Pretty cool service. I got tired of hosting over my home DSL with 768 kbps upload but I was wary of moving to a hosted solution like this. Just got the Coal plan, moved our world over, and it runs pretty great. I've experienced little-to-no lag and I can finally sleep/shutdown my PC when I'm not using it.
One question though, what timezone is the server time set to? The restart world event set up in McMyAdmin was set to 04:00 which I assumed was 4:00 AM but the restart happened around 6:00 or 7:00 PM. Can I set the timezone via SSH to fix that?
I wouldn't consider mob towers obsolete. My SMP server has a small underground tower where you can easily get a couple stacks each of gunpowder, bones, and arrows per hour. It may not be one of the super thousands-of-items-per-hour models, but it's more than enough to be practical and it didn't take long to build.
I could be wrong, but I think applications have to be specifically written to take advantage of HPC clusters. I guarantee Minecraft wasn't written with that in mind.
As stated above, the Minecraft server is largely single-threaded. Each connected client gets a thread to handle input and output with that client but most of the actual game logic happens on the main thread, so more cores don't help very much.
I did set up some performance monitoring logs, I'm using Windows Server so it can collect all kinds of performance data at regular intervals. I haven't run it long enough to check it and see how it's going.
I suspect it's just buggy Minecraft causing the lag because I have TeamSpeak, a small website, and also VPN/Remote Desktop into that server and none of those lag when Minecraft does. All of that is being sent over the same Internet connection. But maybe I'll check the logs and find out that I am indeed limited by my 384 Kbps upload rate.
I'm trying to identify the source of lag on my SMP server so I created this convoluted poll to see if I can find the relationship between internet connection speed and supported players.
Please vote to tell me your advertised download and upload rates (pick the closest category if it's not available) along with the number of players that can play with little or no lag.
Please, vote in this poll IF AND ONLY IF you run your own SMP server over your own Internet connection. If you have something hosted in a gigantic datacenter with 100 Mbps line then please don't vote.
This will be cracked within a couple of hours. If they wnt to fight piracy they should include their measures in the gameplay. Like all wooden structures mysteriously start burning after two hours, massive amounts of creepers attacking you, if you mine diamond it drops nothing, after you swam 10 minutes all water turns to lava.
This reminds me of the original SimCity game. To combat piracy when you started it it asked you a question like "What is the third word on the sixth page of the manual?" If you answered wrong (or didn't answer) it still let you play the game but you'd get severe natural disasters every minute or so.
I agree. Right now it seems there's about a tier-and-a-half technology wise, once you've accomplished that there isn't really anything new to do. You just continue building and exploring.
I would like to see many "tiers" of technology or content, these could be the primary focus of updates once the game has been fully released and is no longer beta. As you gather new tools and materials, you can use those to develop even better tools and materials and access new locations and effectively combat new mobs. More biomes with biome-specific hazards and mobs could add to this. Imagine a biome that has a really difficult mob (or some unique kind of environmental hazard such as erupting volcanoes or earthquakes) so that there's no way for you to safely and easily enter that biome within the first several Minecraft days. But once you've got the resources gathered to build weapons and armor strong enough to combat those mobs, you'll be able to reasonably conquer that biome and build a base there. That biome would have new ores which allow you to build new tools, items, and materials that you could then use to conquer a higher type of biome or realm. Basically that biome is impossible to manage at first, but once you have the right technology it's not a problem to live or build there.
I think the Nether is a slight start in this direction. You can't enter the Nether without obsidian, once you've accomplished that (an unofficial tech "tier") you can enter the Nether where you have access to new materials and monsters. IIRC 1.6 causes beds to explode like TNT in the Nether (!) so items could even have different functions and abilities depending on where you are
I personally don't see a problem with door-based annoyance machines as long as they don't slow down or crash the server. They're fairly easy to build and destroy and I wouldn't consider them expensive. If you can distract your enemy they're more likely to miss your actions and make mistakes.
You could build a few randomly scattered around the map to distract scouts. Finally, a skilled engineer could probably rig a pile of TNT to the mechanism so once it's disabled the whole thing explodes.
But I admit I'm fairly difficult to annoy and I'm good at ignoring and tuning out noise, so maybe that's why it wouldn't bother me, because I actually wouldn't find them very annoying. Having my base shelled by TNT cannons would be more annoying.
Unfortunately it's because of bugs in the SMP server. Internet bandwidth and the server's power seem to affect those very little. For example, my main PC is a Core i5 2500 @3.3 GHz with 16 GB RAM. I can start a Minecraft server with 10 GB RAM allocated to it and then launch the Minecraft client on the same system (so no real network traffic since it's all local) and the lag issues you describe are still a problem.
1.6 is supposed to bring a bunch of bug fixes. Hopefully it addresses the SMP lag problem.
Though it sounds stupid, difficulty telling teams apart can and does happen, especially if you're only playing with friends. We had this problem (IRL) in a nighttime game of Foxes and Hounds on a camping trip last weekend. My team was searching and the other team was hiding, but one of the foxes (supposed to be hiding) just tagged along with us and acted like he was searching and no one caught on for a while, at which point he bolted. We judged him by his behavior (not hiding, using a flashlight, staying near us) before we paid attention to who he actually was.
It's an easy mistake to make and it varies from person-to-person and by team size. Some people will notice and remember details like that pretty easily, others (like me) won't. I'm always getting mixed up on teams when we play 4 on 4 basketball at the local park. I know it's a stupid mistake, but that won't prevent it from happening.
In a Minecraft war, that's easily remedied by having a sticky note (or even Notepad up on a second screen) with a list of your teammates. Eventually you'll get it down.
It's the server software, I can run a server on my PC which is a quad-core i5 2500 @ 3.3 GHz, 1 GB GeForce GTX 460, 16 GB DDR3 RAM, and 64-bit Java and connect locally and it'll still lag with two players while only using 150 MB of RAM and barely hitting my CPU. It's something in the server's code that causes all the lag.
I'm really hoping the SMP lag issues are included in Notch's planned bugfixes for Beta 1.6, but we'll just have to wait and see. As far as I know, there is no way to fix it right now.
Hyperdriving creepers into an enemy base seems extremely difficult to set up, I doubt it would be worth the effort. However, sneaking mobs into an enemy base seems like an interesting idea if there's a way to quickly pull it off without using a ton of resources. If there are enough mobs, like if you hooked the delivery system up to a dungeon or two, you basically have free troops for your side (though you wouldn't be safe if you attacked). Until fixed, they would attack and kill players, distracting them from your actions and forcing them to concentrate on defense instead of building, scouting, and gathering resources.
Now just to see if there's a safe and easy method of transporting hostile mobs, then to see if it can be automated to some extent.
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One question though, what timezone is the server time set to? The restart world event set up in McMyAdmin was set to 04:00 which I assumed was 4:00 AM but the restart happened around 6:00 or 7:00 PM. Can I set the timezone via SSH to fix that?
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As stated above, the Minecraft server is largely single-threaded. Each connected client gets a thread to handle input and output with that client but most of the actual game logic happens on the main thread, so more cores don't help very much.
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I suspect it's just buggy Minecraft causing the lag because I have TeamSpeak, a small website, and also VPN/Remote Desktop into that server and none of those lag when Minecraft does. All of that is being sent over the same Internet connection. But maybe I'll check the logs and find out that I am indeed limited by my 384 Kbps upload rate.
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Please vote to tell me your advertised download and upload rates (pick the closest category if it's not available) along with the number of players that can play with little or no lag.
Please, vote in this poll IF AND ONLY IF you run your own SMP server over your own Internet connection. If you have something hosted in a gigantic datacenter with 100 Mbps line then please don't vote.
Thanks in advance.
1
This reminds me of the original SimCity game. To combat piracy when you started it it asked you a question like "What is the third word on the sixth page of the manual?" If you answered wrong (or didn't answer) it still let you play the game but you'd get severe natural disasters every minute or so.
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I would like to see many "tiers" of technology or content, these could be the primary focus of updates once the game has been fully released and is no longer beta. As you gather new tools and materials, you can use those to develop even better tools and materials and access new locations and effectively combat new mobs. More biomes with biome-specific hazards and mobs could add to this. Imagine a biome that has a really difficult mob (or some unique kind of environmental hazard such as erupting volcanoes or earthquakes) so that there's no way for you to safely and easily enter that biome within the first several Minecraft days. But once you've got the resources gathered to build weapons and armor strong enough to combat those mobs, you'll be able to reasonably conquer that biome and build a base there. That biome would have new ores which allow you to build new tools, items, and materials that you could then use to conquer a higher type of biome or realm. Basically that biome is impossible to manage at first, but once you have the right technology it's not a problem to live or build there.
I think the Nether is a slight start in this direction. You can't enter the Nether without obsidian, once you've accomplished that (an unofficial tech "tier") you can enter the Nether where you have access to new materials and monsters. IIRC 1.6 causes beds to explode like TNT in the Nether (!) so items could even have different functions and abilities depending on where you are
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You could build a few randomly scattered around the map to distract scouts. Finally, a skilled engineer could probably rig a pile of TNT to the mechanism so once it's disabled the whole thing explodes.
But I admit I'm fairly difficult to annoy and I'm good at ignoring and tuning out noise, so maybe that's why it wouldn't bother me, because I actually wouldn't find them very annoying. Having my base shelled by TNT cannons would be more annoying.
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1.6 is supposed to bring a bunch of bug fixes. Hopefully it addresses the SMP lag problem.
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It's an easy mistake to make and it varies from person-to-person and by team size. Some people will notice and remember details like that pretty easily, others (like me) won't. I'm always getting mixed up on teams when we play 4 on 4 basketball at the local park. I know it's a stupid mistake, but that won't prevent it from happening.
In a Minecraft war, that's easily remedied by having a sticky note (or even Notepad up on a second screen) with a list of your teammates. Eventually you'll get it down.
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I'm really hoping the SMP lag issues are included in Notch's planned bugfixes for Beta 1.6, but we'll just have to wait and see. As far as I know, there is no way to fix it right now.
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Now just to see if there's a safe and easy method of transporting hostile mobs, then to see if it can be automated to some extent.