from there, really. The interactive tools are really informative, since you can browse the maps by dimension, depth, etc once MCPE Viz crunches out all the pictures it’s capable of making. I really want to share ours, but unfortunately this means I’ve been spending large portions of the last couple of days cropping the generated overworld graphics down to a manageable size, because … continue

General server news

51 Trillion Squares ARBT [Admin]Posted on by

So things have been a little slow around ARBTland, mostly because I haven’t been online much in the past few weeks. (Stupid real life.) That said, over the past couple of weeks there have been a few changes of note.

First of all we got another visitor from WSE – Rudie! Always glad for the cross pollination between the two servers.

In terms of build news, the monument behind spawn keeps on expanding as new people come in. Rate we’re going that things going to extend into the sea. In addition to adding Rudie, FatalDeath and Billybob decided to silly up their statues by giving them tongues.

FatalDeath has been working on a wizard tower, and Rudie has also been building a very fairy-appropriate home in a large artificially created stump.

I’ve been busy too. Started working on a new skyscraper not far from Wacker Tower, loosely based on a building from SimCity BuildIt, which I’ve been also playing some on the side.

Lastly 5 has been working on a secret project under the Rainbow Balloon. Did I post pictures of that since I refinished it?

One thing I’ve been irked by since a few game updates ago – when they changed all the lighting, the ocean lost its translucency. It’s now REALLY hard to see underwater, which is a pain if you’re building something really deep under, and impossible if you’re trying to take pictures of said something, so the best I can do is sorta present a vague blob under the water taken from the surface.

In server improvement news, I’ve been waffling on transferring the game to an external server for a bit, weighing pros and cons of each platform. I’ve all but decided that I want to move the game to Pocketmine, as I have some experience with running it and it offers the most flexibility and customizability right now. But on the downside, it’s lagtastic, and mobs don’t work yet, which is a bummer; I like having random creatures roaming the world. It gives what can often be a lonely game a little bit of life. I supppose I could treat the missing mobs as a temporary problem, as the goal of PM will be to eventually replicate the full experience of the game, and its main programmer now works for Minecraft proper. The other major problem is that transferring/ MCPE worlds to PM is still an ordeal thanks to the leveldb storage format being a pain in the butt to work with/translate. I and others have put so much time and love and work into this world, so its pretty important that we continue to be able to play with it.

“And that’s Numberwang.”

We’ve had a blip!

51 Trillion Squares ARBT [Admin]Posted on by

Sorry about the couple days of blog downtime, y’all. Your fearless leader had a brain-fart and a few strategically important emails land in the spambox and long story short my domain expired. All better now!

On the Server transfer front, my desktop is proving harder to resurrect than initially expected. No sooner did I get the drive failure addressed when the CMOS decided to die. She’s an ancient machine by any standard, so none of this is exactly surprising, but it is no less frustrating for it. I’ll keep trying to get her up and running, but worst comes to worst, My husband and I are working on drafting a part list for a brand new box so we can finally let this one be honorably discharged after years of faithful service.

As an alternative, I’ve been looking into the wide world of minecraft hosts. It seems like most of them are crap. HOWEVER. I recently remembered that my webhost, whom I’ve had for years (and are awesome people) does offer Minecraft server hosting. No real word on whether they offer Pocketmine/MCPE, but I do have a little experience running one on my own, so I could self-install at the very least if Pocketmine is the way I decide to go. I’m still waffling on it, honestly – I like working mobs! But I’d also like to host more than 5 people at a time! But PHP is a platform I can actually work in! But laaaaaaaaaaaaaag. It’s a dilemma to be sure. To make things worse, I’ve checked out MiNet and while the terrain generation is hilarious (post about that later) it does seem poised to be a capable contender in the MCPE hosting department.

Of course with 0.12.0 on the horizon and Win 10 out, all of this could be rendered moot. We’ll see.

Anyway! Sorry again for the downtime. See y’all Monday!