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Testing a 1,000 player Minecraft server with Folia

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Re: Testing a 1,000 player Minecraft server with Folia

#41
post #12

Interesting to see how they scale a multiplayer big world. Not many systems try to do this. Improbable, Minecraft, Second Life, and Roblox are the ones I know about. Almost everybody else shards. Any other examples of really big shared seamless multiplayer worlds?

Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies, and Planetside

Ultima Online is sharded. Biggest shard is ATL, with maybe 150 players.[1]

Planetside 2 got up to 2000 or so, and may hold the record for a seamless land world MMO.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/ultimaonline/comments/tr1r6j/uo_atl...

Re: Testing a 1,000 player Minecraft server with Folia

#42

On a side note, I've been trying to figure out how to write Java mods for server-side vanilla Minecraft server, but there is basically no documentation at all. Is it safe to say that this isn't possible? Which flavor of minecraft server is the best documented to write mods for, Spigot?

Its paper nowadays :) https://papermc.io

Re: Testing a 1,000 player Minecraft server with Folia

#43
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVE Online

I believe they shard each sector and their inability to sub-divide their hosting on a sector level has created their infamous timewarped battles?

Pretty much. Once you got to 1500+ fleet fights it would originally just drop lots and lots of player actions on the floor as could not cope.

Time Dilation came in to run at 1/10 game/real time ratio, allowing fights to scale better and be a less frustrating experience for participants

Re: Testing a 1,000 player Minecraft server with Folia

#44

What about ZGC?

Somewhat orthogonal to what Folia is doing, and already explored by the community. Folia's main trick is to dynamically split the "main game tick loop", where logic and actions are processed into several threads based on location. Such that processing for say a mob farm in the South of the map does not impede on processing for a hopper based storage system in the North West etc. This doesn't solve the everyone's at o…

Is there a solution for the Jita problem that isn't just beefing up the server?

Re: Testing a 1,000 player Minecraft server with Folia

#45

On a side note, I've been trying to figure out how to write Java mods for server-side vanilla Minecraft server, but there is basically no documentation at all. Is it safe to say that this isn't possible? Which flavor of minecraft server is the best documented to write mods for, Spigot?

There's a bit of a distinction in the Minecraft world between "mods" and "plugins". Even though to the outside perspective they're the same thing, the terms are used for two different communities/ecosystems, basically.

"Plugins" are for bukkit-based compatible servers, like Spigot and Paper (and Folia, with some modifications).

"Mods" are more for forge, sponge, etc servers.

So you can kinda pick which direction you want to go. But the Paper project has a ton of API documentation and a few Github repos to even get you started writing your own plugins. The Discord server has a dev help channel with people happy to answer any questions.

The Sponge team has a similar setup as well if that's the route you'd like to go.

Re: Testing a 1,000 player Minecraft server with Folia

#46
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

EVE Online

I believe they shard each sector and their inability to sub-divide their hosting on a sector level has created their infamous timewarped battles?

Yes, so in that sense it's sharded. In another sense it's all one server, as you can warp between different systems and meet all the players there in the game. Everything is run on one giant server.

Not sure how it is now, but back in 2014-2016 you could inform them of big battles ahead of time for a specific system, at which point they would, in their own words, reinforce the node (moving that particular system to its own allocation of resources). This often was the difference between being able to duke it out in an epic space battle or wait for the system to load while everyone lagged to death.

Re: Testing a 1,000 player Minecraft server with Folia

#47
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where things start to get a little fuzzy. Mineplex had the most concurrent players but they weren't on a single individual bare metal server or single server jar instance. A lot of large "servers" like Mineplex, Hypixel, etc run a proxy which sits in front of a bunch of other servers. The concept of a "server" can have many meanings in Minecraft so it gets fuzzy quickly. I'm not sure if this 1,000 person test…

Ha, nice, thanks. I've never looked into this deeper than accepting the fact that it's doable. Now, if only I had the spare time to look into how did they shard the servers...

We tend to call those "networks", when they have a bunch of different gametypes and servers interconnected. At a smaller scale of a few hundred players it's pretty easily handled by off the shelf software like Velocity for the proxy and a few server instances running Paper.

You generally want good performing (not VPS or "cloud" instances) but you can run a bunch of different worlds and have people with cross server talk, the ability to warp between worlds, etc. Most of the larger networks and nearly all of the smaller networks use a variation of this kind of model.

Re: Testing a 1,000 player Minecraft server with Folia

#48

On a side note, I've been trying to figure out how to write Java mods for server-side vanilla Minecraft server, but there is basically no documentation at all. Is it safe to say that this isn't possible? Which flavor of minecraft server is the best documented to write mods for, Spigot?

There are three competing standards right now:

- Fabric (and Quilt), which uses a mixins system, a really flexible modding API that can do client and server modification

- Paper (and Purpur, Pufferfish, Folia), which is similar to the old-school Bukkit/Spigot ecosystem and supports an intuitive API for server-side plugins. If you're aiming for >30 concurrent players you really need the sorts of performance patching that Paper comes with out of the box, or some custom-developed equivalent to it.

- Forge, which is kinda a general purpose modding API, good for heavy client+server modification like FTB packs

I'd love to green-field everything in Fabric, but the ecosystem is not quite there yet for more serious server setups.

Re: Testing a 1,000 player Minecraft server with Folia

#49

On a side note, I've been trying to figure out how to write Java mods for server-side vanilla Minecraft server, but there is basically no documentation at all. Is it safe to say that this isn't possible? Which flavor of minecraft server is the best documented to write mods for, Spigot?

There's a bit of a distinction in the Minecraft world between "mods" and "plugins". Even though to the outside perspective they're the same thing, the terms are used for two different communities/ecosystems, basically. "Plugins" are for bukkit-based compatible servers, like Spigot and Paper (and Folia, with some modifications). "Mods" are more for forge, sponge, etc servers. So you can kinda pick which direction you…

Are any of these choices restricted in their existing or likely future compatibility with where Microsoft is taking the game?

My understanding is server admins will spend money on mods / plugins. Are there any server types more likely to garner paid license or plugins?

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