StarQuest #7: The Good Old Days
Originally posted on Jul 7, 2014
Sorry that this took so long. I've been out of town / working a lot the past week or two and haven't had a chance to write.
We opened the server on October 28th, 2013. We had quite a rush of people that day and I was very happy to finally have a publicly released server. I didn't have much time to rest, though, as over the next few weeks several bugs popped up that I had to fix still.
The next month or two were the happiest of my days as a server admin. We were a fairly successful medium-sized server, I knew nearly all of the players, and there wasn't much for me to do besides fix the occasional bug or two and write new features. I used to have a couple hours of free time in the evening sometimes, and I would just go on the server and ask the players what new feature they would like today. They would suggest something, or I would think of something and ask them if they liked it, and then if they did I would go code it. I usually chose small things that weren't hard to code, so I would make them in about an hour and put them on the server before I went to bed. Some examples of things that came out of those days are turrets, Jane, torpedoes, and movingpart. This period was also when we began to plan the Age of Steam server, which at the time was known only as Project Vapor.
As most server owners do, I spent a good bit of time trying to recruit more people to the server. Because we have a pretty unique server concept, I came up with very outlandish schemes to try to get attention for SQ. Those schemes include trying to get Hypixel to buy the server and also private-messaging the content admin of Minecraft Forums, Sacheverell, asking him to come visit. Nothing came out of either of those schemes, or any of the several other schemes that I attempted, but I wasn't sad- I hadn't really expected them to work. I was very surprised when, a couple of weeks later, I got a message on skype from a staff member saying that Sacheverell was online on the server. I logged in and he was thankfully still there (I had been making cookies and thus not at my computer). He told me that he had been playing on the server with an alternate account for a few days and absolutely loved the server. He was going to post us on the front page of minecraft forums in a week.
That was awesome, and I was very happy. I never thought it would actually work. However, I knew that our current server code would not be able to support large quantities of people- we estimated that the maximum we could handle was about 40 without lag.
Since the beginning, we had planned to eventually switch our server to use BungeeCord if it got to be very large. BungeeCord is a proxy system that allows multiple minecraft servers to work together and pretend to be one server, allowing for theoretically infinite players on a single server with no lag. We knew it would be a difficult project, so we didn't start on it until we had to. But, suddenly, we knew that we were going to have a massive increase in our playerbase in a week. And Bungee was several months of hard development away from being ready. Nevertheless, we began developing hard, and had made substantial progress by the time the post went up on the front page of Minecraft Forums a week later.
As soon as the post went up, the Great Noobrush began. Our slot count was set to 100, but we quickly had to reduce it to 60 because the server kept on crashing from lag. Even at 60, the server crashed often and there were many lag-related bugs. The server was always full, 24 hours a day, and the staff worked full time getting new players out of the ship spawners and teaching them to fly.
The server stayed full for about two weeks, then began to slacken off. I had to change my habits and not come on the server anymore. Previously, I could come on the server and hang out with players and chat, but after the rush there were too many people all asking me questions at the same time and it was impossible for me to stay on for long. Instead I devoted my time to coding our BungeeCord system.
Next time: how many tries does it take to make a BungeeCord?