Schedule downtime

The server will be down Saturday night (05-07-2011) for scheduled maintenance.

Beta 1.5

Behind on updates again... sorry all. I didn't get any response when I asked for e-mail addresses of players/friends on the server, so you're at the mercy of me checking Notch's blog. If you want to change that contact Jason/Sean for my address.

Anyway, server is updated to 1.5. Get in there and achieve.

Pink Sheep: exactly what MC was lacking

Server updated for 1.4.

Apologies for the delay, all.

We need to work out some mechanism for the users to notify the admins when the server needs updating.

Although I don't want to post my address directly on here, I'll see what I can do about exchanging e-mail addresses if nothing else.

Mordor Awakens - and we have pics!!

Seriously, is there a nicer view than the lidless burning eye of Sauron at sunset? Send JP your pics. I know he wants to post them for you.

And here we have the eye at night. Hey! You can see the Tower of Cirith Ungol off to the right. Still under construction, folks, though apparently Shelob's offspring have been pressed into factory labor by Crampton Industries.

Maps Working Again

We got an update to Cartograph_G (our mapping utility), so nightly map generation will resume. Unfortunately there's a strange line in the middle of the map that sort of looks like image stitching. Don't be alarmed. I don't believe the line actually exists in the world.

We'll be watching for further updates to see if the problem is solved, but this is certainly better than nothing.

EDIT: Looks like the weird line was a fluke. Later maps appear fine without any update to the mapping utility, so I think we're good.

Map FAIL

The Beta 1.3 update broke Cartograph_G (and Cartograph as well). The author of Cartograph_G posted an update, so I tried that, but it is failing with a blank dialog box for the error message. So, we are mapless at present. Hopefully this is temporary.

Backups, Maps, and Cartograph_G

I ran into issues attempting to stop the server automatically to do backups. Those issues could be fixed, but our Glorious Benefactor (sometimes also known as Leon) is already doing nightly backups of the whole Minecraft directory with the server running, so we went down a different path. Here are the details:

At 2:00 AM, the Glorious Benefactor (aka Leon) will backup Minecraft
At 5:00 AM, the day/night maps will be generated

The server will be running during both of these events. You might experience lag during the backup. You *will* experience lag during map generation. I don't think the backup would take more than 5-10 minutes. The map generation may take 10-15. It runs slower when the MC server is also consuming resources.

In other news, sandstone currently does not show on the map, and you may have noticed the market only shows white wool. Sean recently found that someone else has picked up the Cartograph utility and updated it for beta, so the next bit of server improvement will be attempting to upgrade our mapping utility to "Cartograph G".

It *might* even be completed at the time of this post! (Oh, the excitement!) Brief impression while watching it run is it may take even longer to render. So, the server might be largely unavailable for 20 minutes or so.

I see new stuffs!