[Suggestion] Fix the lag

Discussion in 'Suggestion Box Archives' started by Extendingskys, Feb 16, 2021.

  1. Something does need to be done, however I should note that some of the things that need to be done is also on the player base. Here are some things that can be done by you:
    • If you are using hoppers for transport and not pickup, consider placing a composter on top of the hopper to reduce lag. Preference: Composter > Dropper or Furnace.
    • If you are using hoppers for transport and not pickup, then use water streams on packed ice. It is faster. Item drop lag is only a problem if it is not being collected.
    At one point, Aikar mentioned he was interested in buffing the item transfer rates of hoppers to an entire stack rather than 1 at a time. This would break sorters, so he said there would need to be a toggle. I wonder how that's going?
    Tuqueque likes this.
  2. Well, past all the discussion regarding the validity of farms, I'm also not sure on the suggestions.

    I know Aikar has made a lot of custom code surrounding hoppers to make them less laggy, while also debuffing them. Is it less laggy to use water streams (with all those entities out in the open) compared to blocked off hoppers? I don't know. Someone would have to study that, rather to just make an assumption about it.

    However the increased item transfer rate, could be useful, and if there is no change in the amount of lag caused by hoppers, then I'm all for it.

    Trading Cap. Interesting solution, but I still think EMC should remain to some extent, close to what Mojang wants the game to be. I'm 40% positive 60% negative in this one.

    Item stacking radius, sure, but do not exaggerate the increase. Maybe 1 or 2 blocks max. Its still a pain for drop parties to spread the rewards among players, if the items stack...

    As for EXP leaderboard:

    1. Measurable - Is it the fastest / longest / heaviest / most?
    2. Breakable - Can the record be broken or repeated by someone else? All our record titles must be open to being challenged.
    3. Standardisable - Can the record title be done universally? For example, it cannot be related to something restricted to a region.
    4. Verifiable - Can the claim be proven? For example, a claim such as ‘the man who never drank water’, can never be verified unless the man spent his whole life from birth under surveillance by a witness.
    5. One Variable – We can verify the largest painting but would not consider the largest painting by the most people.
    6. Universal - The proposal must be something, or about something that is known to the world’s majority. It cannot be too specific / regional.
    7. Substantially different from a current record - If your record suggestion is similar to something we already have, we will ask you to break the current record rather than approving a variation of the same title.


    So There are two iffy sections. The Breakable and the One Variable, I'll talk about the One-variable version first, seems I think is easier.

    There are several ways to earn EXP in minecraft, however they all go to the same EXP bar. One could argue that these are indeed 1 variable, but There are different levels of difficulties and effort required for each. EMC has always been someone to reward high effort and group activities, while debuffing AFK sessions.

    Instead of just banishing the EXP gained from cactus (EMC is still play your way, and if someone wants to spends dozens of hours making an AFK farm, go ahead), I would just Separate the counts. EMC already differentiates between the sources of EXP because they have different multipliers for the TEXP board. The subtotals I would recommend adding is: Furnace, Villager, Survival (This would include Ore exp, Boss EXP, and (no-mass-killing/farm) mob EXP.

    For the Breakable aspect of the record, it is arguably impossible for someone new, to create new farms and rise to the top, without the top players quitting EMC or taking a break. So on this aspect, I think EMC still can do better. (an already-existing example of this, is the monthly TEXP)

    (Maybe debuff EXP multiplier after 10 of 24 hours of the day has had the player logged in
    stormboy231 likes this.
  3. The reasoning of this doesn't compute. Sure, it may be a mechanic but is it fair? Let's get down to it, growing something vs actual duping items. There is already a system where there is a way to farm gunpowder by use of witch huts so those are fair game. Sand you need time under your belt, you go to a desert with a beacon and collect your 4 dcs of sand to make a dc of TNT. TNT costs 4 sand and 5 gunpower which you need to manufacture by use of crafting. This dupe generates those items for free for little Redstone work, this sounds like cheating the system above. Plus with your suggestion, this allows many other farm designs to be fully automated which in turn would bring down more items in value from current farms. Where this dupe can be used as examples are tree farming, terracotta mining, or any mining for that matter since ores are not destroyed from explosions on EMC. Not to mention the possibilities of carpet bombers and greifing. I think it's a fair rule to not abuse this
    colorphulmonkey likes this.
  4. I have had trouble getting water streams on EMC that don't break because of the custom EMC hopper mechanics. Especially so if there is only a single hopper per item, such as for sorting systems. If you know a water stream setup that doesn't have items skipping over hoppers on EMC let me know because I would be very much interested.
  5. Use dropper lines for sorters, and, if you really need a sorting system that works with a water stream, sometimes a hopper minecart based design is feasible.
    Most of the time, just using automatic item droppers works perfectly fine. Try to pick up the items as late as possible with hoppers, to have them cover as large as possible a distance in water.
    If you want to, I can check your system out, and improve the lag by what probably is a lot. I am mostly a part of the piston door community, which is the only place I hold world records, but I know my way around other redstone as well.

    At the rate people use it? No. They'll just void the items after an hour or two.

    This is true for virtually every redstone circuit, and cactus farms are not special in the way in which this is true for them. Storage systems and everything else have the exact same issues. I would personally even argue that storage is a worse offender than cactus XP in this regard, simply because more people *try* to do a storage system, and because it's easier to mess it up, with even large YouTubers making terrible mistakes.

    Please, continue to act like I don't know this already, like I am not the reason rails being unmovable even is on the wiki.

    ---

    I know this TNT stuff is a tangent, but, here we go:

    There is a difference between "Primed TNT duping" and "TNT duping" The first is a beloved unintentional feature of minecraft, the second a glitch.

    I made a thread about the differences between bugs and unintended features in 2018, in this case with 0-ticks (Which is NOT just something you can use for letting crops grow faster, but also the name of a part of redstone that is mostly used by the piston door community, for crying out loud.)
    Recently, with the 1.13 update, this post has been proven right. Mojang changed pistons in a way that removed 0-ticks, and then, they added it back in, because it was a beloved part of the game. (Again, I am NOT talking about the crops here.)

    The same is true for TNT duping.
    First of all: It’s a misnomer. It’s “primed TNT duping” Basically: it is a way to make a TNT both create a primed entity AND continue to exist as a block in the world. This effectively means that it is a way to spawn a primed TNT item in the game, without using any recourses.
    It takes quite a lot of time to set up, it is quite bulky, and far from as versitile as your comments make believe.

    This is used a lot

    I cannot name any servers here, but it is allowed on all the other servers that I have played more than an hour or two on, on most of those, it was the only 'glitch' allowed. Most YouTubers use it all the time, and it is, by now, a beloved part of the game. Even the larger Youtubers who are relatively bad at redstone, and not at all a part of the technical community, like MumboJumbo or Xisumavoid, have used this feature in their let’s plays.

    The primary reason this is true is because it is quite a lot of work to pull off, and relatively complicated and hard to move, so machinery using it quickly gets really large, effectively making it impossible to make a system that, for example, can mine and collect any blocks faster than a player can by hand. It is really only useful for stuff like tree farms and cobblestone farms, where the module can stay in place. Farms that, now, use withers.
    Realistically: allowing primed TNT duping really only decreases the amount of withers people use for farms, and makes people move those farms to town.

    Standard quarries and world eaters wouldn’t work on EMC anyway: you cannot x-ray, and, therefore, quarries will just break. World eaters will be difficult, but need to be redesigned. I know *I* can do that, but I doubt to many more people can.
    Aditionally: Complicated slimestone is something that very few people know how to not break on EMC anyway… There are quite a few less-than-trivial reasons why quarries wouldn’t even start on EMC.

    Indeed, his argument was a non sequitur, but this is too. I know a *certain* person on SS would use this same reasoning to argue that automatic farms shouldn’t be allowed at all: “Let's get down to it, farming automatically vs farming by hand. There is already a system where there is a way to farm sugar cane by use of your hands so those are fair game.”
    Saying that these two are not the same, which I guess you would, would bring to the actual point: want do we want to allow, what do we not want to allow? The only differences are in what they do, not in what they are. The only difference in what they are is semantic: idiolectic semantics, to be precies. That is not something to base a rule around.

    Before, I argued this: (quoting from another thread)
    “The goals of regulating capitalism in real life and regulating it in Minecraft are very similar: in both cases you’re trying to protect the people from themselves in and from the competitive system that is created. The ultimate goal of rules in general is to create a system that everyone is able to live in. You want everyone to be able to do what they want, as long as it doesn’t harm other people. This has always been at the bottom of all the rule changes and arguments on EMC: What behaviour do we want to tolerate, and what behaviour does more harm than it does good, and should therefore be outlawed. Good regulation then becomes regulation that does this job properly.”

    I would personally argue that primed TNT duping does good for the game: Realistically, the only prices that would go down are cobblestone, stone, smooth stone, the wood types, bonemeal and normal concrete, realative to powder.
    I don’t think that, for any of these, a lowering of the price can be a problem, for many, it would be a good. The fact that the wood market, after all these years, has not jet stabilised, and I still sometimes have problems getting enough wood, even though I have all the rupees in the world, shows that there is a problem there. Concrete being roughly the same price as concrete powder would just be nice, a good way to make one of the most useful building blocks more obtainable, and I don’t really care for cobblestone or smooth stone. bonemeal would be the outlier: with primed TNT, it would also be possible to make bonemeal farms since 1.16, something that, I think, is a nice addition to the game, as I would otherwise make a large crop farm and compost it, anyway.


    *tree farming only, it’s hugely impractical for anything else because of its complexness.


    Griefing is a good point. Sadly, griefing with large flying machines is already very possible in minecraft, also on EMC.
    Luckily enough: making a system with which you would really grief a place, in a way that breaks it more than, let’s say, a similar flying machine spreading water around, would be an end-game project to say the least. I doubt newer players could pull it off.
    Let’s be clear here. This type of redstone is huge

    The point I am making is this:
    Primed TNT duping isn’t some overpowered glitch thing, it is a rather complicated and bulky thing, that has become a beloved part of the game for many people. It is allowed on virtually every survival server I played on, and used by most large YouTubers (meaning quite a lot of people find it being disabled a limitation, and a change from vanilla.)
    Recently, assuming what Extendingskys said was right, the general minecraft development team have started to acknowledge that this is true, and they stopped trying to “fix” it out of existence. It is an unintentional feature: something that had a messy start as a bug, yes, but something that, too, is now a part of the game that the development is no longer trying to remove.

    Contrary to what you might think based on this long post, I am not under the delusion that the development is going to choose to add it, that is also why I posted it on this thread. Having talked a lot with quite a few EMC devs, it seems to me that most would rather disable redstone altogether, and only focus on the “casual” players, than adding Primed TNT duping. This last point is not a hyperbola: When I talked about a server I briefly played on that had automatic farming *in general* as something that was now allowed, two EMC high-up-staff said disallowing automation entirely was something they thought would be better for the game, but they weren’t going to add solely because it would alienate a large part of the EMC player base.
    My point with all this is this: Though I fully understand that it will not be added, given the stance SS has on automation in general, I want to show you that this disabling of Primed TNT Duping is not, like you seem to argue, just common sense, but a choice the development has made regarding the direction of the server: a choice many people rightfully disagree with, and a choice that has many arguments for and against it.
  6. I'm mostly referring to sorted farm inputs, for example a mixed melon+pumpkin farm output. Also, hopper lines or minecart hopper systems are needlessly laggy. I would much prefer to run my farm output through a water stream over 20 item sorts, half for each resource, than to try to manage enough parallel hopper lines to support the output of the farm.
  7. Just something else to add onto this. As a farm owner and someone who tries to see anyway to make the farm better in both production and lag issues. The only real problem I see that can be fixed “easy” is as a cactus grows/cuts it goes into the stream, but as others get cut next to it it tp to them and tries to get as many as possible into a stack of 64. This delays the process of pickup, because we use a minecart system to reduce the use of hoppers. So basically the whole time the items spend trying tp to each other rather then into the cart pick up the more lag they will produce as they get down the stream together.
    Tuqueque likes this.
  8. To add on to what storm said we can try to make it so the area where they group together is bigger