Official Everybody Edits Forums

Update!

Seb has complained about some more worlds which were missing, I've fixed some of the issues causing this and will upload a new archive (and actually release it this time) Soon™!

(approx 626k new worlds, almost entirely spam, but with around 3000 which might be nice to have)

Details for nerds: Previously I had to filter out all these spam worlds since it tripled the size of the archive, but since I've added world de-duplication (which is what allowed me to include home and empty worlds) this no longer matters as much, so might as well just include all of them.

Send me or Seb a message on discord I guess if you want an early sneak peek at the new worlds (and look for any issues / more missing worlds / etc so I don't have to!)

The world portal problem is just because EEO doesn’t really have a way to index world files by world ID rather than a problem with the library, if you want world portals to work you need to bundle all the worlds you need into an EELVLS file instead, I believe the EELVL C# library provides functionality to do this.

And about the update to ArchivEE, I’ll be doing that at some point soon, I’ve just been busy and had a couple last-minute feature requests I’ve been working on before I update the official version.

Edit:
One of the additional features for my ArchivEE Search tool is doing something similar to this automatically, so you can use that as a reference once I release it if that’d be helpful.

ArchivEE 2: Electric Boogaloo

Download here!

Changelog:
- Fixed gravity effects
- Fixed world portal spawn points
- Fixed time trial times (can't remember what this meant but I had it ticked off so I guess it's fixed?)
- Fixed crashes during world exports
- Split the world table in two, one part for metadata and one part for world contents, allowing for de-duplication of worlds with the same contents
- Improved world compression using zstd rather than lzma, allowing for better compression of small files using a common dictionary
- Improved query result loading, allowing the results to be streamed in rather than loading the entire result to memory before beginning processing
- Added roughly 45k worlds to the archive which were previously missed
- Added roughly 720k empty and home worlds
- Probably more that I've forgotten
- All this in an only 15MB larger download!

I'll leave this here for a short while so people can try it out and report any bugs, then once I'm reasonably sure everything is working I'll update the main post, along with uploading a version of the database using the previous format for compatability reasons, and possibly Linux and MacOS versions if I can manage to get these to work.

Plz let me know if you find any bugs, missing worlds, etc and I'll make sure to fix them some time in the next 2 years!

Intentionally deceiving us? They’ve said hardly anything, I’m not sure how they’d be deceiving us lol

Are you just talking about those two quotes about not prioritising monetisation and having at least one rendering bug? If so extrapolating from that to not having any plan for the user experience, retaining players, a vision, etc is a massive stretch.

As you seem to be focusing a lot on monetisation I’ll touch in that directly:

Prioritising monetisation over gameplay is what results in a pay-to-win game completely stuffed full of micro-transactions, and isn’t something that is good for the player. I’d say it’s a very good thing that their #1 priority is creating a good game. Counter-intuitively, focusing on monetisation first is actually generally a bad business decision, since it leads to a worse game, which leads to fewer players and less potential for monetisation. If you have a really good game with a dedicated community, you can generally find ways to monetise it, a lot of games survive on voluntary donations only.

This is fairly unrelated to the performance issue, but I’m wondering a couple things:

Does this mean that things like the physics engine need to be duplicated between the two versions of the client? Or are you doing something similar to maybe Realm of the Mad God where a few times a second the server sends a list of new movements and the client just replays them?

Also on the .net front, is there a reason you’re not using .net core (or its successors .net 5 and 6), since those are natively cross-platform without the need for mono. I believe you can also compile in the .net runtime if running without any setup is a requirement, or you can bundle an installer with the executable like some popular games that use .net do.

I guess until fairly recently (possibly after you already started the .net port) they haven’t had a great way to create GUI applications, but with .net 6 there’s MAUI which I’ve heard good things about.

Thanks!

To do this either all visible false worlds would have to be removed from the archive, which generally people don't really want (since this would prevent the owner from downloading their hidden worlds), or there would need to be some system to verify ownership of EE accounts.

From the ArchivEE side this would technically be possible if I encrypted private worlds then hosted a server to connect to the EE servers to verify ownership of accounts, then give out the encryption keys only to verified owners, but this would be a whole lot of efford I don't really want to put in.

So as ArchivEE contains all worlds no matter what there probably isn't too much of a point in 0176 implementing it just for the Web Archive, and it would still be a reasonable amount of effort to do safely. Either the user would have to send their password to 0176's server so that it could log in to their account, which would be bad for security, or 0176 would have to create a system to prove ownership of accounts by joining an EE world or modifying the database or something (which I'm not entirely sure is still possible).

So technically possible in a couple of different ways, but probably not worth doing.

This really sucks for everyone affected, I wish them all the best and hope they and their families are safe.

Take all the time you need. Even without half your staff needing to flee from a global superpower declaring an unlawful war, things like this always take longer than people expect. EE took roughly a decade to get to where it was when it shut down, and even after all that it was a mess, performing terribly with half of the features barely working.

I’d personally prefer more open development so we can all come along for the ride, but I can see how often this just attracts a lot of non-constructive criticism, so how you develop the game is up to you, the way you’re doing things is fairly standard for the games industry.

So stay safe, take all the time you need to make sure your staff are safe, then even after the war comes to a (hopefully swift) end, take all the time you need to get things right.

Putting the game back online anywhere would just take an unreasonable amount of effort.

Firstly the client uses Flash, which has been discontinued for security reasons, so it would be unsafe to connect it to the internet without a complete rewrite of the client to some other technology like HTML5.

Secondly the server uses PlayerIO's libraries and services, so either you pay the $2.5k/month or also rewrite the entire server to use something that isn't PlayerIO.

And all this for maybe a handful of concurrent players if you're lucky. And once EE! comes out you'd just be splitting an already tiny community in half, which probably isn't the best idea. It's just not really worth it.

EE didn’t need player-run servers because it already provided private servers for free for everyone.

It’s cheap enough to run a server for a game like EE that it could just run servers for free for everyone so that they don’t need to run their own. With games like Minecraft and Terraria, the worlds are much larger, and there’s complex AI that needs to be run, which together make running a server require a significant amount of performance, much more than EE, so they just leave running a server up to the players.

The same is true for EEU, even in the unoptimised state it is in, and assuming something doesn’t go terribly wrong will almost definitely be true for EE! too.

The one exception is EEO, which doesn’t have official servers provided for a variety of reasons as discussed many times before, and doesn’t have player-run servers partly because it would take a significant amount of work (which at the end of the day would have been work taken away from EEU), and partly because now flash is no longer getting security updates it would be irresponsible to recommend connecting it to the internet.

From what I've heard the minimum specs listed on that site are only for new windows devices coming with Windows 11 preinstalled, there are lower requirements for upgrading to Windows 11 that almost all semi-recent devices should meet. (The TPM 2.0 requirement is replaced with TPM 1.2, among other things)

Oh oops, since EE shut down I’ve been keeping up with the forums through GregBot in the EE discord, and it seems like it hasn’t been picking up replies here for some reason?

Yes I still intend to do a big bugfix update, but I’ve had some university stuff I’ve needed to do and we’re about to start exam season, so it might be a month or two before I get around to it.

In the meantime I’ve got the raw EE worlds database saved so no data was lost, it’s just too big to share for people to download so any bugs in my compression code mean that data isn’t saved correctly in the archive. I’ll add all the bugs people find to a list of things to fix and release a new copy of the archive when I have time.

Until then it sounds like the EE database is still up, so if you do run into one of the worlds that were corrupted, other people have released tools to download them directly.

It makes sense, random.org's main feature is that they use real noise (which they collect using radios or something from the real world), rather than generating it whenever people ask for it, so they only have a certain amount of supply they need to share between everyone. When you have a limited resource like that you have to have a way of limiting how much people can use so that you don't run out.