Random Chitchat 2020-2024

[12xx12]

This is really cool! Learning hands on is always awsome. I hate just watching some numbers on the command line. In my university studies I always try to include something for the senses. Audio, Video, Images,...

I also would like to move Cuberite to move forward. I have some time on my hand in the semester break. I heard a lecture on software architecture and some alarms went of during talking about code quality xD

[xoft]

I think I found out what we'll be doing next with the Minecraft-related classes. First, I'll let them build a maze, one or two by each person. Then I'll have 14 days to join their mazes together to make a track, duplicate it several times and prepare a plugin to let them play a minigame, race against each other in the mazes they built. I *hope* I can make the plugin in time. Probably won't be that difficult to make, but I'll need to make extra sure that nothing breaks if they do something unexpected. If the plugin works out nicely, it'll be a great addition to Cuberite as well.

[NiLSPACE]

I took a quick peek in Cuberite's pathfinder to see if it's easily exportable, but unfortunately it needs direct chunk access, so it would need a wrapper around it. With it you could easily validate if the mazes are completable

If you allow the mazes to have multiple entrances/exits you could make a prefab like system that reshuffels the mazes on command, but that might be too much work for 14 days

[Mathias]

The forum has been updated to MyBB 1.8.37.

[xoft]

Huh, it took me half a day just to set up a gallery-like server. And that's considering I somewhat knew what I was doing. If I were an admin with no prior experience with Cuberite, I would have probably given up many times along the way.

We really need to improve the documentation of things, as well. And some UX is also seriously lacking, such as editing permission only taking effect after changing player's rank.

[Mathias]

Huh, it took me half a day just to set up a gallery-like server. And that's considering I somewhat knew what I was doing. If I were an admin with no prior experience with Cuberite, I would have probably given up many times along the way.

We really need to improve the documentation of things, as well. And some UX is also seriously lacking, such as editing permission only taking effect after changing player's rank.

Which parts of the documentation are lacking? Perhaps it would be a good idea to write down everything you think could be improved, before we forget.

[xoft]

Of course it's the worldgen. Trying to set up a flat world at a certain height was not trivial. There's no reference for all the generator settings, and for a flat world, one actually needs to use the option marked as deprecated ("HeightGen" is "old relict" in the Book), with undocumented settings ("FlatHeight"). Only after fiddling for quite a bit I found out there's an example for Superflat world in the Book after all.

Another pain was disabling the mobs. Just deleting the [Monsters].Types line did nothing, which at first startled me, but then I figured out it was getting replaced with the default. I guess there's not much we can do about this one.

Finally, I failed hard at setting the permissions. It's easy to debug plugins if one is an admin on their own server. However, to set up regular players, things are super complicated. First I had to find out what permissions even to give to the players. The newer plugins have a Permissions table which lists all the permissions and their recommended groups, but it's not for all. The Core has a long list of permissions with very little recommendations. Combine that with the need to re-rank in-game players for the permission changes to take effect, and it's a mess.

[NiLSPACE]

I started documenting the generator years ago, but I quickly abandoned it. I believe I had trouble with Git and then didn't have the time to fix it as my priorities shifted due to school. Looking back at the documentation I had it doesn't seem that helpful either: https://github.com/cuberite/users-manual...f19c131c42

[12xx12]

I did add some documentation on the generator at some point.

[xoft]

Considering that I wrote most of it, I should be able to set it up. The years of neglect are showing...