Some serious questions from a MC server owner
Posted: Wed Sep 17, 2014 10:05
Hi all,
First off: I sincerely appologise, I am certain most of these questions are addressed elsewhere, but I looked around the forums for two days and I simply am not confident I have full, brief, yes/no/brief explanation answers.
Some background:
I used to admin on Odyssianrealms, then co-own Revenge Cove. At the moment RC is being rebuilt as Feed the Beast (Direwolf) server and we expect to be fully live soon. I am an Open Source advocate and run various Linuxes on private machines although work keeps me tied to an OS that will run Adobe software. (I am partner in a small business that builds accessible websites. Not something you get rich from, but I like it.) As such I kept an eye on various open source games. Actually, MS buying Mojang does not have me that worried, but it does mean there's now sufficient impetus to find alternatives to MC for many, so I am considering starting a Minetest server in parallel with RC. My beef with MC is more along the lines of it not being very well built. To give an example; we had a 16 y/o programmer pretty much 'unthrothle' MC for our server and upped performance significantly. That should tell you something.
So, without more TL;DR-ing...
-I see Minetest was built in C++ and LUA. Good, Java simply does not offer the power needed. BUT, in real terms, how does the game perform? How would it benchmark against a MC/Bukkit combo? In terms of server load and player experience? (We have staff with fairly decent, if older, hardware who can barely get 20 FPS on our server, and we took great care to unburden the thing as much we could.)
-Mods ... I'm not clear on those. In toddler-simple-language: if we decide to run a server that vwas modded, how would players interact with the server? If they connect with a vanilla install, will they be prompted? Will (which would be ideal and a major selling point over MC) they get to load the mods transparently? Put yourself in the shoes of a Windows-using casual gamer; is this painless?
If not, is there way to offer one-stop download and install? (Again: for the worst users, so OSX/Windows... Linux gamers are used to pain... ;) )
-Grief protection: I see a rollback option, but on a busy server rolling back may be as bad as the grief damage; you roll back legit builds, too, after all. How are the other protections, and have they stood the test against comitted 11-year-old shits with parents too concerned with basing Obama on FB too monitor their larvae? (Yeah, drawing on a real world case here.)
-Has this game performed consistently on a large (1000+ players) server for anyone so far?
-How would you rate the difficulty for porting existing MC mods to MT? Is this an avenue to explore at all?
-I would most likely start off light, say an i3 with 16 Gb RAM and a 50 Mbps up/down pipe. Simply, because that's what I can build from parts I have within reach. How would the game like that as a home? Would it try to escape?
Thank you in advance for any insights!!
First off: I sincerely appologise, I am certain most of these questions are addressed elsewhere, but I looked around the forums for two days and I simply am not confident I have full, brief, yes/no/brief explanation answers.
Some background:
I used to admin on Odyssianrealms, then co-own Revenge Cove. At the moment RC is being rebuilt as Feed the Beast (Direwolf) server and we expect to be fully live soon. I am an Open Source advocate and run various Linuxes on private machines although work keeps me tied to an OS that will run Adobe software. (I am partner in a small business that builds accessible websites. Not something you get rich from, but I like it.) As such I kept an eye on various open source games. Actually, MS buying Mojang does not have me that worried, but it does mean there's now sufficient impetus to find alternatives to MC for many, so I am considering starting a Minetest server in parallel with RC. My beef with MC is more along the lines of it not being very well built. To give an example; we had a 16 y/o programmer pretty much 'unthrothle' MC for our server and upped performance significantly. That should tell you something.
So, without more TL;DR-ing...
-I see Minetest was built in C++ and LUA. Good, Java simply does not offer the power needed. BUT, in real terms, how does the game perform? How would it benchmark against a MC/Bukkit combo? In terms of server load and player experience? (We have staff with fairly decent, if older, hardware who can barely get 20 FPS on our server, and we took great care to unburden the thing as much we could.)
-Mods ... I'm not clear on those. In toddler-simple-language: if we decide to run a server that vwas modded, how would players interact with the server? If they connect with a vanilla install, will they be prompted? Will (which would be ideal and a major selling point over MC) they get to load the mods transparently? Put yourself in the shoes of a Windows-using casual gamer; is this painless?
If not, is there way to offer one-stop download and install? (Again: for the worst users, so OSX/Windows... Linux gamers are used to pain... ;) )
-Grief protection: I see a rollback option, but on a busy server rolling back may be as bad as the grief damage; you roll back legit builds, too, after all. How are the other protections, and have they stood the test against comitted 11-year-old shits with parents too concerned with basing Obama on FB too monitor their larvae? (Yeah, drawing on a real world case here.)
-Has this game performed consistently on a large (1000+ players) server for anyone so far?
-How would you rate the difficulty for porting existing MC mods to MT? Is this an avenue to explore at all?
-I would most likely start off light, say an i3 with 16 Gb RAM and a 50 Mbps up/down pipe. Simply, because that's what I can build from parts I have within reach. How would the game like that as a home? Would it try to escape?
Thank you in advance for any insights!!