As some of you might know, i have become a little erratic with my time on the server, splitting my time between different projects and such. I think there are others who have also begun to migrate to other servers as well. I have decided to stay at Athion, but have seen how other servers are drawing more players simply because they have better plugins to aid builders. For example Hypixel Build Teams /decor command opens up a custom gui with pages of different player heads and banners used for building, sorted by category. Clicking on one spawns it in the players inventory. HPBT also has a custom armour stand gui, which allows builders to have floating text or hanging weapons in their builds. Ravand.org also has some amazing plugins, including the everything on everything plugin, which removes the restrictions on where and how you have to place blocks, allowing for floating trapdoors,signs, and ladders. I am positive that Athion would have a much greater pull in the building community if it offered more opportunities for builders to detail their builds and express their imagination
These are some nice suggestions, as we have a new dev team and are pumping out changes and features faster than ever to make us what Athion originally aimed to be, these could be additions down the track to add after our core features are updated.
@TheYoungWolf52 in regards to what other servers are doing. As much as I love minecraft I've never really much cared for what other people are doing. I generally make content that I think will make people have fun and enjoy our experience. That said I do have some responses for what you've posted. We're apparently already considering adding the ability to set a plot flag for pausing physics inside of your plot. We've already added an insane amount of features that we've not really announced clearly just yet as we're making sure to finish polishing up all of our ranks again. We've recently deleted 2000 lines from our permissions database. We've been working on optimization mostly in the last few weeks which has left a few things disabled. As for Player heads if you may already have access to /i 397: 3 1 player:Khobbits there was a PMC post that showed you a list of about 500 player heads you could use as in game tiny blocks. The moderators on PMC swept it away it seems, so I've taken the liberty to undelete it from the internet. I've printed whats left of the post into a PDF which I've included into this response. I hope that it helps to an extent. I would LOVE if someone would take the time to make a thread for us on here that we could sticky, containing our own list of heads we use. Along with instructions for using player heads as blocks. Armor stands are fun but we're making a build server not a Barbie Doll play funhouse, we don't really need to pose for the camera. Letting the builds speak for themselves is our goal primarily, so sadly its not a high priority of ours to throw on Armor Stand stuff just yet. But it may come [SoonTM] . We wouldn't be a creative server, if we weren't creative enough to make our own features that accomplish our own goals. We would just simply be, yet another plots server that has creative. I hope that my dry sense of humor doesn't come off abrasive, as it was intended to be more entertaining than anything. Cham~
http://www.athion.net/community/threads/heads-you-can-use-as-blocks.917/ i'm not done but i'm running out of time to be on so i thought i'd just post this and work on it more later
"Armor stands are fun but we're making a build server not a Barbie Doll play funhouse, we don't really need to pose for the camera. Letting the builds speak for themselves is our goal primarily, so sadly its not a high priority of ours to throw on Armor Stand stuff just yet. But it may come [SoonTM] ." Armour stands are not just for dress up. They can be used to add amazing details to your build. For example, an invisible armourstand holding an axe can make it look like an axe is embedded in the tree stump, or it can hold weapons touching fences to make sword racks ect. It would also pay to take note of the fact that that database was removed for a reason. The name changes of 1.8 have made the majority of those heads unreliable. Sorry to break it to you Graven, i know you probably worked hard on that database, but a lot of those have turned to steve heads. My point is not to make us a copycat server, but what sense is there in denying our builders privilages that give other teams/communities an edge. If you truly want Athion to be "A New Age of Creative Minecraft" you should take into account the fact that the server cannot be behind ofther creative servers in any aspect. Just a side not, as an easer mechanic to add, the addition of a dynamap would be very helpful once the openworld opens up, as it would allow builders to easily scout for spots. The plugin is already programed, so all you would have to is install it.
Dynmap is great but we are already pushing the boundaries of our storage as we're on SSD's it will be hard to find space but we are considering this. It doesn't sound like your priorities are our priorities so much but if your poll works out and you can convince us to bring one or more of your plugins by all means. I'm only doing this for the community not to boost my ego so if it works out we can do it. My biggest priority is stability and letting people learn how to build.
Development priorities are as follows 1. core features and new additional core features 2. stability 3. flare (thats what the armor stands fall under atm) Also dynmap is a huge, laggy and clunky plugin... it may come in later on but don't count on it as we have many plugins and even with our large server resources (minor ssd space) dynmap would end up being larger than these plugins combined within a month or so.... on one of the servers that created Athion our dynmap was 2-3 times the size of the actual mapfile (which was 80gb) with the minimalistic settings kept. The ideas are great to have, but as a dev team we need to get core features and stability out before fancey decorations, we are not saying it wont happen, it just wont be at the top of the development list.
For a second I thought I actually saw chamunks saying athion has a dynmap but he didnt and i was just reading to fast. :P
I mean if I can find an easy way to host it externally then I'm fine with it. I'd prefer Overviewer because it just looks better and is higher resolution. That said I know it will be tricky. The problem is with all of the worlds we have and the backups that we need to maintain. We actually already ran out of disk space once, about a week or two ago. So not only do we basically need a secondary server for this but we need a new place for the web site. This also includes the main Athion website which keeps having intermittent database issues because of the hosting company we're currently riding on.
I know these features arent a prority, and wouldnt mind going w.o them but i just wanted to make sure the community knows they exist
I believe someone just queued AST into the latest template for the server. I don't know if its implemented for the next patch or if any perm nodes have been added for it. But that is potentially going to be a thing. Dynmap is less likely.