Weeknotes — the Mega Edition Part 1. — Mine Mania
These weeknotes are spanning THREE weeks not one, as the last couple of weeks ran away with me — lots of practical work and sessions with kids and parents for MineMania, general day to day Creative Active Lives work, decorators in and single parenting. The first part of this weeknotes will be about the tech side of setting up our Minecraft Server.
In the second part, I am going to talk about a strand of this project that I wasn’t anticipating, that has become increasingly more important and the need is evident and asked for: real world support to access Minecraft (AND other online gaming) — the real world support takes the form of mental health support and adaptive tech for people with physical requirements to access gaming — Weeknotes Part 2 will follow separately.
Tech Stuff
I’m going to start the weeknotes with a team photo! Meet our tech team, Smudyy, ri4N, bomxacalaka and Reddust9.
They spent a week setting the backend of the server up and coding bespoke systems. It needed a lot of planning first — to decide on the structure of the server, what each element would be used for, deciding on RAM allocation, and how all the different elements would ‘talk’ to each other. We had a meeting that ended up being TWO HOURS long before we called it a day and we still had more to talk about!
Not having a tech background and only playing Minecraft, not understanding the coding in the background, I didn’t realise just how much was involved and how complex this would be. The team did an amazing job in setting it up, and communicating to me how it worked and what they were doing in a way I could understand.
Check out our structure and RAM allocation — we have managed to keep it just within our limit of 64GB! Amazing 😀 Thanks r14n for getting this set up!
To make it easier for kids to play mini games, we decided on a queueing system so kids could select to play, and then go and do something else while waiting for other players to join, and once the minimum number reached they would all auto join.
Smuddy designed a bespoke communication system called Kerb — an event distributor server software — you can check it out on Github
Reddust9 designed a bespoke chat logging software called CLog, you can see it on Github here
We have allocated roles, with Smuddyy coding, and on mini-games, r14N developing the Hub, and bomxacalaca designing a Redstone world for tutorials and builds.
We will be using a plugin called Plot Squared for our Redstone world, to allow players claimable protected plots with infinite redstone resources to work with.
r14N was working on ideas for the Hub after we brainstormed design themes — the main theme was colourful, we love cats, quirky, slightly bonkers. Here is r14N’s update:
Smuddyy also created a Discord Bot which fulfils an important safeguarding function. We have set up a Discord server that parents will be invited to. The Discord Bot pulls in information from our Minecraft Server — a message appears in the Discord to let you know what players have joined or left each server (with their player head displayed!), and also any in-game chat messages are displayed in the Discord server in real time. So parents can always see who is there and whats being said at any time.
I created the initial setup for the HUB, installing all the necessary plugins required for the HUB to run ready for building to take place next week. I created an initial design for the HUB layout which is to be discussed with the rest of the team. I also generated some images using Dall-EAI that can give us ideas on what the HUB should look like based on my design and the features discussed.
Challenges!
We need a fixed IP address to run the server reliably, so I have ordered a new broadband package which includes this — installed Thursday. This means we will have to do some work on the old and new server to get it all running, its a massive faff but I’m grateful to have my amazing daughter Reddust9 who is dealing with all of this making it all work again. Couldn’t do this project without her!
Setting up adaptive tech. God it’s a nightmare. Its SO confusing. There are so many different types with different compatibilities. Settings and cables and an overwhelm of options! It’s all so expensive as well.
Would love any comments on what we are doing or suggestions, please feel free to start or join a conversation below!
Originally published at https://www.minemania.co on November 21, 2023.
