[PMC] Discussion on Alternate nerd.nu Minecraft Servers

[schererererer]

In this thread please discuss the prospects of adding additional minecraft servers; this could include minigames, adventure, clientside modpacks, and more.

 

The idea of a minigames server is the most developed, with the plugin done and just requiring ideas for and creation of game types. There seemed to be a consensus of starting with no particular admins for a minigames server, but distributing those responsibilities across the existing admin team. If it is decided that adding new admins for minigames would be prudent, we'd choose from the moderators that are most active and helpful with the minigames server.

 

I'll move this thread, barring extenuating circumstances, to private modchat in 1-2 weeks.

[Mumberthrax]

During the november admin meeting the idea was presented of having a sort of adventure server, with a pre-made map with custom dungeons and challenges for players to overcome. This is similar to what sadmins have been considering for S - not so much the sense of having it be adventure mode with only dungeons to complete and no building, but rather having a series of WG protected dungeons with rare valuable loot available in them (which reset after a little bit), and still having large wilderness areas for players to build and explore in, plus some safe harbors like small towns where natural resources are null/limited, but in which there's a disincentive against or prohibition of pvp. This combined with some other relatively novel (for S anyway) gameplay elements would constitute the bulk of the servers feel. Several players have brought similar suggestions to us for S, and a few have suggested having a more rpg-ish feel in the sense of having specific classes that players can select which have natural buffs with some weapons/tools. Though I personally am hesitant about a full out rpg implementation on S, and definitely do not want to get rid of the freedom to build in open wilderness, the dungeoncrawling achievement-seeking loot-collecting part of an adventure map is something we're considering.

 

I believe an adventure map/server could be a lot of fun. I think if S does not successfully implement custom dungeons and the other stuff, it's something that should definitely have some attention dedicated toward it.

 

That said, if anyone has ideas for such an adventure server, sadmins are open to trying suggestions out on our experiment.

[Mumberthrax]

I believe nerd could benefit from hosting a server for modded minecraft. It has the appeal of having new content and drawing in players who would otherwise have gotten tired of vanilla. There is a very active community at /r/feedthebeast on reddit who post there, and from what I have seen the "official" server of that subreddit is kind of lacking in quality moderation and activity. nerd being the official reddit minecraft servers could easily draw in players from there in addition to members of our own community that desire to play modded minecraft with each other with quality moderation. Cauldron is a modified version of spigot which runs forge mods and bukkit plugins, so it would be the best bet IMO until sponge is operational.

 

I think if this route were followed, we'd have two options.

 

1) select a well known popular public modpack, like one of the FTB, ATlauncher, or Tekkit packs. (direwolf20 is generally offered to those new to FTB for example as a good one, since it is not difficult to get into, and has a little bit of everything - without being neccesarily EVERYthing. Being one of the "official" packs supported by the FTB team, it's generally regarded as relatively well tested for bugs and incompatibilities - though gameplay balance is another topic entirely. Alternatives here might be some of the more lightweight FTB packs, possibly a few third party public packs like blood and bones, magic farm, crash landing, etc.) Any such pack we select can be tweaked, have lag-producing or undesirable elements removed or blocked with either the individual mods' configs, a forge mod called minetweaker, using bukkit plugins to block recipes, or some other forge mods that can block stuff.

 

2) roll our own modpack, have it available through a modpack launcher like FTB's third party modpack system, tekkit, or ATlauncher. This would be our own selection of mods that provide some value to the game without producing a lot of potential for lag or abuse - more aesthetic mods than souped-up magic or tech mods. I have a short list of suggestions for such a pack:

• Bibliocraft (provides neat chairs and tables, bookshelves, item shelves, display cases, armor stands)
• Biomes O' Plenty (provides a large list of interesting and sometimes beautiful biomes for worldgen)
• Carpenter's Blocks (provides a variety of differently shaped blocks which can be made to adopt the texture of almost any other block in the game, eg. wool stairs, or dirt slabs or slopes)
• Chisel (wonderful aesthetic mod that adds many different variations on vanilla blocks, different textures, as well as a few of its own blocks. Nothing functional really, just pretty)
• Extra Utilities (adds a variety of random utility items, some which might be considered unbalancing - each aspect of the mod can be disabled. My favorite part is the transfer nodes/pipes, which are based on vanilla hopper mechanics)
• Forge Multipart (adds microblocks {slabs, covers, corners, etc.}. May be potentially lag-inducing, so i only tentatively suggest this. Allows for much more creativity and detail in creations. might not be necessary if carpentes blocks is used)
• iron chests (adds a few new expensive chests with larger amounts of storage space)
• Jabba (provides a "barrel" block which stores one type of item, but can store large amounts of it. also a nifty dolly to move containers without disrupting inv.)
• natura (lots of trees, berry bushes, a more diverse and frightening set of nether monsters)
• OpenBlocks (like extra utilities, it adds a random assortment of items to the game. My favorite one is the hang glider - jump from a high point and glide slowly down.)
• Pam's Harvestcraft (adds tons of different crops, and even more kinds of food recipes that can be prepared from them. Want a supreme pizza? you got it - if you have a diverse enough farm to get the ingredients required)
• stackie (purely lag-reducing mod, when more than x items of the same type are on the ground in an area, they are bunched together into one entity)
• Twilight Forest (provides a new dimension, like the nether. A large foresty area with new monsters, generated dungeons and loot. fun to explore)

About a month ago I set up a 1.7.10 cauldron server on my laptop that runs these mods. If anyone is interested in seeing what they are like, or seeing how it works on a server with bukkit plugins, let me know and I'll load it up and whitelist you - here's the modpack (easiest way to use it is to download multimc and unzip this in the instances folder it creates) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1933608/1.7.10%20test.7z . If any techs want to try loading the cauldron server up on one of our boxes, I'll send you the zipped up server folder and you can poke around and change whatever. I don't know if cauldron being a modified version of spigot is currently supported by bungeecord or not, it seems like i heard one of the techs recently say it was. And from what I can see, cauldron is following the same patch-based release process that spigot is using for updates.

 

edit: if you just download the modpack i linked above to try it out in singleplayer, make sure you select the biomes o plenty generation option instead of deftult - its the same place you choose superflat/large-biomes

Edited November 26, 2014 by Mumberthrax
clarify instructions for singeplayer worldgen

[Mumberthrax]

A week or so ago sent smiler a list of ideas I came up with over the course of about an hour for minigames. If more ideas are needed, I suggest everyone pitch in their creativity. Feel free to edit this file: https://docs.google.com/document/d/18ZDLiJ0n6k8zc94Tnpm6HGLzFOFT8Ejl2ex68JikkMk/edit?usp=sharing or just share ideas here I suppose. The document i linked is currently configured so that anyone with the link to it can edit it, but I can change that if desired. afaik all changes are logged so we can revert it if the link gets out and it is screwed up. Alternatively I can change it so that it requires an invitation to edit/access if that is desired.

 

Smiler has said that he would prefer to come up with original games rather than just copy existing minigame servers. I can understand and agree with this, and I also think that it would not be a bad idea to try out some of the more popular minigame servers to 1) get some possible inspiration from them, not necessarily copy directly and 2) see in general what the "competition" is like. Our main selling points compared to the others are always going to be that we are free and public, and we have quality and fair moderation. But it still would be good to see what sort of quality content we could provide on top of quality service.

 

I've played on the hypixel minigame server once, and had fun. Are there others we could check out?

 

Would we want such a minigame server to have all games accessible at any time? Or would it be better to have them on a rotating schedule, so that there is a sense of anticipation or desire for playing games that were fun in the past? What about slightly longer games, which would be somewhere in between a full length event and some of the short 2-5 minutes minigames? Like a trimmed down version of our CTF for example. Whatever we choose here, we would want to make sure that we don't clear out options available to us for fundraisers, but still, lots of players love CTF and wouldn't mind being able to play it more often than once every 6 months.

 

Edit:[ I think we should also consider pulling in games from past revisions, like the obstacle course from CTF a while ago, or the famous 5k I have heard so much about but have not yet tried, etc. ]

 

I think we should outsource some of the creation of minigames to the players. Some of our players are seriously talented at making maps for example. See this post on the subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/mcpublic/comments/2lzdeg/my_new_pvp_map_on_c_warp_rig/ And a few of our players have come up with neat ideas for minigames, for instance natdog has shared with me his idea for a prison riot minigame for use on S which we haven't implemented because it was overlooked. Combine this with the idea presented in the staff meeting and revisited in the admin meeting of having a "backlog" or builds and events, and I think it could work out well.

Edited November 26, 2014 by Mumberthrax
old nerd "minigames"

[buzzie71]

Some other minigames/servers I know of:

 

I've only been on oc.tc for their PvP minigames, some objective-based (capture wool/destroy targets with TNT cannons) as well as team deathmatch.  Some maps have novel game mechanics/loadouts to give variation in gameplay (in two of the deathmatch maps, one gave players weapons powerful enough for a one-hit KO; another allowed players to shoot ender pearls with a bow).  

 

I don't know how well-known multicu.be is but I also stop by from time to time, mainly for spleef but sometimes for a gamemode they call "zombie apocalypse"(?) - players run through a scenic track and get to the finish while defending against zombies that infect them.  There are other games there too.

 

There's also a Trouble in Minecraft Town (TTT on MC) minigame online somewhere, but I don't think it succeeds in gameplay as gmod's does.

[redwall_hp]

Oc.tc is a lot of fun. Project Ares reminds me a lot of our King of the Void, actually.

[Mumberthrax]

Does anyone else have any thoughts or comments on this or are we not interested in having alternative minecraft servers? Maybe this should be moved to the modchat forum to get some more input from non-admins - or have there been extenuating circumstances deterring that?

[schererererer]

Mentioned this at the admin meeting, but I just forgot to move this over (got lost in the slew of other posts I made at the same time). Moved over now.

[Mrloud15]

Closing and moving to the archives.