1.13 Progress Report - November 2018 (and a new site feature)

[haloman30 168]

Hey, everyone! After a long desolate silence on the status of our update to 1.13, I think a progress report is well overdue.

 

Previously, progress was pretty much at a grinding halt. This is because for quite some time not many plugins were up to date. Recently, though, that situation changed. Many plugins started becoming up-to-date or otherwise compatible with 1.13.

 

So, where are we? What is the current status of the server? How long until we finally update?

 

Well, in terms of the number of plugins left to update, the number has shrunk rapidly over the past couple of weeks. However, the plugins that do remain are quite major ones.

 

As of this topic, the plugins left to update are:

• PlotMe - The plugin that powers our Creative world, this plugin hasn't had an update since 1.8. It was apparently coded quite well as it's worked flawlessly up until 1.13.
• PlotMe-DefaultGenerator - This is a world generator that PlotMe uses to generate the plot terrain. This is what's given us the most trouble recently.
• NoCheatPlus - Our anticheat plugin
• Orebfuscator (or alternative) - Our anti-xray plugin, however this will likely be replaced as the plugin's buggy nature has caused a great deal of frustration for a lot of people.
• ZHorse (or alternative) - This is our horse claiming plugin, which itself was a replacement for Stables, which was a replacement for HorseKeep.
• FOLogBlock - This is our specially modified version of LogBlock, both made to work with 1.13 and to have failover support (hence the name, FOLogBlock - FailOver LogBlock

 

However, for 1.13 we aren't just going to be updating to an identical copy of our current server. The whole idea is to also freshen things up and introduce new features and so on. While the list of what can be shown is small for now, what I can show off is a plugin I recently made over the course of a couple days - CUWarps.

 

CUWarps

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This plugin is a counterpart to our existing /warp system. For quite a long time, people have asked: "why is the list of warps private?", to which the response is always "private warps". This is actually only half of the story (though it is the primary reasoning for wanting to keep the list private.

 

You see, since 2014, we've never actually cleaned out our warps folder. Ever.

 

Yes, every single warp that was created since September 2014 is still present on the server. The vast majority of them don't work however, as their worlds aren't on the server anymore. Up until 1.13, though, this wasn't really an issue as the list of 247 warps was private. However, 1.13 introduces a new autocomplete system and, well...

 

 

Yeah. Every warp can be seen publicly as a suggested command argument. So we clearly needed to fix this. The solution was a custom-made plugin that was fully cross-compatible with Essentials' warps system. This allows us to forever keep all those legacy warps from over the years without making a cluttered mess of a warp menu.

 

However, there's always been another peculiar issue with warps. Buying one. Warps have always been available to the public for 1000 ingame dollars. In order to get one, however, it always required that a player wait for a moderator or higher to get on and manually create it. Well, that whole scenario is a thing of the past. Moving forward, you will be able to buy warps on your own, private or public. Doing so works as follows:

 

/buywarp <warp name> <private|public>

 

Private and public warps both cost the same. Private warps are accessed only by /cuwarp <warp name>, and will not appear in any lists. Public warps can be warped to by using either /cuwarp <warp name> or simply /warp <warp name>. Public warps also appear in /warps (the warp list). Keep in mind, however, that when you create a warp that you are standing in the exact spot you want players to  be in - this includes rotation as well. After you create it, it cannot be changed without the help of a moderator or higher staff member. The same applies to the name. Also, any warps with racist names will be disallowed and your warp will either be renamed (and you will be notified), or if done repeatedly will result in warps being deleted and eventually, loss of ability to purchase warps.

 

 

The Future of Semi-Vanilla

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We thought we made this clear a while back, but here and there we keep getting questions on what will happen to the whole Bungee network and SV server once we update. Which is fair, as the planned approach has shifted a few times as time went on. Originally, we were just going to keep SV as it is and replace the old survival entirely. Later on, however, we altered the plan to turn into a sort of blend between SV and traditional CU survival. Then the nature of how that blend would be mixed changed a couple times. So, let's clarify everything once and for all, shall we?

 

Creative

• Creative will remain completely unchanged. All plots will remain, all builds will remain. Nothing is going to be changing here.

 

Survival

• McMMO will be removed entirely. We may bring it back later, or we might not - all depends on player demand.
• Jobs will still be present, however existing stats and job selections will be reset.
• There will not be a /warp shop. All shops will be player-curated, like SV.
• Survey and other crates will still be available.
• The survival world will (of course) be reset, and the old world will be uploaded to our download center shortly afterward.
• The current rank system (Donator, VIP, Platinum, Creator, Sponsor, etc) will remain in place. We are currently looking into implementing a system to let players lock away some of the more cheat-y privileges if they desire, if there is demand for such an implementation.
• Staff members will have the same privileges as they do on SV by default, with the exception of any perks that come with any donator rank they purchased. Any moderator or above can opt to have their original permissions back if desired.
• Economy will be reset
• Any custom plugins and features developed for SV will be made available on Survival (Unenchant, SlimeballJump, etc)
• Economy will be isolated to Survival only. The plan is to hopefully find a solution to ensure that other modes that use economy (mainly SkyBlock) won't be affected. The details of this are yet to be announced. Stay tuned on this one!

 

SkyBlock

• Will be largely unaffected, with the exception of any server-wide changes (ie, McMMO being removed)
• Islands will remain available as players can choose to reset them if they want to
• SkyBlock shop and economy system is still up in the air, depends on what options are available and what can be done within our current system. Stay tuned!

 

Minigames

• All minigames will NOT reward ingame currency, leaderboard systems will be implemented where possible
• Alternative reward systems are being looked into, expect more information on this as we get closer to launch. Stay tuned!

 

 

Whew. So, that covers the main server. But what about SV and the whole Bungee network?

 

 

BungeeCord Network

• The current plan is to keep the Bungee network in place for now, in order to serve as a fallback point during automatic server restarts as well as in case we want to implement gamemodes that don't support a multiworld configuration

 

Hub Server

• Will remain online as a fallback point when the main server auto-restarts

 

Semi-Vanilla

• Will be shut down, and world will be uploaded to our download center
• Any players who paid for VIP rank will be granted the VIP rank on the Main server (though this should already be the case as SV never had its own store product)

 

 

Before we wrap up, I should go ahead and mention that it is possible for any or all of the above information to be changed between now and release. It could change due to community feedback, or just us deciding that we need a different approach due to either technical or other reasons.

 

Oh, right. I almost forgot!

 

We are slowly going to be implementing some more pretty pictures around the website. For those of you who've seen the Elaztek website, you'll probably already recognize this kind of look. That's because it's effectively the exact same design. It's made particularly easy since the Elaztek and current CU themes are both derived from the same base theme (that being the CU 2016 theme). Currently, it's limited only to forum topics, but you can expect to see more and more header banners as time goes on (possibly very quickly after this topic posted). Since we got the new theme released, we wanted to start going ahead and making some other updates and improvements to add a bit more polish to everything as well.

 

Well folks, that's it! If you have any questions, concerns, or comments, let us know!