Building on the Edge

Recent work on the 1.1 server has been oriented towards newcomers. We've been test-building a builders guide to how the ship is set up and how things should be built within the ship, exploring how best to inform players what their initial role would be once promoted. That... and texture pack stuff!

But that was all in the last couple of days, and what I really want to talk about is what progressed last night!



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Last night I spent a number of hours throwing together the numerous components necessary to pull off this feat of conversion. Most of them were in unstable form, literally their developers were, like myself, up late trying to put together a stable build before they lost the ability to keep their eyes open.

There were moments of frustration, brief success, and more frustration. Finally I found a way to tackle the obstacles I was facing which resulted in a map file for Anvil with the latest version of the ship fully imported...

At that point it was a matter of scrounging for bukkit plugins, because bukkit itself had development builds (of course) that were if not complete then certainly in very solid working form.

One plugin was absolutely necessary. All I needed was a method of protecting the server from harm, both from itself and from unknown players. WorldGuard was capable of that, and luckily for us there was someone on top of updating it for bukkit literally while the bukkit server files were being updated in development builds!

Armed with this invaluable tool I was able to run the server (without errors!) log in, create protective region files over the ship, log out and shut down the server, replace the messed up Enterprise (lava and fire and flowing water OH MY) with a clean copy of the map... and that is how you get the image you see here.



So in effect the server is usable RIGHT NOW. The problem is its not very secure, is missing important features, and is running on development builds of critical features besides.

If you thought waiting for this to happen was frustrating, try being on my end! Now you too know just how close we are, how much we're waiting on and relying on the work of a few plugin developers.

I do know one thing though - while we're not the first 1.2 server to run by any means, we're going to be one of the first classic-exclusive builds to be imported to 1.2, and that's not insignificant at all! If you have the time, we're going to need all the help we can get preparing this ship for release once the server setup is finished!

Stick around and keep an eye on the forum, a new thread should appear very very soon!

Live long and prosper!