Benie's General Blog

Since removing that Minimap, I haven’t had a crash or a freeze. Can’t believe it was just that one mod causing mass chaos in my map.
I think I owe Notch a big apology for blaming him due to this. But the best way to “apologize” is to just play his game and pretend nothing happened (until this Friday’s update).

Because of this, my confidence with the game’s stability has grown enough that I’m focused on my transit system again. I’m dubbing it the W2MTS (World2 Mass-Transit System). Lame name, I know. I can’t even think of a name for this map.
I’m been trying to work with the Minecart Mania! mod. Has been nothing that has to do with “easy”. Making the cart move is piss easy, but getting it where it glides into a station.. that’s a different story. The braking system of Slow Sand and Gravel is not as reliable as I want it to.
A full speed cart on steroids (several gold blocks), blows through a Slow Sand block. Yet if you place about five, it will bring that cart to a screeching halt.
If you take away one, it’ll ignore it and keep going like they don’t exist.
These brakes aren’t acting like brakes! They need to apply friction which increases drag, which SAFELY slows a minecart down.
I could just be overdoing it on the gold block boosters. If that’s true, more tedious trial and error is needed. Meh..
I liked it better when I just had AUTOCART.

Having an automated transit system is out of the question (if this was Gmod however, that might change). I would have to tear up the whole thing (or start another map) and redesign it with redstone wires, and I have no idea where to start.
Friend of mine tried to help me but saw the design flaw I had with the stations.

Speaking of station design, is the reason for the entry title. I have been trying to find pictures of every Metro Station in the world, namely in Washington D.C. Thought of using Fallout 3 to get me the pictures, but I don’t have it setup. And the way that game has the Metro, it looks like it was made back in the 1960’s. Nothing like what the Washington Metro looks like to this very day.
I then got GTAIV installed. Found out I could use my latest save game to unlock all the islands to fully take the LCM (Liberty City Metro).
After installing the needed addons (the InGame Trainer and shit) to make it day, I went on the system and did my best to get pictures.

Using what I got, I tried to implement them into my map, and made something that nearly looks like one of them, with Minecraft’s … “blocky” size restrictions. It’s not too bad, and it actually looks like a station.

Yet I’m feeling these stations are kinda.. pointless. I mean, I get all of this setup, and for what? You can’t really DO anything at most of these stations.
Take Cactus Park Station. It has a bunch of cacti that don’t do anything except kill idiot farm animals that walk into them and get stuck.

There’s other failed ideas for stations. Reason of having them in the first place is to connect my House to them, using this thing.
Big Mine for example; there isn’t anything “big” about it. It’s just the first mine I encountered when I spawned in World2 for the first time. And Canal Station. It goes to a canal I made based from Wurm. Woop-tee-fucking-doo.
I am planning to redo the canal to be more like one seen in Wurm, though.

The only station with stuff you can do is Mountain Lake.

All I want is a safe feeling of backing up what I hold dear.
World2 means the world to me right now. Yet no one seems to feel the same on minecraftforum.net. Why?

It started yesterday, in SSP. Had some crashing/freezing and in one part of the map, it kept on freezing. Viewing it in MCEdit showed “Malformed chunks”. I finally got it fixed, but the fixing caused that area of the map to be very slow in SSP. I was forced to, yet again, restore the backup of my server’s map to fix it.

Later, I was in the Tavern (angry’s Skype chatroom), giving hell to one of them who was trying to “help” me kill off my addiction to Alpha. It wasn’t pretty, and he “won” the conversation. *sigh*

Since then I focused on getting some kind of automatic map backupper. I found this Minecraft Backup Tool. It makes a backup of the map you’re playing on, but only when you shut down the client. This isn’t good enough for me.
If it backed up the map when I quit to the menu, THEN it would work for me. Since that’s how I use INVedit.

Last night, angry tried to get me into iCraft. It still uses the old Minecraft Classic (it’s like Mynecraft with added features). Instead of caring about this thing, I told him what was going on in Alpha and what I was trying to do. He mentions using Subversion (aka SVN), then told me to send a Remote Assistance Invite to try to get it going.
At the time I didn’t know how in the hell it was going to work, but I did it anyway. He got control and started setting it up.

Later on he tried to get my server’s map into SVN. However, it kept on saying that it was “corrupted or unreadable”. And couldn’t do it. Instead of knowing he did his best, I said “Thanks for wasting my time…”. Why? I waited two hours past my bedtime for him to do this, and he couldn’t do it.
This morning I apologized to him via my phone’s voice messaging.

Today, I went to minecraftforum.net, and asked if there’s any auto map backup tools. To the time of this blog post, the only reply made was by me to bump it… from Page 3.

That thread about the Minecraft Backup Tool, I posted that if he could change the code to doing a backup when the user goes to the main menu instead of quitting the client. Someone else posted but it wasn’t for my response. Something about putting the .zip generated by the tool into Dropbox. And the author replied to HIM… ignoring/didn’t see my reply.

And my last straw was to go to the main discussion page about Minecraft, and asked if it was possible to do a Subversion. I was hoping someone would respond of having done it and would tell me how.
AGAIN… no response!

I swear, they are ignoring me for hating Notch. I have my fucking reasons why I hate Notch.
All I want is my map to be secured from corruption! Is that too much to ask?! 🙁

I feel like this update has ruined my happiness. Notch stole my enjoyment. Angry told me that Notch isn’t forcing us to play his game the way it is designed, and I have to believe him because he’s usually right.
It just feels now that ANY update out there is going to fuck my map in the ass. I cannot AFFORD another corrupt map chunk!

There is so much… fear. I’ve never been this scared of a game in my life. But I have “what if” fears.
What if it happens again? What if I’m not able to fix it? And then rage fills my mind of how uncaring people are.
If those god damn fucking authors of those two map backup mods were more active, I wouldn’t be like this.

They don’t see or care how serious this is to me. Then again, maybe I’m just overreacting. I’m hoping it’s that Minimap mod, but Nick isn’t having an issue with it. And he’s got like 30+ mods running.

I actually gave myself a migraine from all the stress.

I really felt like I was going to break down, until I decided to search one more time, in a different location. And a lone tool showed up. Minecraft Backup Assistant. I looked it over, and noticed it didn’t have automatic backup, yet didn’t force the player to shut down the client to back up.
I tried it out, made a few backups and saw it runs along side the client. I could backup whenever I need/want to.
I tried simulating the event of a serious map corruption (like the one that happened) by deleting a shitload of blocks and causing utter chaos. Then I tried restoring the previous backup.
It froze for a minute, then very slowly unzipped the map and put it into my saves, restoring the damage I did. For the first time in two days, a grin came over my face.

Seeing this, I knew I finally found what I’m looking for. The restore speed could be better, but.. since I’m not on my server, I don’t really need it to go fast. The peace of mind is all I ever wanted.

Now I can stop whining to Notch and my friends. I’m sure they have grown sick of it by now. It is stupid to be so stressed, over a game.

Facepunch is now being reported as an “attack page” by Google.
And this is the report: http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?client=Firefox&hl=en-US&site=http://www.facepunch.com/

That’s funny because it worked just fine yesterday. I wish I knew what caused it.
What’s worse is if I just shrug it off and say “ugh.. this site isn’t an attack site! Let me in!”, it rams “OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING THIS SITE IS DANGEROUS!!!” down my throat. So I have no way of knowing what the fuck happened.

The site is still up, and somehow I managed to finally get in. Found out I wasn’t the only one, yet the admins weren’t telling us to not panic or anything like there was really nothing to worry about.
I knew there wasn’t anything to worry about. I know Facepunch is the land of bannings and shit, but never an attack site.

To this time, no one really knows what caused it. Some have actually reported getting a virus from Facepunch, but most of those claims turned out to be false.

I haven’t had an issue, and usually my copy of Avast! can sniff out a virus a mile away. Plus I have Adblock Plus and NoScript.

If it wasn’t for these helpful addons I don’t know what I would do.
HoverBoat isn’t working (even with this “update” it black screens when you try) and I found an alternative to Autocart. Gold ore/blocks simulate boosters, and slow sand simulates a brake.

I’ve been trying to install this alternative into my tram system. To do this requires lots of testing. The cart speed has to be perfect.
There was one thing that kept me from even trying it. I kept thinking that the author of the mod is still using Notch’s default minecart code for cart movement.
Was concerned about spawning a cart on a track, having to push it to a gold block to get it moving, and then the cart will take off without me.
The author made it where all you have to do is get in the cart, and wack it to give it a little push. The velocity is just enough to get it through the station and over the gold block to zoom it away with me in it.

There’s been two setbacks to installing the boosters along the routes of my tram.
1. Placement. Spacing of the boosters is required for the cart to proceed as fast as it does with Autocart, until it hits a station. I thought at first to space them between 15 blocks, but even that seems too much. I could turn every block of the tram into a gold block if I wanted to, but that would be wasting blocks.
2. Reliability of SSP. I can’t say if it’s the mods or the big patch we got, but SSP just seems.. quite unstable lately. For one thing, I never had Minecraft Alpha crash/freeze on me, but it has. Some were preventable, but these recent ones are more… unpredictable. I was hoping these client crash issues were only isolated to SMP, but it seems to be affecting both.
3. Longer save/load times. This has to be related to the patch. Nothing I can do about it.

Still, I’m trying not to let this bug me. This tram idea finally has a purpose now, and it’s my duty to make sure I complete it.

(RockPaperShotgun also agrees that Notch failed horribly with this patch)

When people are cheering Notch and saying “he’ll fix this.”, I have gone out and said “He wants SMP to die! He’s purposely making it unstable!”
This update IMO is probably the bomb of failed updates. As they say, 3rd time’s the charm. It sure is, to make SMP USELESS!!

Two of the biggest and serious bugs above all others have to do with boats and minecarts. Trying to go through a chunk freezes the game. Also, minecarts can only be destroyed through fire or lava. It’s quite obvious that these two would have issues from the start.

There’s also one that has nothing to do with these two things. Right clicking with a bare hand causes a client crash. It’s just as serious as the other two, but is more preventable.

Yet these issues aren’t stopping the majority of server owners from updating. I don’t know why. But it’s not like they can do anything about it.
I wouldn’t be as pissed as I am now if it wasn’t for Gmod. But, when running it, then restarting, it causes a CHKDSK to scan my Steam folder for drive errors, everytime.
I don’t know what’s causing it, and no one can tell me how to fix it.

I know this game is still in Alpha, but… ugh. I wish it didn’t act like it was. Sometimes it pretends it’s a finished product, then WHAM! A bomb of an update hits SMP.
Some say we are “Alpha testing” it. This is bullshit. For as far as I can remember, I never heard of a game/program requiring you to pay for it to “test” it.
And the only reason I paid for the game was when I was still in Minecraft Classic, so I can save my games again. It wasn’t to play what would become Minecraft Alpha.

IMO, Minecraft Alpha (aka /indev/) should had been a closed beta. But I guess Notch didn’t want to deprive us of it. Now I feel like a jackass for getting sucked into it. And it was angry that “made it worse” to break myself completely out of Alpha.

Since I can’t do jack shit about this update, I’m thinking of just going back to SSP. As long as INVedit is updated and HoverBoat is updated, I’ll be good. But then comes the feeling of being pissed off because SMP now has a feature to remove those fucking troll animals!
Also, hey0’s Server Mod finally got updated. But I feel it’s pointless since SMP is borked.
There’s also this “Pressure Plate Tracks” addon that claims it has the fixed code for AUTOCART.
One bad thing is no more Daylight plugin. But that’s even with SMP. Since all plugins for hey0’s mod are broken now.

I can still continue this tram idea of mine. Now I know sometime in the future (hopefully), SMP will be from an unstable, shitty version… to a bug-free and lag-free version. Where my tram idea will finally have a purpose of its existence (my guests will love being able to use the tram to get to all the cool places in my map). And even maybe have a section of track that goes into The Nether, and out in a far away area (one of Nick’s ideas).

But right now, that’s not going to come anytime soon. I keep forgetting that SMP is unfinished (though it seems to pretend it is finished), and heavily bugged. But this is actually a good thing. Nothing gets created without a shitload of issues first.
Take our own Earth. It started as a molten ball of rock and hell raining down on it. Fastforward billions of years later, and we call it home.

What I’m trying to say is yes there is going to be more and more bugs (and I’m just talking out of my ass here because if it wasn’t for INVedit I would be utterly pissed at Notch). I don’t give a shit if he frowns upon it. I’m not going to be fucking bored here!
This is MY game. MY GAME! MY WAY TO PLAY IT! If I want to use INVedit and HoverBoat, and AUTOCART to make my Tram idea a success, then it’s my right!

You hear me, Notch?! (of course you don’t because if you ever read my blogs you would lose half of your IQ)

I want to start this off with Gmod before I nearly piss my pants in joy after what I read on Notch’s Blog tonight.

I’ve been working hard on that thing I mentioned in the previous blog entry; the “SubmarBoat”. A boat that thinks it’s a sub.
After several failures of trying to get the damn thing to sink correctly, I have had to settle with Toggable Wire Hoverballs. Still, it has alot of remaining bugs. Mainly weight distribution issues.
When it sinks, it acts like as if the two doors I installed to act like airlocks are weighing it down. Yet it seems just fine in boat mode.
I used to know a guy along time ago that was an expert in subs and making them sink properly. He knew how to weigh the props and make it work everytime. Since I don’t even remember the guy, I have to ask what I don’t want to. Facepunch.

I knew if I posted it in the Contraptions section, they would tear it apart and find every fucking flaw with it (mainly design and effort) instead of actually helping me make it work as-is.
But I posted it anyway, hoping some kind soul (like the guy that helped me) would show up and say “Hey, I can help you. Fire up a server and I’ll get this thing working correctly.” Alas, that did not happen and the comments were fast and harsh. It’s gotten so bad I’m not even bothering looking in it anymore.

What’s worse is they’re treating me like a noob. One guy even had the nerve to tell me the basics of welding, which I already know. I have been playing since 8.3b.
Still, it hurts. I worked so hard and they tear it up with their dickish comments. Telling me to build something that “doesn’t take 5 seconds”. I did expect it, but I still hope for SOME FUCKING COMPASSION!! D:
Now I don’t know if it’s even worth working on it now. It’ll never be good enough for those fucking elite jerks.

To tell you the truth, it does suck. Here I’m trying to make a boat that also works like a sub, and I’m thinking too much SUB and not enough BOAT.
But the thing is, I’m trying to pull away from the “PHX Sub” and “PHX Boat” designs that have been overused for months. I want something fresh. Something new. But nothing is coming to mind!
Everytime I get an idea it’s either based from the PHX Sub and/or PHX Boat. Very frustrating. Such as making a PHX Boat and having a hatch over it for sub mode. But again, that’s recycling old, overused ideas.

.
.
Now for the good shit. While in Facepunch I went to the Minecraft thread and noticed the second poster pasted news from Notch’s Blog, about an “Update coming tomorrow”. I noticed this was posted TODAY (which is yesterday at the time of this blog entry).
I checked out Notch’s Blog and sure enough he mentions an update on the 9th (yesterday) coming on the 10th (today). Why Wednesday, though? Doesn’t he release updates on Friday? I think this is the first time he’s done it.

Before he talks about what has been fixed/added, he mentions about some mods being on a thin line with him, and he frowns upon them.
However, he means mods that alter gameplay to give you an unfair advantage (there’s only one I know of that does, but it’s for SSP. INVedit.).
Yet he also mentions “useful” mods like the bridge mod might be allowed into the game.

But what’s important is why I made this. Minecarts will finally be bug-free in SMP! This is GREAT, great news for my tram lines. Finally it’ll have a purpose for its existence. Also, boats will be seen by other players. There will also be support for texture packs, and new menus for it, servers, and single player worlds. It’s almost as if he’s trying to put a little Gmod into Minecraft. More GUI menus.

No doubt though that such a mega update is going to cause mega downtime for minecraft.net. That’s why I need to update early, before everyone else does. Of course this will break all of my mods yet again.

Unfortunally this doesn’t fix the leaf issue with leaves not being deleted when all the wood is removed from the tree.

And yet again it’s putting blame on my GPU. But the issue seems to be isolated only to Gmod.
First time it happened, I was playing around in gm_bigcity with the helicopter, and using a bunch of Hunters as a challenge. Hoping they’ll attempt to shoot down my helicopter, since enemy Combines when you give them an RPG, just get down on one knee while pointing the receiving end of an RPG at your face, yet not firing it.

Me sucking of flying a helicopter killed me more than the Hunters did. And they were efficient when I tried to run back to every helicopter I spawn to.
But one time they killed me, both screens flashed and the colors went all wacky, then my FPS took a shit. Going like 3 FPS or something like that.

Second time (which is more recent), I was working on an idea inspired by something I saw on garrysmod.org. A boat made out an XQM Roller Coaster prop, and HL2 Barrels. I suggested on there that you could add a dome over the top and make it double as a sub.
Several ideas popped into my head of doing something cool, such as making the whole thing round. But I went with a “classic” tube design, but tweaked it alot.

I’m.. sorta happy with how it turned out. It COULD be better but it’s just a prototype. All I want is something that’s like what I’m thinking.
Before I try to make it move, I save it. And I’m glad I did. About ten seconds after saving, Gmod black screens and so does my secondary monitor, but what shows up on my secondary monitor comes back and I get this popup that my GPU’s drivers suddenly stopped working. If I had not saved when I did, my work would had been lost.

So I tried updating my GPU drivers. After going through hell trying to get into Safe Mode and finding out there’s an easier way to do it, I finally got the drivers updated.
Nvidia now has a new GUI for installing drivers. It actually UPDATES your old drivers without you having to do anything. You also have the option to do a clean install, where IT will delete your old GPU drivers for you!
Really awesome. But I still prefer to do it the way I’ve done it before.

So, back into Gmod, no issues for awhile. Except one time both screens yet again flash, yet nothing happens. Gmod stays solid as a rock.
I have no idea what’s causing this. The fact it’s just Gmod that’s having this issue, it could be one of Garry’s updates that’s doing it.
It doesn’t make sense, since back in April when I came back I had no issues with Gmod.

I just hope it stays isolated to Gmod. I’d hate to have to buy yet another GPU.

After I said I had everything going, I told angry, Simon, and Nick they could all join my server.
When Simon tried, he was saying minecraft.net is down, yet it wasn’t for me. I asked angry to try who was busy with something for his server, and said he was stuck at “Logging in…”.
I started to get concerned, and wondered if I should get this non-forced server update (the updated minecraft_server.jar file), but also was concerned it may break hey0’s mod.

Later on I finally tried updating the server by deleting the .jar I had and launched server_nogui.bat. It showed “minecraft_server.jar missing. Downloading…” and sat there for the longest time. No movement from my cable modem. Then it spat out console spam with a bunch of “(Unknown Source)” things. I had a bad feeling what it was telling me and checked minecraft.net… now it’s down for me! D:

For several fucking hours it went up and down. When it seems like it’s “up”, I try downloading the new server .jar and it goes down the second I attempt, like something is blocking hey0’s mod from auto-downloading the .jar.

I had angry monitor #minecraft, who kept on getting banned by the operators by doing stupid shit, while I checked minecraftforum.net for anything.
The users started thinking if this could be another DDoS attack. Quite impossible since Notch paid for protection against that. But maybe the hackers found a loophole they were able to widen big enough to get in (that’s what he said..).
Others say it’s not a DDoS at all. It’s a shitload of people trying to update their servers and clients all at once, and I picked a bad time to update.

A few hours later, angry somehow gets his server up and gets me, Nick, and a friend of his who’s named BluDragon to join him. I instantly notice everyone’s using the default player models, but it still doesn’t answer how in the fuck they were able to use their login names. Even I was able to.
Turns out angry’s server was in offline mode. Now I’ve been in offline mode before, but what I didn’t know is others can still log into it (that know the server’s IP address anyway). Still, I wanted MY server back, and kept whining about it.. but not too much. I didn’t want BluDragon to get annoyed by me. (what’s left of my dragon obsession pictured BluDragon as.. well.. a female blue dragon. And with me being a male and the fact she wanted me to follow her through the hell world angry made, I had to show her who’s the.. heh, alpha male here?)… yeah. Moving on…

Time went on and angry had to go to bed, which required him to walk outside, at midnight, by himself, to his grandparents house. But he was going to make sure I’d “tag along” to keep him company via the chat, to hopefully scare off the fear that he could had gotten mugged and/or raped and/or shot.
He even called me just to hear my voice. And what did I do, I tried to impersonate a Creeper sneaking up behind him going “ssssssSSSSSSSSssss”, but failing horribly due to spit in my mouth.
When he finally got to where he had to go, I once again tried to download that pesky jar. Two seconds after the server started to boot normally.
My eyes got wide and I looked at the console, and saw “minecraft_server.jar downloaded successfully”. I nearly yelled out “YES!! MY SERVER IS ONLINE!!!”, but did it in chat instead.

Angry then asked me to shut his server down remotely, and told me how to do it. So I tried getting into his server and managed with no problem, then did what was told and shut the server down with no problem.
Then I quickly got into server.properties, set online-mode to true and launched the server normally, and logged in with no problem!

Great to see my server again, and be on as Benie in it. I need to get back to work on the new Cliffside station.

Notch has released another Secret Update for Minecraft Alpha, however this didn’t break that many mods as the failure of the Halloween Update.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1486843146/minecraft-alpha-1-2-1-minecraft-server-0-2-3

This one is trying to focus fixing the CPU hogging issue everyone that owns a server is having. The issue causes extreme studdering when people join.
I’m of course also affected by it. The blog entry I made of my CPU overheating is because of the Halloween Update. But since I installed the hey0 Server Mod and ran the file it comes with, my insane studdering has virtually disappeared.

There’s another update planned for next Friday, focused on reducing lag in SMP. Good he’s actually doing something about it. I just wish mods didn’t keep breaking over it.

But after checking through minecraftforum.net, all of the mods I use are surprisingly untouched. Everything that is “broken” can simply be reinstalled back into minecraft.jar to make them work again; including any texture packs.
So before I finally decided to try, I backupped the minecraft.jar that I had and let the client update. Then put the HoverBoat and the PainteryPack into the new minecraft.jar. And that is when I remembered that I should had backupped THIS minecraft.jar incase I get a black screen.
So after some moving I FINALLY got everything situated and fired up my server and the client and saw everything was working as it should; including hey0’s server mod.

.
.
In other news, I had to help angry do some kind of “school project” by building the base of a well in Gmod. Why couldn’t he do it himself, you wonder? He didn’t have a computer that could run Gmod and view Livestream. So I had to take pictures of it and send him the links.
After completing it, I started playing around like old times, and discovered the “new” feature I never dealt with called Toybox. From what I can see, it’s a thing that shows the best downloads from garrysmod.org that you can instantly download into your game without having to shut down Gmod and install it.

The thing is, it doesn’t install into your game. It installs into the toybox folder in your addons. You have to go there everytime to spawn items you downloaded.

I had a video of showing me playing around using a few of the entities you can play with in the Toybox, but Livestream stupidly captured my secondary monitor while my speakers were being recorded.