[Server] Just Test Tribute (Now on Twitch!)

[sorcerykid]

The Easter Egg Hunt has officially begun!

Nemo has placed random Easter eggs around spawntown, and it's your job to find them all!

There are 80 eggs in total, with 10 of each color dye: red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, orange, and pink. The top four players to find the most eggs by Saturday, April 30 will win a prize!



Keep in mind, eggs may be hidden anywhere -- even inside houses. However, they are all above ground and directly accessible to players (i.e. they aren't behind any locked doors or inside any sealed rooms).

You can always check the leaderboard by using the /eggs chat command. This gives a running tally of how many eggs are still remaining in addition to the current top four players.

Note: The Spawntown District is bordered by Crystal Lake on the west, the canal on the north and south, and Canal Street on the east. So you don't need to venture very far from spawn in your search.

Happy Easter everyone, and good luck :)

[sorcerykid]

Today starts Easter Bunny Mania!

I hope y'all are ready, because the cute little Easter Bunnies are taking over the server. Now's your chance to grab up as many chocolate eggs as you can until this Friday, April 22. Let's get HYPE!

[Wuzzy]

Heh. The easter egg hunt was fun. Good idea. :-)
By the way, I heard the Easter Bunny also has hidden a few golden eggs somewhere in Spawntown. I wonder where …

I like the updated server stats. Unsurprisingly, cobblestone is still the most common item. But I was surprised to see how much gravel there is around.

[ggjones]

Gotta start collecting because these Easter exclusive items will be rare in the future.

[Wuzzy]

All Glory To The Giant Chocolate Egg!



(And blessed be the Holy Easter Bunny! ^_^)

[sorcerykid]

I spent the past week working on improvements to the daily cronjobs that are responsible not only for backing up the world directory, but also rendering the map and publishing the session summary and chat history. Here are some of the key changes that are most noticeable on the user-facing side of things:

• The daily session summary and the daily chat history are now using equivalent time and date calculations, so both reports will be properly synchronized. Previously, the chat history had relied on a rudimentary timestamp comparison, with no conversion to UTC, so the results were always 4 hours off from the session summaries.
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• The player ranks are now automatically regenerated every night, so they will be listed correctly in the daily session summary and the daily chat history. Originally, this was a manual job, so that is why the player ranks were frequently out-of-date.
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• Due to the size of the map database, MinetestMapper has been taking an excessive amount of time to output the daily map renderings. So I developed a command line database tool to extract only the region of the map that is to be rendered. This has reduced the overall processing time from 4+ hours to a mere 10 minutes.
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• The node color map has finally been regenerated as well, so now the daily map renderings will account for newly added nodes. The last update was in 2017, and my original script proved to be way too buggy and unreliable. However, I completely rewrote that script, so it can be used whenever new nodes are added to the game.

There were several changes to the daily backup procedures as well, including filesystem reorganization so that daily and weekly backups are in a more secure location, the introduction of semaphores to prevent server startup until the backup process has completed, and some basic checks and balances to verify the integrity of world directory prior to commencing a backup.

[sorcerykid]

Winners of the 2022 Easter Egg Hunt!

On Easter weekend, Nemo placed 80 colored eggs around Spawntown. The majority were found in just a matter of hours, as players were very quick to seek them out. The top 4 players to find the most hidden eggs were Mister_CJ, talamh, Wuzzy, and ----.



Congratulations! Each of you will receive a trophy to recognize your egg-straordinary hunting skills!

Here's a map of Spawntown, depicting all of the hidden egg locations, and their respective colors.



PS. Just a friendly reminder that Easter eggs are always unprotected. If you want to display them, it is safest to use an item portrait, pedestal, or showcase. Avoid placing Easter eggs as a node, otherwise they may be stolen!

[sorcerykid]

Just a quick heads up: Flower spreading is working again. This also includes mushrooms, which had previously been growing out of control. So no more mushroom invasion at spawn :P

Remember, the only plants that can spread naturally are flowers and mushrooms. All others must be obtained either from mob drops or by harvesting (in the case of crops or trees).

[DragonsVolcanoDance]

Welcome to JT2, aka Just Test Tribute, anarchy survival in an all-stone world.

Rules: No griefing, doxxing, trolling, dating, cheating, hacking or cursing.

Might be appropriate to change the "anarchy" claim in the title to something else, because I see rules... :P

[sorcerykid]

Hey everyone, I fixed a critical bug with bookshelves that crashed the server when attempting to read a book with empty metadata. I'm not sure how the contents of some written books got lost, but it doesn't appear to have affected more than a handful. Nonetheless, sanity checks are now in place as a precaution.

On a sidenote, the book transfer utility that I've long promised is nearing completion. This anomaly compelled me to finish work on the script for extracting all stored books and papers from the database of the @test@ server. So, it's just a matter of developing an in-game GUI for retrieving those items.

[iisu]

lol, that happened to me once but I wasn't sure enough to report the problem. I found an empty written book while scavenging with rotten eggs and when I tried to put it on a bookshelf the server crashed.

[sorcerykid]

The JT2 homepage now features a dynamic map with realtime server statistics, weather conditions, and player information panels.

Not only that, but by hovering over a player's nametag, their location will be highlighted on the map (as long as they are within the map boundaries, of course). Be sure to check it out!



As a bonus, I've also implemented zoom functionality. Since players tend to be clustered around spawn, you can click Zoom In to get a closer view. Both scrolling and zooming will be possible eventually, so stay tuned!

[sorcerykid]

Quick heads up everyone:

On June 1, I'll be removing the Secret Santa stations in Tring Square. They've been up now for 5 months, and the Christmas season is long past. It's time for a redesign.

So be sure to pick up your deliveries and take your stocking down before next Wednesday.

[ggjones]

Quick heads up everyone:

On June 1, I'll be removing the Secret Santa stations in Tring Square. They've been up now for 5 months, and the Christmas season is long past. It's time for a redesign.

So be sure to pick up your deliveries and take your stocking down before next Wednesday.

Are you sure I thought it was still the Christmas season.

[sorcerykid]

I'd like to give a warm welcome to our newest moderator, Liukiller!

Since joining the server in 2017, Liukiller has helped to build a thriving community on JT2 for our Spanish-speaking players, and no doubt will be an invaluable addition to our server staff :)

[Wuzzy]

Don't forget to add Liukiller to the jt2.intraversal.net webpage.

[sorcerykid]

My apologies about the downtime last week. I was updating the engine, and testing took much longer than planned.

I completely rewrote Minetest's built-in "line_of_sight" algorithm, so mob's are now much less suspectible to running into obstacles. However, the motivation for this revision was because flower spreading needs to use this API. That was when I noticed how buggy the original implementation was (hence why flower spreading was broken).

In the process, I took the opportunity to correct how the Mobs Lite engine computes positions during line-of-sight checks: rather than from the mob's actual position, it's now from the bottom of the mob's collision box. Like rats, for example are rendered one node below their actual position due to the model not being vertically centered. So they would always be running into low walls, as the node above was clear. That is finally resolved.

In addition, I cleaned up (and cleared out) a bunch of code from the animal and monster definition files, moving all common routines into a library. I also streamlined how watch-groups are handled, which was rather clunky overall.

So basically Mobs Lite just got a major spring cleaning, which was long overdue!

[Wuzzy]

Have the bugs of Minetest's line-of-sight implementation been reported?

[Master_CJ]

Luikiller!!!! Welcome to the team :D I'll be online Saturday if it's up, miss you all.
Nemo we have got to catch up!

[sorcerykid]

Hey everyone, I fixed a critical bug that allowed TNT to be placed above ground. This was due to a less than ideal implementation of the Stairs mod. I've since moved the problematic code out, and updated the Antigrief mod to mitigate this type of exploit.

The builtin API for node placement has also been improved, so you are still able to build onto stairs and slabs directly. However, for the time being both TNT, water buckets, and lava buckets cannot be placed into item frames (at least those above -500).

[sorcerykid]

Luikiller!!!! Welcome to the team :D I'll be online Saturday if it's up, miss you all.
Nemo we have got to catch up!

Welcome back Master_CJ!

I stopped by on Saturday, but it seems I missed you. We do have to catch up for sure! Hope all is well :)

[sorcerykid]

As some of you may have noticed there is now a LIVE chat feed on the JT2 homepage. So if you can't join the server for whatever reason (maybe you're on a public Wi-Fi network), you can still keep up with all the happenings in chat.

Eventually this will be expanded so that registered players can also send chat messages from the homepage. This will be accomplished by the use of authentication tokens, rather than divulging your Minetest password. Stay tuned!