Hello again – It’s time for another quick update in what we’re doing here on the network.

Firstly, theres some slightly more substantial news: We have chosen to close our CTF server, and from today you will no longer be able to play Capture the Flag on our network.

This decision was made since so few players use the server, and it was just starting to look rather old. We will be keeping the maps from it incase we decide to repurpose them. Removing CTF will allow us to give more resources towards other servers.

So, as normal, heres some of what we’ve done since the last post:

• We ran a scavenger hunt. Lilly and Kori have been working hard to get that all setup over the past month – so we really hope you’ve enjoyed it. We’d love to know what you thought of it – so please post your thoughts and suggestions on our forums.
• We have changed our chat, to a much cleaner look. As this is still quite new – it’s quite likely we’ve missed a few things, and you may notice a few errors or bugs with the chat. Please let us know on the forums.
• We’ve also made lots of small fixes and tweaks to several servers.

What we’re still working on:

• Gladiator. We’re working on fixing it – and in the process just making it a tad bit better. More news to come soon.
• We have started to work on a new hub server! We’d love to hear your opinions, so please post any ideas in the suggestions forum!
• And, we have started to setup a third SniperTown Server, which will serve as a test server for some changes to the game. Again, more information to follow soon.
• Project Z. I know that doesn’t give you much information – but we’re nearly there with it – and it’s all new and fancy! (and may give tokens) 😀

I’d also like to make a side note: Thank you to everyone who has filled out our survey – we’re going to be going through all the responses soon, and your feedback will really help us to know the right direction to go in! If you haven’t filled it out yet – you still can: Click Here

So just a quick update to inform everyone of some changes we’ll be making to the server chat. Just so you don’t panic when it all looks different 🙂

First of all, we’ll be shortening the rank prefixes, and removing the prefix for the default rank. The colours will remain largely the same.

We will also be replacing the red [x] with a small flag symbol, which will be moved to the start of the message.

And the final change in this is that we’ll switch to using the full server names, in place of S, C or PS in the chat. This should hopefully make things more accessible to new players.

Below are some example screenshots of how the chat will look:

General Chat Format

New rank prefixes

A bit of random chat (as an example)

These changes will be implemented on Saturday 16th September.

Well, here we go again; a brief overview of everything we’ve done in the past couple of weeks:

What we’ve done:

• Fixed /sort
  Supporter, VIP and VIP+ members can now use /sort to sort their inventories and chests once again. Unfortunately this doesn’t work on shulker boxes yet.
• Corrected some permissions issues affecting Modreq (/report) on Creative and PureSurvival
• Cleaned up our block logging database.
• Parkour!
  Yes, theres now a parkour course in the hub, which was built by our wonderful build team.
• And, of course, we’ve seen the return of regular build contests – starting with the scaled up contest. We’ve also started to offer world downloads for the build contests – these will be posted with the contest results. You can see the upcoming contests at any time by visiting the contests page on our website

What we’re still working on:

• The scavenger hunt, which opens in a few weeks time, is currently being setup. xLilly and Kori are leading on this, and are bringing some interesting new features to it.
  Many players enjoyed the scavenger hunts we originally ran, and this new one is both bigger and better. (and harder to cheat on). Keep an eye on the forums and in game announcements for more information.
• The website guides. We’ve now got a homepage for the guides section, which you can see here 
  This page is still work in progress, as are most of the individual guides. Please bare this in mind as some information may be incorrect.
• We’ve started planning for a new /warp examples, which will cover a range of building themes not just the modern style we currently have.
• Changes were made to how our JVMs handle garbage collection, the aim to be to keep the TPS more stable. For those who didn’t understand that first sentence, work is being done to reduce overall lag on the network, with the main focus being on the survival server.

As always, we welcome your suggestions, comments or any issues you wish to raise, on our forums.

So, this is gonna be a new thing. We’re going to try and somewhat regularly post updates as to what things we’ve been working on or done behind the scenes.

Being this is the first one, I’m going to cover a lot of the more major things over the past few months, as well as mentioning some other projects we have lined up, and projects we’ve had to put on hold.

So, first off: What have we already done?

• Updated to 1.12
  • This doesn’t seem very major to most people, but unfortunately this takes an immense amount of work. Our network has 18 servers in it, as well as the proxy server. Each one has to be updated (or setup to allow the newer protocol) and this takes time. A huge part of the problem with updates is sadly that they break things.With the server having been around for over 4 years, we have a range of plugins we use, and some of them are no longer developed. In those cases we have to either find a replacement or if we can’t find one – we then have to fix it ourselves. When we have a dedicated developer this isn’t too bad – but either way it’s a lot of work.
• We overhauled our mod request system, kinda.
  • Having had 1.12 break the Modreq plugin we had used, we decided – after it was quickly patched so we could get by – to completely overhaul the whole thing and develop our own.I will say this was mostly Scarabcoder doing the work here – and actually making the plugin. But the process did involve the admins working out how we could improve upon the existing system, as well as testing it to find bugs and issues.And then, of course, we had to roll this new plugin out across the network. So that’s uploading it and setting it up on 18 servers.

    The change didn’t make a lot of difference to how you create and check tickets, but it did have a large impact on how we manage and deal with tickets.

• We rebranded.
  • This was a big deal. When I say we rebranded, we decided to change the network’s name – and remove “LogistiCraft.” A lot of people probably didn’t notice much of a change, but basically – we had to go round every server of the network, the website, teamspeak and forums and change anywhere that said LogistiCraft.This was done to try and remove some confusion. We never really needed to have a separate name for the minigames side of our network – and so we changed it.Changing the network to being entirely “ClownerCraft” also meant we changed the way the paid ranks work – and now Supporter, VIP, and VIP+ activate on every single server in the network.

    I mean, a lot of this should really have been this way in the first place, but sadly we do have to spend time fixing old mistakes.

• We fixed some exploits with WorldEdit on the creative server.
• We (well, I did…) wrote an announcer plugin to replace the individual ones on each server. So now announcements go out to all servers simultaneously.
• The server’s also recently seen a lot of tweaks and updated to the way it shows up in the multiplayer screen. You can now see some detailed information about the number of players on by hovering over the player count. (This was a custom written plugin).
• Theres also little things like Global Join/Leave messages, and the first join message. It’s just nicer for everyone to see.
• The website homepage has been changed, with a new description of the server. We also improved the accuracy and performance of the status widget.
  • A lot of the changes to the website recently are with the aim to help improve how we promote the server. Theres been a lot of optimisations made to try and boost our search rankings, and make the site load faster.
• And naturally, theres been plenty of little tweaks and fixes, or restarts because of crashes.

Things we’re currently working on:

• For a while now, we’ve been trying to create a guide to several things on our website. We started this a long time ago (with the rocket editor guide), but it’s not been a high priority.We now have a few completed pages, but we’re not ready to launch the whole thing
  Some of the completed guides:
  • Guide to Ranking Up
  • Rank Guidelines
  • Economy

  We eventually plan to add several pages to help improve buildings, as well as a library of interior object designs, and guides for most of the plugins we have on the server. We already have a guide to the Rocket Editor (VIP Perk). If theres something you think would be useful to have in this set of pages, please do post a suggestion on our forums

• Replacing the shop plugin.

  1.12.1 broke ChestShop, so we’ve been trying to get an alternative working. We’ve been testing a few different options and think we’ve settled on one now. Just checking that theres no unexpected problems with it before we put it live on the server.

• A new server. Yeah, we don’t want to announce this one officially yet. We’re really not far off from finishing it though.

Future Plans

We have a few other minigame ideas that we plan to eventually make a reality, along with some additional servers. We’ll announce these when we’re ready.

Projects on hold

Sadly, there are some things we’ve put a fair amount of time into that we’ve been unable to finish for various reasons. More recently the loss of our developer has meant we’ve had to shift our focus to working on projects which do not require custom plugins.

• Carnival. A lot of you may have seen that name before. We announced this server quite some time ago. It’s a very custom plugin heavy concept, and so it’s development has been slow.We had put more time into this recently, and with the help of the build team – most of what it needs now is plugins being written.

  If you don’t know – carnival is in essence a funfair, with working rides and attractions. So far we have a ferris wheel, and two rollercoasters that work, and a number of other rides built and waiting for plugins.

  You can have a look at some pictures of it as it stands now:
  

That about sums it up right now, theres probably the odd thing I missed.

~Clowner