Animated Server Icon via Server Modification

After posting on Reddit, I’m also posting here… After 5 hours of work and some inspiration I created this:

Inspired by a friend off EsperNet IRC, after reading the wiki.vg guide I produced this. It functions by sending the icon packets one after another to play this animation. The image given is not aimed to be an advertisement but an example.

I’ve uploaded the modified BungeeCord source I do this with at [https://github.com/MylesIsCool/MylesCord][1] with putting the frames in a /server-icon/ folder and a text file in that with one per line the animated text to show.

This works completely vanilla and looks as the GIF appears (though i’ve had to slow it down due to bad connection for clients). You can see this in action by adding the server to your server list.

I’d love to hear your feedback, the one you see was made as an example of how typewriting and scrolling would work. This also brings a dynamic server count but disadvantage is it’s a continuous connection & will show as offline.
[1]: https://github.com/MylesIsCool/MylesCord

16 Likes

Neat! I like it :smiley:

That’s really awesome man, Definitely a great contribution. Perhaps you should add in some parsing of gifs, Frame by frame, or some other video formats.

I prefer people making their own because I had to spend about an hour reducing size and optimizing framerate otherwise it throttles peoples internet with how much they have to download. Perhaps in future though :smiley:

This is sickeningly awesome! You know what would be even more awesome? More pixels in those things like 1024x1024. Would lag your computer down but still. EPICNESS!

This is insanely annoying and I hope this doesn’t get adopted by other servers (but, it probably will be)

By putting this in the wild instead of just discussing it in the IRC you have told everyone about it, and now everyone is going to be using it. This is basically like when I started doing random MOTDs (i don’t claim to have invented random MOTDs, but it seemed like a pattern) and suddenly everyone else did as well, but about 500x more annoying.

3 Likes

Make a client patch to prevent this behavior. Simply, tell your client to accept the first packet and reject any others.

1 Like

This is really cool!

Do you have a tip for creating the frames easy or did you did them all by hand?

Great job anyways, this looks awesome and works like a charm!

Does this consume many of your traffic server side? I mean is this able to handle like 50+ players?

1 Like

This is really cool. I may be convinced to try and lobby people to allow runtime modification of the server icon for the API.

Note: I looked at the source and see the magic it’s using to do this. It’s a pretty cool hack but definitely a packet mod kinda thing.

2 Likes

I wanted to try this out with your server, could you post it or PM me the IP to see it in action?

Just add ValiantMC.net to your server list to see it.

1 Like

My steps:

  1. Make an animation in Photoshop
  2. Export it using Video Render as a PNG stream
  3. Google Bulk PNG compression and compress

My images are roughly less than 300 bytes per image, It does use some but we have a throttle enabled to prevent it being abused.

A thank you. Now I know what I can do this night: Creating animations :smiley:

1 Like

This. I’m definitely using this.

1 Like

Thank you very much.

I will just delete all servers using this feature from my list…

A serious server should have a short, white message of the day, and a well-designed, non-animated logo.

When a server I on my server list, I already know that it is good. So why highlight it with stupid effects?

It’s just as annoying as the html <blink> tag :frowning:

4 Likes

Nice, I made a countdown on my MOTD

1 Like

That’s awesome, I previously thought having a colored motd was sweet but now… I’m going to have to play with this.

I would use this if it was in the bungeecord/bukkit plugin ServerListPlus, This way I can impress new comers while having my current players enjoy nothing but the player count update thingy.

1 Like