EntCount - What changed on Dec 08, 2012

Discussion in 'Community Discussion' started by Aikar, Dec 3, 2012.

  1. check for clogging maybe? I have 3 12 cell farms.. and like I said.. did not run into any problems.
    AzRicer likes this.
  2. This is great new's Aikar, 1.3 update knocked the stuffing out of us all with so many bugs but the EMC team have prevailed and re-built, re-paired it and made/making things better then ever.

    So looking forward to the Dragon Arena's in the wild so I can start saving Dragon Eggs to purchase land in the wild.

    Just for ppl's info the economy is getting back on track now that villager trade's are limited [YES LIMITED] no longer will you be able to get double chests full of items such as glowstone for a few minuets work. You have to re-spawn the villager to get the same trade again to get more of the same trade item, this is very time consuming and become's less worth the effort after a while.

    If you want glowstone then you will be better off going to the nether then trading for large amounts with a villager.

    Also most block's that ppl buy are cobble, stone, logs etc and these are not part of the trade's. Villager egg price's may not go up as there are so many out there but the items you would trade them for will. This includes emeralds with an average price of 25r this will rise to around the same price as diamond so if you have a lot then hold on to them until the market dry's up the price will increase then.
    ShelLuser likes this.
  3. note if your iron farm is too big it will hurt you as the villagers will push on the cap...

    Why the change was made? The first version of the entity limiter was broken.

    The main point of the limiter was to reduce lag caused by entities. Well here's the funny story. Entity Limiter was one of the biggest causes of lag.

    The code needed improvement so I improved it. It's now more aggressive and smarter about controlling monsters.
    The first version actually INCREASED natural spawns past vanilla amount. This was not desired, but it was a compromise in order to keep entity counts overall in check so a single person cant go afk and build up 2k alone.

    This update simply fixes that issue and brings entity limits down to where they were meant to be from the start.

    Yes I was a little aggressive in the nether and went below vanilla levels, it'll be corrected in the next update.

    It doesn't matter if you see users complaining about lag.. I'm the one who's administering the server and know whats going on. I know our entity counts are too high. I'm doing what is needed to control that as much as possible. Once things have finally stabilized with counting and I'm sure there is no bugs with the counts, I will be enabling auto kill to automatically remove entities from residences in town and areas in the wild that is over the limit.

    EMC is regrowing. These entity counts are not acceptable to the size EMC use to be and will be again, due to 1.3 and 1.4 changes. The lag is a lot worse than 1.2.5 now.

    We have to cope with it. Other server's strategy is to simply delete all entities (including item frames and pictures and your items on the ground) every set interval... Id like to think our strategy of enforcing limits is a much nicer method.

    But the next version should hopefully solve your concerns with nether farms if you slab up the area to the new 5 chunk radius.

    As for iron farms, golems are not natural spawns nor are they spawner spawns....
    This change should of helped them. The only way I can see golems being stopped from spawning is if you have the 300/300 entity limit.

    If you have that many villagers that it has put you to 300/300... Then you need to reduce your villager count.

    The only way golems should of been impacted by this is if you were relying on the seperate 200/200 counts (have near 200 villagers)

    Lower your villager count, and you should have reliable results as natural will be capped at 90 (100 villagers, 90 monsters, 110 room for golems)

    As for natural vs spawners... That's mojangs fault.

    Spawners being uncapped even by the mob limit was the problem to start with.

    I personally wanted mojang to nerf spawners in 1.4 and was very upset they didn't...

    But I got some good news for you guys.... An upcoming EMC update will satisfy you a bit there, where natural spawns will be more desirable than spawners. Stay tuned :)
    (For clarity: We are not nerfing spawners, nothing is being nerfed)
    ShelLuser, PirateOfDW and mba2012 like this.
  4. Good thing I got myself 7 beacons before this.
  5. I thought the community is like more top priority ... and with it economy. Can't separate that two love birds...

    If you read the EMC ad, you will find
    - unique economy (1x) (hehe)
    - balanced economy (1x) (lol :D ;))
    - community run by adults (1x) (really really ;))
    - performance (0x) :)

    Performance is very important, of course ...
    I somehow feel that a server with around 20 users and few thousands of mobs shouldn't have performance problems.
    Perhaps there are other performance killers around?

    Yes ... that was just a bit bigger note on the margin :)
    ... saying "don't forget the community ... ehm ... economy" :)

    How about a more thorough testing before updating the servers?

    How about separating monsters and animals again?
  6. I'm not a programmer by any means but I do know a thing about testing. When it comes to things like this (and Aikar can correct me if I'm wrong), we can bug search all we want on a small scale, but the true tests come when it's actually live and is being used by the actual players on a large scale (which it's intended). Sometimes things are found/come out that we simply can't create on a test server.
  7. Like ruining the economy?
    mba2012, _Stads_ and thestar19 like this.
  8. Go sleep in the nether panda :mad:
  9. See below
    Please point old ads to ICC so he may update them with our new banner.

    Performance is VERY important for ANY server.
    If your server lags, people quit. If EMC regrows back to its old numbers (full 60/60), we will be in serious trouble.

    Even with the changes I just made, we still are not able to handle 60/60 too smoothly yet. A ton more work needs to be done.

    So yes, Performance is a VERY BIG part of Community. If everyone quits because the server lags.... You don't have a community.

    Please do not make assumptions when you don't understand the technicalities of how a Minecraft server works.
    Yes, there are others that still need to be worked on, but entities are a big one. It's the #1 cause of lag on servers.

    Again, the economy is not the root of the community in the future of EMC.

    It did go through adequate testing. Welcome to computer software, there is always bugs.
    As I said above, We will not be balancing our servers monsters around grinder/farm usrs. It will be based around having a smooth level of monsters.

    When going through the worlds, the world was filled with a good level of monsters at an even distribution, exactly the target.

    Testing on residences also seemed to be normal.

    No, and upon further consideration, 300 is really excessive and exceeds our numbers we requested people cap out at before the limit was being put in place.

    On next update, The limit will be reduced to 200 again, but that will be shared between animals and monsters still.

    It's pretty simple of a request to not put your animal farms where your monster farms are at... and 200 is way plenty for a spawner. We do not want people sitting AFK for long periods of time. Build up a pool, kill them off, repeat. AFK'ing for long periods of time is not healthy for our servers, and we do not want to encourage that style of using spawners.

    Everyone got by with a 200 limit before... so nothing should be different there as you really shouldn't be having mass animal farms with your grinder/monster farms.
    mba2012, ISMOOCH and nfell2009 like this.
  10. WEll production on my 12 cell iron farm has been cut in half along side all my natural spawning area's . Thank you SO much
    nfell2009 likes this.
  11. I think we should talk about any possible bugs we might find with the entity limiter, instead of economy, which really, wasn't meant to be in this thread to begin with.

    Also; Aikar, thank you for all your hard work, all that free time that you could spend playing the game, or going out with your friends, but you instead use to code and work for EMC, to the point you even lose sleep.

    Bet you didn't know Aikar was awake until around 5-6 am last night coding for EMC. He then proceeded to go to work this morning at 9:00 am, which means he woke up at 8:30.

    Again, thank you for all the hard work, and keep it up. I love seeing new updates, even if they're updates of old things, that just needed a little love. :)
    mba2012, ZBSDKryten, SthenosX and 6 others like this.
  12. You're right, you can't really test performance without real or simulated load,
    but you can test logic...
    I've "tested" entcount within 15 min while being alone on the server...

    You can also always ask the community to think and discuss an idea through.
    While people here want to have fun and like joking, most of them will also be eager to help.

    (A tiny bit of moderation, a note here and there, and it wouldn't be a big problem in keeping threads from derailing...)
  13. Isn't that most of your posts gone then?
    PandasEatRamen likes this.
  14. When the ent limit originally came out, I didn't really agree with the limits being so low (my mind is changed btw). What I did understand is that the servers were getting overloaded and they were lagging like mad.

    Guess what. I highly doubt that the majority of the community would have understood that the limits were being added to make the servers run as well as they should. So if the community had been asked, then it would all just have been "no", "don't add it" and "I'll quit if you make this happen".

    But we weren't asked. It was added for a reason - we should respect and understand that reason. What is there to discuss about a limit? Aikar's the programmer, he knows what the limit should be. He also knows how spawning works, and sets up the limits to fit with them. Us, the players who just enjoy what he creates don't know what it should be, because we don't know how much the server could handle.

    And just to let you know, I've had a long debate with IcecreamCow about asking/listening to the community in the past. I promise you, they ask when it's appropriate and really do, honestly, do things for the best. They just need a little trust. :)

    Oh, and you're the one derailing the thread.
    ShelLuser, mba2012, Xinn and 4 others like this.
  15. Your not ment to be commenting on this. On my thread NOW!! -_-
  16. What Jack said is absolutely correct. There are things we will do on our own and other things we will ask for participation. It's MY personal goal to involve the community in absolutely everything we can, however I ALSO know that doing that would put production at a dead stop. There are things that NEED to be done to put in the things you guys want. Things that you might not like or understand when it's on its own (like the entity limiter), but when you see our finished product of things (Dragon Tombs+ future other secret stuff) you'll completely understand why we do things how we do. :)
  17. My project is a farm above the spawners, so that the farm works while I wait for monsters to collect. Now this is totally nerfed :(
    First I was angry that (it seems that) days of building are now wasted,
    then I was angry because what happens here is next to griefing.
    You set game rules and people play by the rules, then you suddenly change the rules.
    Well ... one of many, many things that connects EMC to the RL and helps players imagination, isn't it?

    Is it radius of 5 chunks, so checked area is 160x160 blocks? Or 176x176 blocks?

    What was the bottleneck, CPU or RAM? Or I/O Performance?
    Is the system running in a virtual machine?
    Is there enough RAM? Did you put the data on a fast SSD or even SSD RAID0?

    Is there still a possibility that something else is causing bottleneck and lag problems,
    and that 400 mobs per that area is acceptable, 200 monsters and 200 animals?

    What about wild settlements, where people usually have a grinder beneath the settlement?

    Consider situations where several people build in an area, not necessarily knowing about each other. Let's say there are 5 people, two building a grinder around 2+2 spawners, 3 building a farm within few chunks above it. What shall happen to them?
    allengero likes this.
  18. Well, they gotta rebuild some place else now
  19. Now at first i was not happy with a few things about these changes and after a few convo's have been led to the lighter side of things.

    There are certinaly some issues at hand. A few points I have brought up with a friend and offered some feed back, all every one can do for now is wait and watch the event unfold and adept to the changes to come.

    As a founder of one of the larger wild communities I have to face and deal with these issues head on as farm as spawner grinder we tend to keep them outta town anyways but as farm as natural traps " iron farm, squid farm, smile farm" go . Every one simply needs to hope for the best as Aikar works his magic

    Can't ask for anything more then that.
    ISMOOCH likes this.
  20. The nether was like a summer's day walk in the park - one completely disinterested ghast in the distance :(
    mba2012 and Pab10S like this.