Hello CubeCrafters,
Today, I'd like to share part of our journey, which we've spent many months developing for our Skyblock system!
SKYBLOCK!?!?!?
Yeah, we know it's been a while since we talked about Skyblock last, but we're very excited to be able to talk about it again!
Our Skyblock system that we built many years ago for the initial release of the game. The first iteration of the game was built relatively quickly, and we were very much experimenting with the technology as we made it. This meant that we were going into creating this massive game with a lot less experience than we have now. This lead to many issues that caused us to be terrified of making changes to the game. For example:
- Players would sometimes lose access to their islands when files just went missing.
- Updates to our server software could potentially corrupt players' islands and cause them to lose their whole worlds.
- Files in our backend system had a habit of not getting cleaned up correctly, leading to massive storage requirements. As for now, we're storing over 7 TB of world files.
These technical challenges obviously presented a massive problem for us wanting to continue to expand out the game. If we made one faulty deployment, we could potentially corrupt many players' worlds. We do have backups, but a several-day maintenance window for us to restore from a backup is not an ideal situation for us.
Our last few years of tech
We've been hard at work over the past 3 years doing massive rewrites of our entire backend! We first started with our GameFramework change, and following that we moved onto a system we internally refer to as "Rocket". This is a massive backend system that handles everything data wise, including storing data, tracking game instances and handling matchmaking you into games. We will likely follow up with a future post going into more of the technical details of Rocket in the future.
But what does this mean for Skyblock? We really wanted to move Skyblock into Rocket a long time ago, however we needed to ensure that our foundation for the platform was stable enough before migrating Skyblock. We didn't want to rush into making changes to Skyblock, and cause massive problems for the game. Finally, at the start of this year we began the migration of all our Skyblock code onto this new platform. The new system is far more resilient to failure, and gives us far more tools to allow us to make amazing things inside Skyblock.
So what's new?
This update brings little exciting stuff to Skyblock yet, but we are no doubt going to continue to our Skyblock development. Here are the most notable changes with the new system:
- Added backup support (Each profile can be rolled back individually if something happens to it. For initial launch, this is a staff-only feature, but we may roll it out so anyone can restore from a backup)
- The solo profile slot has been removed. All slots are now co-op slots. This also means you can delete your solo profile too.
- Region support. Skyblock servers will launch in NA and AS as well, if you connect from those regions.
- Skyblock Rank boosts count as boosts in the same way that Optimizers count as boosts. (These no longer use different systems)
We're also having a crack at fixing many of the outstanding bugs from Skyblock:
- Pumpkins and melons would grow multiple crops.
- Skyblock games crash when someone disconnects during a profile save.
- Some players are unable to join the game.
- Interacting with generators/spawners/hotbar menu would place the block in your off-hand.
- Placing a Skyblock Shop, will always have a default villager skin, even when a shop skin is selected.
- Potion effects did not save when reconnecting.
- Fixes items pinging out of generators at fast speeds, making them hard to obtain.
Want to stay up to date with Skyblock, join our Discord! (teasers located in the #sb-leaks channel)
Today, I'd like to share part of our journey, which we've spent many months developing for our Skyblock system!
SKYBLOCK!?!?!?Yeah, we know it's been a while since we talked about Skyblock last, but we're very excited to be able to talk about it again!
Our Skyblock system that we built many years ago for the initial release of the game. The first iteration of the game was built relatively quickly, and we were very much experimenting with the technology as we made it. This meant that we were going into creating this massive game with a lot less experience than we have now. This lead to many issues that caused us to be terrified of making changes to the game. For example:
- Players would sometimes lose access to their islands when files just went missing.
- Updates to our server software could potentially corrupt players' islands and cause them to lose their whole worlds.
- Files in our backend system had a habit of not getting cleaned up correctly, leading to massive storage requirements. As for now, we're storing over 7 TB of world files.
These technical challenges obviously presented a massive problem for us wanting to continue to expand out the game. If we made one faulty deployment, we could potentially corrupt many players' worlds. We do have backups, but a several-day maintenance window for us to restore from a backup is not an ideal situation for us.
Our last few years of techWe've been hard at work over the past 3 years doing massive rewrites of our entire backend! We first started with our GameFramework change, and following that we moved onto a system we internally refer to as "Rocket". This is a massive backend system that handles everything data wise, including storing data, tracking game instances and handling matchmaking you into games. We will likely follow up with a future post going into more of the technical details of Rocket in the future.
But what does this mean for Skyblock? We really wanted to move Skyblock into Rocket a long time ago, however we needed to ensure that our foundation for the platform was stable enough before migrating Skyblock. We didn't want to rush into making changes to Skyblock, and cause massive problems for the game. Finally, at the start of this year we began the migration of all our Skyblock code onto this new platform. The new system is far more resilient to failure, and gives us far more tools to allow us to make amazing things inside Skyblock.
So what's new?This update brings little exciting stuff to Skyblock yet, but we are no doubt going to continue to our Skyblock development. Here are the most notable changes with the new system:
- Added backup support (Each profile can be rolled back individually if something happens to it. For initial launch, this is a staff-only feature, but we may roll it out so anyone can restore from a backup)
- The solo profile slot has been removed. All slots are now co-op slots. This also means you can delete your solo profile too.
- Region support. Skyblock servers will launch in NA and AS as well, if you connect from those regions.
- Skyblock Rank boosts count as boosts in the same way that Optimizers count as boosts. (These no longer use different systems)
We're also having a crack at fixing many of the outstanding bugs from Skyblock:
- Pumpkins and melons would grow multiple crops.
- Skyblock games crash when someone disconnects during a profile save.
- Some players are unable to join the game.
- Interacting with generators/spawners/hotbar menu would place the block in your off-hand.
- Placing a Skyblock Shop, will always have a default villager skin, even when a shop skin is selected.
- Potion effects did not save when reconnecting.
- Fixes items pinging out of generators at fast speeds, making them hard to obtain.
Want to stay up to date with Skyblock, join our Discord! (teasers located in the #sb-leaks channel)
We promise we're working on quality Skyblock content 
