Shotbow

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Hey everyone! My name is Mistri and I'll be your host for this month's edition of Dentril's New Moon. Without further ado, let's jump right into the updates!

Updates
Network Updates
As a result of the non-stop efforts of lazertester and aet2505, we have fully transitioned our backend to Kubernetes, a new cutting-edge technology. If you're interested about the technical aspect of this update, or about our legacy server deployment system, check out this awesome write-up about the transition!

With this update comes better reliability and stability, and also better tools for our developers to diagnose and patch issues as soon as possible. While you may not notice it at first, we will gradually be able to handle stability and lag issues faster starting now. Let us know if you notice any differences in the comments below.

Annihilation Updates
A new Annihilation update, Nifty Boron, was released early this month. It included many class changes, balance changes, bug fixes, and a lot more! You can read all about it here, and check out its teaser trailer here.

Community Events
The community-run Annihilation Clan War has continued, with staff commentary available for your pleasure. This month, we premiered match 16, which can be viewed here:



(Writer's note: the ending of this Clan War had me on the edge of my seat. It was a fantastic game and I highly recommend you watch it!)

MineZ Updates
This month, we released an awesome update for MineZ, called First Steps. It includes new mobs, legendary item changes, and much more. It's jam-packed with fantastic content — if you haven't already read about it, you can find the full thread here.

As usual, work continues on MineZ, so expect to see some updates in the next few days!

SMASH Updates
This month, we announced an official tournament for SMASH, complete with a bracket and prizes. You won't want to miss this, even if you're not an avid SMASH player! View info about the tournament here.

Statistics
SMASH Rankings
The summer season has just ended, and the results are in!

• 1st - Sonicboom_ - 75,000 XP
• 2nd - Yesus42 - 50,000 XP
• 3rd - Viral333 - 25,000 XP

Network in General
Staff updates:

• InstantLightning, Red_Epicness, and roby08 joined the Jr. Developer team
• Roquel was promoted to MineZ Co-Lead
• Veghetto was promoted to SMASH Co-Lead
• PokeTheEye was promoted to Film Crew Co-Lead
• Samstag1 rejoined the team as a Full Admin
• wmn was promoted to Full Builder
• A_g_n_i, Detective_Mark, robdoom, and ShadowLAX joined the MineZ Mini Admin team
• Spark_Warrior was promoted to Localizer

Other statistics:

• A total of 88,055,343 XP was earned by players this month
• There were 1,696 players banned in the last month
• This month we achieved a peak playercount of 402 on September 6
• 73 ban appeals were resolved in the last month
• 6 Rank Upgrade Requests were handled in the last month
• 750 support emails were handled in the last month

Closing Words
Thanks everyone for tuning in. Happy October! Get ready for a spook-tacular month.

As always, I'm your host, Mistri — catch you next month, and thanks for flying Shotbow!

This is going to be a slightly more technical read than most of our postings, you have been warned.

After a hiccup or two, we have completed an (almost) invisible fundamental change to our server infrastructure: Every one of our Minecraft servers is now deployed into a Kubernetes cluster for orchestration, instead of a home grown orchestration layer we’ve been using for over 5 years we’ve simply referred to as “Deployment”.

Deployment: A Legacy



Deployment was an amalgamation of Python scripts, cron jobs, and database polling to keep up with the state of the servers, roll new ones, destroy expired ones, and give us insight into what was currently running.

When this first was created it solved a HUGE need and was miles ahead of our old method of “Login and run script A if we need another MineZ server, edit the server.properties, and execute the start command. Login and run script B if we need another Anni server, edit the server.properties etc...”.

It helped us break the model of server instances being uniquely managed (Anyone remember the old days of MINEZ_07_US loyalty?), and instead allowed us to have repeatable units we could scale out and in at will.



Over the years, developers have added and removed from it to automate additional common tasks and it has been very useful, but its deep underbelly became a scary place that no one dared to venture into, since it was impossible to untangle the web of scripts and schedules at its heart.

Sometimes rsyncs of the server files would fail and we’d have to dig through our servers to find what went wrong. Other times, some bad data broke one of its unspoken “rules” and it refused to work entirely. It became a gigantic, spooky, mysterious volcano that could erupt at any moment.

Ultimately the key shortcoming of Deployment was that it was tailor made to only run our Minecraft instances, what happens if we want to run something else like a new database, web service, or even host another game? We knew there had to be a better way, and we happen to have the background necessary to put it to work.

Enter Stage Right

Adam (aet2505) and I both work professionally as Software Engineers dealing with Kubernetes (k8s) on a daily basis.

I asked him what he thought it would take us to get everything running in k8s and we both sort of verbally shrugged and got to work. As many of you know, I am based in Salt Lake City, Utah, what you might not know is that Adam is not.

The time difference between us basically meant at least one of us could be working on it around the clock for almost 2 weeks straight, provisioning the cluster, establishing deployments, creating a dockerization strategy for our instances, and testing out how Bungee liked the networking model inside the cluster (spoiler alert: It loved it).

Every Rose Has Its Thorns

The biggest hurdle we hit along the way was that Kubernetes pods are inherently ephemeral, meaning they come and go at will, however we want our Minecraft servers to only shut down under specific circumstances.

To solve this, Adam established a Custom Resource Definition he aptly named “MinecraftSet” and created an operator that facilitates our desired control loop. This operator will keep the number of instances above the minReplicas, and a scalar can react to server state changes (like population) as well as ask if it is ready to shut down.

This lets game creators respond to shut down requests in the existing event driven pattern inside of Spigot and indicate whether it is safe or not. This has afforded us the flexibility to deploy a server that is usually fine to shut down on demand such as DBV and a server that should NEVER shut down in most circumstances like Annihilation using the same pattern.

Annihilation itself is able to own the logic governing shutdowns by influencing the control loop based on game state instead of a script running on a mystery box (could you imagine every game terminating just as Phase 3 starts!?).

Like Popsicles In Summer

Once we overcame that hurdle, we found a few problems that existed in our deployment world had simply melted away.

Because of Kubernetes’ networking model, all Minecraft servers could simply run on port 25565. Every instance is deployed into a “pod” in the cluster, and receives its own IP address. We had swathes of code for figuring out which port was available and ensuring that port is published when the server registered with our router that was simply deleted (deleting code is the BEST).

Managing storage was a bit of a pain, but PersistentVolumes in Kubernetes and volume mounts in Docker allow us to to handle storage in a way that is transparent to the server running. Using Prometheus, we are able to discover and scrape metrics on running instances automatically, allowing us to create useful Grafana dashboards for everything from server health to player report spikes.

ArgoCD helps us reconcile our repository of Kubernetes manifests with the running cluster, provide single button rollback support, and a quick glance view into what is running as well as server logs. Previously reverts consisted of tracking down the plugin, configuration, or build that had changed, manually reverting it, then re-releasing.

In this universe we can rollback with ArgoCD, which takes the pressure off the team so they can take their time diagnosing what went wrong with a rollout and easily roll forward again with the fix. Here’s When in Rogue in the ArgoCD interface:


One of the new additions I am working on is a proper social system, starting with Friends and soon with network-wide parties. This has a backing web API and is built on a graph database which is well suited for this kind of problem.

I was able to spin up the dev stack in minutes, with full discoverability and connectivity from our Minecraft instances to interact with it. This has allowed me to move quickly to create rich social features that will improve your experience with us here at Shotbow. This has also enabled some of our new devs to dive right into crafting new experiences, ensuring a safety net so those working with established modes can experiment and rollback easily, and has also increased our ability to monitor and support the infrastructure that powers these games we love.


If you enjoyed this technical deep dive into Shotbow's core infrastructure, be sure to let us know! We may just continue to do more of these "Devblogs" in the future!

But for now, as always,

Thanks for flying Shotbow!

Hello fellow SMASH-ers!

Today I bring you all a very special announcement regarding something we have been working on behind the scenes for quite a while now, and both I and the team are very excited to announce the first official SMASH tournament!

Tournament Registration
For this tournament, we will be using a third party site to conduct registration, brackets, and match results. We have a nice, short link for everyone to get registered as quickly as possible; smash.gg/shotbow. Smash.gg has lots of tools which allow us to neatly represent rules and regulations, who the Admins are, and how they can be contacted for assistance if necessary. The brackets and seeding can easily be done through the site, which will make match-ups as smooth as possible for players.

Below is a short video which will show you how registration through smash.gg will look, along with a step-by-step guide.

• Go to smash.gg/shotbow
• Click on either of the registration buttons
• Enter your "gamertag" which must be your in-game-name
• Enter your preferred email, password, birthdate, and country (we will not be using these other than for your initial "account registered" email) I recommend putting your name as your IGN if possible, since your name shows up on the attendees list and is thus shown to others, as you see me do in the video.
• Below it is also recommended to put your timezone, which you can do to ensure you are matched with a player from your timezone in the first match, and so we can compromise on schedules for further matches.
• Lastly, solve the captcha and check off the two boxes. From there you are all ready to go for your matches! Any information displayed about times or what bracket you are in is not set in stone, and will change by October 1st
• Youtube Video Link

Important Dates
Registration opens up today and will close on September 28th, 2020. Because we are unsure of how many players will choose to sign up for this event, the amount of pools and bracket settings must be modified after everybody has registered. We will be taking 2-3 days to do this behind the scenes, and the tournament will officially begin with all brackets and 1st round game times visible to the public by October 1st. However, this doesn't mean matches will begin on that date. We are hoping to conduct most matches in the evenings on Fridays-Saturdays throughout October so we don't conflict with players' or Admins' schedules. We are hoping to finish the tournament by the end of October, however this may change depending on how many players register.
Matches will be run in a 1v1 format all the way through the tournament, however do note if there is an odd amount of players we may have to accommodate in some way.

Tournament Rules + Setup
Smash.gg has all of the rules laid out on the homepage in a neat visual format, however I'll go over how everything will run here.

An Admin must be present at the time which your match is set to start, if an Admin is not present and you have not been given prior notice via discord, ingame/forum messages, or by email, feel free to ping myself or one of the other registered Admins listed on the homepage on discord in the #smash chat. The game will be carried out in a party match, with slightly modified itemsets. The Fishing Rod and the Extra Life items will be removed for this tournament, the timer is the standard 10 minutes, and lives is set to 3. Map selection will be done randomly by the host, although a few maps have been removed from our selection to ensure fair and competitive play. Once the match begins, the Admin will kill themselves 3 times via a command, it is important to not hit them during this time as that can influence how the final scoreboard will be. The winner will be whoever is left standing after the time is up, or in the case of both players having a life remaining, the scoreboard will decide who is the winner. Winners progress on to the next match at a scheduled time via smash.gg, and losers, well, lose.
There is no best 2 out of 3 format, nor is there a losers bracket, it is simply a single 1v1 match to decide a winner (however we may look into doing things like this at a later date for further tournaments). Matches will also be recorded, and the final outcome through the scoreboard will be posted in the discord for everybody to see, and the smash.gg site will update shortly after the match concludes to show the winner.

Hacked clients and such are forbidden, and any form of cheating or bug abuse will result in a disqualification. Failure to show up within 10 minutes of your assigned time will also result in an automatic forfeit, and if both players fail to show up, we will do a coin flip to decide a winner. If a player disconnects or lags out during a match, we will decide how to proceed on a case-by-case basis.

Prizes
・1st Place: 1 Month Shotbow Subscription + 50,000 Shotbow XP
・2nd Place: 40,000 Shotbow XP

Please be sure to only register once, if you accidentally register multiple times or lose access to your account, please contact a Smash staff member through the discord or as a reply to this post.

A Note from the team
This, to my knowledge, is the first event we've hosted like this before officially. There have been player hosted tournaments in the past, and we hope to live up to expectations of what an official tournament can be for the gamemode. We sincerely hope that this experience provides something fun for both new and veteran players.

In addition, we also have some more fun stuff cooking up behind the scenes which we hope the community will love, and we hope to continue growing as a community, and a gamemode.
*Thank you to Admin jiren74 for the amazing banner used on the site and post!*