Black Raven Dragoons

[Jargath]

I decided to hop on MC to see what had changed and when I entered my portal in my home it ported my ass into a wall. I died. Unconvinced that I died, I tried it again. Yup, died again. At least I was naked this time. Then I ran over to the other portal I made and I made it through, after falling down a bit. Of course I did this naked as well. Yup, stranded this time.

Now, I decide to look at the map (which I should have done in the first place) and it appears that the nether world reset I'm assuming due to the updates. So, off to the lava lake to start over.

[Zancarius]

That's really weird.

I just logged in and it appears that some things have been rolled back somehow. The structure Josh built over his nether portal was rolled back (for example), and I don't know how much else has been changed. The server did freeze up about a week ago, and I didn't check on anything, so there's a strong possibility that might have damaged some chunks.

I'm currently investigating and trawling through my backups. Nothing much has changed since the 20th near as I can tell. I'll test out re-writing some of the chunks so that it'll keep anything newly generated but revert all of the changed stuff, hopefully restoring any structured that may have been damaged.

I'll post again whenever I get this sorted out. I may or may not be able to recover your items and fix your portal spawn point, but it's entirely possible these are unrelated issues.

[Zancarius]

Okay, I think I figured out what the problem is. Actually, there's two problems.

1) You had logged out into the hardcore world and remained there since the update. I don't know what happened, but the HC world is almost completely inaccessible. This is going to take time to figure out and fix. I should be able to restore your inventory, however.

2) There has been some damage and reversions done to a number of chunks. I'm not entirely sure how many were changed and reverted, but the most obvious was Josh's structure around his nether portal. Presumably, there's probably been some reversion of things inside the normal world's nether, but I haven't yet checked. I've selected most of the areas I've known that Josh has altered and replayed the LogBlock log to restore everything, including his chests (their contents reverted back to sometime before the 11th). Everything is mostly back to normal, but I'll have to get him to verify this. If not, then there's a bit more work to do.

So, if you've been on since the 10th or 11th, your work may have been reverted in whole or in part. I'll need to fix this manually. What puzzles me the most is that this isn't the first time I've heard of this. Cosh mentioned that an area he had been working in appeared to completely revert (ore included), and I attributed it to something of a fluke. That means that this is the second time such a reversion has taken place, and both reversions have occurred in chunks that were first generated in 1.8 BETA (!) and recently changed (within the last month). Perhaps it's a coincidence, but none of the work I've done in chunks that have been generated only a handful of weeks ago appears to be reverted. Elade's area appears unaffected, too, which suggests that the actual damage may be isolated to a relatively small period of time (about 2-3 days).

I honestly have no idea what caused this problem. I can only speculate that it may be due to the Java process crash/freeze, but I don't have enough data to verify whether or not that's the cause. Bukkit isn't using the same save methods that the stock Minecraft server does, and I have no idea if that could plausibly be interfering (I doubt it, but it's almost acting as if save was disabled somehow).

Anyway, I apologize for the issues. I'll see about restoring your inventory, Ralph. It should be pretty straightforward given the backups and may or may not catch everything, but the best bet is for you to camp out in the default world for now. Your inventory there looks like it should be intact.

Sorry. I'm afraid I don't have the instrumentation available to me to be able to determine exactly what has happened. If any of you are affected let me know, point out the areas that have been damaged, and I'll do my best to replay the logs on them.

[MaxRile]

Would it be best to remake the server seeing how we've kinda patched it from different builds if that would be something or an option everyone would consider ??? doesnt bother me its minecraft half the fun is building the stuff

[Zancarius]

Possibly. I do think that the multiverse setup may be contributing to the instability, too.

There are supposed to be a few more changes related to world generation in 1.6, possibly later, so if we do decide to just start over again, it'd be best to wait until after those versions. But it is an option.

[Grimblast]

I'm indifferent as to what we do really. As for our other contributors to the world though, we should get their input before pushing the plunger down. If we do decide to regenerate the world and start from scratch, I say we arrange a night where we all get on and have a little minecraft send off of our existing world before we "Blow" it up. Ok, more like before I blow it up.

[Zancarius]

Hah. Personally, I'd rather not regenerate the whole thing since it's trivial to just spend a day trekking into previously ungenerated terrain (e.g. not that hard). However, I may have to kill the hardcore and creative worlds that are attached via multiverse. I think that's really the source of the problems. They were a good idea to try out at the time, but the implementation wasn't fantastic.

[Jargath]

Hmmmmm 5 gunpowder + 4 sand = 1 TNT. Several of those and red circuit to detonate. Sounds like a party! I'm ok with starting from scratch. I was getting the "itch" to venture off to a far, far away place to create something. 1 world is ok with me as well.

My 2 cents

[Zancarius]

Here's one way to look at it:

Regenerating new world:

The good:

• Gain access to all new terrain features up to the current patch level without warning to far off lands.
• Smaller world size at start.
• No buggy terrain in and around the spawn point.
• Clean slate.

The bad:

• New terrain features come out every few updates meaning that you still have to wander off to find the new features.
• World size will always grow anyway.
• Terrain boundaries near newly generated terrain won't mesh if the generator is updated significantly.
• Lose access to previously built structures.

Keeping the existing world:

The good:

• Known environment and layout.
• Keep existing structures, inventory, and so forth.
• Relatively trivial to just find a new place to build in an area that hasn't been generated, thanks to Dynmap.
• The quirks and bugs in the patchwork map we have from terrain generator changes give it character.

The bad:

• The quirks and bugs in the patchwork map we have from terrain generator changes give it character.
• Newly generated terrain is farther and farther away from the spawn.
• Eventually, abandoned structures will dot the landscape.
• The world continues growing.

Truth be told, there's no right or wrong answer. One solution that involves a bit of a compromise might be to kill the multiverse worlds and install a portal addon that would allow players to create their own portals to far away lands. It would operate something like the nether except that you could venture off, place down an end point, link it with something in a place you control, and then use it to warp between places. Another similar solution would be to enable a warp plugin, although those tend to cause issues similar to multiverse in terms of server load (warping to an area no one has been to forces a sudden load of dozens of chunks rather than gradual as is the case when you're physically walking between points).

As much as I hate to nuke the multiverse worlds, it may come to that point. I noticed that transferring from one world to the other causes a noticeable lag spike for all connected players (as an example) and increases JVM memory usage from its allocated pool which could affect game play. I also suspect that those plugins may be responsible for the server instability I've been seeing. It's not common, but after about a month of uptime, its behavior gets a bit quirky until it freezes. I don't recall that issue before I added multiverse as we often had uptimes of 3-4 months on the server process.