Hi all! As many of you know, we began testing world plots on Node Beta yesterday. Through this, we gained a lot of helpful user feedback, as well as important information on the server resource usage patterns of the world plots system.
If we can no longer make progress and determine that world plots are not feasible, we will be restoring the entirety of Node Beta from its pre-worldplots backup. We may also do this if for new 5.x features that need testing before they go live on the main nodes.
We've got a lot of super cool features in the works (such as a friend/party system), and we'll be sharing additional info as new features get closer to release. Thank you all for your support!
- DiamondFire Dev Team
Background
World plots have been planned for a long time as a way to make the server capacity more scalable as our playerbase grows. The system would offer better plot isolation and stability, as described in our previous dev blog. Development of world plots officially started in early June, and the dev team (especially @Owen) has spent a great deal of time working on it. We wanted to get a test on Node Beta as soon as possible so we could get feedback and analyze usage under more realistic player counts and usage patterns.What we found
While the user feedback was helpful (many of you expressed concerns about build and code separation), another concern for us was the resource usage of the server. We noticed substantial lag and very high RAM usage that did not appear in the dev testing, as much of Minecraft's chunk ticking behavior is determined by where players are located. We've been analyzing this extensively, and it appears that fixing this would require additional internal modifications of Minecraft's chunk system, if it is even fixable at all.Where do we go from here?
We were very excited to bring world plots to you, and we are still going to try to make it work. However, as the prospect of it not working becomes increasingly probable, we feel it would be irresponsible to focus all of our (very limited) dev time on world plots. In the near future, we will be working on refactoring non world plot features on the 6.0 (world plots) codebase to work on the 5.x codebase. We will also be developing new features on the 5.x codebase. Hopefully this means that you won't have to wait too long for a new server update.What about Node Beta?
As the world plot improvements can only be tested with a fair amount of players, we will be continuing to test world plots on Node Beta. I would like to remind everyone that Node Beta is a testing environment, especially for testing things like "does this update break your plots?" We break things on beta so that we don't break them on main. As such, don't get too attached to anything you build on Node Beta.If we can no longer make progress and determine that world plots are not feasible, we will be restoring the entirety of Node Beta from its pre-worldplots backup. We may also do this if for new 5.x features that need testing before they go live on the main nodes.
Final Thoughts
While world plots may not work out in the end, we are still hard at work figuring out other ways to improve the stability and scalability of the server. I ask that you be patient and supportive of our devs as we shift our focus to non world plot features. We are still trying to bring world plots to y'all, but as a team we feel it is time to prioritize bringing y'all an update sooner rather than later. (Note: this means an update built on 1.16.5, as 1.17 is not stable enough at this time).We've got a lot of super cool features in the works (such as a friend/party system), and we'll be sharing additional info as new features get closer to release. Thank you all for your support!
- DiamondFire Dev Team
