EPTOn October 24 2011 01:57 Chuiu wrote:
A team of coders eh... What worries me the most is this is going to end up going the way of the last server. Where there was an update and the mods didn't update fast enough so the server never updated to keep up with the new patches and eventually everyone lost interest or couldn't connect because their minecraft was 2 patches ahead or whatever and the server eventually went down despite donations to help keep it up.
A team of coders eh... What worries me the most is this is going to end up going the way of the last server. Where there was an update and the mods didn't update fast enough so the server never updated to keep up with the new patches and eventually everyone lost interest or couldn't connect because their minecraft was 2 patches ahead or whatever and the server eventually went down despite donations to help keep it up.
That's the entire reason why I took the server down until retail. Bukkit was still in beta, plugin authors were half-assing the switch from hMod, and the actual game itself had loads of issues.
Fast forward to now... Bukkit is rock solid, plugin authors are extremely dedicated (not to mention there are ten times as many as before meaning more options available), and the game itself is, dare I say it, a respectable piece of software in terms of stability and performance.
It's really like night and day. Back then we had to fight with plugins for a week just to get a single Minecart to travel one chunk before glitching out and crashing the server. Now it takes me five minutes to set up a hundred fully automated minecarts that never disappear or crash. Back then we had to handle multiple zones with buggy territory plugins (pretty much the original Factions plugin) and really poor permission systems in notepad files. Now I can make a separate world for every area I need and handle permissions with MySQL databases. Back then I had to jump through a dozen hoops to get PvP, monsters, nether, etc on the server. Now I have capture the flag battlefields, neutral NPCs, custom dungeons with custom monsters, nether, skylands, ender realm, and so on.
I know the game itself has changed a fair amount in the last 6-8 months... but on the server side of things it's like a completely new one. It's almost like the difference between map making in StarEdit compared to GalaxyEdit. I mean it's just amazing how many things can be done now and how easily so.
I sorta planned on retail being more stable and it is. Plugins can go multiple patches without needing an update now and with the retail version of Minecraft the patches should be less spread out to begin with. There won't be many patches that completely change code in the game after release (probably none at all, to be honest). Those are the patches that cause plugin issues so without those happening every month there's no need to update plugins constantly and thus no reason we should need to play on an older client.
On a side note, people didn't really lose interest because of playing on an older client. The server was online for six months and peaked about two months in. People were losing interest for the last four months because they were bored (I was one of them, as there wasn't much to do but build back then). People would log in for a few days, work on a project, and leave when they finished it. The lack of things to do is something that should be nonexistent on the new server.
So far I've put in somewhere between 200-300 hours of work on the server, plus whatever the people helping me have put in. That number will probably double before it opens. Long story short I'm setting this up to last quite some time and unless something drastic happens in the next few weeks and Notch decides to change his entire development process I see no reason why the server should need to remain on an outdated patch or why anyone should get bored in the game.
EDIT: Also, if you have any requests or suggestions feel free to PM me. There's plenty of time and room to add features to the server.
