LEFTEROS / PERSONAL NOTES
The RFS Dev Team website — the digital home of the Greek Minecraft community
5 May 2013 / Lefteris Iliadis / SomniusX
The RFS Dev Team logo — source: rfsdev.net captured in the Wayback Machine.
In May 2013 rfsdev.net was online and serving a whole community. I had built the entire website — not then, but earlier — with the single purpose of serving the needs of the Minecraft community of Greece, as well as of Europe and the whole world. The May 5, 2013 capture is still preserved today in the Internet Archive, and this text is a nostalgic walk through it.
RFS and its servers
The team was born from the idea that "for every problem there is a person who can provide the solution": software engineers, programmers, game designers, graphic artists and advertising people. Minecraft got us hooked back in 2011, and "Rainbow" — an RPG server with custom plugins and structures built block by block — was the reason the team came together. After two years of constant development, RFS Lobby was added as a second server with modes like Wars of Races, Nazi Zombies, COR (Call of Rainbow), Slayer, Skyblock and more, always on dedicated machines.
The website divided all of that into clear sections: About Us, RFS Servers, Development, RFS Lab, FAQ, News (category/news/) and Creations (category/creations/). The Creations section was effectively the team's digital shop: any visitor could download a ready-made server — the well-known bukkit_serverAlpha V1.10–V1.12 packs with the Start_RFS script and a few-click port opener — and play with friends from all over the world. Support ran on Buycraft donations (PayPal, card, paysafe) for server cost, maintenance and RAM, CPU and bandwidth upgrades.
The MASS LOGINS CONTEST
The News section holds the announcement of the Mass Logins Contest of May 19, 2013: the biggest Minecraft event held up to then, with the goal of breaking the record of simultaneous logins on a Greek server, featuring an in-game Minecraft concert, a drop party and smoke signals aimed at Mojang, Notch and Jeb_. Organizers: padakoys, yorgaraz, somniusx, afrokolis — MADE IN GREECE. You can see that page inside the capture.
GameAthlon 2013
This chapter continued a little later, at the HAEC GameAthlon, where the RFS Dev Team kept over 8,000 players simultaneously connected to one server — a record number for that era. I wrote about it in detail in the post GameAthlon 2013, the RFS Dev Team and the 8,000-player record.
The technical side
My own role in the team was deeply technical. I managed the game server rentals and their initial setup on the CentOS of that era, wrote scripts to manage the Minecraft servers with bash, screen and tmux, and ran monitoring utilities. The servers ran from RAM drives, on machines that reached even 128GB of RAM back then. The Java that Minecraft is written in is extremely demanding on memory and CPU, and server-side optimizations you could do were limited at the time — RAM drives and multi-threading were the first necessary step.
There was also a chance to present some of the team's work at the Thessaloniki International Fair (DETH), but there are not enough sources to write about it properly — I was not there.