InsaneJ

The HappyDiggers TFC server has been updated to TFC 0.79.16.642. Please update your clients. You can find the download here: http://terrafirmacraft.com/download.html

For those using Opis, that has been updated as well to Opis-1.2.5_1.7.10 with MobiusCore-1.2.5_1.7.10.

As always, please report any issues you may encounter.

World information

 

80.000 x 80.000 blocks

 

- fully pregenerated and pre-rendered in Dynmap   

- Requires 4 hours sprint in one direction 90° to reach the nearest edge starting from spawn !

I was excited when I read your posts. Then I visited your Dynmap. It looks like it's roughly 10.500 x 10.500 blocks. That's less than 2% of what's advertised

Or am I missing something here?

Instructions on how to apply can be found in the opening post of this thread.

Try restarting your game like it sais in the message

Also makes sure to add the port to the IP:

tfc.happydiggers.net:4000

If you are willing to pay for hosting, I'll set one up.

Today I spend the morning trouble shooting my PC and ended up reinstalling Windows. When that was finally sorted we discovered that the map we had planned for the Lobby server doesn't work well with TFC. This has to do with the fact that we lowered the world to accomodate for some mountains around the spawn area. It looks really nice but given that floor level is at Y:8 everything looks very dark. We can raise floor level and get rid of the mountains, but that would mean manually editing all the worldguard regions, mob arena regions, pvp arena regions. spleef arena regions and paintball arena regions.

As a result of all of this we're postponing the server migration to a later date.

Right now the Hardcore world runs on the same Minecraft instance as the regular overworld does. This causes some timing issues. To work around this we're going to setup a new server just for the Hardcore world. Work on the new Hardcore server is progressing nicely.

The current and new server will be placed behind a proxy. This allows us to do some really cool stuff with the server.

• The most obvious benefit is a performance one since the Hardcore world will no longer affect the regular overworld.
• The proxy allows us to setup a fall back server where players will get redirected to when one of the servers goes down (daily restart after backup). We're hoping this will also help with people getting disconnected periodically due to the large amount of tile entities.
• The lobby server is an old favorite of ours. It was used for one of our regular Minecraft servers and features a ton of mini-games like: spleef arena, mob arena, pvp arena and my personal favorite paintball arena. There will be no building on this server. Just some things to pass the time while you wait for a server to come back online
• We are going to start caching Minecraft player sessions. This means that when the Mojang servers go down again, you will still be able to log in if you do so from the same computer and launcher (which also has a cached player session).

For players nothing much will change. We're going to setup a portal at spawn that will allow you to go to the Lobby server at will, and vice versa. Regular overworld and Hardcore players will remain seperate like they are now. Chat will work as before. I've made some really cool scripts that allow the Towny gobal chat channel to be send between servers. If you don't want to play on the Lobby server, you don't have to. It's just an extra option.

I'm hoping I will be able to get this new setup running sometime during the upcoming weekend, probably on Sunday. There is going to be some down time. When I know an exact time I'll update.

We wish to be transparant about the things that happen on our server. To this end we have decided to make the list of warned and banned players public. One of the reasons we are doing this is because we sometimes see questions from players why someone isn't joining the server anymore to finish building project X.

I have updated the rules section of the opening post of this thread with the following:

If you break the rules you may be banned. In some cases we issue a warning first. If you are banned and wish to be unbanned you may appeal your ban on the HappyDiggers forums. If you cannot resolve the issue there please feel free to start a dispute on the MCBans website. Keep in mind however that a dispute only means that you think we banned you for the wrong reasons. It will not get you unbanned from our servers.

HappyDiggers Warned players and banlist: http://happydiggers.net/showthread.php?1384-Warned-players-and-banlist

HappyDiggers TFC on MCBans: http://mcbans.com/server/50359/

We (have to) strictly follow the MCBans guidelines for global bans. This means that we have to supply proof of what happened for each ban. This also means that banning someone means extra work for us with the potential of having to deal with appeals and disputes.

Long story short: please don't get banned.

Cool, so Prof Mobius' warning about not going overboard might not be too much of an issue then.

It'll probably be a couple of months after Sponge has their initial release before most major mods and plugins get ported. I'd expect it to be similar to a new Forge/Bukkit version in that we'll just have to be patient for a while for things to get updated.

These are the things we regard as absolutely essential. Without these we would never even consider running a non-whitelisted public server.

• Prism (or similar log function for all block, inventory and chat/command interactions)
• Towny (or similar plot managing function with permissions that can be set by players. We had problems with MyTown for MC 1.7.10 before. Don't know about current version.)
• Lockette (or similar function to lock all inventories and doors. Having logs isn't enough. Having to restore player's stuff would become a full-time job.)
• MCBans (or similar ban aggregator. Keeping out known and proven(!) griefers saves us a ton of work.)
• PermissionsBukkit (or similar global permission system.)
• WorldBorder (Someting to pre-generate chunks and set a world border so players can't generate new chunks. Prof Mobius has a Forge mod to pre-generate chunks, but it can currently only handle small parts at a time.)

Nice to haves:

• Player inventory editor (to see and edit any player's inventory.)
• Trade plugin (players put in their items in a gui, hit a button, items are traded between players simultaneously so they can't get ripped off.)
• Plot manager Dynmap support. (so players can see towns on the map and plan their journeys/new location of settlement)
• Support system (so players can open support tickets when there aren't any staff members available.)
• Region permissions (WorldGuard or similar region protection. In addition to Towny this allows us to setup special regions with specific permissions. Trade posts and vanity plots for example.)
• MultiVerse (this allows us to have multiple TFC worlds for different player groups. There are several Forge mods that do this, but I currently know of no Forge mod that works with multiple TFC worlds.)

Given the things we regard essential (open to interpretation of course), I'd have to say that trying to port several Bukkit plugins to Forge at this point in time isn't a great idea. WIth Minecraft 1.8 we should get Sponge and all the mayor Bukkit plugins will get ported to that by their respective authors. So making Forge versions of those plugins now seems counter productive.

Just a reminder everyone, the State of Sponge is two days away. (Saturday 24/Sunday 25 depending on your timezone.)

Source: https://forums.spongepowered.org/t/state-of-sponge-25-01-2015/5681

Think of it this way. How long will it take for just a few of the essential plugins to get ported/remade into Forge? How long before the Forge mods are stable and mature enough to run reliably on a production server? How long can those new mods be in use until the "originals" get ported to Sponge? Would that be worth the effort of the mod author(s) and the people play testing them?

I don't like saying this because i really would like better server tools for Forge. Cauldron isn't likely to get updated officially or unofficially. And new (reliable) mods will probably not arrive in time to make much of a difference.

I have begun recording Server Tours again. Server tours are short <10 minute YouTube videos recorded by me and posted on my channel here: http://youtube.com/happydiggers

In these videos we visit towns and people get to show all the cool stuff they have made on our server. If you would like me, and maybe a few others, to join you on a grand tour of your town please let us know.

Post your town name and your in-game Minecraft name. Also a general indication of when you are available would help. I live in the CET time zone and am usually available between 19:00 and 23:00 however other times aren't excluded. Just let me know and I'll see what's possible or not. Use a timezone convertor to figure out what that means for you: http://www.thetimezoneconverter.com/

Please try to have a working microphone ready. We will ask you to join us on our TeamSpeak server so we can talk to each other. If you don't have a mic, or are really shy, you can type things in chat. Get TeamSpeak here: http://teamspeak.com/

Our TeamSpeak server IP is: teamspeak.happydiggers.net

I'll update this thread with a bunch of server tours after the first couple have gone up.

What you're saying is all true. The sample in that image are from the active servers posted on the TFC server forum and by no means contain all TFC servers worldwide. What's also true is that many people who play TFC use a mod pack and never visit the TFC website (our or own forums for that matter).

Either way it will never be possible to get an entirely accurate reading on all of the TFC players.

Regardless of the outcome of this discussion. I would like to thank you for taking the time and effort to investigate this matter. It shows a lot of dedication.

Thank you for the explanation.

We'll go take a look and see if we can pin point exactly which (if any) tile entities use a lot of cpu time. On that comes to mind, or at least I've heard people mention, is anvils. They seem to take up a fair amount of CPU even if they aren't actively being used. We'll report back.

@Djakuta, player count doesn't say if a server is fun to play on. It also doesn't say if a server should stay up or not. And it sais nothing about the staff running a server. It only sais something about the people who play on those servers since they choose to stay or go. Some people like small communities, other like large ones. Some like plain vanilla TFC, some like server commands.

I changed the image. It now shows whitelisted vs non-whitelisted servers. Apparently the whitelisted player base is considered to be the primary source of TFC players, all 5 of them. Yes I know there are more than 5, the image is just an indication of how player bases are divided. These numbers are pretty much what we see daily though. 90% of players can be found on non-whitelisted servers.

More numbers. The HappyDiggers TFC b78 server for Minecraft 1.6.4 has had 8466 individual players. The current server is at 927. I haven't compared to see how many of those are double. It does show something else that should be very relevant to TFC devs which I'll get to in a moment.

As for complaining to the cashier. to make the analogy more accurate. In this case strangely enough the cashier has full control over the prices in the store. And the cashier is free to ignore whatever other shops are doing. The cashier just does not want to because either the cashier doesn't care about non-whitelisted customers. Even though the majority of multiplayer customers want non-whitelisted. Or the cashier is afraid to because of beliefs that it will somehow hurt the store. This attitude is driving customers away. And that's what I was hinting at in the previous paragraph. TFC popularity is declining. The absence of more non-whitelisted servers could help in that regard.

It's quite simple really. I'm arguing so much because TFC claims to be a multiplayer oriented mod. And I have seen people been cut down on these forum for claiming otherwise. All I'm asking for is to cater to the 90% of your player base that does do multiplayer. If you don't want to, that is your decision of course. All I'm doing is making a suggestion and arguing why it's the right thing to do.

I'll say this. You could back port TFC b79 to Minecraft 1.6.4 and retain the bulk of current features and gameplay elements. It's not easy to do andd it would be an absolute pain. But it is possible with the limited set of Forge hooks provided back then. That is just how programming works.

A new Forge hook may solve a bug or provide a new feature more easily. But given that TFC is full of non-gamebreaking bugs, that shouldn't be as high up your priority list as caring for the majority of your multiplayer users.

HappyDiggers

Rhodance

Darkagecraft

Vividcraft

NewMelinia

Terrafirmacraft Survival Russia

Tree Tech Network

LiteitUp

Didn't notice this list before. Are you sure it's accurate? Guess that makes my huge image look kinda silly now :B

Point remains though.

These two statements completely contradict each other. It is entirely the new forge hooks that allow us to add a lot of cool new features that couldn't previously be added due to the lack of hooks, as well as to better optimize existing features using these new hooks so that things run better and smoother.

I'm sorry, I really am. I don't mean to insult you. You do a terrific job here. But that is just pure an utter nonsense. New hooks offer new possibilities. But the ones in the Forge version Cauldron uses aren't limiting TFC. They don't hold it back in any meaningful way. TFC only uses a fraction of Forge's available hooks.

I'm not trying to insult you guys or start a fight here. But please take a look at the following:

If you want TFC to be a multiplayer game, there is no way around Cauldron for Minecraft 1.7.10. HappyDiggers currently is the only non-whitelisted server with a serious player base. Admittedly there are a few whitelisted servers to which I don't have the IP and those aren't listed here. But I doubt they show high player numbers.

I'm not requesting that TFC doesn't add new features or not optimize existing features. Quite frankly I don't understand how Kitty could come to that conclusion. Older Forge does not equal that at all. The list of issues mentioned aren't game breaking. People can work around those like they are doing right now on the Cauldron servers. Also it should be noted that Optifine helps with game breaking bugs (persistent client crashes) in TFC that have been present in b78 on MC 1.6.4 and b79 on MC 1.7.10 with regard to fruit trees. Cauldron and Optifine are essentially what's keeping multiplayer TFC alive at this point. Yet they receive huge amounts of hate.

I've already requested for Sponge support for Minecraft 1.8 when that comes out. Which you should really give serious consideration. In the mean time all I'm asking is to please not use new Forge functions that will break on the current Cauldron. Which I don't think is unreasonable since it won't hinder TFC development at all. Essentially it's: pretend the new Forge hooks don't exist and continue with what you've already got.

Running a large server we see that TFC uses a lot of tile entities for it's core gameplay mechanics. In single player and smaller servers the current way tile entities work don't cause too many issues. But having 10.000+ causes a large strain on even the (currently) most powerful hardware. And even if load isn't an issue, there are issues with Minecraft itself that just can't handle really large amounts as observed by running the Warmroast profiler during a mass disconnect event happening on our server:

We used Warmroast, a Java profiler aimed towards Minecraft, to track down what is keeping the server occupied. It seems that during a mass disconnect the server is busy processing a lot of tile entities. The server has upward of 15.000 tile entities loaded during peak hours. In the screenshot below you can see that

net.minecraft.world.WorldServer.func_72939_s() is using 82.79% CPU time during a mass disconnect on the server. It looks like it's going through a very large array and deleting items from it. If this takes too long (1200) it dies, which seems to be when the mass disconnect occurs.

Many TFC processes are dependent on how many ticks something has been busy. For example crops on tilled soil and cooking a pork chop in a fire pit take X-amount of ticks to complete. Would it be possible to change this behavior (perhaps for TFC 2) so that these tile entities don't tick 20 times per second but maybe twice and then compare world time to determine progress?

In our server we can for example specify how many ticks any given tile entity skips so we could force them to only tick twice per second. However that causes problems if a workload is counting ticks. A pork chop would take 10 minutes to cook instead of 1.

Thank you for your consideration.

Bioxx has made it clear in his post: "News from the Front" that a Minecraft 1.8 release of TFC isn't going to happen.

TL;DR for that post: Bioxx is frustrated with what Mojang has done in Minecraft 1.8 making his live as a mod developer more difficult. As a server owner stubbornly running Cauldron and TFC without official support I can relate to that :B

TFC 2 for Minecraft 1.8 will at some point in the future make it's appearance. No one knows how long that is going to take. Since moving to MC 1.8 entails rewriting a lot of code, I'm assuming it's going to be a while.

Therefore I would like to request that TFC for MC 1.7.10 in the mean time does not break Cauldron compatibility. I'm not asking for official support for Cauldron as it has been made clear that this is not something the people behind TFC are willing to do. Please do not break compatibility by using new Forge functionality that isn't implemented in the Forge version Cauldron is stuck on.

Thank you for your consideration.

We have started recording a new series of HappyDiggers TFC server tours. In these tours we visit towns and try to get the people of those towns to talk about what they're doing, what they've accomplished, what their plans are.

To start I've made a small server intro video. In it we (mostly I) talk about the server. It's meant for people who not yet know the server.

The first video in the new series of server tours will go up next week.

The other day someone asked me what the donor perks of our server are. That's simple. By donating you are supporting our server. You make me feel happy. Which in turn ensure that this server will keep running for a long time.

"But what do I get?" the person asked.

Our server gives players a lot of Towny plots, the ability to teleport between towns (unless restricted by town mayors), several /home warps players can set themselves, free food and healing at Enertron stations, vending machines at outposts. Along with some very robust grief prevention, a very nice community (because we ban all the bad players with proof of grief,stealing,etc.) and helpful staff that offer up their free time to deal with bugs and quirks that our out of our control.

Donors get an honorary in-game tag in front of their name. That's it. You don't get materials or extra homes or town plots or any in-game item or features. You already have those for free. We don't do pay-to-win, period.

Also it should be noted that the Minecraft EULA clearly states that servers are not allowed to sell in-game items. So buying packs of items and in-game features may end up killing a server instead of supporting it. You can read more about this here: https://mojang.com/2014/06/lets-talk-server-monetisation/

You are allowed to sell in-game items so long as they don’t affect gameplay
We don’t mind you selling items in game, but they must be purely cosmetic..

In-game TFC items have a huge impact on gameplay. Charging money for those is a bad thing.

We have decided to make the following changes to the rules. This should give players more freedom to play however they prefer.

Each town may have:

• 4 mature animals of each kind. This means: 4 cows, 4 pigs, 4 horses, etc. All mature, not counting young animals.
• 3 plots of tilled soil farmland or berry bushes. This means 3x16x16 = 768 tilled soil blocks or bushes. They may be in more than three plots, but 768 max.
• 9 fruit trees total. (All kinds allowed: red apple, green apple, banana, peach, etc.)
• 1 of each kind of anvil. (copper, bronze, wrought iron, steel, etc.)

We have added several mods to the whitelist:

• OpenEye
• Schematica and LunatriusCore
• BetterFoliage
• FastCraft

OpenEye is a mod that automatically submits crash-reports which can help mod developers track down issues faster.

Schematica adds an easy way to copy buildings.

BetterFolliage adds extra sprites to trees and other plants and generally makes vegetation and the world look nicer.

FastCraft optimizes the way Minecraft loads chunks. It's not nearly as good as Optifine (which we highly recommend) but if you want to use it, now you can.

To try to keep things running smoothly we are going to enforce some restrictions. These restrictions are on a per town basis. Meaning each town may have:

• [*]

Again, to be absolutely clear. This limits are per town. If your town is very large and isn't getting enough food, please let us know. Also if anyone needs help removing large amounts of tilled soil, fruit trees or berry bushes you may contact staff to help you.

Now for some technical stuff explaining why and how we came up with the new restrictions.
We have made quite a lot of progress since the last update. We used Warmroast, a Java profiler aimed towards Minecraft, to track down what is keeping the server occupied. It seems that during a mass disconnect the server is busy processing a lot of tile entities. The server has upward of 15.000 tile entities loaded during peak hours. In the screenshot below you can see that net.minecraft.world.WorldServer.func_72939_s() is using 82.79% CPU time during a mass disconnect on the server. It looks like it's going through a very large array and deleting items from it. If this takes too long (1200) it dies, which seems to be when the mass disconnect occurs.
Unfortunately this is a vanilla Minecraft function. This means that only Forge could potentially create and optimization for this to better deal with large amounts of tile entities. But even if they did, it would mean a new version of Forge which we can't use since Cauldron, which our server runs on, isn't being maintained any longer. Cauldron is essentially Minecraft_server + Forge + Bukkit + magic glue code.

So that leaves us with two possible options. Perhaps the TFC devs could do something to optimize server performance. Or we try to reduce the amount of tile entities on the server. During peak hours we've seen that the majority of tile entities are made up of farmland and fruit trees. Below is an example of this:

Going through what the server is doing we discovered that about 10.000.000 blocks are formed on the server each hour. That's about 2700 blocks each second. These are most likely snow blocks and the like. However each of these blocks forming meant one more record in the Prism data base which logs everything that happens on the server. We have change the Prism configuration to no longer include these naturally forming blocks which aren't necessary for grief prevention and roll-back. This saves us a considerable database overhead.

We have installed a mod that optimizes performance. It's quite a scary mod to run since it changes a lot of the internal workings of the server.This is the summary:

• [*]Ticks multiple worlds at the same time in different threads [*]Ticks multiple entities and tile entities within worlds at the same time in different threads [*]Performs movement updates in network threads, so players will move smoothly even if TPS is bad [*]Performs chunk loading and chunk generation asynchronously - no lag spikes from players logging in or teleporting [*]Improved collision code which can handle thousands of mobs in a single block space without terrible TPS. Will still break clients. [*]Many more small tweaks to minecraft's internals and other mods, both to improve performance and ensure that multithreading doesn't break everything.
  

This is the first time I've heard about Schematica. I'd like to hear some opinions about this mod first before considering it. On the b78 server there were some disgruntled people when others copied 'their' work without asking or getting permission first.

If you know of more people who would actually use this mod, please have them pitch in with their opinions.

Right now mod devs can't really do anything yet in regard to Sponge other than wait and see. Which is why I'm requesting this now. So they can already give it some though and plan ahead if needed.

MCServer sounds nice, but it doesn't really add much.Yes, Java uses more RAM but Java isn't slow CPU-wise. It's comparable to C++ in that regard. What makes Minecraft slow is poor programming, that's all there is to it. A new Minecraft implementation in C++ has the potential of being faster then it's Java counter part. But only if they program it more efficiently which isn't an easy thing to do. If it was Mojang would have done it already. They have made a lot of improvements in that regard with Minecraft 1.8. But there is still much that can be done. Also we will have to wait and see if the C++ implementation is at all compatible with current Minecraft. And as you said mods and plugins will have to be written in C++ as well which means they all have to start from scratch again. Given all that, I don't see MCServer being a great succes. It will probably find a small niche with dedicated followers, and that's it.

Sponge on the other hand has a couple of well known devs in the Minecraft community behind it. That's no guarantee of success obviously. But it does stand a good chance of succeeding because of that.