Failed to connect to server.

Still failed to connect.

It ran pretty good with just the two of us. Also, I managed to find the path between those epic cliffs and the spawn point.

We managed to play perfectly fine on my development VM with 4 players, blowing the fuck out of the map with all the TNT you could ask for (we're talking like single explosions with 500-700 TNT blocks), and building huge towers and landmarks and such.

Neil Black made a nice castle and an awesome stone wall. He later remade much of the wall when he was supplied with obsidian for it instead. It looks awesome with the obsidian. Samuel Henderson made a...stack of stone with stairs on top!

I began clearing out an area to build a diamond palace on, but I couldn't seem to dig deep enough to find a solid stone base (for aesthetic reasons only). I began digging with TNT and Neil Black joined me and things got kind of out of control. I blew a large crater into the ground before venturing away and packing a small crater in the ground with upwards of 50 TNT blocks. That was satisfying enough, but I later found myself packing a natural cave with 256! Neil Black came to witness the explosion and shortly thereafter Samuel Henderson joined us for some pyrotechnics. That section of map is pretty much obliterated.

Samuel Henderson began digging a hole near spawn so I began working on my diamond palace just across the way. By evening, MiquelFire had joined me in building it. All in all, it only took us about 12 hours of work, perhaps 6+ of that with MiquelFire's help, to build a tower in the middle of a small lagoon that stretches from the bedrock to the ceiling! I noticed as we were digging out the bottom that Sam had begun building up really high so I took it upon my self to build to the ceiling while he was AFK.

Seems all that is gone now... Oh well, I think we learned some things. Not least of all, that I have trouble being legit when there's a console at my finger tips. Still, I think we had fun testing the engine and server out. It will be more legit when the bugs are fixed.

Just an FYI, the server seems to have a memory leak. I left it running all weekend and around noon Sunday it encountered an OutOfMemoryException and seemingly nobody could connect until I restarted it (which required root SIGKILL'ing it).

(My VM only has 500 MB RAM, but you can obviously up it if you have more available... Notch recommends 1024 MB, but we didn't seem to have any problems with up to 4 people at a time...)

This way, you can just execute minecraft from a shell and automatically start the server when it's not running or reattach to the screen if it is. ^a d to detach, of course. I'm planning to write a Perl interface over it to make the console more friendly (libreadline, and parsing user messages for custom commands, etc.). I have to finish reading through perlipc first though.

That's a silly bug. A far more interesting one is where blocks that you've dug up or blow up respawn, killing anyone standing in their way! This has bitten me a few times as I was mining.

Also, there are some void spots at the bottom of the map between the bedrock. It looks like sky and I think Sam tested the waters and the result was invariably death.

Most of the bugs are the result of client-side work not being transferred to the server yet.

Pretty much.

I've seen some suspicions of memory leaks on the minecraft forums, too. Hopefully Notch will track it down soon.

I wonder if we should try to orchestrate a voluntary group project; where we design some kind of massive building or structure and all work towards completing it: gathering materials, digging the land out, building up the walls, etc. I'd be a little afraid of it becoming a chore though, but so long as we remain free to do as we please and try to resolve arguments peacefully it shouldn't.

Neil, Sam, and MiquelFire helped me out on my server and someone972 helped me with my waterfall on decepto's server. I think the game is more fun when you're working towards a common goal together as opposed to disappearing for three days and then reemerging to show each other what each has accomplished on their own. With a well coordinated effort, I think a rather epic project could be completed in relatively little time with enough people contributing.

Perhaps the memory leak got too bad. The server seems fine with shutting down and starting back up again so perhaps my vaporware wrapper script should wait for the server to be empty and restart it automatically every ~12 hours.

Around 7am this morning, this lovely peak happened to my server. I wonder what exception was thrown.

{"name":"601928","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/4\/84da29bf75fc94ebe2f041b5541ce742.png","w":697,"h":288,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/8\/4\/84da29bf75fc94ebe2f041b5541ce742"}

I restarted the server. It's back up.

Make sure it has grass next to it for the pigs to spawn on.

I've been waiting until he gets most of the singleplayer features working before trying something major (mainly chests and furnaces). Just dropping all your items in a safe place works for a while (probably was over an hour when I tried), but they may disappear.

EDIT: Its too bad you all cant see the massive, several thousand block castle wall I built in singleplayer. I think it was 70 blocks wide, not sure how many in length, and has six towers the height of the wall. It also has 3 levels I think, with a two block space to walk in (4 wide total). And I built it all without cheating .

I was thinking of making a sprawling city, though I'd be more inclined to do so if there were more kinds of blocks to work with. Maybe I just haven't seen it all (likely) but all I know of is a few kinds of rocks, and wood, and glass. Is there straw for roofs? Different textures of rocks for roads and walls and brick trim? etc.

When I made a town awhile back I just did different styles for each house using the same basic materials. Wood, cobblestone, half-blocks, and glass.

There are also tree trunks, half-blocks stacked into a single block, gold blocks, diamond blocks, and cotton blocks. I might have missed a few more, but as far as I'm concerned there are more than enough types to make an interesting and dynamic town.

Heck yeah!