May I ask you to round out the boardwalks near the surface of the water? There are a few that are very straight and have a lot of right or 45-degree angles. If you could arrange those into curves and make them less linear, that might look a bit more natural, and shouldn't be too challenging. Thanks for asking!

I left some signs posted along the wooden pathway with suggestions of what else I'd like to do with it. You can mimmic how it looks elsewhere, or make it rectangular. You can bother with torches on posts, or leave it out. In either case, any help with that is great, and we can always fix up anything if you are worried about how it looks etc.; ... I don't know who put the flower bushes along some of the stairs, but that was a great touch

Yeah, for the most part I've been working more on function than form--just getting everything connected to get a general idea of how it looks. This tends to make most things pretty straight I can work more on rounding them out a bit tonight, too, as well as some decorations.

Yeah, it looks like I spoke after the fact ... Awesome, thanks!

I will want to modify the form at some point, though it might not be within the next couple/few days. I may also change what's connected where, but this is great and gives plenty to work on! Thanks

since we are going for the [super radically cool] modern city style theme, lets not use torches if we can help it. try lamp posts; you can see two on the southern rail exit that i was working on. spiffy up if you can, too, i just threw something together that looked remeniscient of something in the screenshots forum thread (Nether village, i think it was named?).

On the one hand, I think the torches fit the wooden, natural, curvy aspects of the boardwalks well. On the other hand, I do agree that we've been going for glowstone-based lamps and lighting and redstone block powering to try to avoid torches wherever possible. I understand if Shkaboinka, the mastermind behind the boardwalks, makes an artistic ruling that torches are what he wants.

The nice thing about modern design is we can still use old things

Also true; I can't argue about that.

i know that Charles was asking for a bridge in some area, so i made one. hope you all like it:

Link

I like the modern look overall. What I was originally going for though was an older/rustic look for a board-walk below everything, just around/over the water. However, it's now extended all the way up to the spawn area. I decided it would be fun to keep the old wooden look, under the rationale that we have modernized everything else, so the alternative to a modernized rail system with stations would be a rustic "walking" alternative.

I'd like to keep torches with some of the wood path. However, if we want a more modern look for any part of it / anywhere else, let's definitely do the lamps. Some lamps would be nice along the boardwalk too, but where the path goes along a more "natural" route away from the other modern stuff, I think the torches keep with that theme ... but that's not to say there can't be some lamps.

Edit: I say let's put some main lamps in, but space them out so we don't get a "high-way of lamps" look along a wooden boardwalk. You can try put some lamps in key spots where it looks reasonable (e.g. one or two lamps per small "area"), and let's see how that looks.

We had a whopping eleven people on the server at once today! We're looking forward to an exciting and active server, so you should tell all your friends. Here are the map-building team, for the rare moment when I finally got them all to stand still and stop throwing items (Merthsoft AHelper ahem):

Hey, fireworks are festive!

Due to someone creating a massive, massive wooden stair in the PvP part of the map (ie, not in the rail system and not in the spawn), and me trying to fix it, part of the map is now corrupt. I am working on trying to identify the broken part and restore it from backup.

Edit: All fixed, after an hour of stress and worry. Although WorldEdit refused to find my snapshot directory, we got extremely lucky that the northern edge of the region (ie, the 512x512 area) fell a bit south of spawn. After wrestling with //regen and //snap restore, I ended up just dropping in the r.-1.0.mca file from yesterday night's daily backup (yay functioning scheduled backups!), and restoring the changes from today on the section of rail that was lost. Everything is back under control. However, I cannot stress this enough:

Since work on the rails is complete, do NOT build outside the spawn pylons. DO NOT! Please also remember to keep your builds to things that we actually need in order to launch, as we're getting very close to be able to do so. Spending a lot of time cleaning up houses, traps, etc is not something we will enjoy doing. And of course, as always, thank you all for your invaluable help. This would have taken me so many months on my own, and it wouldn't look one-tenth as good without all your awesome creative input.

Final Edit: Lest I seem ungrateful, many thanks to the builder who must have spent a lot of effort making those stairs. I know you meant well, and I was not clear about just building inside spawn.

I was just doing what the signs said to do. Sorry

Indeed, I know you were just trying to help (although I actually thought it was dcook who had made the stairs). I didn't catch the signs in time. Your help has been invaluable in getting the server to the state it's in in the surprising time of only about two weeks.

It was me who started the stairs. Moving on (but thanks for helping as I posted on the signs)!

... I still want to clean up some of the pathways in places before it gets locked down. I don't know when/if I'll have time within the next few days, but maybe I'll come on and post some more signs and some help would be nice?

Sounds good to me! I can help if you post some signs about what you'd like done.

*Bump* Let's review that To-Do list:

Server: Non-dev build of Craftbukkit. DONE: On Beta 0.2
Plugins: Need:
- Fe (Not updated to 1.7 yet) -> Appears to work with 1.7 anyway, but needs Vault
- Vault (Not updated to 1.7 yet) -> Code work in progress, no artifact?
- Groupmanager [See Essentials]
- SignShop (Not updated to 1.7 yet)
- Towny (AVAILABLE from http://palmergames.com/category/towny-download/towny-dev-build/ )
- WorldGuard (Dev build exists) -> Needs WorldEdit first -> http://builds.enginehub.org/job/worldedit/?branch=master and http://builds.enginehub.org/job/worldguard/?branch=master
- Essentials (Not updated to 1.7 yet) -> http://ci.ess3.net/viewLog.html?buildId=5797&buildTypeId=bt9&tab=artifacts ?
Economy: Need to decide on which materials will be sellable and buyable, the prices for each, and the prices of creating towns, upkeeping towns, and buying chunks (plots).
Rails: Need to build stations along four branches. Need to WorldGuard all branches and stations. Need to block building and mob spawns on all stations and rails.
Spawn: Missing features: signshop chests in shop buildings need items and costs, spawn border delineation DONE, cleanup around LTWTTF stairs DONE, more ways out of spawn DONE, some grass that has not grown over dirt DONE, general cleanup of entertainment projects DONE. Cleanup of "clipboard" of rail pieces DONE. Protection of spawn build=deny pending after all building is complete.
Configuration: Setting up groups for new members, members who have visited before, mods, and admins. Turning off PvP inside spawn and rails. Configuring Towny. Mostly still pending

Wow! Things are starting to converge (:
Even though a bit of the plugins are still not ready for 1.7 yet, will we still be able to possibly get started once all the spawn/rail building is done, and just add the plugins as they get updated? It'd be wonderful to enjoy a winter break day on the server before school starts back up

I have made lots of (partial) changes to the wooden paths, and left a lot of signs up for instructions to finish/fix some parts of the paths. I also had some help making some nice little "parks" along the paths

I noticed a lot of "path spaghetti" around the lake under the station (some of it mine): that is, a lot of paths in one area that all interconnect and go to the same place (or to nowhere).

The goal of these paths is to get to different areas without cluttering up the landscape too much. Let's have paths go different places, but please not connect a bunch of paths in one area. That's not to say that there cannot be SOME connecting of paths so that there's more than one way to get somewhere, but let's try to minimize it.

I threw some wood pieces where I'd like paths to go, and posted signs with more information. Please feel free to work on those ... I've tried to set it up so that we have walking paths leading out of spawn in different directions, and to/from different areas of spawn (e.g. not all just to/from the lake under the station).

Currently, all wooden paths start from the same place near the top of spawn. Is there a second place we'd like a path to come from as well, or does this seem central enough?