Anyone else watching the MC "Snapshots"?

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Hambeau

Hambeau

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Jul 24, 2013
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Yesterday's 14w29a/b snapshots from Mojang have added threading to world generation... This results in almost instantaneous terrain generation without, so far, any of the missing swaths of land that previous versions had. There are also a few new settings for video and they've smoothed out the fps operation a bit.

They say they'll be threading chunk refreshing next and expect a similar performance increase from that.

1.8 is shaping up to be a good vintage for MC, in my opinion :D
 
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I'm following the snapshots a bit and I must say they are doing some nice things. Really looking forward to playing 1.8 with mods in some (hopefully not *too* distant) future :-)
 
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If they get chunk updates properly multi-threaded 1.8 *should* be the release that makes large servers much more common.

However, vMC improving server performance via multi-threading might not easily translate to Forge being able to do the same. There indeed may be significant multi-threading work needed in Forge as well. Multi-threading the right way is not easy. Brute-force approach of mutex'ing everything may cause performance hit. It has to be done well to be fast.
 
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MigukNamja said:
Multi-threading the right way is not easy. Brute-force approach of mutex'ing everything may cause performance hit. It has to be done well to be fast.
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I run into this every day at work. I have to have the right frame of mind that day or I'll refuse to tinker with multithreading at all. Some days I just can't wrap my brain around it and still do it justice.

And does it ever make debugging a nightmare.
 
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MigukNamja said:
If they get chunk updates properly multi-threaded 1.8 *should* be the release that makes large servers much more common.

However, vMC improving server performance via multi-threading might not easily translate to Forge being able to do the same. There indeed may be significant multi-threading work needed in Forge as well. Multi-threading the right way is not easy. Brute-force approach of mutex'ing everything will cause performance hit. It has to be done well to be fast.
Click to expand...
FTFY if you mutex everything than only 1 thread at a time may run and acquiring a mutex is non trivial, having multiple that you need to get (one mutex for each chunk for example) leads to fun deadlocks rather fast
 
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ratchet freak said:
FTFY if you mutex everything than only 1 thread at a time may run and acquiring a mutex is non trivial, having multiple that you need to get (one mutex for each chunk for example) leads to fun deadlocks rather fast
Click to expand...

Exactly, yes. Textbook example is threads A and B with resources 1 and 2.

Both A and B need to write to 1 and 2 at the same time. Thread A grabs 1, then is swapped out before it can grab 2. Thread B grab 2, then is swapped out before it can grab 1.

Now we have A deadlocked waiting on 2 and B deadlocked waiting on 1. Neither thread releases nor moves forward.

Indeed, multi-threading is not for dummies and has to be done carefully to avoid situations like that.
 
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Hambeau said:
Yesterday's 14w29a/b snapshots from Mojang have added threading to world generation... This results in almost instantaneous terrain generation without, so far, any of the missing swaths of land that previous versions had. There are also a few new settings for video and they've smoothed out the fps operation a bit.

They say they'll be threading chunk refreshing next and expect a similar performance increase from that.

1.8 is shaping up to be a good vintage for MC, in my opinion :D
Click to expand...

Just a quick thanks for sharing this with the rest of us. :)
 
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Loaded up snapshot "b" to try it out. I spawned, and right in front of me was a chunk loading error, I could see all the way down to the lava until I flew away.

Some things never change I guess. :)

But yeah, the chunks did load faster, but creative flight is pretty darn slow (compared to, say, flying around in a Modular PowerSuit) so I couldn't really get a good feel for just how fast I could push the chunks. I often outpace chunk-loading when flying around in my Monster FTB world.

I'd say I was intrigued, but not astounded, by the speed.
 
I just loaded up the latest snapshot and...
Not super impressed. The chunks did load faster, but I noticed an overall FPS drop(small, but still), and chunk errors happened even more frequently, persisting even after doing F3+A. They only went away after decreasing my render distance.
 
I saw tweets from Mojang this morning showing this week's progress concerning multithreading the worldgen...

Jeb shows an image with a 32 chunk render distance. Runs in 2GB but generates "a little slow" due to 65 * 65 total chunks generating:

https://twitter.com/jeb_/status/491615857400086528

Searge tweets that Advanced OpenGL may be going away.

https://twitter.com/SeargeDP/status/491613295548567552

Searge also says they found and fixed the missing chunk issue from last week.

https://twitter.com/SeargeDP/statuses/491574028163747840
 
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Gideonseymour said:
Because the human eye can totally process 1082 Frames Per Second. :p
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Maybe the eye can't, but maybe the brain can? 'Subliminal Perception' ring a bell, perhaps? :)

I'd say this is biggest news for the folks with older, slower computers who run at 10% of the speed of the high end systems... so 1082 fps on those will be 108 fps on theirs, and everybody is happy? :D
 
asb3pe said:
Maybe the eye can't, but maybe the brain can? 'Subliminal Perception' ring a bell, perhaps? :)

I'd say this is biggest news for the folks with older, slower computers who run at 10% of the speed of the high end systems... so 1082 fps on those will be 108 fps on theirs, and everybody is happy? :D
Click to expand...
The human eye can only process 60 FPS


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