Request/Suggestions for a new Cartograph System

[MasterCommaThe]

I'd like to request that we update or replace our Cartograph system with something better.

 

I personally use a lot of steps and half bricks in my builds and would really like to see those rendered properly on the Cartograph. In addition, I've seen a cartograph from another server that actively shows player locations!

I'm pretty sure there's a system out there that is better than the one we have, where 1/2 a map doesn't get cut off because its not the same size as the previous map. Can we make this happen?

[schererererer]

Another feature that would be nice to have is the option of a direct overhead birds-eye view.

[GMMan]

Regarding the live map portion, I think one of the admins mentioned that having live player locations would add extra work on the server. Plus some people don't want to be found, and unless there's a way to hide their location from the map, it would go against their wished. If there was an option, it'd still be more work for the server.

[MasterCommaThe]

I'd like to see the ability to rotate the angle of the carto so it can be viewed from all 4 directions.

[GMMan]

I'd like to see the ability to rotate the angle of the carto so it can be viewed from all 4 directions.

P has a rotated map, so I'd imagine it isn't hard to enable it for C's carto.

 

Out of curiosity, how are the maps processed? I'm guessing the world is backed up and exported during a restart, then some scripts are run to generate the carto, and the results are uploaded to the wiki server. Though just wondering, is carto generation running on a separate machine from the game server machine?

[Cyotie911]

Regarding the live map portion, I think one of the admins mentioned that having live player locations would add extra work on the server. Plus some people don't want to be found, and unless there's a way to hide their location from the map, it would go against their wished. If there was an option, it'd still be more work for the server.

 

We had, at one point in time, a live carto of our maps.  However, in trying to keep server costs down, and trying to keep lag at a minimum.  We have decided to nix the live carto's due to it eating to much of the server resources. This isn't to say that they might not come back in the future, but for right now we'd like to use all of our resources for game play.

[MasterCommaThe]

Mostly, I'd just like blocks (like steps and half steps) to render correctly.

[kandoko]

Another feature that would be nice to have is the option of a direct overhead birds-eye view.

 

Like this http://176.9.157.196:8123/?worldname=world&mapname=surface&zoom=4&x=1043.584428088699&y=64&z=-458.310375151528#

 

Chat, player locations and a nice location marking system.  Also looks helaciously resource intensive.

[MasterCommaThe]

Like this http://176.9.157.196:8123/?worldname=world&mapname=surface&zoom=4&x=1043.584428088699&y=64&z=-458.310375151528#

 

 

So beautiful! <sniff> Can we do that? Heck, it even displays player comments as they happen next to their avatar!

[GMMan]

So beautiful! <sniff> Can we do that? Heck, it even displays player comments as they happen next to their avatar!

Chat? Frick, it shows armor and health as well.

 

Regarding resource intensive, if the game state is cached every 5 seconds, and any client polls to it reads from the cache, it shouldn't be too bad.

 

Edit: Just thought of it: why not havea client dedicated to the task? Have a Minecraft client that runs on the carto server and have it receive all activity on the server. That way, the game server only has to handle an additional client, and if resources pemits, the carto server can render everything live and show the location of players, etc. I'm not familiar with the Minecraft game protocol, so I don't know what scope of information a client receives, but if neccesary there could be a plugin that sends all available data to a client with a specific IP and name.

Edited June 7, 2013 by GMMan

[cmdrtebok]

We used to have that exact one. One day it was disabled I assume because of resources.

[zifnab06]

We used to have that exact one. One day it was disabled I assume because of resources.

 

Dynmap is much more resource intensive. The chat feature is nice, but anonymous users can use it to spam chat (last time I used it, it was difficult to ban people from using the chat on the map). The map cache can be set up to not automatically update and can be updated with a command at a certain interval (close to how ours is set up).

 

Chat? Frick, it shows armor and health as well.

 

Regarding resource intensive, if the game state is cached every 5 seconds, and any client polls to it reads from the cache, it shouldn't be too bad.

 

Edit: Just thought of it: why not havea client dedicated to the task? Have a Minecraft client that runs on the carto server and have it receive all activity on the server. That way, the game server only has to handle an additional client, and if resources pemits, the carto server can render everything live and show the location of players, etc. I'm not familiar with the Minecraft game protocol, so I don't know what scope of information a client receives, but if neccesary there could be a plugin that sends all available data to a client with a specific IP and name.

 

Technically, the server already outputs chat logs to a file (see http://nerd.nu/logs, possibly slightly broken right now)

[GMMan]

Technically, the server already outputs chat logs to a file (see http://nerd.nu/logs, possibly slightly broken right now)

Quite broken, since none of my logs have been updated, and it only shows one user at a time, which isn't useful for following conversations. Also, it takes forever to poll, and does not live-update.

Edited June 10, 2013 by GMMan

[MasterCommaThe]

PVE's map hasn't been updated since the Rev started, and the above issues still persist. Can we get a new carto?

[kitcatbar]

PVE's map hasn't been updated since the Rev started, and the above issues still persist. Can we get a new carto?

 

To be fair, PvE's carto is never released until a couple weeks after launch in an effort to get people to explore the map rather than scouting out the carto for preferred building spots. So we're not really expecting it to be up until at least* this Friday.

 

*At least Friday, I have no idea when it will actually be up.

[Synergetrick]

Chat? Frick, it shows armor and health as well.

 

Regarding resource intensive, if the game state is cached every 5 seconds, and any client polls to it reads from the cache, it shouldn't be too bad.

 

Edit: Just thought of it: why not havea client dedicated to the task? Have a Minecraft client that runs on the carto server and have it receive all activity on the server. That way, the game server only has to handle an additional client, and if resources pemits, the carto server can render everything live and show the location of players, etc. I'm not familiar with the Minecraft game protocol, so I don't know what scope of information a client receives, but if neccesary there could be a plugin that sends all available data to a client with a specific IP and name.

 

The way this used to work is that the regular backups that are made are shipped off to another box (if I recall, it's the redditpublic.com box owned by darkskynet) and a cartograph is rendered there. This is why it only updated every few days. Right now, the cartos are on the same box as everything else, which doesn't really change anything as it's still generated from a backup.

 

To clarify as to scope of data sent, the server sends the chunks in an x radius around the player. For PvE, this radius is 7 (thanks to slide23 for that info). To send all chunk data on PvE, you'd be sending (4000/16)² chunks; 62,500 chunks at the same rate that you send the regular 225 -- (2x+1)² where x = 7 -- chunks to each normal player. That's 277 times more data to that player than all others, effectively tripling the average PvE peak-time population (277 / 80).

[slide]

We did use to run DynMap and though I was not around at the time, I am fairly certain it was turned off because of it being too resource intensive. The way the carto is currently being generated is a backup is taken and Minecraft Overviewer is run against that. I'm not sure of what rendering bugs there are currently as I haven't really heard any complaints. The PvE carto will not be available publicly until a certain time after rev start like usual, which is up to the PAdmins. I can also look into possibly adding rotational views and a top down view to the existing system, it will take a fair about of disk space and bandwidth though. The PvE map takes about 24 minutes to render, so adding the other 4 directions would add about 100 minutes to that.

[CROCKODUCK]

Kitcat has a point. The carto is designed to show players builds, not to give an advantage in scouting an area. As far as when the carto will be up I would like if a tech could maybe clue us in.

[XkinOEC]

I'd like to point out a few things about Dynmap 

1. We were using Dynmap back when all 3(5 if you include the average 20 on chaos and 2 on war) servers were constantly full to capacity... 200+ players per server... Currently we're lucky if we max 50 on 1 server. Back then, lag was a problem, but minecraft was also 10X more resource intensive on users and servers. I don't believe that the map was actually the cause of it due to the fact that major lag issues had ended before the Dynamap carto was removed. That said, I believe we have enough unused resources for a more dynamic map
2. If I remember correctly, we didn't stop using it because of lag issues either. We stopped using it because of the mod not being updated with some really far back version of minecraft. It's period of hiatus appears to have ended however soon after we replaced it.
3. As for the chat function; Dynmap is very versatile in terms of settings you can apply to it. The one shown above actually is modified from the default. You can disable the ability to chat from the map, yet maintain the ability to display chat and use the IRC relay (Which would get rid of the need for the creepy bot that sits in various areas of the spawns of our 3 servers)
4. Part of this versatility also allows for extension mods to be installed, such as 3d rotation chunk update comparison and even a full virtual walk around mode. These unnecessary addons can give more features to the map and some may reduce its resource usage as well.

Now, It isn't up to me to decide, but I do suggest we play around with a new carto. Perhaps we could get something better for viewing the beauty of C and Pve... I know for a fact that I would be greatly happy if I could see my builds that end up covered by other builds on the map because of the perspective... But perhaps what we have now is simply the best solution for us. I'm not sure.

[MasterCommaThe]

^ I fully agree nickeox. I would really like to see us try out Dynmap again as it is the only alternative that has been proposed at this point. Perhaps just on a trial basis. 

I'm not really clear on why we take 2 weeks before distributing the Carto, is that to prevent some player advantage or a technical reason?

This link displays two rendering errors. One is that the corners of steps are improperly rendered, the other is that the black looking walls are actually light grey half brick steps.

I would also request that at the end of a rev we make a nice render of the map for advertising purposes to at least look like:Maybe eventually look like this:

And finally maybe progress to something really impressive like this:

and this:

Those are my goals, can anyone help suggest how this even happens, even if it requires some work of my own (I have extensive experience with Bryce, and some experience with 3DS Max, and Lightwave.)?

[Tolgar]

We wait 2 weeks on the P carto so that folks have to actually explore the map to see where they would like to build, if there was just a map, people would just look at that and go "Ok im gonna build there and ignore everything else".  Also evens the playing field a bit on folks wanting prime real estate, AND its easier to hide non-underground secrets for a while.

 

As far as chunks in 3d programs, you are welcome to take the previous rev, download it and convert chunks to 3d renders, the problem I always ran into was most programs back in the day did it on a chunk per chunk basis, that you had to stitch together in your program of choice, was pretty tedious, then there was getting the textures right, ug.

[GMMan]

To clarify as to scope of data sent, the server sends the chunks in an x radius around the player. For PvE, this radius is 7 (thanks to slide23 for that info). To send all chunk data on PvE, you'd be sending (4000/16)² chunks; 62,500 chunks at the same rate that you send the regular 225 -- (2x+1)² where x = 7 -- chunks to each normal player. That's 277 times more data to that player than all others, effectively tripling the average PvE peak-time population (277 / 80).

Sending all chunks at the same time seems overkill. I was thinking either the ones that are updated after an initial load or maybe if the mapping client as a player can fly to locations a carto user wants to see and load those chunks only.

[Sapphric]

I would definitely like to see us try a live map again. That was so awesome.

[XkinOEC]

Mastercommathe made a good point. We should also do very nice renderings of our maps. The ones currently used on nerd.nu (website) are from revision 13 of creative... Now, It was a creative spawn, but we've had much more amazing things on the server since then. We should update those with each revision change. We should also use these types of images when making our server look interesting to other people like posts to other subreddits, youtube videos, etc.