Plugin fun

So here is the list of Plugins I started with

• CoreProtect_2.0.9.jar  - logging and rollback
• EssentialsAntiBuild.jar - spawn protection
• EssentialsChat.jar - chat made better
• Essentials.jar - good general stuff for admins
• EssentialsProtect.jar - more essential goodness
• EssentialsSpawn.jar  - more essential goodness
• FreezerPlus.jar - freeze player in place - good for stopping grief
• Modifyworld.jar - disallow world modification
• PermissionsEx.jar - permissions system
• scriptcraft.jar - javascript interpreter

To which I need to add 

• Mutiverse-Core
• Multverse-signportals
• Mutiverse-Inventories
• TimeLock
• PlotMe
• lwc or Lockete for lockable chests?

 And of course the appropriate permissions

 

 

Design goals - a rambling list

My notes about what I'm thinking of for a server design and how to accomplish it...

Kids spawn in super flat world for programming

• portal to easy survival (plugin Mutiverse-Portals)
• portal to creative (plugin Mutiverse-Portals)
• portal to world_of_the_week (plugin Mutiverse-Portals)

Programming world

• superflat  (Plugin - Multiverse-Core)
• peaceful  (Plugin - Multiverse-Core)
• timelock to noon (plugin : TimeLock)
• no animal spawn on, but allow if the students do it (Plugin - Multiverse-Core)
• no monster spawn  (Plugin - Multiverse-Core)
• spawn protected for a radius out (Plugin - Essentials)
• turn off TNT? (plugin - not sure yet)
• students can’t modify the world except for using script craft (Plugin - Modifyworld)
• give each student a plot to build on (but not really enforced as it can’t really be) (possibly plugin PlotMe)
• allow multiple homes for easy teleport (Plugin - Essentials)
• Perm list (Plugin - PermissionsEX)
• allow flying (plugin Essentials?)

 

Easy Survival

• normal survival
• separate inventory (to stop creative mode smuggling) (Plugin - Multiverse-Inventories)
• locakable chests (hopefully)
• cool starting biome (get a cool seed)
• spawn protect for a radius out (Plugin - Essentials)
• portal back to home world (plugin Mutiverse-Portals)
• disallow use of javascript (perms)

 

Creative

• normal creative
• separate inventory (Plugin - Multiverse-Inventories)
• plot system (plugin Plotme)
• portals back to home world  (plugin Mutiverse-Portals)
• timelock to noon  (plugin : TimeLock)
• allow fly - (creative by default?)
• allow javascript

(should this just be the programming world?)

 

World of the Week

 

• grab an exceptional world off the web and upload it to showcase builds
• possibly stop world modifications so kids can look around, but maybe not

Onward to Javascript

So in investigating programing minecraft with Python I discovered several things.

1. The python extensions don't seem to understand the concept of worlds.  So doing anything in a Multiverse based world doesn't work out.
2. The python extension doesn't seem to pass on who is running the program to the MC server (to be fair this seems to happen in Scriptcraft as well).  So my idea of running a PlotMe based creative world and only having the kids run programs on their plots won't fly.
3. The gent over at ARGHBOX, seems to have made his blog private. (Update : It's back now, but it was private for several days and I was worried it wouldn't come back as a resource)

 

With all that going on, I started to revise my ideas for my class, and stumbled upon ScriptCraft.  It seemed well developed and active.  Plus it already had a beginners guide - The Young Person's Guide to Programming in Minecraft, and a google discussion group.

So after a bit of reading, I think this is a better, more developed way to go.

Naxx and why I probably won't finish it

The odd non-Minecrafty post, because I play/played Hearthstone and used to like it.

Not sure what I was expecting, but for me Naxx  is becoming brutally hard with each new quarter.  The bosses all appear to be puzzles that need just the right deck with just the right initial mulligan or you're screwed.  You can't take a reasonable deck and a bit of skill and expect to get through. 

And really, bosses with 75 health and 2 mana 4 damage.  Really.   Thats like taking a kids soccer team to pro match and throwing them on the field with a hearty "do your best".   And the pro team are also cannibals... who eat their opponents... and they all have tazers...  

All thats left is the crying.  What a bunch of turtle toss.

 

Here is my current strategy for the military quarter..

- try

- die lots

- look online, find deck that might work

- realize I don't have the legendaries to make the appropriate deck

- try a variant anyway

- die more

- realize I just paid $20 for a game that frustrates me more than anything other than work.

- go play Minecraft

- feel better

 

Seriously though.  Naxx is hard and really makes a statement that Blizzard has forgotten about new players entirely.  Lets look at a new player.  The grab the free game.  The play for a couple of hours unlocking all the heros (which I believe is a prerequisite for getting into Naxx).   The have all the base cards, and possibly the equivalent of say 5 extra packs (25 cards).

They plunk down their hard earned $20 for Naxx expecting to have fun.  And then they lose every match and can't complete the first quarter.  Not fun at all.

Honestly Blizzard, what do you think your new player experience of Naxx will be?  I get that the game needs to be more balanced for the higher level players, but you're alienating all the casual and new players right away.  Bad form.

 

 

 

 

 

There in lies madness...

So this all started because my son liked to play minecraft (and to be fair I did too) and I wanted to teach him some programming.  Combine with the fact that we homeschool, and there are always kids looking for learning opportunities and down the rabbit hole we go.

My goal here is to try to document how I went about setting up a minecraft server and teaching some homeschoolers to program.  But its also about minecraft in general, and its from the perspective of someone with an IT day job.  

Lets set the stage as it exists at our start in 2014.  Minecraft has sold something like 54 million copies.  Since 2009 its been an unstoppable force or nature in the gaming community especially with kids.  Popularity is MC's greatest asset but also fair detriment from the server/admin end of things.  Its easy to find people talking about MC.  Its hard to wade through all the non-technical posts to find actual content you need to run a server/admin.

Having played more than I'd like to admit, I purchased a Mojang Realm to see what a persistent world would bring to the game.  And it definitely was worth it.  It was MMOish, but with a much smaller community.   Having it always on meant that people would play asynchronously.  So everyday was a neat exploration into what someone else had been working on.

But then I started to want for extra features (my kingdom for a lockable chest), and saw that running my own server would be a path to get what I wanted.

Plus I wanted to get onto programming.  I knew that the Raspberry Pi version of minecraft had a python API, but try as I might to get my son interested, the Pi proved too slow and the Pi version too feature limited to keep his attention.

There was however this great resource -

ARGHBOX

A whole curriculum based around programming python.  All it needed was API hooks to the full version.  And that, it turns out is 

Raspberry Juice