Some of you may know, I also work with the Spigot project to help make Minecraft servers better in terms of performance and features. The real performance improvements come with some sacrifice to vanilla game mechanics. Recently we saw the Entity Collision change -- But I had to tweak that to not be as effecient in order to keep better gameplay. However I now have something in place that I wrote, and continueing to expand called "Entity Activation Range" This feature lets me configure a limit on how close an entity has to be to a player in order for the server to process most of its main actions... Like monstes/animals moving and acting. Some checks such as in the air and in water makes it always activate to keep good gameplay for things such as grinders, so we should'nt have any major gameplay impact with this! These ranges will be balanced to ideally target only stuff on your own residence. Current Ranges: Town: 24 Wild: 32 NOTE: CROP GROWTH IS NOT AFFECTED MOB FARMS (Eg Iron Farms) SHOULD NOT BE IMPACTED This means, most of your residence will be activated while standing in the center. If you go to a neighbor 2 doors down, you may be able to see your residence, but your animals and such will deactivate and stop moving. Sure I may be gloating insaying this, but this feature is the biggest thing ever so far to improve server performance. We will tweak numbers as appropriate to keep gameplay smooth, but there will need to be some sacrifice from users who expect everything to behave like vanilla. Long as your near your stuff your using, it will behave like normal! This is intended for you to not really notice it, but if you look in the distance and see your animals standing still for long periods of time, this is why
My iron farm is already completlyyyy wrecked... Nice updates, should cause the server less laggy/crashy
Hang on a minute........... So if the furnaces part gets implemented, and I load some stuff into my furnaces in my wild village (Which spans several chunks) then go to another part to work away at whatever project I'm on, they wont operate? So I'll have to build a furnace range wherever I intend to work? This is starting to get a touch ridiculous now. What about minecarts? Will they stop moving after they leave the entity area? Will that wreck my trainlines within my village too? What about redstone? Will it continue to work?
Better performace is (usually) always a good thing. So is this "beta' performace update in place now or planned for the coming days/weeks? (with Normal difficulty update?) Edit: Take that, iron farmers
For people like poor Kilmannan, who's gameplay it will effect, probably not that great. But in the long run it's better for everyone performace wise
Ugh -My "work room" is set up near bedrock on my res. The top floor of my res is 80 blocks away. So over half of my res will not activate my furnaces. My farm is right above the furnace room. Will my plants not grow? I have spent many hours setting up my farm so I can auto harvest into hoppers while I work on my res. Will this not work?
I have one concern about this really, wool farms would be impacted a lot from this, since they have to be able to eat grass, and I am 1 of many that I'm sure doesn't want to sit withing range of sheep in order for them to regrow their wool and any other animals for other reasons. Also for supporters who has residences together so that they can have more animal farms are also gonna be extremely impacted. Just my opinion on the matter.
For town farmers, is there any way to implement the growing/entity distance for the WHOLE res, not just a certain area. Sort of like how /entcount is for the whole res, not an area. So that it can go down to bedrock? Might be a solution for Melody.
I'd like a better explanation of what's actually going to happen when this comes in. It's great posting an update, but not so great when it's a touch vague and leaves a hundred questions unanswered. How will it affect: Redstone (Including all things powered by redstone - rails, pressure plates, etc) Minecarts Crop farms Sheep wool regeneration Animal breeding / growing to adulthood Water flowing Lava flowing Hoppers I'm sure there are more.
FIRST OFF: Let me state these"Ranges" are intended to be the point where it does not impact your gameplay. For example, a range of like 48 is the point where your starting to not even be able to see the entitiy (MC Cuts off showing entities before your actual 'view-distance') The idea is to cut out the entity ticking for entities that are not being used. If your using it it should work unaffected. To answer some questions: Redstone should be unaffected currently - but likely to disable it when too far too. Same effects as a chunk unload. Minecarts that are not near a player will stop moving till a player is near it... exactly the way it already behaves with the unloaded chunk scenario. Nothting changes there except it stops a little earlier Crops unaffected - they are not entities. Wool regrowth will require being near them. You have to be near animals to breed - so unaffected, aging will be affected if your not near them. Stand by them while waiting for them to grow. Water and lava unaffected. How am i suppose to know about hoppers? lol. As for mob farms - they should be unaffected! If your seeing issues with it, let me know and ill investigate. Before bashing the feature, (and in many cases before you even see how it affects you) try it and let me know if something is undesirable and ill see if i can tweak to accommodate for it... Not really, all of this is done on the internals of craftbukkit unrelated to plugins. As for furnaces - I said it might not come to them... I will see, but its unlikely they need to be limited. The furnance talk was sort of to be an example of how it can affect things. This feature basically acts as if we lowered the view-distance, without actually lowering the view-distance, giving a better world view.
Also, this feature has been in place since saturday... There's been 0 complaints. Please don't rage until you try it.
This does not factor in height distance, only X/Z. the entire chunk top to bottom will be active. Also about wool, another change I will be doing soon is to make sheep with wool not eat, and I can raise the wool regrowth rate. We can accommodate to make up for things you see
