LimeeFox – You won’t believe what I do as STAFF!

Hello there I’m lime Fox and in this special video I’m going to be mostly talking about the development of the server that I’ve been working on for almost a year so if you’ve expected a building tutorial or a building process as you’d usually see on my channel this isn’t going to be about

That I’m going to talk about Empire War a Lord of the Rings Castle Siege server whose story actually began back in November 2012 now I’m not going to go over the history of the server in this video since I have more pressing things to do but in this video I’ll focus on

What is actually happening on Empire War right now and what is my role on that server now for those who don’t know me yet I currently hold the rank of developer on Empire War this might come out as a surprise for some of you who are familiar with the server since we

Actually forgot to to announce my new rank on Discord and on forums but that doesn’t matter right now what matters is that I’m one of the few people who are writing Java code for our Minecraft plugin that handles the entire server and my job as a developer includes programming new game modes class

Abilities and lots of other cool Technical atmospherics and commments and so on indeed I have coded things like the rock throw ability item throwing ability blood setting concept of purchasable classes and a lot more I actually started working on more interesting stuff as well such as the

Domination game mode which will get an entire video on its own the mount ability which allows you to mount and control any more block a horse and Atmospheric catapults to Launch much rocks in the background however my developer Adventures don’t end here in fact in July I started working on a new website

Homepage which would be a lot more welcoming than our current one uh unfortunately a lot of the things suddenly came up and the release date of the new server was announced for September the 1st and there was still a lot of things to do a lot of work to get

The so prepared B for the release and so there were a lot of other things that had a higher priority than the new homepage so I had to lay aside that project and for the most part it’s mostly finished but the biggest issue so far right now is that it’s not mobile

Friendly and I want to reing the navigation bar to add categories and add more buttons and stuff like that I am confident that a new homepage will be live sometime perhaps early next year but in in the worst case scenario it would be like somewhere in 2024 for my second function on Empire

War which is the thing I’m more popular for within the community is building beside having the developer rank I also have the Builder Rank and as such my job is to build stuff for the server like the main lobby improve adjust various parts of maps when they need to be

Updated fun right wrong where do you think this maps come from out of th there do you think the owner just pulls it out of his ass like a magician would pull a rabbit out of his hat no we are not conjurors of Tricks here I’m in the

Lead with a few other guys of an army of Green Goblins so vicious that you’re forced to like this video now do it though as it helps battle with the YouTube algorithm anyway it takes an entire dedicated build team a lot of time to deliver a map for Empire war and I’m not

Even talking about making a new one right now many of you know that we’ve had lots of maps on Empire War for years but they are all outdated as heck oh my God bro oh hell no man what the man get your ass on and also they don’t exactly fit the new

Game logic as the new class has got a lot stronger in terms of damage they can take the fights last a lot longer than before and so the distances need to be at least reth thought revamping a map is a very long process and it cannot be

Rushed if you want a long-term mainten ability and if you want the build to make sense so beside programming plugins and tweaking some flags on the map I need to actually plan revamps and new maps and I need to coordinate the building process of an entire build team

In a way as for people to know what to do and how to do it and when it comes to building an entire map it’s a lot of work building is an immensely timec consuming thing especially when you want to make it good now of course I could

Throw together like a map in maybe one weekend but it will be a the now cool I’m actively writing new features in our server’s main plug-in I’m slowly preparing a new website and killing a lot of brain cells planning and coordinating map revamps as well as

Completely new maps and of course I need to also build them looks like a little bit of work I could do it better right correct you’re absolutely right we can and we will allow me to present to you my third function social media all of this is fun games until it comes to

Working on videos oh hey lime why is it so difficult to make a 10-second video you silly schmu what the heck do you want me to pull it out of Bilbo’s left on the foot I have over 26 hours of raw footage of Empire war combat and

Whenever I want to use some of that for a video I need to spend three to four times as much time as the first footage going through that footage selecting the portion I want sending up the camera path and rendering it and usually before that I need to spend hours looking for

The perfect music track that is preferably not copyrighted and that gives me good ideas for the vibe and atmosphere I’m going for I need to make a selection of scenes and edit them together and spend another chunk of time rendering all of this stuff and then obviously I need to spend time writing

The desp description of the videos and stuff like that on top of that I need to also make Stills take screenshots of the Raging combat for announcements and stuff like that all of this requires a lot of time and I need to sit through the raw footage entirely look out of a

Key moments in a battle which spends over an entire map and then not only select the perfect camera angle but also adjust various lighting settings and stuff like that it’s not something I can do in small periods of time I can’t do it for 30 minutes every day because I

Need to get into the process get back into the mentality I had when I was doing the thing like what is the dynamic of the scene I want to render and stuff like that last but not least I also do some of the behind the scenes coordination like planning the agenda of

The new updates and map set up and stuff like that we need to decide on features that the update will include write instructions on what should be done for the update and how it will be done need to plan timings Etc and then of course

You spend 30 times as much time on the debates surrounding the updates with the rest of the stuff as you spend time planning now I’d like to talk less about me and more about the plan first of all I’ve seen certain people confused about something that is really crucial for the

Pace of the development of the server there are some people who are convinced that our staff are getting paid from the Service donation income which is false none of our staff are getting paid any money from the Empire War not even the owner we’re putting aside a portion of

The earnings for the months we would not get enough donations just so the server has enough to guarantee being online for a long time and the rest is being saved up for some of the Investments we have in mind that will help develop the server I won’t talk about those for now

Um because it’s confidential but that being said since the staff are all volunteers you cannot expect them to sacrifice their real life to work on the server they are happy to help out in their free time but they do not work for Empire War they do not owe you or us

Anything they are simply here to have fun and make sure that others have fun as well this brings me to one of my biggest concerns about the public opinion so far there is this General consensus that we’re in some kind of a rush and that we need to be doing some

Sick things as soon as possible like some people are saying why not just read all the maps because apparently the server is dying and the staff are doing nothing useful to save it first of all the server is not dying LOL allow me to present to you the

Graphs this is not made up you can visit the statistics on one of the voting websites of the server I’ll leave the link in the description it’s public clearly you can see that the server is doing better than in the past 4 years and now that we’ve started the server

From a fresh new blank page we’ve got lots of plans for it and in particular will be a lot more present on social media once we’ve got Mor update out as it’s probably among the top two best maps in the server’s history secondly my response to this is that we are in no

Rush we have earned enough money to last this Ser a long time for now so getting donations in is not our priority our goal is to Simply continue working on the server as a hobby otherwise you’d be able to tell that the emotions are artificial in fact taking our time is

The smartest thing we can do as we want to deliver quality features for the server there is no good in rushed content we want to take our time to work on the updates and make good stuff there is no point going full beast mode in advertisement if we haven’t got enough

Content on the server to keep the player base entertained long term just lose lose all of the momentum and the most important thing is that even if we did add like 12 of the maps from V2 which look bad and have bad game play there would still be people who would be

Complaining they would be like why didn’t you put more effort and why didn’t you spend more time preparing these Maps why did you just throw it at us so it really comes down to one choice that we need to make between pleasing the people on a short term or take our

Time to work on a good result in such a way that we won’t have to come back to it every now and then to update it because that’s entally one of the biggest problems of V2 we constantly had to come back to many flags for example

Or features and redo them and so this is why it is important to take the time to do things correctly such that we don’t have to constantly worry about fixing it all the time we are absolutely fine on working on the server at the paas we are

Right now slow as what it seems to some but actually quite fast for us considering the work that needs to be done I would also like to address another smaller concern that has been brought up a few times on This Server as some of you know the other developers in

Particular cender had to recode a few public and well-known plugins from scratch so most of the server is running on custom coded stuff we made ourselves people have been wondering why would we do that if we can just use existing plugins or update existing code from existing plugins the main factor for the

Decision to recode the other plugins was performance many of those plugins originate from a long time ago some were created 13 years ago and others have been simply coded by some Amat programmers and despite regular updates on most of these plugins a lot of them still have old core logic in them that

Wasn’t always the most optimal on the previous instance of Empire War also known as V2 which ran for 7 years the server was often quite laggy and it wasn’t necessarily due to people’s internet connection there were occasional lag spikes and just general lag due to well simply because of some

Plugins and they required quite some power to run so recoding those allowed us to massively improve the performance of the server another factor which I mentioned briefly is that a lot of the plugins were quite Legacy old code that relies on how things used to work on older versions of Minecraft tend to

Become messy and hard to maintain especially since the goal of the server was to use modern API from various libraries and advanced functionalities and features in programming it is hard to work on new new features in 1.20 when the plugin had support for 1.8 it greatly Nerfs the optimization capacity

And it is just it just complicates a lot of the workflow and the end result simply leads to a bad performance and thus such plugins were unreliable for us lastly another portion of plugins didn’t have all of the features we needed a few of them were closed source

So we couldn’t just ify existing code in order to make such plugins work for us the way we need them to we simply have to recode them from scratch one of the examples I can give is lip disguises it’s a plugin that allows players to disguise as Minecraft Mobs its code is

Hidden behind a pay wall and it was one of the slowest plugins to update to the newer versions back at the time we were still heavy into the deep core development of Empire War we didn’t have any money so we couldn’t pay for the plugins then

But now that we do have some funds we’ve already recoded most plugins ourselves so we just stuck to them one of the major features it lacked that we needed was hitbox compensation you couldn’t just become a warden and have a warden hitbox you still had a normal players

Hitbox cender just made an entire new plugin which addressed this problem to recode those plugins it takes time it’s not some school you need to write in particular the plugin he coded also allowed to handle NPCs like you see in some RPG servers most of the existing NPC plugins were still inferior

Performance-wise to what we needed and a bunch of them cause lag and L spikes the plug-in cender coded solves the issue I could go on for longer about the technical aspect of Empire war that has taken so much time and effort to deal with but I think the main point of this

Video has already been addressed all in all I’d like to say a massive thanks to the community of Empire War for being so awesome and supportive of us and for coming to play on our server working on this is a real pleasure and despite ups and downs we’re still very solidly

Moving forward with 11 years behind us we’ve got ambitious plans for the future and I’m 100% confident that glorious days are still ahead of us my final message to you is be patient just forget that there is a race against time the business is going as it goes and everything is Chill stay

Cool