From what I understand, you can run Minecraft pretty reasonably as a server on a Raspberry Pi.
Roll 20 is a decent system, but it’s not as fun as the “in the room” gaming style that many are used to. It is, on the other hand, great for displaying maps, pre-making maps, and then allowing the players to interact within them, without having to determine where everybody can see what.
I figured on using the mapping from Roll 20 to run the table if I ran a Kobolds ate my Baby (KAMB) game.
On the topic of RPGs, can anybody suggest a good mini-campaign for learning the various skills, or does that come with time?
Check out Queen City Comics and Cards. There’s a location in the Pleasant Ridge neighborhood of Cincinnati (basically the north east corner of the city limits) and one in Fairfield, a northwestern suburb.
Dave’s suggestion is probably best in terms of accessibility and uptime, since the servers are already racked. The server runs in a JVM and works under linux. A Java Virtual Machine running under a VM always seems weird to me, but it works just fine.
The resource requirements for minecraft are dependent on how many people will be using it at the same time. When you hear about people running minecraft on a raspberry pi it’s usually for just a couple of people. The issue is ram, since the server has to allocate enough memory to handle what’s going on in a certain radius of each person. When two people explore the world in opposite directions, it’s like two different sub worlds being tracked, one for each player.
I’ve seen a rule of thumb that the JVM’s heap size needs to be 1 GB for every 10-20 player slots, which means the OS’s VM for a hive only server should have at least 1.5gb allocated to it. I’m not sure about disk space.
These requirements go up if you have a lot of mods and addons on your server.
I ran a Bukkit server with multiple mods at home for 50+ users for around four months. I have a great deal of admin experience, and I have no problem spearheading this. My usual setup includes two servers: one testing and one production. The biggest issue is lag due to I/O times on the server. The workaround I used for this was rather neat.
Create a RAM disk at boot
Copy the contents of the Minecraft directory directly into RAM and run the server
Every 5 minutes or so, run a cp operation from the RAM disk to the harddrive (this is obviously configurable) to sync the world data
Again, this ran for quite a few months with no issues whatsoever. I was on multiple Minecraft servers at that time, and mine was definitely the most responsive for how many users I had. If you guys want to go ahead with this, I could probably have a basic server running by tonight. Just need the VM/hardware. Let me know!
I’ll try to get a VM setup for you. I would however ask that you NOT ramdisk too much stuff. RAM is somewhat at a premium on that machine (16Gig total) but it has relatively fast I/O (~150-200Mb/sec) coming off the RAID1 stack.
You emailed me about this, I’ll email you after I get you a VM setup.
-D
RE: comic book shop: My recommendation is Yotta Quest in Mt. Healthy. Besides the comics, they carry a huge selection of nerdy board games and hold regular events.
I’m hoping to join in for the board game day when it happens. Up for Catan, Munchkin, or whatever, though probably can’t commit to playing a pathfinder campaign!
Thank you. I’ll try it out with just regular disk I/O, maybe it was the machine I was running it off of that was causing lag. The world only gets up to a couple of hundred megabytes, unless it REALLY gets crazy. My whole Craftbukkit install was less than 1GB.
Are we going to be able to open this server to the outside? I don’t really want to be limited to being physically in the space.
If we don’t want to be bothered with doing that, my second question is (and perhaps I can get the answer off list) is there a host I can SSH to from the outside to get access to the hive network? If so, I/we can just tunnel to whatever internal resources are of interest.
Ok. On Saturday, October 5, I will be at Hive 13 with Settlers of Catan, a couple of mini expansions, and the new Explorers and Pirates expansion. I will also be bringing a couple of Halloween like Fluxx decks, a copy of “Are you the Traitor”, a copy of “Cheap Shot” and a couple of pen and paper RPGs. Depending on how much this stuffs the bags I have, I may also bring Munchkin with a few smaller expansions as well. I intend to be there starting at 10:00 AM. If anybody would like to join me for gaming, I will stick around until mid-afternoon if nobody shows up, or until I get too tired to play more games.