[PC Game] Minecraft HF server info and game discussion

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FnordBear

FnordBear

I checked the Canary website yesterday and they had a progress bar at 75% completion. Then notch released a patch today. So...meh.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
They said they're "working on it," but no joy yet... meanwhile, Notch shared an interesting email about changing the height of chunks in minecraft:

Notch said:
I briefly talked to the crazy engineers over at Bat Country Entertainment about mods that alter the height limit in Minecraft. Ryan send me this interesting email about what different tradeoffs there are, and his experiences working with it:

Very cool! Off the top of my head, here’s a list of the main points:

Implications behind changing height:

- Memory Implications: Due to the way chunks are architected internally, the only relatively-easy way of increasing level height is to double it. As a result, memory usage can spiral out of control very quickly when increasing the number of bits available to the Y axis. A somewhat short-sighted view would be to point out that this is wholly manageable in SSP, but pragmatically, SMP is already a hornet’s nest when it comes to RAM usage, and the only way to increase the level height would be to neatly double the memory footprint. Ouch!

- CPU Implications: Chunk terrain generation occurs in pieces on the X/Z plane, but expects the chunk to be fully populated along the Y axis, from bedrock to sky. To be fair, much of this can be mitigated by the fact that any terrain above a certain cutoff can be assumed to be completely air, and any terrain below a certain cutoff can be assumed to be completely stone, thus eliminating the need for temperature / humidity / biome calculations far down in the level or high up in the level. Nonetheless, it’s still a cache-thrashing memory-fill operation. Worse still, due to the fact that subterranean features are populated per-chunk, to maintain a consistent distribution of ore you would need to double the number of calls made to any given feature generator as well for each doubling of the Y axis. While this is relatively cheap for things like ore, it’s eclipsed by the idea that cave generation would need to occur along the entire Y axis, and being a recursive function, this has the potential to get very costly very quickly.

- Storage Implications: Anything stored in memory needs to be serialized to disk and read back from disk. Given the fact that in SSP, the number-one performance killer - even on my beastly computer - is disk I/O, it would be a highly questionable idea to double the amount of data that needs to be written out to disk. I’m not completely sure if chunks are gzipped before being written to disk, or if that only occurs to chunks when transmitted over the network, but if they are, this simply robs from Peter to pay Paul - it mitigates the disk I/O issue while increasing the enormity of the CPU issue.

- Network Implications: On SMP, Chunks need to be sent to many more people many times more often than in SSP. It can be taken for granted, from a client’s perspective, just how much data needs to be shoved around by the server, and although network packets are gzipped, it’s still an additional networking load, and still an additional CPU load as well.

Regarding changing the level height, it was “easy” to the extent that it took me around 4 hours yesterday morning to do it, but only because I’ve been poking around the engine internals since January and have been mentally keeping track of all of the assumptions in the code on exactly that topic. From top to bottom:

- Search through the codebase for « 11 and « 7, replace with « 12 and « 8 as necessary.
- Search through the codebase for 128, this will hit the majority of places that assume the map height as being 128, such as tile height checks.
- When changing the above locations, save yourself a recompile and make sure to change any variables from bytes to shorts or ints if you’re increasing them past 128. Being a C++ engineer, I keep forgetting that everything is implied as signed in Java.
- Search through the codebase for 127, this will hit the remainder of places that assume the map height as being 128.
- Search through the codebase for 64 and 63, this will hit the places that assume sea level is at 64, as well as Iron’s ore generator height cutoff. Personally, I dialed sea level up to 96 from 64, rather than fully double it up to 128, in order to have 32 additional tiles’ worth of water height, but have an entire 96 additional tiles’ worth of land height.
- Fix up the level feature generators for Redstone, diamond, gold et al.
- Visually grep through all of the level feature generator classes, doubling the RNG baseline and spread for each one.
- Change a few instances of 32768 to 65536 to accommodate 16*256*16 rather than 16*128*16.
- I’m not sure how much of this is a result of JAD and how much of it is actual code, but there are a few instances of “char whatever = ‘\200’;” in the MCP codebase, change it to a short or int containing 256 instead of 128.

I have to say that the game was *remarkably* performant with the Y height pushed up to 256. I imagine 512 might not be too bad on my beast of a machine, either, though 1024 would be pushing it. That said, one of my short-term “just for fun” goals is to see if I can’t get the Nether to populate from 0-127, the main world from 128-255, your Sky dimension from 256-383, and then that one group of modders’ new dimension, the Aether, from 384-511. That would be epic.

Additionally, there’s a mod that some guy made that re-works chunks to be 16x16x16 (it appears), but I’m rather nonplused by it. The bug list is as long as my arm, and it doesn’t actually rescale any of the terrain-generation features, so you don’t get neat things like this: http://moogle-tech.com/bce/gorge.png

As a result, I’m in the process of just trying to re-do what he did on my own. I’m filling all chunks above Y=256 entirely with air, filling all chunks below 0 with stone, manually invoking the cave generator, and theoretically things should just work. In principle, theory is a flimsy thing to go on, and to that end I’ve been chasing down bugs for the past 4-5 hours. At present I’m able to get in-game, but the chunks are horribly mis-arranged, so I suspect I’ve missed an important hashing function somewhere, since that would also explain why it’s spitting out reams of “Wrong location!” exceptions that it’s spitting out whenever it tries to spawn animals - the level provider is providing the wrong chunk.
<snip>

Cheers,
- R​
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​
 
FnordBear

FnordBear

That mod looks awesome and I would TOTALLY do that in single players. Unfortunately if my guess is right they would have to reset Ragnar to make it work. I doubt anyone really wants to do that.
 
strawman

strawman

They aren't targeting multiplayer, although I think it could be added to multiplayer just fine without a reset. It would require the program to modify the existing world in order to add the shrines, temples, etc.

The biggest problem is that the mod specifically requires the users to explore vast areas of land, which is a big no-no on multiplayer servers right now.

But I honestly think it would be better in multiplayer, with a scoreboard so it's not just something you do at your own leisure, you have to be pretty active about it to find them.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Yeah, multiplayer would rock. Everyone could be searching for the artifacts. Turn it on to full PvP and you could have a world where everyone fought for the items.

We'd have to stop Gas from cheating, though.
 
drifter

drifter

Hey GasBandit, would you mind stashing some slimeballs in the post office dispensers? I'd like to get my hands on some more sticky icky.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Hey, Tiq! If you want a place to start I have a place with a pool that I never visit any longer. If you want it it's yours.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Tiq said:
Sounds great, davey boy! Thanks muchly. :)
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It's unfurnished for the most part but does have furnace x6 and a couple large trunks for storage. It has an awesome monster trap for when they get turned on. It also has 2 underground lairs, but I've never done anything with either of them other than place a lot of torches and explore.
 
T

Tiq

Was working my way through the hellmaze earlier... got to the third floor, working my way through dark corridors... found a random chest with a diamond block in it... and right as I was about to grab it, moss teleported me to the top of the maze. D:

Oh, and thanks for the permissions, gassy.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
Tiq said:
Was working my way through the hellmaze earlier... got to the third floor, working my way through dark corridors... found a random chest with a diamond block in it... and right as I was about to grab it, moss teleported me to the top of the maze. D:
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Well, it's not like it's called the "fairmaze."
 
drifter

drifter

I meant to ask this a while ago, but I forgot; would it be okay to add a junction to the Playa railroad line? I wanted to add a line in case people wanted to check out the Dragon Boat. It would, however, add a stop between Ragnar proper and Playa del Halforums.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
drifter said:
I meant to ask this a while ago, but I forgot; would it be okay to add a junction to the Playa railroad line? I wanted to add a line in case people wanted to check out the Dragon Boat. It would, however, add a stop between Ragnar proper and Playa del Halforums.
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You make a functioning, aethetically acceptable train station for the junction, and I'd say you got a deal.
 
drifter

drifter

Oh, I was just going to make a small switch, but okay.

Hmm, I think I have a pretty interesting idea about that. I think you'll like it once I'm finished :)
 
T

Tiq

Ok, so I'm feeling slightly ambitious... gonna try something I haven't done before... gonna try and make a goddamn DRAGON. This is either going to be horrendously awesome or horrendously shit... did a little work so far on the claws, and realised if I want him perched on my castle I'm going to have to move everything I just did, forward a few squares... will give it a go after some sleep.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Here's a little something to make you feel inadequate (well, most of you, anyway).



Advance warning: The video is about 45min long, which means you probably weren't going to want to watch it at work anyway.

--Patrick
 
drifter

drifter

If you were interested in that Artifacts mod, the Aether mod might whet your appetite. Simply put, it's kind of an anti-Nether; it doesn't have the same strong adventure component that Artifacts is planning, but it does have some miniboss-type mobs guarding dungeons, from what I can tell. Lots of new blocks, items, and mobs, among other things.
 
drifter

drifter

So, there's some internet drama about that Aether mod. The modders threatened some Minecraft podcasters (Yogscast) with a backdoor ban unless they recant some criticism levied at the modders' use of Adfly links (apparently Adfly is notorious for ads that inject viruses?) to download the mod. They might equally be a bunch of cunts, but knowing the modders have a hidden blacklist system they can use to ban players makes me say fuck those guys.
 
Dave

Dave

Staff member
Yeah, I just installed this yesterday. Figures. Guess when I get home tonight I get to uninstall and do a system scan for malware.

And I went to the Aether last night and it sucked. I was immediately attacked by a metric fuckton of flying...things. Didn't get a chance really to do anything until I go into God mode.
 
T

Tiq

drifter said:
So, there's some internet drama about that Aether mod. The modders threatened some Minecraft podcasters (Yogscast) with a backdoor ban unless they recant some criticism levied at the modders' use of Adfly links (apparently Adfly is notorious for ads that inject viruses?) to download the mod. They might equally be a bunch of cunts, but knowing the modders have a hidden blacklist system they can use to ban players makes me say fuck those guys.
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Essentially, lewis from yogscast tried to make people aware that adfly is a rather dodgy service to use, to release your mods as it can lead you to a lot of malware (espcially for kids who play minecraft, who may be somewhat less savvy about what they click on)...

A bunch of the more popular minecraft modders acted like stuck up fuckwits and took this as a direct attack at their income and have been trying to kick up a shitstorm ever since, claiming lewis is "taking the bread from their mouths" and then calling him a hypocrite for using youtube ads to make money, because they missed the fucking point completely. The argument has essentially boiled down to "even if adfly has dodgy links, you should be smart enough not to click on them "smugface"

Still not sure about the backdoor thing though, as the yog boys just released a video of them playing with the aether yesterday.... t'is all rather curious.
Added at: 21:40
Added at: 21:41


:eek::eek::eek:

Creepers be creepy.
 
drifter

drifter

Tiq said:
Still not sure about the backdoor thing though, as the yog boys just released a video of them playing with the aether yesterday.... t'is all rather curious.
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Apparently that bit about the backdoor is to be implemented with the full release of the mod.

Also: there's a mod pack out there called OptiFog+OptiMine that can really help your framerate. What's new is that the mod now supports multi-threading and can send background chunk loading on to another core.
 
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