The hardcore technical folks seem to prefer things that don't alter the vanilla mechanics quite as much as Paper, it's true. But FWIW there are lots of farm and redstone designs that work reliably on Paper.
(Disclaimer: I'm on the Paper team, and Paper is the org under which Folia sits)
I didn't watch the stream because I was offline when it happened, but I just want to note that the test was run by someone not on the Paper team who got tubbo to stream it, which is how they got so many players. It can be tricky to get enough players for such a large test, so it made sense for cubxity to pair up with someone to get more players.
Twitch can get pretty funky, especially twitch chat, so hopefully there's nothing "bad" in that video, though.
Microsoft has struct rules about the stuff you can sell for the server, and servers need to be EULA compliant. If they aren't they can get blacklisted or shutdown.
People do buy plugins but the vast majority of the plugins you'd want to use are free open source plugins. A lot of the paid/closed source stuff is kinda crappy or misleading anyway.
You can run a great server using free plugins and software. It might not be a money maker, but if your goal is to have people play and have fun and not buy stuff it's super easy and doable.
People do still donate to projects to support the authors who make the wheels spin.
(Disclaimer: I'm on the Paper team, and Paper is the org under which Folia sits.)
This is true to an extent, yes. Chunk generation can be real tough. That said, chunk generation has been re-written in Paper, so it's substantially faster than vanilla Minecraft.
When we did a large scale real player test on a much earlier build of Folia we had ~327 players at peak and we did not generate chunks because we specifically wanted to see how it ran. We didn't max out at ~327, we just didn't have more joins than that.
The project improved a bunch already so that number without chunk generation is very doable to beat if you didn't pre-gen any chunks.
Generally it's free performance to pre-gen your world though. Highly recommended for regular players.
We tend to call those "networks", when they have a bunch of different gametypes and servers interconnected. At a smaller scale of a few hundred players it's pretty easily handled by off the shelf software like Velocity for the proxy and a few server instances running Paper.
You generally want good performing (not VPS or "cloud" instances) but you can run a bunch of different worlds and have people with cross server talk, the ability to warp between worlds, etc. Most of the larger networks and nearly all of the smaller networks use a variation of this kind of model.
There's a bit of a distinction in the Minecraft world between "mods" and "plugins". Even though to the outside perspective they're the same thing, the terms are used for two different communities/ecosystems, basically.
"Plugins" are for bukkit-based compatible servers, like Spigot and Paper (and Folia, with some modifications).
"Mods" are more for forge, sponge, etc servers.
So you can kinda pick which direction you want to go. But the Paper project has a ton of API documentation and a few Github repos to even get you started writing your own plugins. The Discord server has a dev help channel with people happy to answer any questions.
The Sponge team has a similar setup as well if that's the route you'd like to go.
Mineplex had the most concurrent players but they weren't on a single individual bare metal server or single server jar instance.
A lot of large "servers" like Mineplex, Hypixel, etc run a proxy which sits in front of a bunch of other servers. The concept of a "server" can have many meanings in Minecraft so it gets fuzzy quickly.
I'm not sure if this 1,000 person test is a record but I'm not aware of any other test running so many concurrent players on a single dedicated box with a single instance of Minecraft running. Folia takes advantage of more CPU threads so everyone is in sitting in the same server instance.
(Disclaimer: I'm on the Paper team, and Paper is the org under which Folia sits.)
Paper (and Folia) have differences from "vanilla" (official) Minecraft, which is part of how they improve performance to begin with.
So it is true that there are differences from vanilla. Most "in-game devices" - if you mean builds, redstone machines, mob farms, etc - have versions that people have found will work on Paper and Folia. They might require some tweaking but complex redstone and mob farms are definitely very doable.
The goal is to have a close-to-vanilla experience while fixing bugs, patching exploits, and improving performance to run more people on a given piece of server hardware.
The biggest issue with Folia right now is that it's very new so there aren't a lot of plugins that support it just yet. That's changing every day! And of course it still has some crashing issues because it's still in development. :)
(Disclaimer: I'm on the Paper team, and Paper is the org under which Folia sits)
AgentK20 explained the technical bits along with the other reply to you, but basically the "actually all in one world" is the big part. For sharding you're handing players off to different instances. With Folia someone can just walk from one person to another without any issue or lag.
Folia dynamically groups people into regions depending on their distance. So it was designed to have people spread out to be able to support many regions across many threads. You can put 1000 people in one spot, it just gets very unhappy and you're now not really taking advantage of the whole point of Folia.
It's not a solution for every server or person but it's definitely cool because it's another tool in the Minecraft tool box. And the API is very similar to Paper, whereas the sharded options start to get kinda tricky quickly.
Anecdotal counterpoint: I've worked with three sets of people who dated in the workplace, and when they broke up it was fire and brimstone. In all three instances, one of the two quit.
I'm guessing the answer is something along the lines of:
"Despite being immensely popular, it is a labor of love and generates little (or no?) revenue, so unfortunately, no there isn't anyone else minding the site."
Perhaps eventually. At the moment you need to be an "Accredited investor" in order to actually join and invest. They define an "Accredited investor" as meeting at least one of the following criteria:
- Someone who has made $200k+ for the past two years and will continue to do so.
- Someone with joint income with a spouse exceeding $300k for the past two years.
- Net worth or joint net worth exceeding $1 million.
While this does make sense, it basically means the type of folks who are already quite rich and would be making these sorts of investments just have the tools and ability to make investments at a lower scale, and through a website.
It's definitely an interesting idea, but I'll be more excited about it when the investors they allow get closed to the "average people" in the industry who aren't sitting on a million dollars.
This seems a bit misplaced. More like if Torvalds invents a motor and then someone puts it in a car, he might complain if the motor doesn't run the way he'd like. Which isn't entirely unreasonable.
Absolutely - I didn't intend to downplay being a TV writer.
In that vein, being a session musician is also "making it" as well. But "it" is subjective - if "it" is being on stage, you didn't "make it" in either case.
Assuming your write your own material, the rough equivalent for a comic is getting a writing gig. TV shows, for other comedians, etc. You basically write "session" material as a comic the same way a "session" musician would be a hired gun.
This is a bit of a misunderstanding of how SMTP works.
If you run and maintain your own SMTP server and it goes down, you won't be able to send email.
Everyone else will still be able to send email to you, and it will be delivered to you, and you'll be able to read it.
Now, if you break Postfix or something on your server and start bouncing emails then you can be in trouble, or if you mess up the DNS somehow.
But generally running your own mail server is a set it up and leave it alone type of affair. Any junior level hacker can cobble one together with guides online and have it up and running with no problems in a few hours.