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kscherer
Which way is up?
 
Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Boyzeee
 
2015-11-05, 00:03

Well, I was watching a video to build a monster iron farm. The guy doing it mentioned the rendering of items in chests. He was playing vanilla in creative mode and ran a number of tests demonstrating reduced frame rates as his chests filled up. I took him at his word.

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As far as lag/fps, you are right. Lag is caused when the server is overwhelmed; FPS drops are local (playerside), which is why some people's frame rates are lower than others.

It is the FPS issue I am discussing, not lag. We (the players) can do nothing about lag. That is either on Turtle's end, or the internet connection sucks. FPS can either be fixed by everyone buying new computers (if I win the lottery, I'll hook ya'll up ) or by eliminating highly concentrated zones of mining/building/redstoning. By segregating downtown into a no-mining zone, we eliminate all of the underground activity that I believe is leading to such slow frame rates. And by placing some limits on above-ground activity, we add to the help pile.

You are correct that in outward mining we will build areas with local FPS issues, however, those issues will be isolated in unrelated chunks, thus lessening the FPS strain on individual's computers (not to mention they might get wiped regularly, further reducing the stress). Mines will most likely be separated by hundreds of blocks and remain out of each other's rendered chunks, thus lightening the load, and keeping that load away from downtown. When we are on the server, we will be able to prance about in downtown without all of that busy crap dragging our systems down. As we move away from downtown, we will likely never load more than one or two operations at any one time, as opposed to the current strategy which has us loading many tens+.

By limiting downtown construction to, say, small-town style buildings and no underground development/complex redstone machines we can really clean up the performance. Big builds would do best in a periphery beginning at, say, 500+ blocks from the center and rimming a square, much like what is currently going on around the spawn chunks in CC. Grey's and my big builds (the Museum, Castle Whammerstein, Tall Town, etc.) are outside the spawn chunks and cause little to no FPS drops due to their isolation from all the other busy-things. Also, downtown is not in any way affected by their immense scales, redstone BS (like my Palace), or mining operations (I have a huge one below and east of Whammerstein). By moving outward, we separate these things one from another and drastically reduce the strain placed on each system.

Take, for instance, the mob trap. It has very slow FPS. Granted, it's where it is, not to isolate FPS, but to isolate mob spawning. If it were near downtown, the whole place would be an FPS nightmare! Same goes for my sorter beneath the Palace. Much like yours, it drags down FPS to unbearable rates (and I'm out there with no one else around). Stick all that crap together in a concentrated area where it is all loading simultaneously and things tank in a hurry.

My line of thinking would drastically reduce these accumulative problems and stretch it all out. Personally, I'd much rather encounter small FPS "zones" in the periphery where each builder is responsible for his own fun, rather than a titanic and increasingly larger zone where we all gather together and combine our fun until it is, well, no longer fun.

I really don't know what the numbers should look like. I'm just tossing ideas. I do think a 500x500 area at the crosshairs should be off limits to anything other than community builds (the exchange, chx joint, post office, etc.). Just looking at MC and chunks, a chunk is 16x16x256. MC will load a maximum viewing distance of 32 chunks (512 blocks). So, for those with good systems, the maximum load in any direction is 512 blocks from your feet. That means anything within that viewing range is loaded. I keep my system to 14 chunks (all it can handle) which means I can only "see" 224 blocks in any direction, but anything exposed inside those 224 blocks is rendered. In the downtown area, when I stand at our current crossroads (the Needle), that means your place, MT, the needle, the chicken joint, hell, all of downtown is rendered. But it's not the aboveground business that's causing the trouble (other than 15,000 blocks of animated trouble forming the walls of MT ), but the underground crap, including mines (everybody), redstone machines (or their remnants ), titanic basements (Brad and Ken), huge holes filled with gigantic portals ( ), a monster-sized tree farm (or two ) and accompanying charcoal factory, various underground storage facilities of untold size, etc.

All that crap is rendered on my system and my FPS tanks. When I get out to the sticks, the FPS rises to very acceptable levels and the game becomes fun, again. In town, it sucks. I can think of only one plausible solution, and that is long-term planning.

Like I said, I'm even considering undoing the mountain of work that went into my item sorter because the Palace is almost unbearable. But it's at least in the sticks and doesn't add to downtown's nightmare.

If anyone else has ideas, please toss them in. Better to have a game plan, now, than a pissing match on day 1.

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