After nearly 10 years of my old logo, I thought it might be nice to rebrand my personal logo; taking some influences from my life since the last time I did a brand design for myself.

The new update to jtiong.com brings with it not only the Blog – but also an attempt to roll in all the content of my other domains into it. I come across an interesting dilemma – I haven’t really got a plan for the design of the site per se… I have content – yes, that’s easily pulled from the existing Minecraft info website (at the soon to be defunct jtiong.games domain), but no actual design idea.

The Old Design

Below is a set of screenshots of the jtiong.games Minecraft section:

Deciding Requirements…

The “original” design had a number of features I’d really like to pull over to this current site – like the Whitelist section – I was particularly proud of that section having fought with bootstrap CSS to try and get a nice layout happening. The Whitelist also allowed authenticated users to dynamically add themselves to the Whitelist without any manual intervention on my part. It was convenient, and looked cool!

Here’s the thing though, all that information, all those features – they’re split up across 4 or 5 separate pages! And I don’t think I should have an online form where my friends can arbitrarily add people to the server’s Whitelist – just for posterity’s sake. It is meant to be our FOREVER SERVER after all. People who join the server should be vetted and added when a human moderator is able to.

The Requirements

Thanks to my ranting above — I have an idea for some design requirements now:

• Condense the server information into less pages
• Find a way to integrate the Server Map nicely into the site design
• Display the whitelist in a reasonable way (a list maybe?)
• Integrate a way to see posts I make about Minecraft (and the server) into the page(s)
• Make this section easily viewable on mobile (this is a hard requirement across the whole site)

The New Design

Behold! The new design!

Almost everything about the server, fits on the one page! With the exception of the World Map – a visitor can view everything they need about the server, although the Player Whitelist is hidden for unauthenticated visitors.

There’s a few adjacent tasks for jtiong.com’s upgrade to proceed in tandem with the rest of this section’s update, but for the time being, this’ll serve all my requirements!

I’d been craving the old community of Minecrafters we had during the COVID lockdowns a few years back; so I’ve decided to re-launch the Minecraft server for my community. It’s been a long long time and I hope everyone joins the server or at least leaves their mark on it in whatever little way!

I want to keep the server as low maintenance as possible by trying to stick to just Mojang official releases of Minecraft’s Server – no PaperMC or Spigot or any other modded servers. This will also reduce the temptation to make Minecraft into some weird modded dystopia where people have to install a half dozen java packages just to join.

Recently with my career, health has become a thing I’ve been a lot more conscious of. Physical, mental, etc. So I’ve made the decision to move to 3 days per week, leaving Thursday and Friday available to me for health care and rest.

I’d like to eventually transition to a career in which I can work more independently as well, and the career options are pretty simple:

• Come up with a product – build and sell it (SaaS, etc.)
• Come up with a service – promote and sell said services (Contracting, etc.)

I have a couple of projects and things that I do which fall into the second category – I do some web hosting and consulting on the side, which produce some income for me. So I feel like I could certainly return to pushing those paths a bit more if need be.

Games are a passion project…

– me, now.

However, I’ve always wanted to build a game. Since I was a kid playing Super Mario Bros. on the NES back in the 90s, all the way through my adult life – I’ve always been a gamer.

In my mind, games aren’t something you build to make money – sure there’s that one in a million opportunity to build a Minecraft, or the next World of Warcraft. But that’s both extremely rare, and extremely difficult to achieve. Games are a passion project, and if you’re lucky, you get a financial reward if you find something that strikes a chord with the gamers who try your game out.

I’m at a stage in my career where I can afford one last hurrah at a passion project beyond the gaming events and marketing adventures of yesteryear.

Time to give it a go!

Do you have a plan?

I’m not quite sure about the games I’d like to make yet. But I think the plan is to build:

• Some basic indie games to learn games development, and;
• learn some basic art creation (2D – Aseprite, 3D – Blender) to flesh out said games, and;

In terms of sound creation and audio design – I may just leave to 3rd parties, if I’m honest – Audio is always and will forever be a dark magic for me

Okay…

So why am I blogging here about something I haven’t even started?

To keep myself publicly accountable. I’ve already told my mates on Discord, now I have to just execute 😂

So, it’s no secret that I’m very much into PC gaming; and with it, the hobby of essentially running LAN parties or gaming communities.

Recently, with the growth of the pandemic, I’d been able to grow my own little community to about 120-odd people on Discord. There’s a core group of about 15-16 of us that play games together, and the rest sort of float in and out of discussions and various gaming releases.

September’s been a pretty crazy period; and I’ve started taking stock of the hobby I call “Only Snacks” and gaming. Not only is it a gaming community of close friends and family, it also ties into an enterprise level server rack, and internet connection. Granted I get benefits out of it in terms of business and capabilities; but it opens doors for our small group that didn’t exist before.

It’s pretty expensive. I don’t mind, there are others out there with wackier and (far) more expensive passions. I’m still within my means, but I did note today that it eats up almost all my time and energy.

The group is something I consider close friends – and among them a circle that I’d consider family. They honestly saw me through a rough time (that I think everyone went through) yet here we are, still together and thick as thieves.

So what’s going on? Nothing really, I’m actually just putting down some musings into the blog to keep things going.

So the new Minecraft version is out, and with it I’ve created a new Vanilla server for my friends to play on.

Over the weekend, I wrote a service loading daemon for my Minecraft server that essentially allows me to interact with players to create custom, scripted actions and dynamically run commands – all tied into a Database thanks to the comfort of PHP!

I’ve aptly named the system the Minecraft Assistant Interactive Daemon (MAID for short). So far things have been working wonderfully but we’re still exploring the possibilities with this tool; from gathering player positions, to inventory security, and more! The system is based around a PHP script running in a ‘daemon’ mode that never times out, and monitors the console of the server – it reacts to things that then happen via the console (picks up commands, events, and so forth) – and updates as needed – be it via a website, database, or otherwise.

A big benefit of how I’ve implemented MAID is that I can run a Vanilla based Minecraft server, that still allows for the latest versions released by Microsoft to run – without essentially affecting functionality.

The current plan is to have:

• Custom vault control – players can protect valuables in a web-managed inventory/delivery system
• Production of materials – a “maid hiring” system, where players can pay an amount of emeralds for various maids that’ll help them acquire resources

The system is essentially a PHP based plugin wrapper on Minecraft – it doesn’t directly interface or interfere with the Minecraft client’s functionality, but instead runs as a parallel service alongside the server. So the only real drawback is a lack of real-time in-game interaction and even then, some degree of interaction can be created via the command-block system; all the features of Command Blocks are directly accessible to the MAID system.

I’m keeping it in a private repo for the time being; but in the near future I might look into releasing it 🙂

It’s really interesting to try and build out all the solutions of a modded Minecraft server, into a vanilla server! This morning, I encountered an issue where Villagers were unable to execute their regular mechanics (repair items, farm, breed, etc.) due to me disabling mobGriefing in the server’s game rules – this prevents them trampling crops, blowing up blocks, etc.

I ended up needing a solution via CommandBlocks which I’ve now had to carefully hide into the architecture of my little home so that other players on the server don’t inadvertently disturb it. I attached the following command to my CommandBlock, and set it to Repeat, Unconditional, and Always Active:

execute as @e[type=creeper,nbt=!{ExplosionRadius:0}] run data merge entity @s {ExplosionRadius:0}

There’s only one small disadvantage right now – Creepers don’t actually deal any damage anymore…! I guess this kinda makes them… huggable?

Northrealm as a whole – proceeds well! It’s less a sort of MMO style map/game as it is just a creative, adventurous sandbox right now. Eventually I might start building in specific styles and locations into different regions; but it’s more important to just stick to building what’s fun and chilling in the server.

It’s fun, in and of itself – coming up with solutions to our server’s problems without the need for heavily modifying the server itself!

Well now, over the last month or so; I’ve been running a Minecraft server that I’ve tentatively called Northrealm, after a dear friend, Claire Northman. Claire passed away in 2012; and it’s an event that I’ve carried close to my heart ever since.

It’s been a complicated run for this ‘server’ of sorts – over the last near-decade, I’ve been tinkering with a variety of Minecraft servers that are modded, in various levels of interaction – in an effort to build the ‘ideal’ fantasy world that would represent everything Claire loved about Minecraft.

Finally, I settled on the idea of just running a plain, standard, Minecraft server. One that my friends and I can play on, and build upon using only the unmodified, basic installation of Minecraft. Luckily for me, the game’s reached a point where a lot of features that were once mods, are now doable within the confines of standard Minecraft!

Anyway, I’ve started by opening the gaming/Minecraft section of my site – it’s completely bare, except for an interactive map that gets generated at about 4:34am UTC every day. The map has zoom/drag capabilities, and should be fairly high res enough for people to use. It’s powered by Overviewer!

You can view a larger version of the map by visiting https://minecraft.jtiong.com as well. (NB: these links don’t work anymore! – JT, 29/05/2022)

Coming features over the next few days will include:

• An ability to create an account, and apply to join the whitelist for this server
• Some rules and regulations on this
• A materials pipeline that somehow interacts with players online and offline

The third point in particular, is of interest to me, because I’d really love for players on the server to be able to “build” something on the site, which then generates an amount of materials over a time period, which can then be deducted from a player’s inventory. My initial thoughts on the flow of such a system would be:

While a player is online – they will have the ability to:

• Construct basic workshops – these can refine raw materials, create basic components
• Recruit workers, these workers affect the speed a workshop functions at

Eventually, I think, I’d like to increase the functionality – but that’ll require some more thought! A post for another time 🙂

Previously one of the projects I mentioned in my last blog post was Project Stronghold – where I build basically something akin to a games room/home office. I quite enjoy retrogaming – and a good deal of modern gaming (on consoles or PC, or in VR) as well.

I just thought I’d post here to present an inspiring picture of how I’d like to attach most of the controllers in this situation:

Obviously, the cabinetry in my own home is not like this – with different shelving and configurations to consider. But I’d like some form of storing these controllers in the room I intend to utilise, for the next few years.