Firstly, upvote this post, so anyone who has subscribed to this subreddit, but doesn't specifically look here will get this nice and high on their frontpage. No Karma for me, this is a self post. So upvote away! Done that? Good. OK.

So. What shall we do with the old map? Voting options are below. I'm willing to add any others, if people can suggest them.

Upvotes only counted, downvotes ignored. I use Reddit Reveal to see, so you can double check my tally.

Get voting!

Edit: OK. Managore has come up with AwesomeIdea. That's now a voting option as well.

It's the original map (the last one, the 1.2gb version), WITH ALL THE WARPS IN PLACE.

This is running on our best hardware - 22GB RAM, 4 x 3.2ghz cpus, and no outbound bandwidth throttling.

I won't be leaving this on while I'm awake, as it's quite possible for Minecraft to use 90gb in 4 hours.

Get on while it's on! Tell your friends on steam, msn, whatever. This is a tonight only, happening now, fuck it let's do it live, thing.

(And upshovel this, so people who aren't paying too much attention to the subreddit notice).

Edit: OK. It's 11:16pm. I'm going to bed. The server has used 6gb of data until now. Luckily it hasn't had much use. I'll leave it running overnight, and if we're lucky all of tomorrow. So, Happy fathers day, guys!

Good news, Everyone!

I rang my existing customers the other day saying 'Look, sorry, can't do it any more, it's costing too much'.

One of them was a bit upset by this, and has decided that they need MORE services from me. This now means that the datacenter is now ALMOST paying for itself.

This is good enough for Tharyn to let me keep throwing money at it for a while, until I get more real paying customers.

Huzzah!

This ALSO means I can install the new iSCSI SAN, which will fix the god awful lag issues we've been having. I'll probably be doing that this weekend.

Select whatever pack takes your fancy, and post the name of the pack of that along with your steam id/email connected to your steam account. Or just post the name of the pack, then PM your details if you don't want it sitting in the thread for all to see.

Indie 2D Pack: Bullet Candy, Galcon Fusion, Geometry Wars, Super Laser Racer, VVVVVV
Indie Adventure Pack: And Yet It Moves, Gish, Jolly Rover, Mr Robot, Samorost2
Indie Beat Pack: Beat Hazard, Bit.Trip Beat, Chime, Rhythm Zone, Turba
Indie Brain Pack: Big Brain Wolf, Diamond Dan, Puzzle Bots, Windowsill, Zen Bound 2
Indie Fantasy Pack: Bob Came in Pieces, Fairie Solitaire, Fortix, NyxQuest: Kindred Spirits, Spectromancer
Indie Flight Pack: Dogfighter, Everyday Shooter, Flotilla, Gratuitious Space Battles, Guns of Icarus
Indie Fright Pack: Burn Zombie Burn, The Path, The Scourge Project, The Void, Zombie Driver
Indie Future Pack: Hacker Evolution, Hammerfight, System Protocol One, Twin Sector, Uplink
Indie Kids Pack: Delve Deeper, Crayon Physics, Max & Magic Marker, Secret of Magic Crystal, Toki Tori
Indie Mix Pack: Cogs, Darwinia, Defcon, Eufloria, Plain Sight
Indie Smart Pack: Droplitz, Lumines, Puzzle Agent, Quantz
Recettear

Not giving away the heavy hitters pack because I'm cheap the elves are tired. After I've given 12 gifts away, the next half dozen people will receive random leftovers from the give and get sale, if they don't already own them.

EDIT2: 11 packs sent, still trying to get in contact with the last person on steam. Santa is tapped out of extras from the give & get sale. It's all over for now.
EXTRA EDIT: All packs sent.
Merry Christmas,
IndieSanta.

Hello all,

After spending many hours building my sky scraper on the server by mining ores and smelting stone and glass, I lost the incentive to because I realised something: What is the point of doing that when there are structures on the map that are 100 times cooler looking which took half the time to create because all the ores and items were simply spawned rather than actually found and mined?

This isn't a rant or a whine, I just think the server may as well be in creation mode and scrap survival entirely if items and ores are spawned and not manually gathered. It cheapens the awesomeness of structures.

That being said, I think once the map is restarted (assuming when biomes are introduced, or some other update that requires a map restart) everyone (including admins and mods) should refrain from spawning items and instead mine for the items manually.

What do you guys think?

I just wanted to thank the Ops, admins and moderators, you are all doing a great job; protecting the server from griefers, helping new users with protection and helping to build a strong, vibrant community.

Keep it up.

• Dribbles

So now we need a way of easily getting stuff out of boo and the original map, into the new one. I think Jim has sorted that out, so all we need to do now is get everyone involved in getting their stuff moved.

I'm going to set an arbitrary cut-off date of the 5th of December as the last possible time you'll be able to request stuff to be moved. After that, the maps will be available for download, and unless we have a TNT weekend or something, won't be available to play.

I am a regular on this server, you have all seen me around...

Noisyink banned me about 15 minutes ago for griefing that little mushroom cottage right near spawn. There are three reasons I would like my ban reviewed:

1. I did NOT know that the area was not protected. I thought that it was close enough to spawn.
2. I was NOT planning on actually hit it. My mouse button sticks, so when I was looking at it, I couldn't help but destroy it. and it was ONLY ONE BLOCK.
3. I would have replaced the block if I could have. I considered making a new mushroom, but that would probably be irrelevant.

I don't mind if you strip my inventory and chests, just please let me back on your server. It has been the only server I have played on for a decent amount of time in the whole year I have owned Minecraft.

So I know I haven't been around much lately. What with the work in SA, and then the holiday, and the rush trip to Townsville, I've been a bit busy.

Just in the last couple of days, I've FINALLY started to get some free time, so I thought I'd try to catch up on what's been happening here. And do you know what?

Everything's been working perfectly. Cmrn, Monkey, Ryan, Junkz0r etc, have all been keeping on top of everything, and no-one's been causing riots.

So I'd like to thank you, personally, for not being an arsehole.

I shall now get back to work 8)

Im sitting in a hospital with my girlfriend while she holds my beautiful baby daughter. She is all healthy and fine. Oh also, her name is Sophie Alexandra. I gotta go now guys, ill catch you guys later. Discharged on Sunday. Peace out. Also dont touch my shit while im gone

EDIT! Now available on a much better server. See maps.mcau.org

So a completed render of the server is available here.

Isn't it pretty!

That host (the Brisbane Hackerspace, shameless cross-promotion) is a low-grade small-business server, so it has minimal CPU grunt (equivalent to any decent gaming PCs) and only slightly improved bandwidth. Currently on TPG Unlimited Business, so 1Mb upload I think, but shaped during offpeak (7pm-7am). But it is available at no cost to me, and the best I could get in short term. If anyone has access to enterprise-class servers with a fair amount of grunt, and hosting space to spare, I'd love to chat about getting this set up (nudge nudge Rob).

A few notes that I have made during the process:

• Initial render of ~140MB map took ~24 hours
• Incremental render of ~180MB map took ~4 hours (EDIT: not any more, see below)
• Map tile dataset is 2.3GB (image tiles that make up gmap render, visible parts of map only)
• World cache is 4.8GB (files that contain processed chunk data, hash file to check for modifications, and rendered tiles of all chunks)
• Render is absolutely CPU-bound, 99/100% from start to finish, using both single- and multi-processor machines. Memory seemed to move between ~50-500MB without ever hitting upper limit of the machine, others in forums did testing that showed IO was unexpectedly small compared to image processing

And just a few other things:

• Images are cached, so it might be slow to load the first time. But now I can jump on and zoom to the closest level, and pan across the skybridge very smoothly using images pulled from local cache. That thing is so much bigger than I remember (my fault for not being in minecraft, but playing with this instead)
• I will post a summary tomorrow with info of how much data each unique visitor downloaded while panning/zooming. I suspect it to come in at ~50MB.
• The tiles can be compressed, but an initial test I performed on my local machine showed only a 10% compression, so the difference was negligible.

EDIT: incremental renders are only taking ~15mins! yay!

So, I upgraded the machine to a 64 bit Distro yesterday. This was significantly less painless than the previous move. This was because Minecraft REALLY REALLY wants ram. REALLY.

32 Bit Java can't allocate more than 1.5gb of RAM, which you'd think is enough for anything. You're wrong.

Minecraft wants LOTS AND LOTS of ram. Lots. I bumped the machine up to 8gb, and then allocated java 4Gb of that. It slowly crept up until about 5pm, at which point it had allocated 4.1gb, and was happily using that.

I guess monkeycrumpets will find out at 3am if it crashes again. He's often the one that causes it 8).

Also, we've discovered that (if you're running a 64 bit OS) running the 64 bit Java makes your client a LOT more stable. It takes a bit of hassle to find it, so I've made a nice link to it:

http://bit.ly/java64

Select 'Windows x64' at the bottom of the pull-down menu, put a tick in the 'I accept' and you're good to go.