The EpicQuestz Newsletter #26 (11/05/20)


The EpicQuestz Newsletter
Issue #26 - 11 May 2020
Editor’s Note

Well look who it is. Yes, unfortunately you have me again this fortnight… feels like 2019 again! Apparently I’m a much busier man than I was before (I wonder how that happened), so apologies for the lateness of this release. Since I’m apparently the Owner, hopefully this letter will be beautifully accurate and utterly up to date… maybe. Quite a lot has happened of late, especially regarding behind-the scenes System Administration stuff. I’ll stop rambling and get to it.
Project Progress


Osgiliath | In Progress
Project Leader: @the_pharaohs_cat

“The Osgiliath guide video is still in the works, but apart from that progress has ground to a halt. We hope to get going again on this in the coming weeks, but all the project leadership are quite busy at the moment, unfortunately.”


Rohan Terrain | Paused
Project Leader: @Enoshade

“Truth be told, I’ve been getting somewhat burnt out on making Rohan Terrain lately. However, I have pushed through and finished the Aldburg region which means I’ll be able to take a good long break while that project is underway. I am really happy with how the Aldburg terrain came out, and it was great to finally see what all of my texturing, trees and vegetation looks like put together. Once the structures are planned out (and I’d be happy to help on that) the long put-off building on it should commence.

With my school year being over, I can imagine it being quite soon that I get back to finishing the overall terrain. The current plan is to get the entire southern part of Rohan finished and exported, which is broken down in a detailed 5-step document that past me has so kindly put together. Actual efforts will mostly be focused on sculpting the terrain in order to increase the detail and allow places for building, however some assets may still have to be made and exported - especially for shrubbery. And maybe I’ll make some of the farm fields in worldpainter, which would be easier than struggling with the ingame AWE plugin.”



Setton | In Progress
Project Leaders: @LimeeFox & @raarmaarwaar

“Not much new to the horizon of Setton. We’ve completed some more house exteriors. That makes 6 exteriors left to be build, those are small farm houses and barns. We are looking for a fence design for the farm fields, so if you have a good idea let us know! There have been added some trees in the village and we are planning the road pallet.

We still can use a lot of help from builders, its really easy to find out what needs to be done because of the EpicJobs plugin. Claim a job and get started!"


Other Developments

@the_pharaohs_cat has been working on Resource Pack stuff: Gondor Pack 0.4 has been released, here’s a link to the download/changelog. There’s not been much work on my part, with my focus primarily being on our sister server - Empire War.

We’re gearing up to start work on Aldburg, which I’ll initiate when I have the time. The terrain is effectively done, so we can start work on in-situ planning.

Once FAWE is sorted out, I’ll be talking to @Enoshade about what the plan with moving Grimslade, Aldburg, Helm’s Deep and Eoford into the same world is.

Also of course of note is the build contest, which you can read more about here.


Technical Corner

A lot has happened here, here’s an account from our System Administrator @StealWonders:

"This past fortnight we had a little incident where the hard drive for EpicQuestz filled up, a day after talking about expanding it funnily enough. Tobberz and I have therefore created a quick response taskforce of fixing this issue!

I present to you: a server upgrade!

Due to Empire War being back up and EpicQuestz needing even more expensive server gear we have decided to ditch cloud hosting and get our own bare metal box (dedicated server).

Specs: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Hexa-Core, 64 GB DDR4 RAM, 2x 512GB NVMe SSDs (RAID 1 configuration) and 1 GBbit/s connection

The pricing stays roughly the same (if we combine Empire War and EpicQuestz but the exact sum still has to be calculated as we use a dozen of different services). Over the past three days I have slowly migrated the Minecraft servers & the correlating software to the new machine, followed by email server & forums.

The coming week we will see the Website (maybe hopefully) and the downloads being moved over to the new server, which once done will mark the end of our server baptized “icecream” who has served us well for two years! RIP.


Rank Changes

Congratulations to @Jay1004 for his completion of the in-game trial, thus being promoted to Builder.


What Can Members Do?

Simply use the EpicJobs plugin to find a job to do, thanks to this helpful guide courtesy of @raarmaarwaar:

General commands used to operate EpicJobs.
• /jobs
• /jobs help
• /jobs list [mine]
• /jobs info
• /jobs claim
• /jobs abandon [job]
• /jobs tp|teleport [job]

Most of these jobs are on Setton, but we’ll add jobs for Osgiliath and Aldburg in the coming days & weeks.


Featured Creation

This week’s featured creations goes to @Jay1004, with his great application plot.


Closing

I hope I haven’t missed anything. Over the past few weeks I’ve been taking a few steps back from the day-to-day running of EQ, but I can assure you that my fingers are still in as many pies as possible. One last thing: as Steal mentioned, our old cloud server that served us loyally since our independence from EW in 2018 is being ‘decomissioned’, so and F and RIP for icecream. You’ll be missed.

FORTNIGHTLY QUIZ:
Umbar time! Following on from Cat’s question, who was the king of the first Corsairs, and why did he flee to Umbar, and during which age did this initial Corsair settlement happen? (Extra points for a rough year!)

Answer to the previous quiz:
I believe Eldacar’s parents came from Gondor and Rhovanion, but if this information is wrong @the_pharaohs_cat is free to steal my beans.

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Lovely newsletter Tobba, I didn’t know much about the formation of icecream, but it has certainly done a good job for such a long time. May he rest peacefully, after having served an honourable life.
(We need a new silly name for the new server)

Quiz time!
Well, I may not be totally right, but I’ll have a stab at it.
I’m pretty sure that after the Kin-Strife, the nasty bugger Castamir (the Usurper) fled from Gondor with his followers after he was defeated- and he fled and set up in Umbar, which was already a Gondorian colony of sorts, he was safe there because the Gondorian navy was almost completely destroyed, save for his own ships, so he couldn’t be followed.
So if I was to have a guess at the first king, I’d hazard a guess and go for Castamir the Absolute bastard.
Ehhmm, the year… I know it was in the Third Age, and somewhat early on at that.
The events of the books happened in the rough 3000s of the 3rd age, so, and this is a total stab in the dark, I’m gonna say that it happened in 1700 of the Third Age

Although, it was originally a Numenorean colony along with Pelargir, so that could be something else that’s significant.

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