Opening statement
Dang my head hurts really bad. There were just too many things going on the past few days, but hey, all of them were awesome! First off, we had a very very long but also very very good staff meeting last saturday in which a lot of good topics were brought up and a lot of nice decisions were made. Find more details below! Then second of course on sunday we finally got all the new plugins! Some of them were still a bit unstable at first, but in record time q and Eriol fixed the most pressing issues. Instead of pasting what the new plugins are and include I will redirect you at this point to Eriol's announcement thread: MCME Launch of new plugins
IMPORTANT!!! Do not forget to thank all who worked on these plugins when you see them online! These mainly are:
- @Eriol_Eandur, for coding on all the Plugins
- @Ivan1pl for coding on the Plotbuild Plugin
- @q220 for providing the Dev server and all the help with the implementation
- And humble me, who helped those two with testing and reviewing and a bit, and wrote and collected a good part of the quiz questions (which probably makes it the biggest Tolkien quiz, well, ever)
Project Progress
North Andrast
North Andrast
South Andrast
Belfalas: Methrast, and in the background Mindmaw and Coaldael
Belfalas: Minas Aduial
Lamedon
Moria - Connector hall
Moria - Hall of Aulë
Moria - Vertical connector hall
Moria - guess what place this might be
Andrast (In Progress) - Lead: @jacenpeter
On the small, still nameless village in the north there was more progress than prism can handle, please forgive me that I did not check through all 200 pages to extract all the names I should have mentioned!
Voxel wise, Mr_Smithz has worked on the materials and vegetation in northern Lamedon.
MORIA (In Progress) - Lead: @Despot666 & @Finrod_Amandil
Plugin Development@jacenpeter continued on the northern part of Andrast, modelling out the upper parts of two more valleys, one of which has a nice, partially frozen lake.
@Wroxxite in the meanwhile created some very impressive coasts at the south end!
Belfalas (In Progress) - Lead: @Thijs1801@Wroxxite in the meanwhile created some very impressive coasts at the south end!
Once more there is a ton of progress all over the fief! Terrain work has continued and is nearing a conclusion near the location of Lostfalls, major progress has been achieved in the northern part, and during a small project meeting they decided to also match the terrain a bit further to the north to the currently used style.
Check @Eaglz24's fantastic updates, especially if you're an Artist and looking for something to do: Belfalas
Lamedon (In Progress) - Lead: @_LukCheck @Eaglz24's fantastic updates, especially if you're an Artist and looking for something to do: Belfalas
On the small, still nameless village in the north there was more progress than prism can handle, please forgive me that I did not check through all 200 pages to extract all the names I should have mentioned!
Voxel wise, Mr_Smithz has worked on the materials and vegetation in northern Lamedon.
A lot of progress in Moria this week, especially in various halls and caves near the 2nd hall:
Tolfalas (In Progress) - Lead: @Tyranystrasz- In the Hall of Aulë, bender worked a lot of ruining, and got supported by some Artists as well as Adventurers, which helped during some jobs he hosted.
- Brazen and Darki completed a - in terms of Moria scales - small connector hall.
- Ivan continued on his hall which serves a military training ground.
- Together with WalpoleLegoMen, Despot worked on a very impressive hall which extends over multiple levels and serves as vertical connector and if I remember correctly, will eventually be fitted with a couple of big cranes to bring goods from one level to the other.
- Wraith and Despot worked on a big goblin-infested cave, which features a tremendous amount of houses for these beings.
- I worked on a cave far off the eastern side. Some of you might know which one it might be, check out the image above and see next week whether you guessed right
No progress this week.
Valley of Erui (In Progress) - Lead: @Mandos
Together with various Artists Mandos continued the work on the village at the mouth of the Erui and a few more farmhouses and residences further up the river.
Animation Plugin (In Progress) - Dev: @Ivan1pl
This week not much progress can be reported as Ivan is currently working in Moria, but I can mention that there were some small changes that are not worth mentioning.
Plotbuild Plugin (Implemented) - Devs: @Eriol_Eandur & @Ivan1pl
Probably the most tricky, but also the most game-changing, plugin is at last implemented and working as it is supposed to! With it's many many features, especially those that will allows all kinds of build permission related things, is very difficult to combine with those plugins that already serve to prevent griefing. Huge compliment to @q220 and @Eriol_Eandur for making this work!
Also please don't expect the Designers to put up Plotbuilds withing the first few days of implementation. While the plugin is very flexible it's also fairly demanding to understand all its features, especially all the staff commands it comes along with.
Be sure to join the Plugin Introduction event next saturday, where I will mainly focus on this plugin.
Architect Plugin (Implemented, minor fixes in progress) - Dev: @Eriol_Eandur
There are still a few small things that need some fixes, but the vast majority of the features is working like a charm, such as the Banner and Armorstand plugins, the Painting Switcher and the new /give command. Especially /give misc should help all Artists to make furnishing a house without staff help a lot easier, try it out!
Minigames Plugin (Implemented, some fixes in progress) - Devs: @Eriol_Eandur
Rank UpdatesThis week not much progress can be reported as Ivan is currently working in Moria, but I can mention that there were some small changes that are not worth mentioning.
Probably the most tricky, but also the most game-changing, plugin is at last implemented and working as it is supposed to! With it's many many features, especially those that will allows all kinds of build permission related things, is very difficult to combine with those plugins that already serve to prevent griefing. Huge compliment to @q220 and @Eriol_Eandur for making this work!
Also please don't expect the Designers to put up Plotbuilds withing the first few days of implementation. While the plugin is very flexible it's also fairly demanding to understand all its features, especially all the staff commands it comes along with.
Be sure to join the Plugin Introduction event next saturday, where I will mainly focus on this plugin.
There are still a few small things that need some fixes, but the vast majority of the features is working like a charm, such as the Banner and Armorstand plugins, the Painting Switcher and the new /give command. Especially /give misc should help all Artists to make furnishing a house without staff help a lot easier, try it out!
About 1200 questions we wrote, but so many quizzes were already played that we already got the first questions twice... But hey, let's take this as a good sign, quizzes are really fun and working just great!
A bit buggy still are Races and Hide and Seek games though. Please still wait with trying those as Eriol is still investigating on the bugs. Compared to the rather clean and overviewable environment we had on the development server there probably are some plugins interferreing with each other on the main server.
New New Player World (Implemented) - Dev: @Eriol_Eandur, Assistance: @_LukA bit buggy still are Races and Hide and Seek games though. Please still wait with trying those as Eriol is still investigating on the bugs. Compared to the rather clean and overviewable environment we had on the development server there probably are some plugins interferreing with each other on the main server.
Despite some major issues at first q and Eriol managed to make the new New Player World working properly! You can check it out yourself by typing /mvtp newplayerworld. Please don't do that too often though so you don't spam the chat with the welcome messages all the time
We have a lot of rank changes this week once more, and fortunately it's mainly promotions that I can announce this time!
Since this weekend we have two new Enforcers, on one hand @Milwargen (aka Genwlinldal aka Milarwen) who switched to that rank after a short time as Artist, and @otho who changed to the yellow guys from Designer. Congratulations and all the best for your future challenges!
Then we have a new old Designer, or in other words after Brazen another former staff returning, and this is @Mr_Smithz aka iSMiTHz. A hearthly welcome back to you!
And lastly we have the following promotions in the Artist rank:
- @QuantaCube (some may remember him as willgreen1)
- @BWOT
But two resignations there are, and that is Artist @Darkarz who decided to take a time out from MCME, with the solid promise to return eventually and Designer @Emilio, who also had to give in against the overpowered IRL obligations. You may still see him lurking around as Artist for a while though.
Media of the week
Very active in producing Media this week was @Wraith_Knight. Here's my favourite of his big collection, check them all out here: Wraith's Screens
The Misty Mountains - Redhorn pass west
The Misty Mountains - Redhorn pass west
MCME Staff Meeting #19 Summary
On the past saturday evening we had one of the longest staff meetings ever (3 hours and 17 minutes), but probably also one of the best ones in terms of how many decisions we made and how much we discussed. Here's a summary of what we talked about and what we want to change in the future:
Upcoming- Chat rules for Staff
I reminded our staff members of the position they have and reminded them of that they do represent MCME as a whole with their actions. We tried to fine that difficult to grasp line, beyond which statements in public chat are no longer tolerable. While we, as expected, could not find that line, I simply wanted to remind people why we have these rules, especially as we had to record a few situations in the past, where staff clearly crossed the line.
- Too many Artists/Designers?
There's a reasonable amount of promotions taking place into these two ranks and the question came up whether at some point there might be too many of either rank. I on one hand debunked this one as there is no clear tendency that the number of Artists/Designers has been rising over the last years (it may rather be that the number of online Adventurers sank and thus it seems like there's more Artists, on the other hand we try to make good progress and it is obvious, at least as long as you can organise them, that more workers equal more progress.
I only promote people I deem capable of fulfilling the tasks the rank comes along with.
- Realism in Projects
Multiple Designers handed in the request to invest more work and time into our projects, and a quick poll during the meeting showed that indeed the majority of Designers wants that. I pointed out some practical limitations to how realistic we possibly can get, like the limited amount of detail you can reproduce with Minecraft blocks, and also that Tolkien's descriptions may conflict with what would be realistic. We decided to organise ourselves better when it comes to realism-related topics and that we want to assemble guides and references for various types of aspects of realism that we already incorporated into our builds, as well as gather new ideas for further topics we want to respect. These threads may eventually get published in a publicly accessible forum, but first of all some of them need to be written.
- Project Organisation
We agreed that we need to improve how we organise ourselves in terms of projects. This means we will invest more time into planning a project, so that flaws in the concept can be spotted before any building is done (and probably has to be undone) and we have to post more updates to keep track of who is doing what and how much progress is being made. For the latter we will try a principle of daily updates, respectively whenever a Designer worked on a project, conclude the sessions with a very short post summing up what he did. Artists working on projects are very welcome to join the Designers in that task, especially if you got in charge for your own village, farm or similar!
- Artist Jobs
Multiple times we had the occasion that Designers would have had a task for an Artist, but no Artist was available, or an Artist was unoccupied and no Designer was around. We tried something similar with a Scheduled Jobs thread which slowly has died down though. The main reason was, because its so much less efficient and so much more work (Designer has to announce it, keep the date free, wait for the date to come, and still probably have not enough workers), but with Artist Jobs it would be a lot easier to do something like that, as Designer and Artists don't have to be online at the same time.
I came up with an example google sheet that we might use to announce available Artist Jobs that can be claimed by Artists, I presented it to the other Designers to open it for dicsussion and improvement, but most likely this will be a thing by next week!
- Moria
Currently the biggest challenge in Moria is bringing the people into the project. So far this has not really been possible for non staff members, but concrete plans are being made, and a big announcement is planned for next week's Times as of which we hopefully solved all the remaining issues with the new plugins, as we will need some of them direly in Moria.
For the Designers I debunked the rumour that I might force them to work on Moria even though they don't want to. I stated that while I theoretically might be able to do that, it would only lead to some resignations and unsatisfying results. Still we face a big challenge: Moria is the biggest project that we don't really split into multiple projects (like Gondor into all its cities and fiefs) and thus is easily the biggest project ever attempted on MCME. Thus I really hope that as many of the community can overcome the challenge the master the Moria Resource Pack and its building style and find their to being diligent helpers in Moria. And as said, for non staff members there will be good news next week!
Themed Build
Themed Builds are weekly build events that serve to show off your building skills and/or help you to gain the skills required to get promoted to the Artist rank! All instructions on how to participate can be found in the thread linked below.
Theme: White House of Erendis
Pack: Gondor
Thread: #30/16 - White House of Erendis
Community OutreachTheme: White House of Erendis
Pack: Gondor
Thread: #30/16 - White House of Erendis
Plugin introduction event
Closing statementThe new plugins come with a crazy amount of new commands. As I helped the devs testing now and then I am already fairly familiar with these and want to offer the opportunity to learn the most important things about them. I will mainly teach a bit about the Plotbuild Plugin (both how to create one and how the Adventurers and Artists can use it) as well as a bit about the Architect plugin.
Minigames I don't know yet, depends on the time elapsed and how many are still interested at that point.
The event will take place on Saturday, September 17th, 19:00 BST, on Teamspeak and the main server.
Lore quiz competition hosted by @KnightZackMinigames I don't know yet, depends on the time elapsed and how many are still interested at that point.
The event will take place on Saturday, September 17th, 19:00 BST, on Teamspeak and the main server.
KnightZack is going to host a fancy event for all you LotR nerds out there! Always wanted to show off how many LotR facts noone else knows but you were able to keep in your head? - Then quickly hop over to the >>matching thread<< and sign up right away!
Like our Planetminecraft page daily to help promoting MCME!
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