And thats the kind of stuff that shouldn't be done. Tons of Entities in a compact area causes more lag than entities spread apart. AI movement code causes extra lag due to collision when entities are crammed together in things such as grinders and farms. By having a 200/200 animal farm on top of a 200/200 monster farm, you're contributing to a good chunk of the lag. Spread it out. [/quote] Monster grinders with animal farms on top of them are not the only things to build in Minecraft. No, what is next to griefing was that 2 players on Utopia, IE 2/60, was able to bring the server to its knees in lag. All because of Iron Golem Farms... Thankfully those players worked together to not kill the server and we did not have to take forceful action. I'm sorry but that is not acceptable that it was even POSSIBLE. What if 5 people did the same thing on SMP9, who already has the worst lag due to higher entity counts in town...? Should all of SMP 9 suffer for 5 people to run their iron farms? No. It is very selfish to think an entire server should suffer for a select few to be able to AFK farm items at Iron and Gold farms. The limiter is in place to prevent people from being abusive (aka griefing) with their builds. If someome creates such a large redstone device that it also causes lag? Then well have to take action on that too.. There is a reason people build the super creations on Single player. It's not as plausible on SMP... Where was the rules ever stated to be permanent? This is minecraft, as I said above, Mojang themselves could massively break any mechanic your commonly use to and force you to change. If you play Minecraft, you have to accept that risk. 5 Chunks from players location is loaded by server (visible range), that should be the exact same spawn range too. CPU is the bottleneck, and we run a pretty good CPU already. Minecraft is just VERY poorly coded and every update is making it worse. They will have to move the animal farms if they are in same area then, or, don't afk so long at the monster grinders and kill them as they spawn.... Which is the ideal case as I said monsters piled up in grinders cause additional lag. Work together, figure it out It's not the potentially 58 other peoples problem to deal with the lag of 2 others.
Seriously, I have to ask how many of the staff ever get away from torched up areas and actually explore mines, caves, or the Nether. How can you compare how it was before with now? You're looking at lag statistics. I'm looking at the absence of mobs. You've affected everybody that goes to the wild or nether for any reason, not just a minority. My farm's not large either, but I'm not even talking about my monster farm being killed by this. I can get past that. There's no hostile life out here. Creative/peaceful mode dead. I'm writing this standing in the Nether in iron armor on the middle of some Netherrack with my sound muted and I'm confident when I go back I'll be untouched. This reminds me of last summer when mob spawning was broken. We had the hardest time getting any staff to notice. Everyone kept blaming it on grinders, but it wasn't the problem and those of us who spend a lot of time outside of Town knew it. It took someone(JoshPosh, I think.), to scour the Bukkit forum and point out the problem to Aikar to even get acknowledgement that there even was a problem that could be fixed. I'm not sure where we're at with numbers. I think they keep getting changed. Allowing 300 animals but limiting monsters might make great administrative sense, but makes less sense to me from a gameplay veiwpoint. 300 animals, but not monsters... That allows for a lot of cows, and pigs, but is useless in the Nether. Are we all sheep farmers now? The way it's set up now, I could write my name in giant colored letters in the Wild using thousands of sheep. When one area hits the limit, I move a ways off then start another pen. Yet my little monster farm is going to blow up the server. You've used the argument before that cumulative excesses in mobs were causing lag, but you are limiting monsters in the Wild while simutaneously calling those of us running non-spawner farms an extreme minority. We may be a minority, but I think most of us try to manage our farms conscientiously. I know of two types of farms that are completely broken by this. If you want to limit mobs, why not attack the real problem: spawners? Instead you're allowing limitless peaceful animals while strangling one of the largest factors that make being in the Wild or Nether fun: monsters. I accept that you know more than I do about running these servers. Please accept that some of us may be more attuned to gameplay and trust us when we say that you've flipped things upside down out here. Please, take a break from tuning and go mining or come visit one of us and you'll see what we're talking about. It's dead out here, man.
It's even worse than that. I'm lucky to even see three wither skeletons now, much less kill enough of them to get three skulls. I took down my skull and beacon signs at my shop monday until I see what this does to the price. If it continues this way, beacons will be the new Dragon Egg.
Nether aside, which Aikar admits needs adjustments, I find mob levels are near to level I get in single player. I also don't get excesive amounts of animals. Just now I am lighting up caves around my witch farm, which is now a bigger task due to the increase in mob spawn area (thanks Aikar ), I am encountering mobs frequently and have had several close calls with creepers sneaking up on me (protip: full enchanted diamond armour is useless if you just leave it in your inventory and forget to put it on). If the area you are in has a lot of animals then this would reduce the number of hostile mobs. I think the problem you are seeing is not lack of hostile mobs but too many animals already spawned
I don't see any major differences, other than the nether. I just logged on, went AFK for 8 minutes, and had a good number of mobs in my natural grinder...especially for the short duration. I was exploring caves yesterday, and had no issue with a lack of mobs..... Maybe I'm just missing the issue here.
Of moderators? All of them... I don't get as much time to play anymore but I did test this. I flew through the wild (which is faster movement than running) and everything was fine. if it's really as bad as you say then thats a bug. I've already mentioned theres bugs and next update will improve things. Ghasts I noticed did seem lesser but I considered it acceptable since such an outlash over ghasts last time... I will tweak ghasts to spawn more often now though. if you look at the old threads, youll notice I acknowledged there was a problem but denied that it was Craftbukkit++'s fault, because it didn't make sense. But I later found out that CB++ had been making experimental changes to that that caused it is what josh found. It wasn't anything we could fix beyond not using CB++ which wasnt going to happen (and def won't be switching back to vanilla craftbukkit anymore -- it's just not technically possible anymore) Remember, I use to be heavy on the wild, and i'm pushing wild updates for EMC. Believe me I want it to be right, but it's got to be sane levels. This has nothing to do with Spawners / Natural / Animals being different. They are all the same. That chicken causes about the same lag as a skeleton. Hell, even an item on the ground is comparable! But limiting items on the ground is dangerous as people could lose stuff... Thankfully Spigot has made some optimizations to items that will be in our next update. The pool of 300 is SHARED between monsters and animals. If you use a spawner, you need to find a balance on how many of each you want between the pool. 300 entities in a close area is bad, regardless of type.. As per Spawner attacking, I think we would of had an even more outrage if spawners were nerfed to 100 or less monsters... Though I personally would like that, I left it at 200-300 so people can still AFK some but not go too ridiculous. Natural spawns HAVE to have a different cap. It just works differently. If natural cap was 200, everyone would cause 200 monsters per player and it would be disasterous. Vanilla is 70 per player, it's 70 now for wild, but im bumping wild and nether to 90... Things will be fine on next update. Again, this is a bug. It's not suppose to be that way... I assure you it wasnt on my test server. I'll be double checking my test servers bukkit config vs productions... but I don't know why the results are different now. I've already made big changes though that will resolve issues regardless. I've got stuff mostly ironed out but working out some kinks... maybe tonight we can see an update.
If you mean me, the place I've been playing at is under the ocean and I have no animal pens. Before this change, I had mobs coming out of side caverns and tunnels and finding me while I was cooking cobble and slimes trampling my wheat. Last night I saw one zombie and one slime. There must be a squidfest going on above me. I'll wander farther out tonight.
I got the impression that you were inland and had a sheep infestation with your comment about making sheep pens. I now realise that you meant that you could build the pens and breed sheep to the cap, then move on to the next pen.
Aikar, I completely understand what you are wanting to do and I have faith that you will try to make these changes work, so after this post, other than maybe providing observations I'm done picking on you over this. I was taught to test software by using it in the same way as the users. Sadly, I can't fly, but I spend a LOT of time playing in the Wild an Nether, and here on the ground it just isn't the same. I understand that you and the mods don't have a lot of time, but I felt over the mob problem last summer and the last couple of days that we were being placated or ignored. Actually this time I feel like I'm being told that I'm crazy for saying something's changed. I've brought up my darkroom grinder, because I thought it was a good measure of the natural spawn rates. Maybe you guys don't see the difference, and I did wander around in a nearby mine for a few minutes and I saw some monsters, but something's changed, and my darkroom is barely trickling anything out now. I'd like to go to a desert to see what one looks like mob-wise, but I'm not in a good position to do that on any server right now. Actually they aren't the same nor are you treating them the same and you've said so. If I can have 300 chickens in a 80 block radius sphere, but I'm limited to 200 monsters in a spawner grinder or 70 naturally spawned monsters in the same size area(50 in hte Nether), they are being treated very differently. In this case, you're giving passive mobs, spawner monsters, and naturally spawned monsters priority levels, with passive mobs having top priority and spawners favored over natural spawns. Allowing massive iron farms and barely restricted spawner afking to have priority over natural spawns seems like it's actually the opposite of what you seem to be saying your goal is. I usually wipe my grinder mobs when I'm below 100 because of lag anyway so I'd be fine with a lower spawner limit. I personally treat grinding as a goal that's secondary to getting something other than a spot on the leaderboard, like a set of armor, a looting sword, or gunpowder. So if there's any leeway for a compromise there, I'm all for it. I look forward to seeing what tonight's like.
On a semi related note, I have absolutely zero idea what's going on with the numbers. I feel like I'm watching Sesame Street.
You got it. I'm working on a huge 2D Aikar avatar made out of colored sheep now. Too bad you won't be able to see it from the Live Map
I think theres some confusion. Right now the limit is 300 (pending update to 250), shared between mobs and animals. once 300 is hit, neither will spawn. this is the point you have too many in the area and were not going to add more. However, natural spawns have 2 checks, first they check if the player has 70 (pending update to 90), and if that passes, then checks the 300 (pending 250). If that fails, then no spawn. For every bit that the natural cap is raised, the overall entity count the server has for people out in the wild increases unintentionally. People walking through the wild just causes a ton to spawn. Vanilla caps at 70 to make it essentially 70*players for max entities in wild. Spawners however ignore that cap and just keep going... Now to be fair we could also cap spawners at 70... but that would make 3+ spawners strategy alot more annoying to use (crushers/splash potions etc) so we give flex to allow more effecient killing of spawners. Now, this may seem unfair to natural grinders, but theres not much that can be done... increasing that limit just has too many other implications. So the scale is between natural vs spawners, where animals are just kind of separate things (they have very slow spawn waves to begin with)
So I'm limited to 70 animals, villagers let's say, in a 5 chunk radius around me? I'm quite sure that's not the case, since I just checked an iron farm and a sheep farm that have 139 and 122 animals respectively. I assumed that if I could have 250/300 entities but only 70 monsters, that the remainder were open for animals. It's true that they are all limited by the max 250/300 limit. My point was that if you are further limiting monsters but not animals within the larger limit, you weren't treating them the same. You are giving priority to animals. Not only that, but if a monster spawns, he has a chance to despawn especially if he's far enough away from me or if I log out. Animals are forever in that respect. So, I could potentially have 250/300 sheep in one 5 chunk radius and not have to worry about creepers wandering in because monsters won't move unless they are closer than that to me and they would have to spawn well outside of that area if they spawn at all. If I'm wrong about this let me know so I can improve on my wild/nether projects. All the information you're providing is great.
New form of creeper protection. Take about 5 stacks of chicken spawn eggs, and spawn them in the middle of your base. Pshht, who needs regenerating walls when they can have a load of chickens!
If I wanted to match my Optifine settings to this view distance, what would you suggest? I'm currently using Far which seems ok in some places, but not in others. If Normal would be more appropriate, I'd like to know so I don't waste RAM.
Ugh. And craftbukkit just broke 10-15% of plugins. Had to do some special work to get abuild of CB w/o the breakage as some of the entity issues could of been a CB issue so I took out the bugged code until they can fix it and focus on the E Limiter.
