Discussion on a 1.15 server

Discussions
1

Hey everyone,

With the new CR 1.15 alpha having been released a few days ago we’re reaching ever closer to the public 1.15 beta, something which AC isn’t able to benefit from immediately due to Sponge still being in development.

Obviously only having access to 1.15 long after the wider CR community does isn’t ideal. Because of this the Overseer team have had some discussions about how we may go about possibly setting up a second server. However, there are some problems that come with this which impact the community. We want to be as transparent as possible, so we’d like to open this conversation for everyone.

The general problem we would encounter is that opening a second 1.15 server will obviously majorly impact the main server including current projects. Demotivation in using 1.12 will also be quite common (trust me, I can hardly bring myself to build in 1.12 anymore).

So, lengthy deliberation have resulted in two options we feel would work the best. These are:

A) To open a second 1.15 server, but with some major restrictions. i.e. only opening the server for the community once or twice a week to prevent people ditching main but to still enable them to contribute to project related developments; while giving access full-time to people developing Gondor and Moria. Bree-land can possibly be started on the 1.15 server directly, and the community can contribute in build-day chunks when the server is open. This option might delay progress towards beginning Gondor a bit more, because Bree-land is the only thing (aside from 1.15 itself) in the way of starting Anórien. But we think this option is safer and will better maintain the wellbeing of the server.

B) To impose no restrictions to the wider community in the use of the 1.15 server, meaning you’ll have full access at all times (again, only for strictly on-topic developments and Bree-land), with the cost being that progress for current projects (Tharbad, Shire, Eastfold, Caras) will almost definitely grind down, and the server will be faux-dead for the public, impacts on the app system with fewer people online, demotivation etc. The benefit would of course be that Bree-land can be worked on in full force at all times, ideally paving the way to Anórien/MT and Moria quicker.

Basically go hard and go quick, but gamble with the server’s wellbeing as we hope for Sponge to release quickly, or to apply a safer approach that will better stabilize the server.

So we’re in a bit of a dilemma, but we’d like to hear everybody’s opinions. @Freshmilkymilk will also leave his thoughts on the technical side of things.

Regarding the release of the public beta, nothing can be said for when that will come, we ourselves on the dev team don’t have a fixed deadline or anything.

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I would say option b tbf, at least that way everyone can get on and work on something, pushing progress further, even if there is drop on the main server for a brief while. I think option a would also lead to demotivation as people would ree that they are not deemed worthy to be part of the group allowed access always, and you’d risk just pushing people to play 1.15 on single player worlds and come back once the server has updated. Its a fucked - fucked scenario, but at least if you give all players full time access to a server instead of having to go on single player, we can still see progress on the map. And people will still be willing to work on the old map, maybe just some sort of notice at spawn and in discord for new players to explain the situation and assure them we are not dead?

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Agreed completely. If we’re in a lose-lose situation regardless, I’d rather us benefit the most from a potential loss.

Switching Focus to 1.15 completely:

Negatives:

  • New players feel like they’re joining a dead project or one that isn’t interested in progressing along side them.
    Counter Argument: While new players coming in and refreshing our player base is an essential part of progress, new players such as Joe, Jeharnes, and Elder come to mind as stand outs—we can’t afford to burn out our existing experienced builders either. I’ve heard quite a few of us say we’ve lost desire to build in 1.12 after testing 1.15. Overseers and builders will just need to be encouraged for the sake of the community to still be active on the 1.12 project, at least on a community level—to help new players out on plots. After being given apprentice, the new apprentices can be given access to the 1.15 converted map.

Positives:

  • We advance the server agenda forward ahead of time—Rather than slowly grinding progress to an inevitable halt(which I think we’ll start to see after Eastfold)
  • Builders will see improvement with what is a complex new build system.
  • We can start on the 1.15 tree grid which we not only wanted for our own needs, but Fornad promised to make available to the rest of the CR community
  • Morale would boost to existing players
  • We would be able to start advertising to the CR community that we have a haven for their creativity to be expressed on a wider project. Players such as Lego and Fil have stated they may only return for Gondor.
  • Have you tried building ruins with the new 1.15 way of building? Locked block states for layers, debug stick layering vs having 5 different layer blocks in your action bar. Plants on layers. Even projects that can be easily completed in 1.12 such as Tharbad and Lond Daer would see tremendous benefit.

Not switching completely, having a cautious approach to 1.15 with limited access to certain builders or certain days of the week:

Negatives:

  • Players who now have used 1.15 will feel discouraged about building in 1.12 and may only log on during times where 1.15 is allowed.
  • We will have a long delay between the end of the Shire Revamp and the start of Bree; a long delay between the end of Eastfold and the start of Anorien; and a long delay in starting the first sections of Moria beyond the limited scope of concepts we can do now.
  • Who decides whose allowed to be on, when, and why? Seems rather unfair that certain builders are making the design decisions moving forward, getting to happily experience the newest improvements while others aren’t. This is the 2nd appeal to an emotional argument I’ve made for a negative—but it’s an important point.

Positives:

  • We look nicer to new players on an outdated building map/model.
  • We’re not doing entirely bad on our current 1.12 building plan. We can keep going with 1.12 on limited projects such as Lond Daer
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All good points, especially the tree grid, getting that started and even finished before the server is properly live would save so much time, getting people working on it while they have hype for 1.15 could be the best option for making it go quickly and rather painlessly.

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I kind of think A is the only option until Sponge is out due to the complete absence of protection plugins. If the entire map was made public and there were constant backups in option B it’s very likely someone could still break things and you wouldn’t find out before it’s too late due to the scale of the map. Working on 1.15.2 in small sections on a separate server is far easier to manage in terms of overall security and could be completely off limits to the CR community/new builders who would still be able to visit and work on the 1.12.2 server until such time as said plugins become available.

In addition it could be a while until the converter is bug free and it might be worth waiting for other players to report issues they find to us so we can fix them instead of finding them later when too much progress has been made to revert. A separate server with new builds has less of a chance of breaking and might be the safer route.

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How would it work in terms of eventually copying over to the new height limit map and keeping consistency?

If we’ve got two servers on the go with progress happening in different parts then it’s going to complicate things massively? Do you intend to schematic copy any future progress on the current server over to 1.15 server?

I think best to just ditch the building on the 1.12 server entirely and move on to 1.15. Even if that means banning guests for a while until we have protections (they can still see the 1.12 server and it’s easy to explain what’s going on to them).

The switch itself will undoubtedly require weeks of sorting out converter issues so I think best to get that sorted asap whilst we’re in a bit of a lull too.

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When we not make a public fb for 1.15 people will just work on a other sever (or single player) for the time being so then we going be dead anyway. When you make it private we will also give people the feeling that they aren´t really part of the sever, and in my opinion that would be even less nice then just have guest visit on a show map (1.12).
Besides that Moria is in a other map so I don’t see a issues with starting that on other version. If we open up small sections we will still have control about what people are doing. ( we can always just ban people that are big aunts).

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It would depend on what we do. But in general the idea is that only Bree-land would really be worked on as an actual project during this 1.15 server, for which the terrain isn’t really affected by any new map changes. I like to think (hope) that we have Sponge running before Gondor starts at the end of this year… If not then we have some bigger problems but that’s another can of worms.

Yeah I don’t really see a reason for doing this, nothing other than Bree-land is open to being worked on in a serious and formal capacity. We’re referring to concepts and stuff of that sort as the ‘builds’ that will be developed on the 1.15 server.

Moving everything and deserting our main server should be the absolute last option we take, it creates far too many problems for it to be worth it.

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Olaf makes a solid point, people have been waiting so long for 1.15, they will just go to a singleplayer server (or god forbid darwin) and spend time using the new mod, and then once they have used the new mod, they are not going to want to go back to the old version. If you open up the new server for everyone, they can continue to progress. If people play and see how much better 1.15 is, there will be no motivation to go and continue using what is the inferior version of the mod at all, they will choose to just wait it out until we can update.

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or god forbid darwin

They won’t be able to update to 1.15.2 before Sponge either so people wanting to play on 1.15.2 will still be stuck on SP.

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11

I see, can imagine people still preferring singleplayer though which would lead to dead time

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Personally i think option A is better. I’ll go for the safer option here.
Just have a select few builders who really need 1.15 to prepare for future projects. Set up the build styles, guides etc… So that when the server finally updates to 1.15, they can teach and guide the rest of the build team.
Other servers won’t be able to upgrade anyways either. And if you’re worried people will just build in Single Player, well, i can say that i rather build with a team on a 1.12 server than 1.15 alone, personally i get bored of it very quick with nobody around… Everyone’s different tho.
Building in 1.12 should continue untill the server updates imho, at least get the Eastfold, Shire Revamp, and Tharbad done. Personally i’ll be doing Moria concepts and planning, but i’ll still help out on the main 1.12 server with ongoing projects.

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13

This is something I feel like I should address clearly to everyone before certain viewpoints get strawmanned.

If we were to use the 1.15 server on a full-time basis as option B indicates, nobody will be using 1.15 in any meaningful sense for our current projects. Using new 1.15 blocks and building techniques in places like Tharbad, Shire, Caras and Eastfold is off the menu. What this means is that unless you’re working on the treegrid or developing strict concepts for moria and gondor, you will for all intents and purposes be using 1.12 anyway. It makes no difference.

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It should also probably be mentioned that Sponge will only come out for 1.16.5 based on one of their blog posts so unless that changes all potential plugin/safety restrictions will apply indefinitely on 1.15.2. Just something to take into consideration.

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In that case i would definitely not actually build for the server in 1.15, like Bree for example.
But only work on enstablishing the build styles needed to get the server started quickly after updating to 1.16.5.
This only reinforces option A for me.

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How far behind a sponge 1.16 would Conquest be?

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Can’t tell the future. We have no clue how much time Sponge will take. All I know is that 1.16.5 textures are already done in the vanilla resourcepack and unless there are unforeseen difficulties, implementing those and updating mappings are probably all that needs to be done in order for us to update.

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18

I think option A is probably the more safe option. A negative of it would be that the community gets kind of “splintered”, would it be possible to have certain “free days” where everyone can come and do building stuff together on the 1.15 server? Not build days, just saying “okay everyone can come on friday and build random stuff if they want.” Or is that too much work and kinda anal? Dunno, king can tell me.

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Yeah the idea is to have 1 or 2 days be open for everyone. But I don’t agree about letting these days be used for doing whatever, that’s what singleplayer is for. Need to stay on-topic especially when the project is already slowing down.

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What if 1.15.2 build days were determined by progress speed on 1.12.2? The more people get done the more 1.15.2 build days there are. Provides an incentive to keep working on 1.12.2 but also allows for more time on 1.15.2.

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