We're back !
We're back online! Or, almost...
Our downloads are now available once again, and we just released new maps as well.
Fresh update... and new maps!
After several months of inactivity (well, we were active but you could had not noticed that), we're back with new maps!
Have you ever dreamt to build in Fr*nce or Italy ?
Well, this dream can be yours now.
In the following weeks, we're going to release the following maps:
- Africa
- Morocco (21st January)
- Asia
- Europe
Join our Discord to be the first to get mentionned when a new map releases!
Improved download experience
The EarthMaker Assistant bot is back, with a huge change. Instead of using a single channel, we rewrote the bot to use Discord's forum channel feature.
You can find the map you're looking for using the search bar provided by Discord, and you can also filter by tags.
But behind the scenes, we reworked the way download works, leading to increased download speeds. Feel free to share additional feedback on Discord about how we can improve the bot.
The future of EarthMaker
As you may know, generating these maps is quite costy. Feel free to check the an in-depth explaination below.
More details about the server
We used to pay almost 70€ monthly for the server. The performence/price ratio was good, for the price however, but this is still a significant amount. Here are the hardware specs of the said server:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900 (12 cores, 24 threads @ 3.1 GhZ / 4.3 GhZ in Boost mode)
- RAM: 128 GB (4*32 GB) ECC
- Storage: 2*1.92 TB (3.84 TB), in a ZFS pool
The map generation tool we use runs only on Windows, but since we've had some issues with Windows randomly throwing BSODs, instead of installing Windows Server on the bare-metal, we've decided to install it in a virtual machine.
Unlike a "standard" virtual machine you could create in VirtualBox or VMWare Workstation, we used the KVM (Kernel Virtual Machine) hypervisor. This allows us to have little to no performence loss (about 5%, or less), as the VM is running in the Linux Kernel, right above the bare-metal hardware, instead of running in the user space.
To acheive this, we installed Proxmox Virtual Environment, an open source hypervisor (yes!) which allows us to create VMs using the KVM hypervisor (heck yes!) and QEMU, while exposing a web interface for management (this is peak!).
This setup is of course overkill, but it's much faster to boot Windows through this than to log in to the Hetzner web UI and then ask for a "button press". As a bonus point, Proxmox also provides a console to view the VM screen, which Hetzner does not allows, unless we order a KVM Console (or boot the server in the vKVM console, or buy a Dell server, tho they are expensive for our usecase).
The installation was not complicated, but since Hetzner has not provided a Proxmox ZFS setup at the time, we've had to install it through Rescue mode, inside a QEMU virtual machine with the phyisical drives mounted. If you're interested, the instructions are here.
For the moment, we don't have any plans to generate more maps, but this does not mean, that we won't continue.
New maps will release when we have the financial means to cover the server costs.
If you wish to support our work, please consider donating via the button below:
The 100% of the donations will be used to cover the project's costs.
Sharing is caring
Our maps are provided for free, and you can use them however you want, but we'd appreciate if you could link back to our website, on a sign, on your website, or on your socials for example.
As mentionned earlier, if you want to donate (both one-time and monthly are possible), you're free to sponsor us on GitHub Sponsors.