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Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

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Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#71

Post by Sylos »

csallen wrote: post #49
synchronise wrote: post #42

This is nice, but considering the animosity the modding community receives from official channels I'm really surprised why FOSS Minecraft clones that specifically focus on mods, like MineTest, haven't taken off comparatively. https://www.minetest.net/

I see this sentiment a lot on HN. I know nothing about Minecraft, but I'd be surprised if the factors at play here are any different from other situations where "superior" FOSS clones fail to overtake the original closed versions: Network effects. If Minecraft is a multiplayer game whose fun is largely derived from sharing your experiences with others, then a new and "better" version isn't really better at all if it'…

So, if you've ever gone onto the Google Play Store and saw some Minecraft clone that worked far too well for what anyone could possible hope to invest and make money off, that's almost certainly a rebranded Minetest-version.

And there is a lot of these. It would not surprise me, if Minetest had already silently overtaken Minecraft in terms of active players.

But yeah, this doesn't solve the awareness issue. These users don't know that they're playing Minetest. Even if they were playing the official Minetest Android build, they'd not know that this is the real thing.

And people interested in modding Minetest might not learn this either, so never reach the platform in the first place. Some of these rebranded Minetests bundle mods, icon packs etc., so you at least have an audience.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#72

Post by Sylos »

voltagex_ wrote: post #47
synchronise wrote: post #42

This is nice, but considering the animosity the modding community receives from official channels I'm really surprised why FOSS Minecraft clones that specifically focus on mods, like MineTest, haven't taken off comparatively. https://www.minetest.net/

Could language choice play a part in it?

I think, that's rather an argument in favor of Minetest.

It's true that Java (which the original and mainly modded version of Minecraft is written in), is widely known and generally allows to write functionality relatively quickly.

Minetest uses C++ for the engine and Lua for its modding API. C++ is much better suited for a game engine, due to being closer to the hardware, using less RAM (due to not being executed in a virtual machine), not having a Garbage Collector, which halts the universe for a short moment every few seconds and is the main-reason for Minecraft still having lag spikes after years of optimizations, and then miscellaneous things like array boundary checks, but also just more game libraries being available in the C++-context (Minetest for example builds on top of Irrlicht).

But Lua for the modding API is the critical part. Minecraft doesn't have a modding API. To this day, you still mod the original Minecraft by decompiling its code (which is relatively easy thanks to Java), making your changes as a professional developer at Mojang would have to make them, and then bundling your modifications up and releasing it to the world.

As a result, it's just really not easy to do at all and mods regularly break when Mojang releases a new version.

With Minetest's modding API on the other hand, it's really easy to just quickly make some changes. I for example always disliked that digging stone gives you cobblestone, which you then have to smelt in order to get stone again. Changing that took me less than 10 minutes with no experience in Minetest modding.

All I had to do, is to find the right file and then in this section:

    minetest.register_node("default:stone", {
	description = "Stone",
	tiles = {"default_stone.png"},
	groups = {cracky = 3, stone = 1},
	drop = 'default:cobble',
	legacy_mineral = true,
	sounds = default.node_sound_stone_defaults(),
    })
...change the Drop from default:cobble to default:stone.

I then also added in a crafting recipe to convert stone to cobblestone, if I ever want to use cobblestone. Again, find the right file and then just add this:

    minetest.register_craft({
	output = 'default:cobble',
	recipe = {
		{'default:stone'},
	}
    })
Just copy-paste an existing crafting rule and change it to your needs. This is something I could have pulled off (and would have had huge fun with) even before I really knew what programming is.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#73

Post by astrodust »

iscoelho wrote: post #26
astrodust wrote: post #3

Great work, but...Java? Is this for compatibility with mods? One of the biggest pain points with running a Minecraft server is the onerous memory requirements. Java needs a ton of memory to get out of bed, and after that it's not always pretty with how the allocator works. That's fine on an enterprise server with 64GB of memory, but not cool when you're paying $10/mo. per GB of memory for what should be an inexpensiv…

Memory has never been a problem for MC servers. Speaking as someone who's personally been involved in some of the larger servers -- Pain point has always been CPU usage on a single threaded level. Nowadays servers are optimized to the point where we squeeze all of the performance out of the CPU and run multiple instances of MC in order to accomplish that on a multi-threaded level. You can easily hold 500 players conc…

My point is 16GB of memory isn't a whole lot if you've already got server hardware and a place to host it, that's really low-end these days, but it's a small fortune if you need to pony up $5-10/GB. per month for hosting services.

I've been able to host Minecraft instances on my own hardware over a cable modem feed, and on a VM provisioned within a machine I fully control, but it's just not economical to do cloud-wise.

I do miss the days when the server component of a multi-player game was pretty lean and non-intrusive so you could run it as a background process on pretty much anything that had good bandwidth.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#74

Post by astrodust »

fabian2k wrote: post #14
tylerhou wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10 per GB? That’s insane -- basically what high end DDR4 costs upfront.

That's not unusual for small VMs, but at the point where you need a serious amount of RAM it's drastically cheaper to rent dedicated hardware.

You can get 32 or 64GB dedicated servers for around $80-110USD per month, so that is technically more economical, but that's a lot if you need to commit to that just to get a good deal per GB of memory.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#75

Post by bgrohman »

mastercoms wrote: post #69
bgrohman wrote: post #61

I just tried setting up a Glowstone server on a Linode instance. It was a very quick experience. However, I ended up switching to the official Minecraft server jar provided by Mojang when I realized that Glowstone doesn't support the "allow-flight" option for flying in creative mode :/

You should be able to fly in creative mode.

Take a look at the Glowstone configuration docs here:

https://github.com/GlowstoneMC/Glowstone/wiki/Configuration-...

It says for the "allow-flight" option that the default is "false" and it's "Currently not implemented."

I tried setting it to "true" anyway, but it still didn't work.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#76

Post by Teckla »

astrodust wrote: post #73
iscoelho wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memory has never been a problem for MC servers. Speaking as someone who's personally been involved in some of the larger servers -- Pain point has always been CPU usage on a single threaded level. Nowadays servers are optimized to the point where we squeeze all of the performance out of the CPU and run multiple instances of MC in order to accomplish that on a multi-threaded level. You can easily hold 500 players conc…

My point is 16GB of memory isn't a whole lot if you've already got server hardware and a place to host it, that's really low-end these days, but it's a small fortune if you need to pony up $5-10/GB. per month for hosting services. I've been able to host Minecraft instances on my own hardware over a cable modem feed, and on a VM provisioned within a machine I fully control, but it's just not economical to do cloud-wis…

Perhaps you use a cloud VPS provider that over-provisions customers.

Until recently, I ran a Minecraft server on a $10/month DigitalOcean Linux VPS. (I consider $10/month dirt cheap.)

It ran very smooth. No lag or performance hiccups.

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#77

Post by brianwawok »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #48
brianwawok wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, and a airplane flight from Chicago to New York City caries a premium on the price of a gallon of gas. Please tell me how this means it is a reason to complain about the price of airline tickets?

Your analogies do nothing but confuse the issue, AWS is vastly more expensive that comparable connectivity and reundancy with colocated, dedicated or even virtualized instances in comparison to other providers, at all but the smallest scale, especially in terms of ram.

You are comparing apples to oranges. Look at the list of services you can spin up with 1 click at AWS. Now go to your little rent-a-server provider with a $49 a month server. Tell me how you add RDS / multi region LB / S3 / IoT / blah blah blah with 1 click to your $49 rent a server?

Re: Glowstone: open-source Minecraft server

#78

Post by tylerhou »

brianwawok wrote: post #18
tylerhou wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$10 per GB? That’s insane -- basically what high end DDR4 costs upfront.

Yes because buying a stick of memory from Best Buy is ALMOST the same thing as hosting a sever in a cloud data center with an slice of an entire computer, redundant power, redundant network, and administration baked in. It is soo insane that every time we have a post, and someone compares hosting a computer in their garage with AWS. This may be a new record though, comparing hosting with buying a stick of memory at b…

Yes, because when I'm hosting a server to play Minecraft with a few friends I need redundant power, network, and administration. It's not as if I could just go to Best Buy, buy another stick of RAM, shove it into my decently spec'd desktop, port forward to a self hosted server, and get 99% of my necessary performance for a tenth of the cost (over a year of operation). Plus I don't have to return the RAM to Best Buy after I'm done with it.

Because casually hosting a Minecraft server is ALMOST the same thing as hosting a SaaS which needs 5 nines of reliability.

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