Anthos Podcast: Mechanics

[Tythus 1307]

 

Hi Guys,

 

The Lord of the Craft's Technical Team (Tythus and Reag) discuss with Redbaron and Haelphon about the upcoming plugin and mechanic changes in Anthos. Revealing brand new, exclusive details they discuss:

- The situation with the Technical Team's numbers

- Upcoming projects

- Shop Plugins

- Chunk errors

- Future plugins

 

Thanks,

 

Tythus

EDIT: Thanks Hydroox for the transcript

Redbaron=B

Reag=R

Tythus=T

B: Hello Lord of the Craft Redbaron here with Tythus and Reag and Haelphon to talk about the future plugins in Anthos. Huge thanks to them for showing up to give you guys information. Say hello guys.

All: Hello

B: Is there anything you want to say before we begin asking questions?

R: Yeah, I have been asked by the administration team to issue a warning: I am notoriously foul mouthed, so if that offends you, you may want to stop listening.

T: Or at least try and listen somewhere else (This line was a bit hard to hear, but I think that’s what he said)

R:Yeah, sorry

B: Okay, to start us off here is a question, there has been huge controversy over the dilemma that we face a lack of coders do you have any plans to combat this? Possibly hiring outside help besides Lord of the Craft players?

R: Well I am currently looking for coders, so I am making an active effort to search through people in the community. The problem arises from the fact that everyone I talked to I want to get a coding example from them, and they just never get back to me.

B: I see and you Tythus?

T: Well it’s sort of the same thing as well or vice versa. They aren’t really in it for the community, and more as a way to make a quick dollar and there is no way we can afford to pay hundreds of dollars to random coders.

R: Yeah, coding is expensive. Like really expensive. I’m a trained software engineer, and I make a good buck, but I do this for free.

T: Yeah I know the starting salary is like 30,000 pound a year and we can’t afford to pay someone thirty thousand a year.

B: Yeah,

R: I mean we do have people from the community who have stepped up and tried to help, but it’s just no one ever volunteers to do something, or never gets around to actually finishing it.

B: I see I see. Well moving on to the next question, what projects do you currently have in the midst that you are going to reveal soon to Lord of the Craft?

R: Currently I am working on two projects right now. One is on the back burner and one that I am really focusing on. On the backburner I have been working on this sort of combat plugin, just you know to see how it would work out for wars and stuff something to make Minecraft a little less spam clicky. I am basing it very very roughly off of Dark Souls.

T: Like where you have got to time your moves and it’s got to be correct and if you screw up bad things will happen.

R: Yeah so that is on the backburner right now, because of just problems in general plus it’s not really that relevant to Lord of the Craft seeing we’re more of an RP server and not a PvP server. But the main thing I am working on right now is a complete rewrite of DnD 3.5 in Minecraft. So I’m trying to make a sort of optional stats system.

B: So, like a new skill system?

R: Basically like a new skill system, but unlike previous skill systems this one’s applications are only to RP it doesn’t have any practical effects on the world, it doesn’t make you better at killing people, it doesn’t make you able to run faster or jump higher.

T: Well it does in the RP, but it doesn’t specifically make you mine faster or builder of blocks.

R: Exactly.

B: So it’s like you can right click someone and see their skills, or compare skills with other players to see who would do something better? Something like that?

R: Yeah, it’s basically just to stop power gamers. I mean that’s the way I see it, it just adds a little more balance to the game. I always get annoyed when I see Lore Killer Von Killenstein who wields two great swords.

T: …and is batman and has a bazillion gadgets and knows ninja kung-fu, and he’s only like two months old.

R: Yeah, because you know you always run into people who do that. So the whole point of this is just to even it out a bit, make it a little more uh…

T: Friendly.

R: Yeah, you can’t just be Lore “god mode” Almighty, you have to make sacrifices.

B: Will this be a training plugin, like do you have to train to level up? Or is it going to be something different?

T: Actually there are a lot of thoughts we have had on this and the one I have generally be looking at is time based.

B: Oh

R: Well the thing is I am very much against forcing players to preform repetitive actions to advance. The reason behind this is because technically speaking from a psychological point of view it’s actually fun, I mean it doesn’t sound fun, but it’s like in MMO’s.

T: It’s all like time spent vs. what you actually get for it, so that can make it fun to a certain extent.

R: Like the grinding thing, I don’t like it because I feel like I am cheating; I’m artificially making the game longer and harder than it should be. So what I’m thinking of is either giving everyone straight off the bat no questions asked a few general levels and then having some bonus levels you need to apply for, so instead of a villain application you would do an epic character application.

B: Yeah that sounds very interesting actually. Moving on, there has been talk about a shop plugin, which seems to have been confirmed by Danny not too long ago, could you give us more information about that? Like is it an original plugin that you made, or is it something you got off a website?

T: Work in progress.

R: The thing is with the shop plugin is if we had a second person on board, besides just me coding, we could actually work on it. Right now we are basically forced to use an off the shelf shop plugin, and I’m currently fighting with Danny, about which one to use.

T: It’s still very much up in the air.

R: Yeah, I mean personally I want to go with chest shops. They are the least RP yes, but they are also the fastest and most efficient on the server.

T: And from pure performance and actual space to put your stuff in you can’t just have an invisible NPC that carries your stuff around.

R: Yeah, but just from a performance point of view it’s ideal. While Danny is leaning more towards an item shop that actually displays the items on little planks, so you can see them spinning around. While it looks really cool, it’s very detrimental to server performance and I am not sure the effect it will have when we have 150 players online. When you have 20-30 it’s no problem.

T: I think it’s more of an issue with Minecraft as a whole. In terms of we are still limited by that single thread and you can only have so many entities up at one time.

R: I am very cautious about my coding for that very reason; it’s also why development is so slow. I really don’t want to put something on the server that is completely broken that will destroy everything.

T: Well at least you aren’t Vaq then.

*laughs*

B: More personal question for you Reag. Many on Lord of the Craft don’t know you very well do you have anything you want to say about yourself so they can know you a little better?

R: Don’t fear the squid.

*laughs*

R: I have been playing on Lord of the Craft for ages, I’ve been around since Aegis I actually tried to code for you guys back in Aegis, but Vaq was um…

T: Very anti-

R: Let’s not go into that, but he didn’t want people looking at his stuff and from what I’ve seen of it for good reason. So literally how I became the coder is Dusk said to me on Skype “Hey, Vaq quit” and I’m like “YESSS!”

*laughs*

R: And that’s how I became the coder in like 10 minutes.

B: So onto some issues we have been having in Lord of the Craft. There have been a lot of chunk errors going around, and the build server has been plagued by it also. Do you have any information about what’s going on or how you’re gonna fix it?

R: It’s a perfect storm between, a coding mistake, a Bukkit glitch, and a server map corruption. What’s happened is there is a glitch in the current version of Bukkit where it doesn’t always handle the NBT tags correctly, that’s like the lore tags, like enchantments on something’s. So if it’s a custom enchantment it doesn’t always handle it right, but that’s not a big deal it’ll just throw an exception and keep going. If you remember we used to have a custom items plugin on the server, coded by Alec. Now when Alec originally coded this it was a piece of genius, because this was before Bukkit had an interface, a sort of way for us to play with this easily. So he made his own. Alec was a brilliant coder, brilliant. So he made his own. Then he quit and we updated. When we updated Bukkit changed how it handled that stuff and what basically happened was, every single custom item that Alec made, would throw an exception. Now if these exceptions happened, if they were in item frames, World Guard would bug out. And when that happened World Guard didn’t know what to do and the world got corrupted. So I would have to disable World Guard, and revert the chunk. And so you get the world corruption. So it’s just a perfect storm of all these weird things happening at once. It shouldn’t happen again and we got a new custom item plugin on the server now, this one doesn’t use that proto-hacking method that Alec used, because Bukkit has made the API to use it now, and we shouldn’t be getting these problems anymore. But just to be clear if you still have any of Alec’s custom items burn them.

B: Yeah, if you don’t want your place to be destroyed.

R: Actually if you are in Oren keep them, because I have a little running bet with the GM team to see how long till the white roses camp gets a chunk error.

*Laughs*

B: OK so on to some Minecraft updates, the 1.5 is fast approaching do you have any plans to make it easier for both of you to update?

T: Nothing at all at the moment.

R: Whiskey, lots of whiskey.

*Laughs*

R: The 1.5 update is going to be a nightmare; I’ll be honest as soon as we get a working version of craftBukkit for 1.5 we are probably going to go down for a while. I’ll say 6 hours, but it could end up being a week. I’m being honest here. The problem is with every one of these major Bukkit builds they reorganize a lot of things and they change how a lot of things work.

T: Also a lot of things get redacted and changed.

R: Yeah, they change things basically. And you need to spend a lot of time going through, we’re running quite a few plugins something like 40 plugins right now.

T: Which is nothing compared to some servers I have seen.

R: Yeah, Herocraft runs 80. But each one of those we have to go through and check “does it work? Yes/no. What’s broken? Can we fix it? Can we get rid of it easily?” You have to go through this whole checklist and it takes time.

T: One thing for the love of god don’t update your client, or if you do keep the Minecraft .jar.

R: Yeah don’t update your client until you know we have update fortunately Minecraft is good about this now, it shows the version number next to the server. So don’t update.

B: I know Vaq used to have this update thing; do you have any plans to make one of those again to automatically downgrade or whatever?

T: The main issue on that is Vaq is really on the legality of the issue.

R: That and there is another one available which you can find online.

T: Yeah we might just post that up when the time comes.

R: Yeah that’s probably a good idea. Like I’ve said I have been really busy, I do all the sys administrative work for live, and I do all the coding, and doing all that on top of keeping up with my studies is very difficult. I don’t get to do what I want to do, like right now I want to sit down and work on that DnD project, but I just don’t have time to do all that and keep everything working.

B: Yeah, I see what you mean.

R: Fun fact, we do have a magic spells plugin on the server right now.

B: Yeah, that follows into the next question. What future plugins do you have planned for Lord of the Craft, if any?

T: Magic

R: Well right now one of the applicants for the code position says he is working on a magic spells plugin. Currently we are using an off the shelf plugin so it has some problems. While it does a lot right there are a lot of other things about it which I really don’t like about it. So I am hoping this new guy actually finishes this I’ll be overjoyed. We’ll get a new coder and we’ll have a better magic plugin.

T: To be honest as far as coders, we just want someone who can keep a plugin up to date.

R: Exactly, just a plugin.

T: It just makes it that much less work for us.

R: Seriously if you can code, please talk to me. I’m mean I’m nasty, but if you can code I’m your best friend.

B: You’ve answered a lot of questions today, and you’ve answered really well and I’m sure the people will be really impressed with this. Do you have anything you want to say before we close this off?

R: Yeah, look I might troll a lot and like drop anvils on people and make giant anvil towers, but I do take my work seriously. The reason I do this is so I can relax and cool off.

B: Do you have anything to say Tythus?

T: No one knows about me. It’s annoying.

R: Yeah Tythus is the unsung hero.

T: I still get compared Tyrion, every single time. I want to die.

R: Definitely I take care of the live; he takes care of the Dev. Though I will say Tythus, what the hell is up with your file structure on dev.

T: Yeah, sorry.

*Laughs*

B: I’d like to thank you Reag and Tythus, for joining me to talk about the plugins and any future updates coming to Lord of the Craft.

R: Once I finish this DnD plugin, I think I am going to focus really hard on professions, or maybe incorporate that in the DnD plugin. But those are the big things on the horizon, but I have no other big things planned, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something.

B: Thanks. And make sure to follow on Twitter and like Facebook for a plethora of new information coming out. Goodbye.

~

[Wretched 2075]

I'm sorry, what? Too busy watching that avatar....

[LaCabra (Soda) 1519]

"This video is private - sorry about that."

 

That's the message I'm getting, hopefully it can be sorted out! Can't wait to see the video! :D

[Tythus 1307]

Woop's forgot to remove that

[Augor 142]

Yes, Good.....

 

 

Good... Good!

[The Best Basileus 97]

"I just wanted to warn everybody, that I'm notoriously foul mouthed... SOOO..........."

 

Dude, you aren't possessed by the curse of foul-mouthedness. Why don't you just. not. have. one. There's an idea. :P

[Eleatic 1033]

Ohgod.. 1.5 = A week downtime.. D:

 

/me slits his wrists

[Silevon 497]

I'm watchin' this.

[Redbaron™ 690]

Enjoy noobs.

[Nefarious Aus Shitpost 891]

Is there a transcript anywhere? I can't exactly watch this at school...

[Heero 4092]

Is it bad when Tythus' avatar makes me pause the video and laugh like a madman...?

[Ryski 32]

MAGICZ PLUGIN! :D

 

In all seriousness, I hate to say I really appreciate the amount of work you guys put into just to allow us to have have a good fun time on minecraft. Kudos to you guys!

[gabriel101x1 463]

Dark Souls Combat on LoTC...?
*Shudders*

[Hydroox 11]

Is there a transcript anywhere? I can't exactly watch this at school...

Yeah I typed up a transcript just now for anyone who prefers reading, or can't watch the video for some reason. Pretty much word for word. Please excuse any spelling/grammar mistakes.

 

Redbaron=B

Reag=R

Tythus=T

B: Hello Lord of the Craft Redbaron here with Tythus and Reag and Haelphon to talk about the future plugins in Anthos. Huge thanks to them for showing up to give you guys information. Say hello guys.

All: Hello

B: Is there anything you want to say before we begin asking questions?

R: Yeah, I have been asked by the administration team to issue a warning: I am notoriously foul mouthed, so if that offends you, you may want to stop listening.

T: Or at least try and listen somewhere else (This line was a bit hard to hear, but I think that’s what he said)

R:Yeah, sorry

B: Okay, to start us off here is a question, there has been huge controversy over the dilemma that we face a lack of coders do you have any plans to combat this? Possibly hiring outside help besides Lord of the Craft players?

R: Well I am currently looking for coders, so I am making an active effort to search through people in the community. The problem arises from the fact that everyone I talked to I want to get a coding example from them, and they just never get back to me.

B: I see and you Tythus?

T: Well it’s sort of the same thing as well or vice versa. They aren’t really in it for the community, and more as a way to make a quick dollar and there is no way we can afford to pay hundreds of dollars to random coders.

R: Yeah, coding is expensive. Like really expensive. I’m a trained software engineer, and I make a good buck, but I do this for free.

T: Yeah I know the starting salary is like 30,000 pound a year and we can’t afford to pay someone thirty thousand a year.

B: Yeah,

R: I mean we do have people from the community who have stepped up and tried to help, but it’s just no one ever volunteers to do something, or never gets around to actually finishing it.

B: I see I see. Well moving on to the next question, what projects do you currently have in the midst that you are going to reveal soon to Lord of the Craft?

R: Currently I am working on two projects right now. One is on the back burner and one that I am really focusing on. On the backburner I have been working on this sort of combat plugin, just you know to see how it would work out for wars and stuff something to make Minecraft a little less spam clicky. I am basing it very very roughly off of Dark Souls.

T: Like where you have got to time your moves and it’s got to be correct and if you screw up bad things will happen.

R: Yeah so that is on the backburner right now, because of just problems in general plus it’s not really that relevant to Lord of the Craft seeing we’re more of an RP server and not a PvP server. But the main thing I am working on right now is a complete rewrite of DnD 3.5 in Minecraft. So I’m trying to make a sort of optional stats system.

B: So, like a new skill system?

R: Basically like a new skill system, but unlike previous skill systems this one’s applications are only to RP it doesn’t have any practical effects on the world, it doesn’t make you better at killing people, it doesn’t make you able to run faster or jump higher.

T: Well it does in the RP, but it doesn’t specifically make you mine faster or builder of blocks.

R: Exactly.

B: So it’s like you can right click someone and see their skills, or compare skills with other players to see who would do something better? Something like that?

R: Yeah, it’s basically just to stop power gamers. I mean that’s the way I see it, it just adds a little more balance to the game. I always get annoyed when I see Lore Killer Von Killenstein who wields two great swords.

T: …and is batman and has a bazillion gadgets and knows ninja kung-fu, and he’s only like two months old.

R: Yeah, because you know you always run into people who do that. So the whole point of this is just to even it out a bit, make it a little more uh…

T: Friendly.

R: Yeah, you can’t just be Lore “god mode” Almighty, you have to make sacrifices.

B: Will this be a training plugin, like do you have to train to level up? Or is it going to be something different?

T: Actually there are a lot of thoughts we have had on this and the one I have generally be looking at is time based.

B: Oh

R: Well the thing is I am very much against forcing players to preform repetitive actions to advance. The reason behind this is because technically speaking from a psychological point of view it’s actually fun, I mean it doesn’t sound fun, but it’s like in MMO’s.

T: It’s all like time spent vs. what you actually get for it, so that can make it fun to a certain extent.

R: Like the grinding thing, I don’t like it because I feel like I am cheating; I’m artificially making the game longer and harder than it should be. So what I’m thinking of is either giving everyone straight off the bat no questions asked a few general levels and then having some bonus levels you need to apply for, so instead of a villain application you would do an epic character application.

B: Yeah that sounds very interesting actually. Moving on, there has been talk about a shop plugin, which seems to have been confirmed by Danny not too long ago, could you give us more information about that? Like is it an original plugin that you made, or is it something you got off a website?

T: Work in progress.

R: The thing is with the shop plugin is if we had a second person on board, besides just me coding, we could actually work on it. Right now we are basically forced to use an off the shelf shop plugin, and I’m currently fighting with Danny, about which one to use.

T: It’s still very much up in the air.

R: Yeah, I mean personally I want to go with chest shops. They are the least RP yes, but they are also the fastest and most efficient on the server.

T: And from pure performance and actual space to put your stuff in you can’t just have an invisible NPC that carries your stuff around.

R: Yeah, but just from a performance point of view it’s ideal. While Danny is leaning more towards an item shop that actually displays the items on little planks, so you can see them spinning around. While it looks really cool, it’s very detrimental to server performance and I am not sure the effect it will have when we have 150 players online. When you have 20-30 it’s no problem.

T: I think it’s more of an issue with Minecraft as a whole. In terms of we are still limited by that single thread and you can only have so many entities up at one time.

R: I am very cautious about my coding for that very reason; it’s also why development is so slow. I really don’t want to put something on the server that is completely broken that will destroy everything.

T: Well at least you aren’t Vaq then.

*laughs*

B: More personal question for you Reag. Many on Lord of the Craft don’t know you very well do you have anything you want to say about yourself so they can know you a little better?

R: Don’t fear the squid.

*laughs*

R: I have been playing on Lord of the Craft for ages, I’ve been around since Aegis I actually tried to code for you guys back in Aegis, but Vaq was um…

T: Very anti-

R: Let’s not go into that, but he didn’t want people looking at his stuff and from what I’ve seen of it for good reason. So literally how I became the coder is Dusk said to me on Skype “Hey, Vaq quit” and I’m like “YESSS!”

*laughs*

R: And that’s how I became the coder in like 10 minutes.

B: So onto some issues we have been having in Lord of the Craft. There have been a lot of chunk errors going around, and the build server has been plagued by it also. Do you have any information about what’s going on or how you’re gonna fix it?

R: It’s a perfect storm between, a coding mistake, a Bukkit glitch, and a server map corruption. What’s happened is there is a glitch in the current version of Bukkit where it doesn’t always handle the NBT tags correctly, that’s like the lore tags, like enchantments on something’s. So if it’s a custom enchantment it doesn’t always handle it right, but that’s not a big deal it’ll just throw an exception and keep going. If you remember we used to have a custom items plugin on the server, coded by Alec. Now when Alec originally coded this it was a piece of genius, because this was before Bukkit had an interface, a sort of way for us to play with this easily. So he made his own. Alec was a brilliant coder, brilliant. So he made his own. Then he quit and we updated. When we updated Bukkit changed how it handled that stuff and what basically happened was, every single custom item that Alec made, would throw an exception. Now if these exceptions happened, if they were in item frames, World Guard would bug out. And when that happened World Guard didn’t know what to do and the world got corrupted. So I would have to disable World Guard, and revert the chunk. And so you get the world corruption. So it’s just a perfect storm of all these weird things happening at once. It shouldn’t happen again and we got a new custom item plugin on the server now, this one doesn’t use that proto-hacking method that Alec used, because Bukkit has made the API to use it now, and we shouldn’t be getting these problems anymore. But just to be clear if you still have any of Alec’s custom items burn them.

B: Yeah, if you don’t want your place to be destroyed.

R: Actually if you are in Oren keep them, because I have a little running bet with the GM team to see how long till the white roses camp gets a chunk error.

*Laughs*

B: OK so on to some Minecraft updates, the 1.5 is fast approaching do you have any plans to make it easier for both of you to update?

T: Nothing at all at the moment.

R: Whiskey, lots of whiskey.

*Laughs*

R: The 1.5 update is going to be a nightmare; I’ll be honest as soon as we get a working version of craftBukkit for 1.5 we are probably going to go down for a while. I’ll say 6 hours, but it could end up being a week. I’m being honest here. The problem is with every one of these major Bukkit builds they reorganize a lot of things and they change how a lot of things work.

T: Also a lot of things get redacted and changed.

R: Yeah, they change things basically. And you need to spend a lot of time going through, we’re running quite a few plugins something like 40 plugins right now.

T: Which is nothing compared to some servers I have seen.

R: Yeah, Herocraft runs 80. But each one of those we have to go through and check “does it work? Yes/no. What’s broken? Can we fix it? Can we get rid of it easily?” You have to go through this whole checklist and it takes time.

T: One thing for the love of god don’t update your client, or if you do keep the Minecraft .jar.

R: Yeah don’t update your client until you know we have update fortunately Minecraft is good about this now, it shows the version number next to the server. So don’t update.

B: I know Vaq used to have this update thing; do you have any plans to make one of those again to automatically downgrade or whatever?

T: The main issue on that is Vaq is really on the legality of the issue.

R: That and there is another one available which you can find online.

T: Yeah we might just post that up when the time comes.

R: Yeah that’s probably a good idea. Like I’ve said I have been really busy, I do all the sys administrative work for live, and I do all the coding, and doing all that on top of keeping up with my studies is very difficult. I don’t get to do what I want to do, like right now I want to sit down and work on that DnD project, but I just don’t have time to do all that and keep everything working.

B: Yeah, I see what you mean.

R: Fun fact, we do have a magic spells plugin on the server right now.

B: Yeah, that follows into the next question. What future plugins do you have planned for Lord of the Craft, if any?

T: Magic

R: Well right now one of the applicants for the code position says he is working on a magic spells plugin. Currently we are using an off the shelf plugin so it has some problems. While it does a lot right there are a lot of other things about it which I really don’t like about it. So I am hoping this new guy actually finishes this I’ll be overjoyed. We’ll get a new coder and we’ll have a better magic plugin.

T: To be honest as far as coders, we just want someone who can keep a plugin up to date.

R: Exactly, just a plugin.

T: It just makes it that much less work for us.

R: Seriously if you can code, please talk to me. I’m mean I’m nasty, but if you can code I’m your best friend.

B: You’ve answered a lot of questions today, and you’ve answered really well and I’m sure the people will be really impressed with this. Do you have anything you want to say before we close this off?

R: Yeah, look I might troll a lot and like drop anvils on people and make giant anvil towers, but I do take my work seriously. The reason I do this is so I can relax and cool off.

B: Do you have anything to say Tythus?

T: No one knows about me. It’s annoying.

R: Yeah Tythus is the unsung hero.

T: I still get compared Tyrion, every single time. I want to die.

R: Definitely I take care of the live; he takes care of the Dev. Though I will say Tythus, what the hell is up with your file structure on dev.

T: Yeah, sorry.

*Laughs*

B: I’d like to thank you Reag and Tythus, for joining me to talk about the plugins and any future updates coming to Lord of the Craft.

R: Once I finish this DnD plugin, I think I am going to focus really hard on professions, or maybe incorporate that in the DnD plugin. But those are the big things on the horizon, but I have no other big things planned, but I’m sure I’ll come up with something.

B: Thanks. And make sure to follow on Twitter and like Facebook for a plethora of new information coming out. Goodbye.

~

 

Also I am fully aware probably no one will read this, but oh well. Enjoy I guess.

[Lord_Sauron_ 43]

On the contrary, Hydroox - thanks, that's awesome! I much prefer to read these things, as audio is a fickle thing that can lose its way in memory. Words... words are forever.