Hello all,
Happy 9th anniversary of GunColony! This year’s celebration will be a grand one consisting of multiple updates. In Part 1, we are starting with significant backend overhauls, a new web-based scoreboard feature powered by the Place engine, as well as a new weapon modification. Many of our new backend features are unprecedented innovations that have never been done by any other server in the world.
We are also releasing a lot of news at the bottom of this blogpost, including the announcement of the Place Blog, a series of devblogs detailing the development and plans of the Place engine. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements to come during the rest of our 9th Anniversary celebrations!
WEB-BASED LIVE SCOREBOARD
An often-requested feature for GunColony is an improved scoreboard that not only provides detailed stats of all players in the game but also can be conveniently viewed even after the game is completed. This feature is finally here!
Powered by the Place Engine, you can now access a webpage containing a personalized scoreboard for both the current live match as well as up to 9 past matches in the lobby! It currently supports PVP and Competitive lobbies.
This feature can be accessed through the /pvp scoreboard command, which can be used at any time.
You can also access the scoreboard link directly from the PVP map voting GUI.
This feature is currently meant partly as a tech demonstration, as it has a temporary UI styling (originally intended for a blog layout) and simple text-based layout that will be improved upon later. We also plan on adding a QR code to the webpage to make it easier to open it from different devices. However, we expect that this feature should already be quite useful for veteran players of GunColony.
The webpage display technology behind this feature is extremely versatile. Uniquely, web pages in Place are directly rendered by game servers themselves rather than hosted on a separate service that accesses an intermediary database. A new high-throughput networking system leveraging technologies like Kafka and REST APIs ensures that the system supports a network of multiple game servers, any of which may create webpages that can be accessed from the same public endpoint. These innovations mean that we can create a vast array of web-based features that interact live with gameplay far more efficiently than any other online game in the world, and will let us provide interoperable web UIs between Minecraft players and those on our future standalone game.
NEW SHOTGUN SLUGS
Slug rounds are now available to three auto-shotguns that normally fire 6 buckshot pellets per shot. These weapons include the M1014, SPAS-12, and Origin-12. They currently have the same stats as slug rounds for pump-action shotguns but may be rebalanced later.
NEW PLAYER DATA HANDLING
The Place Engine has been updated with a new player data loading system that offers increased reliability and represents another step in the migration of GunColony to the Place Engine.
- When transferring between servers, your player data is now fully saved and unloaded in the previous server before being loaded on the new server
- This fixes several past long-standing data inconsistency issues (without any code changes needed), and vastly simplifies the handling of player data in the Place engine, as we can now assume that player data has successfully loaded for all online players at all times
- Players will now be kicked if the Place engine fails to load your player data. While we believe that this is unlikely to happen as we have tested the Place player data system with staff members in the past months, there is still a chance that player kicks may occur in some circumstances. If you are kicked due to a Place player data error, please report this issue to Discord so that it can be fixed!
- This is a necessary step in order to begin the gradual migration of GunColony player data to the Place engine in future updates
NEW SERVER TRANSFER EXPERIENCE
The above updates to player data handling has come with the addition of a new experience when you transfer between gamemode servers on GunColony.
- A BungeeCord reconnect plugin has been added and used in a “makeshift” manner to facilitate the new transfer functionality between servers
- Players are now “kicked” from their previous server when they attempt to transfer to another server, allowing the previous server to unlock the player data (this is not possible by default on BungeeCord)
- The reconnect plugin will keep the player connected to the BungeeCord proxy while the new server processes the login request and obtains a lock on the player data
- Players will see an animated title screen when attempting to switch servers
- If the new server does not succeed in time in logging in the player, the player will be reconnected back to the previous server. Should this also fail, then the player is disconnected from the entire network
- We believe that we are the first Minecraft server in the world to implement this system, and it should drastically simplify our player data handling going forwards
PLAYLIST CHANGES
- Finally removed the Easter scenario playlist
OTHER CHANGES
- Removed the Hunters variant of the Aviation playlist due to lag reasons
- Reverted the behavior of the Barrage Crossbow due to lag reasons
- I guess we finally figured out how many projectiles the server can handle before lagging…
- Improved the Place command system to properly hide admin commands used for testing from regular users
- Apparently RNG decided that LastStand should be the endless map this week, idk it’s useful to note
BUG FIXES
- Capped the max mob count contributing to wave countdown acceleration calculations when killing a mob to 0.8x the arena’s normal mob limit.
- This fixes the bug where waves were spawning too slowly at high waves in an Endless match due to mobs failing to spawn due to the mob cap
- Fixed a major issue in the Place world system which caused entities to be added to the wrong internal chunks and resulted in frequent console spam errors when entities moved between chunks
- Fixed a major issue in the Place world system where entity removals can cause a concurrent modification exception during world ticking
- Due to the new player data loading process, many inconsistencies around legacy systems such as quests when switching servers should now be fully resolved
THE PLACE BLOG
We are only 1 year away from the 10th anniversary of GunColony, when we plan to release a version of the server primarily powered by the Place engine. In the past year, we have worked steadily towards this goal by developing several crucial systems in the engine including players, player data, worlds, blocks, entities, commands, Minecraft interoperability, and the web framework. This progress was shared through the “Development Progress Update” sections of regular GunColony update logs.
A few months ago, we first demonstrated the Place engine’s potential for improving GunColony’s gameplay by developing a block damage and destruction system based on the engine. We mentioned then that we are approaching a stage where more updates powered by the Place engine are forthcoming that will make much more visible impacts on GunColony. This time has finally come: today we have finally demonstrated the unique advantage of the Place engine by unveiling a web-based live scoreboard feature unprecedented in any Minecraft server. With the confidence that we now have the capability to readily create unique and impressive features in GunColony to show off the Place engine, it will now be a lot easier for us to actively share our progress on engine development.
In light of this advancement, we are announcing a new devblog series called the Place Blog, which will aim to document our progress on the Place engine and all of its derivative games and server features. It will live on the GunColony website for now, but we plan to create a dedicated place for it in the near future as we increasingly prepare for our eventual goal of attracting an audience outside the Minecraft Java community.
NEW UPDATE SCHEDULE & THE FUTURE OF GUNCOLONY
This anniversary coincides with my graduation from university. With much fewer unpredictable variables in my life, I will have more consistent time to work on GunColony. As a result, I have decided to adopt a more frequent update schedule containing smaller but more frequent updates, including more regular limited-time events, playlists, and quests. I will also aim for more timely addition of content created by our staff team, as well as greater community inclusion in the design of new seasonal content from now on. The goal is to make up for my inconsistent schedule in past years and make the day-to-day gameplay of GunColony more exciting for regular players.
The graduation has also given me a reason for deeper contemplation about the long-term future and goals of GunColony from a personal and business perspective. In summary, in an extremely contrarian approach to the rest of the games industry, I believe it is best to aim to keep the project entirely independent by continuing to work on it part-time, and radically prioritize interests of the playerbase over any short-term personal profit motives. I will shun profit-maximization in favor of community trust and the fundamental avoidance of conflicts-of-interests, two invaluable traits that cannot be bought with money and that I believe are central to the long-term success of the project. You will be able to read more about my stance on GunColony’s plans in the very first blogpost in the Place Blog, due to release in the next couple of days. In the meantime, the “Message from the Server Owner” section of the GunColony homepage has been updated accordingly with a focus on the upcoming standalone game.
