Game dev #6: Activity tracking
In the same vein as last month's post about backups, I also need to manage the disk space taken by the various servers. Laurasia is the biggest concern, as it is the largest server by far. A world border was introduced relatively late for it, so people already had time to explore far and wide. A large circle now delimits the areas available for building, but there's a lot of unvisited areas still.
Once in a while, I'll take Laurasia down for several hours and set off to delete areas that have been accessed yet never built, or that have been left alone for a long time. This makes it easier for the players to find new, untouched places to explore while it also decreases the disk space used by the server. It's a slow process that needs to be handled carefully, but the end result is worth it.
Of course, it's important to avoid accidentally deleting players' creations! As I'm preparing a new trim that should be announced soon, I developed a tool to help me identify what can be done, and I decided to give you patrons an idea on how that looks!
Here's a special version of the map for Laurasia – overworld (link removed). It's generated off the images created by DynMap, to which I've added a layer that displays the coordinates of each server file along with the amount of days that a specific area has been untouched. That data is fetched from the servers files themselves: just like any computer file, the system automatically tracks when they were last modified. A simple color code helps to preview the information:
- Green: recently updated
- Yellow: untouched for a year
- Red: untouched for 2+ years
For something that's easier to see and understand, here's Rodinia's overworld (link removed), which is much smaller. The North-West, South-West and South-East corners haven't actually been visited for about 200 days, while the core areas see a much higher rate of updates.
Going back to the Laurasia display, it's now easier to notice some areas that are good candidates at being deleted that might not have been obvious otherwise!
– Doctacosa