I totally not know what title i should write down

Context
I am trieng to create a mini game server for Minecraft with the help of Minestom which is a java library toolkit to create servers from scratch

I only have minor changes to tell you because I am working on a BIG thing right now but i don’t know if it is going to work.

But this is what i have added/changed

• Added teleport command to throw my friend around while testing because they are non technical and somehow don’t get used to the commands i made :(
• Made banned players get kicked while in the login phase instead of when they are already logged in
• Added a line shape to my in game world editor
• Now the world editor takes care of worlds itself instead of having to work with messy code working with the default games manager thing i created
• Created a rank. Players can now have ranks like idk “admin” or “dev” & so on. They are only visual in the tab list and everywhere else their names are.

and i had fun with redo/undo feature of the in game editor as you can see in the pictures

I like snow

Context
I am creating a mini game server for Minecraft with a java library named Minestom which allows you to create a server from scratch for Minecraft

Today i continued programming my in world editor. Now you can copy &
paste structures. You also can now create a sphere if you want.

The snow thing in the title is about the newest game. A snow ball fight game where
you have to throw others from the map by throwing snow balls.

Did you know that snow balls are not real projectiles because they can’t hit players. It is a bit hard to make them hit players.

I also made the map for the spleef game & already created a map for
the snow ball fight game.
Both were now made with my own in game editor without additional tools.

CTRL+Z would be useful i think

Context
I am creating my own mini game server for Minecraft withe Minestom,
a java library to create your own server for Minecraft from scratch.

I managed to get the build tool to a moderate level of usability.

You can now:

• select an area
  • over wooden axe
  • over pos1 and pos2 command
• fill selected area
• setblock at specific position
• replace blocks in selected area
• undo & redo actions you did
• give yourself an item you need and don’t find in creative menu like a
  light block or a command block or something

I also made the world where you can edit maps calculate light in the
world.

Thanks to that i managed to fix some light issues i had previously with
my lobby map. Now i don’t have to give all player night vision the
entire time.

Programming a in game world editor because i am too lazy to create server code for axiom or other tools

Context
I am creating a custom mini game server for Minecraft with Minestom
A library allowing to write a java Minecraft server from scratch

Today i spent most of my time building a in game world editor functioning similar to the popular world edit plugin.

My little twist is that i use the new displayblocks Minecraft offers to make a visual appealing selection box of what you selected. It is ridicules how long it took me >:(

I also made it possible to load specific worlds and edit them which are saved after you are finished this way i could for example modify the TntRun game world a bit to my liking while the server runs but these modifications made are permanent. Normally worlds don’t get saved after the mini game is finished.

So now i could just rely on my own tools instead of having to create a world in vanilla Minecraft and then import them into my Minestom project.

I also touched the idea of trying to implement protocol code of Luanti or formally known as Minetest which works with Minestom to let players join through Minetest for people who don’t want to use proprietary applications or don’t have an account for regular Minecraft. But i will probably fail at that task because it is waaay over my head :|

Oh no i forgot to do a post 👀

Well, here we are 16 hours in… again.

Context
I am programming a mini game server for Minecraft with Minestom, a library which allows me to create my own server from scratch. (in java)

Overview of what i have done

• Added a server side console where an administrator can input commands which the server executes with a library called jLine
• Tried making a workflow for automatically building with some success
• Made a Spleef game prototype
• Improved the ghost player system
• Made a ui makeover for chat elements (again again)
• Added some new abilities/commands

Server side console

I have added a console thing where, after the server started, somebody with access to the terminal can run commands as the server with all permissions.

For that i used a lib called jLine to make it just like the consoles most Minecraft server administrators should be familiar with.

The actual hard part was that i had to rewrite some of the code i already have done. For example commands that would only work if they where run by a player needed now to check first if the command caller is the server actually itself.

Actions

I never used github actions or something like that.

So i did the normal thing and created a runner for my own forgejo git instance and build an action without understanding more than 60% of it or even less.

While i did not manage to create a docker build process i managed to create an action which builds my gradle java project with shadowjar and puts all required files into a zip which gets saved to my repo as an artifact file to be downloaded and executed instantly.

turns out it is really dumb to try create an action on an runner which uses podman which uses docker in docker in a container which now should have installed docker inside of that to build an image?
IDK man i have to sleep at some point

Ghosts

I have already made a system letting games make players ghosts who can’t interact with the world around them.
Now i have made it like hypixel does it. Players are getting hidden from all other players. Not by giving them an invisible potion or something. The server lets players disappear by just not sending information about their whereabouts to the other players oh and they are in a survival mode but can still fly. TO NOT LET THEM ESCAPE MUHAHA i am evil or something.

Oh and new commands

I have made small commands which i though would be fun.

hide

Tell server to hide your player account by the same principle as the ghost system.

fly

Enable flying for your player account.

stop

Literally stops the server

help

A help command which tells players all about the commands they can access with their permissions

nickname

Kicks you but after joining again you will be logged in as another account name with the others skin etc. Only your uuid will stay the same to still be able to fetch your accurate permission etc. on the server.

(of course this and most of the others commands on this level are behind permissions and can’t be accessed that easily)

By, by

Hope you have a great rest of a good day!

I am currently on vacation and therefore have to use my Labtop instead of my PC. I already miss him i just tried another linux distro on it :(

Security

Context
I am creating a custom mini game server for Minecraft with Minestom.
A library allowing to write a java Minecraft server from scratch

Security is one of my least favorite thing because it is sooooooooo complicated to get done right but this time it is not about security for protecting the server itself. It is about user security.

Banning

Every public server (sometimes also private ones) need a ban system. I now have implemented one which allows banning players even if they are not on the server by using Mojang’s public API to get the uuid of players with their name. This uuid gets saved alongside a ban time and a reason for the ban to the sqlite database.

The players are also automatically kicked when the writing to the database happens.

Each time players try to connect to the server it first checks if they are banned or not. If yes they kick them instantly again with information for them about how long the ban is etc.

Players get also automatically unbanned if they ban time runs out.

Or an player with sufficiant permissions can unban them over /unban unban <player> manually.

Permanent bans are also possible by telling the server the ban time is 0.

Report system

Players can now report others with a reason. Administrators can then look up all open reports not handled by another administrator. They can view information about the report like who is reported, when is reported, why is reported.

After they have researched if the player actually made something stupid they can react to it and tell the report system to archive the report and tell a reason/a explanation on how/why it is fixed now for future administrator actions to look at.

Chats

Going to a more fun little thing.

Now every player can only chat with other players in the same world/crate/game/whateveryouwannecallthem so that not all players are getting flooded by messages by ALL players of the ENTIRE server.

Auto banning

I also gone ahead and made a system which checks those chat messages before sending them to other players for words from a word blacklist configured in the server configuration. If a match is found the player who send that message gets instantly banned for using a blacklisted word.

This is just basic security from people using bad/horrible words in chat for/with others.

When the system maybe fail to detect something because players are probably starting using cryptic things to express words we also have the report system and the logs made from those chat conversation which can be viewed by server administration.

Let me just shortly re implement everything

Context
I am creating a custom mini game server for Minecraft with Minestom
A library allowing to write a java Minecraft server from scratch

Overview

Yesterday and today i did this here

• Now hard coded values are instead read from properties file
• Made nearly all commands rely on same design in chat to look good
• Players who disconnect also leave queues now automatically
• On shutdown the server actually closes things like THE DATABASE CONNECTION :|
• Made queue reset if players leave while in start sequence
• Made a little game loop system for all games (countdown to start/countdown to end)
• Create auto completion for queue- & permissions command
• Rewrote large portions of the queue and party system

Config file

I now use the same thing for config files the official Minecraft server uses. .properties. It is actually a library provided by java and does not use any other dependencies.

Same design everywhere to feel at home

Mostly all commands now rely on the same design in the chat to make it look more consistent.

Disconnecting players

I have made a event handler for player disconnection which tells the queue and party system to kick this player from their system. Because you should not be in a party with someone who
is not on the server.

Actually handling shutdown now

Previously the server just terminated everything including the database connection :| now Minestom sends my program a signal and i gracefully close database, kick players and so on.

Game loop system

Just a small collection of functions helping with standard game presidia like starting after 5 seconds or sending all players back to the lobby after 10 seconds.

Auto completion

I added auto completion to commands the user will interact with to make it easier.

Rewriting CoDe

YAY my favorite thing. My original code was kind of spaghetti code and now i rewrote large portions which should improve understand ability?

The hardest thing

Probably the hardest thing i am facing with this project is Minestom’s lack of documentation. It has a wiki which only covers the basics. The rest is java doc but many functions/variables are defined like this: this_specific_thing() Does this_specific_thing but doesn’t tell what this_specific_thing is. But thankfully Minestom is open source so i can just look at the source code thought it is a bit hard for me because i am still somewhat of a java newbie.

The first mini game

Context
I am creating a custom mini game server for minecraft with Minestom
A library allowing to write a java Minecraft server from scratch.

Cleaned up on blueprints & crates management

I rewrote parts of the logic of crates (system to manage mini games).
To be hopefully better maintainable.

Tnt Run

I made a first game the classic TntRun. Players are on a floor which
disappears under their feed. There are 3 floors and it is checked who has won.

I also had a bit fun with the light engine at the start (first image)

Jar

I made everything, including dependencies, able to be build into a single jar
with shadow jar.

Docker/Podman

I used my jar to create a Docker image file which takes everything important
from the repo & puts it into a docker/podman image (only tested with podman).

I also made an environment variable that can be set which gives a specific player the highest admin permissions.
So that you don’t have to mount the container & manually change add a player to the permission table of the SQLite database in it.

Ghost system

I also made 3 functions to implement a basic ghost system for when games want to get rid of players from the game.

And an readme

I added a README.md to my repo… with some text about how this thing works and breaths.

Procrastinating with design over function

Consistent chat UI

So today i made a consistent chat design for different parts of the server. Except admin tools those still need to get a makeover.

Queue upgrade

Furthermore I added a bit of UI for the queue to tell players how full the queue is and how long it will take to start.

I also made the queue wait for a few seconds before actually starting to give other players to join if the game can start but also works with more players.

terrain loading screen

This was such a paaaiinnn i didn’t find any documentation that is up to date. After some digging i found out the Minecraft client shows users the loading screen for change worlds if the dimension is changed NOT THE WORLD THE DIMENSION so i made a dimension… again a bit painful because docs are kinde not existing? But… i guess the source code is enough docs :).

The reason why i wanted a loading screen on client side when changing worlds is to hide some ugly chunk glitching that happens sometimes and hopefully not to confuse the client too much about in which world it actually now is.

In addition I had fun with dimension parameters and accidentally made a horror map.

I kinde forgot to install hackatime extension for Vscode _(° - °)_/ … but 5 hours are still some hours.

But now to get your introduced to what i already have managed to create.

1. A server
2. A system to dynamically manage different worlds, which will host different games in future
3. A queue system for games
4. A party system
5. A lobby
6. A permission system
7. sooommeee chat UI stuff to look okay
8. Permissions get saved to sqllite database

So yea a bit of stuff are already on their way.

Dynamically managing of different worlds

I have made a system that can on command create/remove worlds and move players to them. Furthermore it also removes automatically old worlds with no players in them to save on resources.

I call worlds crates because they are a bit self contained.

Queue system

On top of the crateManager i build a queue system. Players can join queues for a game and if a queue has enough players it creates the crate for it and moves all players to it. In the crate they can than play bc the crates have their own self contained logic.

Party system

Players can all join together in a party and if they queue they always get into the SAME queue.

Permission system

I have made a permission system. Players can get permissions like admin.build.place to for example be allowed to place blocks in normally non build areas. But they can’t break any blocks that would also require admin.build.break or instead of having to give both permissions you can just give a player admin.build and they will have all permissions of sub permissions of build.

Each permissions is saved/read from/to a sqllite database to make them persistent across server reboots.

lobby

oh yea and i did spend around 3 hours building a lobby :))))

Making my own internet protocol in a language that i never programmed in before can’t be thaaaat hard … right?

I am talking about Rust. I only know C, Java, Python and a few other and Rust isn’t one of them + it has some unice things like the borrowing and match thing.

I already made plans on how my protocol will probably work. I plan on something similar to HTTP.

That means I am building on top of TCP/IP and have a header and a body. However the header is in my protocol in ini file format and I never looked at the real specifics of http so I will probably make some dumb stuff.

The most time on this project currently spend is probably fighting with the rust compiler and not really knowing how rusts ownership works.

In addition to the protocol implementation I am working on a browser thing for it and a server software implementing it.

But I will start with the server.

I even have some basic server / client finished but only that they can talk over TCP in the protocol. Next is error handling, file serving, redirections, large file transfer capabilities, client parsing of documents, finding great ideas on how to replace HTML, CSS and mayyybbeeeee Js.

This project currently does not have a repository attached because my code is currently a total mess, while star dance screams at me that only 10hr are logged max.

We will see if i manage to actually do this thing not completely over my head.

PS: Idk what image i could send the project is still in its little boots :|

I am not finished yet

First of all thanks to the feedback from some. It gave me a bit more motivation to work more on this project.

Somebody bothered the loading timer after each round and guess what i also didn’t like that. So I fixed it. The cause was that each time a ghost was placed onto the canvas a new HTML image tag would have to be created, source set to the ghost image URL and than the script had to wait for the browser to load the image and only afterward it could place it onto the canvas. I fixed that by loading each image at the start of website loading. This way I already have all images loaded and only need to print them to the canvas no waiting needed.

There was also this major randomness error. If you remember from an older post I did some random generator thing which makes it impossible to spawn too few ghosts while still allowing random positions on a mask without too much hugging each other.

What i did not notice back then because of the mask, that if the mask isn’t applied the ghosts form a straight line from top left to bottom right. And guess what the error was:

if (delta(g.x, x) < ghostSize / 2 || delta(g.y, y) < ghostSize / 2) vs if (delta(g.x, x) < ghostSize / 2 && delta(g.y, y) < ghostSize / 2).

I used and OR instead of and AND logic operator. It took me 30 mins to figure out :(

Another person mentioned they had a optimization warning in their console. I did not had such a warning because I use Firefox personally. I also test on chromium but i don’t look into logs there, how ever now i did. The Dev tools of chromium really improved a lot, but i am still going to use Firefox as main browser.

Well, I fixed all warnings chromium gave me.

The context of a HTML canvas has an optimization flag in case you request data from it frequent what i do. I just had do set this option to true.

Also the drawing part of the ghosts is now not blocking the main thread entirely with timeout calling the same function which acts like a for loop to distribute work over time. Otherwise the website would freeze for a second because printing images to a canvas is very sloww for some reason I don’t want to get into now.

For the loading part i threw a bit CSS and HTML together making up a progress bar and added some random phrases so users don’t get bored.

Furthermore instead of creating new HTML tags each scene change the code now already has them in the HTML code loaded but changes their visibility. In theory this should improve performance because the browser doesn’t have to create new elements each time.

Last small improvements on my ghost game 👻

Code

I reorganized parts of the code to make it, hopefully, more readable.

Permission problems

I have a browser with a bit more strict rules that broke my game. For that i made a check if the browser lies about color values of pixel and if that happens, we tell the user to please give us the permission.

Canvas sizing

Now after every try, of the game, the canvas resizes instead of only when reloading the page completely.

What could be added?

I had some ideas for what could be next. But i want to have a shipped project + move on with other projects. So i only list them here because i thought they are interesting.

• A seed calculated randomness generator to play against friends with same picture.
• More options of backgrounds and ghosts.
• Different ghost sizes.
• Different art styles.
• Dark mode.

Minor improvements.

• I updated the design a bit
• Added java script for automatic date/time updating
• Improved the API from PHP a bit

The java script

I just take the h1 and h2 tags and set their inner text every 1000 ms (1s) to a date.
Time was easy because we just use new Date().toLocaleTimeStrin() for the date i hade to get a bit more creative ${("0" + dt.getDay()).slice(-2)}.${("0" + (dt.getMonth() + 1)).slice()}.${dt.getFullYear()} ${weekdays[dt.getDay()]} / ${months[dt.getMonth()]} All this is there to have leading zeros that only appear when the second digit isn’t used (0-9). Also i convert months and days with help of arrays to short strings that are getting placed at the end. I personally need number & name because i really can’t memorize the names for the months.

The PHP

The PHP code is now also caching the image from the Nasa API so that clients don’t have to call any other servers. I also made the php script read from the API key file, trim spaces and other characters that are there for some reason and than use it. Of course i also added the .htaccess file to block access to the API_KEY.txt

Furthermore i added headers to stop clients from caching so that when a new image from Nasa replaces the old one the clients get the new image displayed. May be not the best solution but it works!

Another thing I would like to add is that I made it so that when a image from the API is requested with special copyright it gets displayed in the footer. If the API doesn’t give an copyright notice the PHP script just default to Nasa.

So we got this new mission for making a new tab page with some API stuff.

Well… I did started it. I have made a simple website that can be used as a new tab. With a HTML form automatically going to duckduckgo. Therefore I actually still don’t have any Java script to work with currently. But you may ask how did I then requested thing from the free Nasa API. I do it through PHP. I have already made several applications with PHP so instead of following the tutorial I build everything without it (again…) was it a mistake? maybe? But now my PHP script asks every 24 hours the API endpoint for the updated info and than caches it until next time. This way clients only request from my website files + the API key is stored on the server and only used by the server + rate limit will not be a problem (i do 1 request per day, Nasa blocks at 1000 or something like that)

What i want to add with Java script is actually updating the time and date (currently server sends its time and it never gets changed) and i want to add shortcuts a bit like duckduckgo’s vim keybindings.

Maybe i also just make a quote of the day thing. Because, in my terminal, I have a Fox ASCII art that tells me every day a new quote.

fortune | cowsay -f fox

👀 Now you can actually play Ghostly party on the web

I only did minor improvements today.

In earlier versions of the game ghosts started plopping up on the canvas after one another and the worst part was that the ghost you should search for was always the first one because the browsers would use the cached version of the ghost, which obviously was way faster. To fix that i added a small loading screen which hides the canvas and makes a circle spin, in an CSS animation, until the canvas was finished drawing all the ghosts.

There was also a dumb bug where i miscalculated the time the player took for a round I calculated Math.round(deltaTime / 60 * 100) / 100) when it should be Math.round(deltaTime / 60 * 10) / 100). There was only one 0 too much.
:[

Sometimes there are just those dumb bugs…

I also finally deployed the game onto a web server, where it can now be played. https://ghost.foxors.de

However before shipping i will try to find some bugs and add some icons and others stuff and generally try to polish up and tie loose ends together.

Have a great day! or night or noon or whatever timezone you are in… :)

Hello, everybody!

Today i fixed the width and height of the canvas. So that when you have a large screen you get a large canvas and if you have a smoll screen you get a smoll canvas. (Dynamic canvas size)

I also fixed an issue where you couldn’t click the ghosts after scrolling, by taking scroll distance into account of the win condition check.

I also made, just for fun, that when you find the right ghost and click on it. You get a zoomed in (cropped) image of them in the picture.

Next thing would be to release it on my website…

I managed to implement the background. But wait! There are actually 2 backgrounds. One is a mask that masks specific areas, where ghosts are allowed to appear and the other one is the actual background with coloring. This should prevent ghosts from appearing at completely random nonsensical spots.

I also programmed in that ghosts respect each other and spawn in some distance from one another, to not make it too crowded.

But this created a new problem. The pseudo randomness is… well random. So there is a slight chance the ghost you need to find doesn’t even appear because you had bad luck. Furthermore many ghosts don’t appear. The script tries to spawn 50 total ghosts, in case one fails it will retry finding a position for that ghost 100 times before giving up and not spawning it. And out of the 50 only 10 manage to actually spawn.

I will have to look into another solution to finding the random positions.