I've turned my eyes recently back to Hexxit Minecraft, the adventure themed Forge modpack. It can be recalled for a short time in January I hosted a Hexxit server but was never satisfied with how I maintained it.
On a typical Minecraft server, you'll mostly find that you administrate through the Multicraft (or a MyMCAdmin) web control panel. Shoot, I generally run one myself since it provides easy, visual cues and structures most of us can easily work with. But running a Hexxit server through Multicraft just never launched the jar file and gave me errors about the server not being writable. Multicraft aside, I really wanted to host a Hexxit server to play with some of my friends. I mean... most of us can admit by now that playing singleplayer Minecraft is just balls. I love singleplayer games far more than multiplayer, personally, but Minecraft is really a social game and best played with other people.
Hosting the server, then, entailed brushing up a lot on using the Linux shell through SSH. Easy enough it was merely going to the directory I kept the server files in and using a bash script that's nearly identical the the Craftbukkit launch script I mentioned in a previous entry to start the server. Back then, though, I had two problems which was 1). My VPS only had 1gb of memory which was painfully nowhere near enough to run any sort of Forge server with and 2). because of this lack of memory the server tended to crash a lot and could not resume normal gameplay until I manually started the server again. This was tedious, as it needed done several times a day, often the crashes occurring while I was at work and could do nothing about it. When the server was actually up, though, we all had a blast destroying Battle Towers and finding rare treasures and artifacts which could never be found in vanilla Minecraft. God, it was so much fun but the maintenance was just horrifically tedious and I ended up just stopping the server with no warning and went back to running a plain-jane craftbukkit server nobody played on or knew existed
More recently, though, I got a little anxious to start playing Hexxit again and bought the extra gigabyte of memory my server needed, and found a marvelous script which ran as a cron job every five minutes to see if the server was running and if not, started it. Boom--there was the automation I needed. The server's back up, and I have no intention to bring it down again unless for maintenance.
I'll tell you something that sucks about Forge, though--it's completely deplorable in terms of admin and protection tools. For most of the server's life-span I used ForgeEssentials which has always been a beta project which as best I know has been abandoned. It essentially had all the things you'd want for protecting your server and making things easier for your players with home and teleportation commands, but the problem was that none of the modules worked all that well or fell flat in features. Imagine Worldedit where the only things you could do was set positions and //setblock--that was more or less what you got with ForgeEssentials' Worldcontrol. Or setting permissions on a group over and over which are never applied. I kept it light on what I allowed players to do with FE since it was very easily broken.
I had heard about MCPC+ which was essentially everybody's dream server that ran bukkit plugins and loaded forge mods. I had always been skeptical and wasn't interested in using something that clearly promised too much and couldn't possibly deliver, but I was dead wrong. For one thing, my server was still essentially just a modded vanilla server, and it was still inefficient as fuck. The lag was often painful and drove me to lower the chunk loading as low as 8 chunks which made a noticeable change, but not enough so to completely eliminate server lag. My server pings usually between 120-200ms, which is horrible. MCPC+, however, is built on Spigot (which is in turn built on Craftbukkit). Spigot generally well-optimizes gameplay and chunk loading while maintaining compatibility with Bukkit plugins. Taking a chance I set the launch script to use the MCPC+ jar, and relaunching the server it generated what I was so anxious to see--a plugins folder.
Runing MCPC+ and keeping the chunk loading down low has increased the performance on my Hexxit server so much, it's unbelievable. If I could only find something like EntityGuard that worked on Craftbukkit 1.5.2 to keep mob spawning to more conservative amounts, I'd say the performance would be comparable to running a standard Craftbukkit server.
Having access to use Bukkit plugins on MCPC+ server is invaluable and has allowed me to install a proper permissions plugin, the Essentials plugin we all know and love, Lockette for privating containers and doors, the light but powerful Prism for block logging and what I thought would be the strongest addition to a Hexxit based server--MCMMO, the skill and leveling based RPG plugin.
I'm a happy man at the moment. Things like this really give me a sense of accomplishment and pride knowing how to take so many individual pieces and put them together to form my favorite all time game. And I know I probably shouldn't be too proud--I mean, it's not like I wrote the bash script, assembled the modpack, or coded the bukkit plugins or forge mods but when I think that back in the summer of 2012 when I bought a game on DinnerWarrior's recommendation, spawned in an ocean and drowned my first day playing it's weird to think that now I'd be running my own Minecraft server and co-administrating another with Robotnikman.
So yeah--I've got the fantasy and adventure based Hexxit Minecraft server if you're into that. Grab the technic launcher and select the Hexxit modpack--it'll download and patch all the files for you and you can connect to my server at revisionistfables.com. I've changed the permissions around enough so that you're good to start building and playing without waiting around for me to add you to the player group.
If you're into things like guns, FPS minigames, vehicles, and challenge dungeons or if you want to build in or look at YouChew's old worlds from the old days you can drop by Robotnikman's server at the-outpost.org. The spirit of Minecraft is still strong on YouChew and we've a loyal group of regular players we'd love to add you to.
On a typical Minecraft server, you'll mostly find that you administrate through the Multicraft (or a MyMCAdmin) web control panel. Shoot, I generally run one myself since it provides easy, visual cues and structures most of us can easily work with. But running a Hexxit server through Multicraft just never launched the jar file and gave me errors about the server not being writable. Multicraft aside, I really wanted to host a Hexxit server to play with some of my friends. I mean... most of us can admit by now that playing singleplayer Minecraft is just balls. I love singleplayer games far more than multiplayer, personally, but Minecraft is really a social game and best played with other people.
Hosting the server, then, entailed brushing up a lot on using the Linux shell through SSH. Easy enough it was merely going to the directory I kept the server files in and using a bash script that's nearly identical the the Craftbukkit launch script I mentioned in a previous entry to start the server. Back then, though, I had two problems which was 1). My VPS only had 1gb of memory which was painfully nowhere near enough to run any sort of Forge server with and 2). because of this lack of memory the server tended to crash a lot and could not resume normal gameplay until I manually started the server again. This was tedious, as it needed done several times a day, often the crashes occurring while I was at work and could do nothing about it. When the server was actually up, though, we all had a blast destroying Battle Towers and finding rare treasures and artifacts which could never be found in vanilla Minecraft. God, it was so much fun but the maintenance was just horrifically tedious and I ended up just stopping the server with no warning and went back to running a plain-jane craftbukkit server nobody played on or knew existed
More recently, though, I got a little anxious to start playing Hexxit again and bought the extra gigabyte of memory my server needed, and found a marvelous script which ran as a cron job every five minutes to see if the server was running and if not, started it. Boom--there was the automation I needed. The server's back up, and I have no intention to bring it down again unless for maintenance.
I'll tell you something that sucks about Forge, though--it's completely deplorable in terms of admin and protection tools. For most of the server's life-span I used ForgeEssentials which has always been a beta project which as best I know has been abandoned. It essentially had all the things you'd want for protecting your server and making things easier for your players with home and teleportation commands, but the problem was that none of the modules worked all that well or fell flat in features. Imagine Worldedit where the only things you could do was set positions and //setblock--that was more or less what you got with ForgeEssentials' Worldcontrol. Or setting permissions on a group over and over which are never applied. I kept it light on what I allowed players to do with FE since it was very easily broken.
I had heard about MCPC+ which was essentially everybody's dream server that ran bukkit plugins and loaded forge mods. I had always been skeptical and wasn't interested in using something that clearly promised too much and couldn't possibly deliver, but I was dead wrong. For one thing, my server was still essentially just a modded vanilla server, and it was still inefficient as fuck. The lag was often painful and drove me to lower the chunk loading as low as 8 chunks which made a noticeable change, but not enough so to completely eliminate server lag. My server pings usually between 120-200ms, which is horrible. MCPC+, however, is built on Spigot (which is in turn built on Craftbukkit). Spigot generally well-optimizes gameplay and chunk loading while maintaining compatibility with Bukkit plugins. Taking a chance I set the launch script to use the MCPC+ jar, and relaunching the server it generated what I was so anxious to see--a plugins folder.
Runing MCPC+ and keeping the chunk loading down low has increased the performance on my Hexxit server so much, it's unbelievable. If I could only find something like EntityGuard that worked on Craftbukkit 1.5.2 to keep mob spawning to more conservative amounts, I'd say the performance would be comparable to running a standard Craftbukkit server.
Having access to use Bukkit plugins on MCPC+ server is invaluable and has allowed me to install a proper permissions plugin, the Essentials plugin we all know and love, Lockette for privating containers and doors, the light but powerful Prism for block logging and what I thought would be the strongest addition to a Hexxit based server--MCMMO, the skill and leveling based RPG plugin.
I'm a happy man at the moment. Things like this really give me a sense of accomplishment and pride knowing how to take so many individual pieces and put them together to form my favorite all time game. And I know I probably shouldn't be too proud--I mean, it's not like I wrote the bash script, assembled the modpack, or coded the bukkit plugins or forge mods but when I think that back in the summer of 2012 when I bought a game on DinnerWarrior's recommendation, spawned in an ocean and drowned my first day playing it's weird to think that now I'd be running my own Minecraft server and co-administrating another with Robotnikman.
So yeah--I've got the fantasy and adventure based Hexxit Minecraft server if you're into that. Grab the technic launcher and select the Hexxit modpack--it'll download and patch all the files for you and you can connect to my server at revisionistfables.com. I've changed the permissions around enough so that you're good to start building and playing without waiting around for me to add you to the player group.
If you're into things like guns, FPS minigames, vehicles, and challenge dungeons or if you want to build in or look at YouChew's old worlds from the old days you can drop by Robotnikman's server at the-outpost.org. The spirit of Minecraft is still strong on YouChew and we've a loyal group of regular players we'd love to add you to.