Editor's Note by BWOT

Sorry for such a late Times, but ladies and gentlemen it is finally out! We have had one Build Day this week and two more to come same time, one in same place next week. Hopefully we can finish New Town off by then. Sorry for not being as active as usual. I am in America currently deciding some major things but anyway; back to Europe very soon and some big things coming up for sure. Thank you so much @superlolster for all the great work you did in this edition. It helped a lot! Thanks to the rest of the Times team as well. Now I hope you enjoy this edition of the Times.



Andrast - Lead: @jacenpeter | In Progress
Report by BWOT

A lot of planning is going on behind the scenes so expect a lot of progress real soon.



Belfalas - Lead: @Darki | In Progress
Report by Eriol

No progress (I believe).



Dol Amroth - Lead: @Thijs1801 | In Progress
Report by BWOT

Wow we have come far. Royal Town buildings have all been completed which is just great. New Town was started and through the build day almost completed. Great work everyone! Now to finish this project off we are doing street detailing in the main city and going to have another Build Day next week. Also keep your eyes peeled for the sewers are starting again very soon.



Mordor Terrain - Lead: TBD | In Progress
Report by BWOT

Small progress has been made but a lot of work is being put into Dol Amroth and the resource packs at the moment. If you haven’t noticed work on the Morgul Vale has appeared.




The Noman Lands and Dagorlad - Lead: @Fireinferno | In Progress
Report by BWOT

No progress has been made these last two weeks.



Moria - Lead: @Despot | In Progress
Report by BWOT

Close to no progress has been made in the Deep Halls, Ivan was there working but we need our other short and cave loving Designers back. Upcoming build day though



Tolfalas- Lead: TBD | In Progress
Report by BWOT

No progress has been made these last two weeks.



**NEW** Ship Build - Lead: @BWOT | In Progress
Report by BWOT

Hello all, there is a new place to build ships. This area will be a hub for all ships on the server. /warp Shipplots to access to the location. The organization of this project is still at the beginning however at the moment we do have some aspects which are open to Artist+.

A realism guide in-game and out will be coming soon but for now here is the first plot build for ships. Current Ship plot build will be led by @didi45 and @BWOT. Please look at the forum post provided:

Plotworld - Ship Building



Tree Build - Lead: @RubenPieterMark | In Progress
Report by superlolster

No progress these last two weeks.


**Please note some of the screenshots were taken by @Merlinc01 this week.


Report by Finrod

Gondor RP merge

The work on the merge of the two RP’s is continuing and there will be some first changes, although only temporary on the actual map this weekend: As Dol Amroth lies both in the Gondor as well as the Dol Amroth Resource region I need to create a temporary resource region that excludes DA to prevent that the blocks in Dol Amroth will be affected by the Block Replacer plugin. You may notice the change on the Dynmap if you enable the RP regions, but otherwise you should not notice anything about that. After that I will implement a handful of changes to the new Gondor RP which will be rolled out prior to the replacement.

All info on the replacing / merge of the RP’s can be found here: Gondor RP Update Thread [v2.4].

Taking a glance at in-development Minecraft 1.13.

In the last few days I spent a little while comparing the available blocks between Minecraft 1.12.2 (the current version of the server) and the most recent snapshot version that is 18w08b. This revealed a ton of changes that have not been covered by any of the snapshot reviews I found on Youtube.

There will be a lot of changes in terms of which blocks are in the game, I still need to write up a proper report for a complete list, but here are the changes that are most significant to us:

• All logs will get a stripped log version (without bark), which will also be orientable like the regular logs (no “all-bark” equivalent though)
  
  
• There are now pressure plates and buttons for all types of wood, which gives us a very nice set of additional blocks to put to use.
  
  
• Similarly, there will be trapdoor variants for all types of wood. The trapdoor is very useful for thin walls, floor covers, thin ceilings and many more. What's very noteable is that every trapdoor gets a new “powered” tag which doubles the blockstates once more. That means we don’t only go from 2 to 7 full trapdoor sets, but from 2 to 14 complete trapdoor sets, each of which can supply 2 different thin walls in all orientations!
  
  
• We get full slab and stair sets for the three variants of prismarine! Yay!
  
  
• Other wholly new blocks include seagrass (1-b-tall and 2-b-tall), kelp, dried kelp block and turtle eggs!
  
  
• The instrument and pitch of a noteblock will now be stored as blockstates, which it was not before. This means that we will get 499 additional full blocks that we can use!

(BWOT just needs to squeeze in here and do some cheering \o/)

• Beds are now also fully represented using blockstates, which theoretically gives us a lot of half-height blockstates that we could not really control flexibly before. But as we probably will continue to use the beds as we are now we won’t really exploit that for something else, but we could!
  
  
• One quite surprising change is that Mojang changed how they technically define the mushroom blocks (that make up the giant mushrooms on mushroom islands). So far there were the red_mushroom_block and brown_mushroom_block set with each 13 blockstates; There were exactly those blockstates that were actually needed. Now these blocks are defined differently, which however means that there are tons and tons of blockstates that vanilla Minecraft will never ever use; but for us we get a ton of new full blocks to use: From previously 26 mushroom blockstates we go to a whopping 192, so 166 additional full blocks that we can use however we want!

(BWOT here again to do the cheering \o/)

• Skulls (Skeleton skull, Creeper head etc.) are also being represented differently which may prove to be very interesting for us if we ever need something with a head-shaped hitbox.
  
  
• Unfortunately, some blockstates will be removed, most notably some of the seamless double slabs, which are currently in use in the new Gondor pack. But as there are plenty of other full blocks we can easily move them before we update.

In case you want to see the detailed analysis of mine you can check it out here: Blockstates across versions

1.13. Will fundamentally change how blocks are represented. While its nice that we will get a lot of new blocks it will cause the devs both of our custom plugins as well as all external plugins (like our grief protection or voxel) a lot of headaches, or at least most likely a lot of work to update these plugins. So don’t reckon with us updating too soon after the update rolls out! But I predict that 1.13. will make behind-the-scenes work easier as many changes really improve the consistency of how blocks are represented, which is a very nasty thing in 1.12.2.


Report by Eriol

MCME-Perks Plugin

New perks plugin has been installed at build server, but permissions are not yet set up.

MCME-Architect plugin

Door placements is fixed and redstone torches can be switched by clicking with a stick in hand.

If you have suggestions please post them at the forum Plugin Status.

Link to Announcements: ~The MCME Times~ [25/02/18] Announcements