There were Many many changes made to the gameplay mechanics of Minecraft in the 1.8 update. I recently built a farm relying on 1.7 game mechanics and found that it would not work. I know the 1.8 update would in fact break this farm. Being that EMC is running an Emulation in place of the real 1.8, I was curious how much of EMC relies on the Mechanics of 1.8.
We currently only use the "emulator" to allow players running a 1.8 client to connect to the server, but all of our server's mechanics are 1.7. What could possibly cause some issues with farms are the Technical Changes from vanilla Minecraft (http://empireminecraft.com/wiki/technical-changes-from-vanilla-minecraft/). What type of farm were you trying to make? At which point exactly did it "break"?
An Iron Golem farm using 1.7.2 village building mechanics. Minecraft has changed how villagers recognize and add doors to respective villages. This forces 1.8 farms to be build in a special way as compared to 1.7.2 farms.
The actual break in my farm came from one of two issues: 1. Emc uses 1.8 village mechanics and thus I have built the wrong version. 2. The villager detection delay on the server is lagging to a new level of extreme. The normal detection timer has a max length of 6 seconds. My detection timer has a 30 second delay built in for the villager to detect. I suppose the amount of villagers in the world could drive the detection lag to over 500% its normal delay, but I would like to think otherwise. At this point, I hope it is the second issue, as I can eventually fix that.
Recently I found out that EMC uses the color change of beacon beams that come with 1.8 (by recently I mean the day EMC was 1.8)
With a change in the behavior of Beacons, I am lead to believe that there are more than just a single mechanic change.
Is it not simply that you can 'see' the beacons color as this is seen on the client side, as where the server side just sees stained glass over a beacon? Remember, during the prior change in the 1.7, we could 'almost' craft stained glass. In that I mean that we could put dye in the middle of a crafting table and surround it with glass, however we were never allowed to pick it up, and have 'stained' glass as the server did not recognize this as a possibility. Where I have not played around with moss stone, etc... I would imagine its the same, where if you are on a 1.8 client, you can put the items in the crafting table, and 'see' the output, however cannot pick up what you are crafting as the server does not recognize it. Again, not tested, but I will soon. So, keep in mind the difference between the 'client' you are running, and the 'server' version. What you see may be different than what the server sees. Then again, maybe i'm wrong, but hope others more knowledgeable will chime in?
And that's exactly why I still have my EMC profile on 1.7.9. I just don't want to confuse myself with that sort of stuff.
Things simply based on crafting ... we could 'technically' release some of them crafting moss stone, for example - since everything isn't ported over to sponge yet, still using spigot (bukkit repo) ...there can still be custom crafting recipes... So you can check to see what areas in a crafting bench someone has an item, and it will output a specific item... Also there are 'on new chunk loading ' events ... where we could run a random math code to specify the size of groups of sponges ... so they could be generated in certain biomes... (might be slightly laggy though) Daylight Sensors - on right click can be set to an altered form, inverting the redstone signal... ---- Tricky ones would be to prevent farming certain things.... like Monster spawners - if you click one with a spawn egg, it turns monster spawner into that type... Arrows under water - and on fire... will be extinguished .... would just need to get it's location - get its' velocity, yaw, and pitch... delete it... replace it with a normal arrow, set its' velocity yaw and pitch and location to that of the other one... (as soon as it hits water) ...would be tricky to keep people from farming arrows from an infinity fire bow. ---------- All of these are possible, probable, and doable .... but would take awhile to do 'all' of them... but there are a few like 'signs' having more space in 1.8 ...and 'newer items' that can't be added unless it directly makes a reference to the newer items
Would be cool if we had 1.8 items added, however I am sure it would be a bit of work to try and add this. Would also probably take time away from other stuff being done I would imagine. Meh, I am good waiting for 1.8, so we can have it all at once! WooHoo!