This is more of a bug fix request than a suggestion, really, but it can count as both.
Currently, floating items despawn after 5 minutes.
First suggestion:
Personally I'd prefer it if the delay was more like 20 minutes, so that i have time to finish whatever I'm doing, like cutting down that single giant oak tree, mining out that small room, placing my farm fence, before I have to think about having to go pick up the pieces left over from my work laying all around right and left, before they despawn.
Currently, I have to constantly think about items despawning, it's a real concentration breaker. It's often "Gee, I must go pick up those blocks quickly, then come back to continue my work right after." Several times per even simple tasks. With a 20 minutes despawn delay, I would have time to have a breather while mining/farming/building. It would be instead "Ok, must not forget to pick up items once I'm finished with this part here".
I could finish cutting down an entire row of trees from my tree farm, before having to pick up the wood, and THEN start the next row, instead of having to constantly stop every 2 or 3 trees and thus be forced to move around a lot. I could finish cutting down a giant oak then pick up the wood, instead of having to jump down and climb back up about thrice before finishing the tree. I could finish mining a 12x12x6 room in one go without having to stop once. In short, I could complete a DECENTLY SIZED "little chunk" of work without frequent interruptions. I'd be starting to pick things up at my own pace, instead of having that pace forced upon me at a rate so high that I can't do anything for more than a couple few minutes at a time without interruptions.
Mostly, if I'm working mining *and* building over a big chasm, I don't want to take *1 minute out of every 4 or 5* to get down to the bottom of the chasm, grab whatever fell, then come back up. I'd like to be able to finish mbuilding my little bridge or what-have-you before being forced to come down. "Meh, why don't you just ignore the falling cobble, man, anytway its worthless". Well yeah, that may very well be worthless to you, but who says its worthless to me? Who says its actually a cobblestone bridge and that whatever is falling down from my "trial and error bridge building" couldn't be muchg more valuable than cobble? (because of course almost nobody gets it perfectly right the 1st time especially when youre in a "let's try to see if this way would look better" mood. I could put my full concentration on building without being force to worrying as much about item drops.
It would really improve the freedom I feel from the game if done this way.
And now, please, if someone tells me that this would effectively quadruple the number of floating items on the server and thus create mucho lag, I'd wish they'd use their brains instead and not assume that:
- ...ALL the players on the server are currently ALL doing "itemd-ropping tasks" (like mining or tree farming), and ALL of them are doing more than small amount of that task (so that items will accumulate mor than 5 minutes), and that NONE of them likes to pick up the dropped items frequently. Reality is very far from that picture. It wouldn't even double the number of floating items, much less quadruple them.
- ...ALL of the new "later than 5 minutes" items are dropped away from the previous ones so that they don't merge into single item stack, which don't take up any more processing. While this may be true for collecting tress in a long row, it is not true of collecting the wood (and falling saplings) from a big oak, and not always true when digging a large room, and is only negligible for items drops from fixing small errors during construction projects, that you just won't have to pick up immediately is all.
- ...ALL floating items take processing. Once a floating item is "immobile" (stops dropping, stops being pushed by water, etc.), it should simply become "anchored" into the block it is inside of, and stay that way until something happens (like in a block update). The client would add the rotating and wobbling item effect, who cares if I see a rotating pumpkin facing left on highest wobbling position, while you see it facing toward you at at bottomest wobbling position? That would just be nitpicking over a small graphical mismatch that has zero effect on gameplay. Immobile items wouldn't take any server processing, they'd just be there. Yes, it would add *some* overhead (nearby players loading the chunks would load more numerous floating items), but new items dropping would still be broadcasted to the same number of nearby players, and items older than 5 minutes would be, in all probability, immobile items that the player clients already know about, thus zero extra server processing here, and would probably be items which probably won't move until picked up or despawning. So no, there would NOT be a "quadruple server lag" because of Not even twice as much. Maybe a few percents, nothing more.
EDIT:
Observant posters said this would affect the time to retrieve yout stuff from death before it despawns. On that point, I completely agree that 5 minutes is enough time. *IF* (and only if!) it is *impossible* to spawn items such that their despawn times is not "always" 5 minutes, then this 1st suggestion of this post becomes invalid. anyway I find the 2nd half more important.
Second suggestion, which I find extremely MORE important than the previous one:
Before, when I checked my chicken farms, I usually got a LOT of eggs per visit, nearly half as many eggs as chickens sometimes.
But now, I get twice or three times as many eggs for the same number of chickens!
Why? Simple: Currently, when two floating items '"merge" together, it seems the resulting floating item "pile" is treated as a new item and that resets its despawn time (or at the very least, sets it to the new item that which has more despawning time left). So in an environment where new items of the same time are constantly added, like in the gatling-ass-egg-laying-rates of chickens, this means the piles of eggs have a tendency to almost never disappear.
It should NOT be this way:
Timestamp = 10 minutes
Situation = [new egg with 5 minutes remaining] added very near {pile of 12 eggs with 1 minute remaining}.
Timestamp = 10 minutes + 1 tick
New Situation = items merged together to get {pile of 13 eggs with '5 minutes minus 1 tick' remaining}.
See how these mergings can eternally "reset" the despawning of old items?
The item pile of items should not have a single despawn time, but instead have an ordered list of times, each entry listing how many of its items will despawn at which time, and exactly enough entry to cover the total amounts of items in the pile. And of course upon despawning the floating items icon will update (only if necessary, like for example if the number goes from 6+ to under 6, then the icon would be changed to go from a "3 items" thingy to a "2 items" thingy) http://www.minecraft...i/Item_(entity)
And thus, getting stacks of eggs from only a few chickens packed together, wouldn't happen anymore.
And for those who still have their eyes glitching madly about the 1st suggestion, applying this 2nd suggestion fix would remove a LOT of those egg "stacks" that are floating around seemingly forever.
EDIT:
Those saying it would add lag are in error. Only the 1st "soonest to despawn" entry in the pile would be checked for despawning, so it would stay the same amount of time. Some knowledge of programming sorted lists, b-trees, and N-order-algorithms, may be required here to understand why the processing added would be very slight and negligible.
The item pile despawn change would be quite a bit laggy... One of the reasons they merge is that they work as ONE item, thus decreasing lag.
Onto the first one.... 5 minutes is quite balanced. If you die, should you get over an ingame day to go recover your stuff? No! It's life-or-death! You have to race there, or lose all your stuff. I agree in certain situations it would be useful, but in certain situations it could be quite laggy too.
Actually, I thought of one problem that sorta makes both these obsolete. They cancel out! Sure, second idea would stop you from getting 5 or 6 stacks of eggs from a few chickens with FIVE minute despawn time, but with 20? Tons of eggs!
The item pile despawn change would be quite a bit laggy... One of the reasons they merge is that they work as ONE item, thus decreasing lag.
No, it would not be laggy at all. Currently, the server checks the item pile for despawning, yes? It would not start checking EACH entry in the item pile for despawning, only the 1st one. Thus, it would take the same time.
Onto the first one.... 5 minutes is quite balanced. If you die, should you get over an ingame day to go recover your stuff? No! It's life-or-death! You have to race there, or lose all your stuff. I agree in certain situations it would be useful, but in certain situations it could be quite laggy too.
First, personally I'd prefer if if you die you IMMEDIATELY lose all your stuff.
Why? Because this "if you die run to save your stuff" thing encourages players to stay very close to their spawn (or at least move their beds around a lot).
Because it is a feature which discourages exploration (which requires going faraway). Just like thre new biomes all looking the same also tended to discourage exploration.
If stuff despawned immediately upon death (effectively, not even spawning out of the invetory at all, just deleted directly of the inventory, which takes much less processing than creating the items out of the inventory then despawning less at most 1 tick later), you wouldn't have this (and less gried over stolen stuff). (and also less lag in case of massive player deaths somewhere). Since all items are despawned upon death it would laso be much easier to "log in" the equipment at time of death (on servers which would use the info I mean) and avoid "duplicating" items on death on such servers that choose to restore a players equipment on death from grief or whatever reasons. For example, if a server made a "lava parcour park atttaction", players wouldn't have to unequip before playing.
And if I am to play in a map with this chance to get my stuff back upon death, then gee, I'd like to be able to not have to stick so close to spawn. Also, the 5 minutes is irrelevant because all you have todo is place more beds and use the closest one.
Also, it would be EXTREMELY easy to make it so that "items dropped when dying last only 5 minutes" and all other items from working last 20 minutes.
I thought about this death issue before you posted and really its a non issue here.
And my post is NOT about the 5 minutes being 20 minutes to have more time to get your stuff back when you die. For that I agree 5 minutes is *more* than enough and people really lose stuff only to lava and mostly only if they are inexperienced enough not to use beds when deeply mining or away from their home base.
One could even say that even with 20 minutes to find your stuff back, if you haven't found it in the first 5 minutes it's probably because you did NOT use a bed, you did NOT trace your path properly, and you probably lost it in a maze of tunnels somewhere, and if you *do* manage to find it back anyway, you still have lost up to 15 minutes of your time *only* to find your stuff back, well I'd say that player deserves his reward.
But my post is about having 20 minutes before NORMAL items despawn, and not "upon death" items, which is another situation completely different altogether.
Actually, I thought of one problem that sorta makes both these obsolete. They cancel out! Sure, second idea would stop you from getting 5 or 6 stacks of eggs from a few chickens with FIVE minute despawn time, but with 20? Tons of eggs!
Because they have opposite effect in that specific case doesn't make them "overall obsolete".
Yeah, you'd have a lot, but that is only because chickens poop out eggs as such a quick rate. We already have too much lol. I'd lower the chicken egg laying by a factor of 8. Since the eggs would stick around four times as long, overall you'd have slightly half as many eggs to pick up in an average chicken coop.
Another way to reduce "uber concentration" of mobs would be that the breeding algorithm doesn't work 100% of the time when there are more than X mobs nearby.
Anyway despite the looks of things, it is the 2nd part of my suggestion which I deem, by far, the most important. The 1st part is just *my* preferred way of playing, while the 2nd part is actually a glitch in the game.
This is more of a bug fix request than a suggestion, really, but it can count as both.
No. it's not a bug fix request. Learn what a Bug is. it's unintended behaviour in the game. Now, from where I'm standing, they set items to despawn in 5 minutes. They despawn in 5 minutes. That isn't a bug. It's entirely intended.
Personally I'd prefer it if the delay was more like 20 minutes, so that i have time to finish whatever I'm doing, like cutting down that single giant oak tree, mining out that small room, placing my farm fence, before I have to think about having to go pick up the pieces left over from my work laying all around right and left, before they despawn.
20 minutes is not infinitely larger than 5 minutes, so I'm not sure what real difference this would make.
Currently, I have to constantly think about items despawning, it's a real concentration breaker. It's often "Gee, I must go pick up those blocks quickly, then come back to continue my work right after."
Uh... what? This seems more like you aren't aware of how long 5 minutes is.
It would be instead "Ok, must not forget to pick up items once I'm finished with this part here".
And... You can do that now. Unless you are really slow or you are working on a big project or task... but then again that just means the "required" despawn time suddenly scales with the project.
I could finish cutting down an entire row of trees from my tree farm, before having to pick up the wood, and THEN start the next row, instead of having to constantly stop every 2 or 3 trees and thus be forced to move around a lot. I could finish cutting down a giant oak then pick up the wood, instead of having to jump down and climb back up about thrice before finishing the tree. I could finish mining a 12x12x6 room in one go without having to stop once. In short, I could complete a DECENTLY SIZED "little chunk" of work without frequent interruptions. I'd be starting to pick things up at my own pace, instead of having that pace forced upon me at a rate so high that I can't do anything for more than a couple few minutes at a time without interruptions.
You have to seriously come to grips with how long 5 minutes is. I don't know what your tree farm layout is, but it takes me 15 seconds to cut down three oak trees. I can see maybe a bit longer if they were big oak trees. It took 15 seconds to cut down one average jungle tree.
With my tree farm (30x36 birch trees) I cut their trunks down, then retrace my steps and pick up the saplings and apples that drop when the leaves despawn. Unless I purposely abandon it, I don't think I've lost anything to the 5 minute mark- certainly nothing that I wouldn't have also lost at the 20 minute mark.
(because of course almost nobody gets it perfectly right the 1st time especially when youre in a "let's try to see if this way would look better" mood. I could put my full concentration on building without being force to worrying as much about item drops.
You don't have to worry about the item drops. The way you are presenting it, it's like it's some sort of race against time to get them. I've had similar situations with various items from mining falling to the bottom of a pit when there was more to collect. I simply noted that would be my next destination and mined out the ravine. The drop was still there when I finished. 5 minutes is not as short as you seem to imply.
- ...ALL the players on the server are currently ALL doing "itemd-ropping tasks" (like mining or tree farming), and ALL of them are doing more than small amount of that task (so that items will accumulate mor than 5 minutes), and that NONE of them likes to pick up the dropped items frequently. Reality is very far from that picture. It wouldn't even double the number of floating items, much less quadruple them.
You are assuming that items are even going to be picked up. Some people will mine through hundreds of blocks of cobble to build a tunnel, and won't pick it up because their inventory is full. 5 minutes worth of such activity is going to be four times less than 20 minutes of it.
...ALL of the new "later than 5 minutes" items are dropped away from the previous ones so that they don't merge into single item stack, which don't take up any more processing. While this may be true for collecting tress in a long row, it is not true of collecting the wood (and falling saplings) from a big oak, and not always true when digging a large room, and is only negligible for items drops from fixing small errors during construction projects, that you just won't have to pick up immediately is all.
No idea what you are saying here.... This time limit applies to 'new' items, now?
ALL floating items take processing. Once a floating item is "immobile" (stops dropping, stops being pushed by water, etc.), it should simply become "anchored" into the block it is inside of, and stay that way until something happens (like in a block update).
Or, the gametick handler for item drops can remain as it is now and not be slowed down by that method.
The client would add the rotating and wobbling item effect
The game already does this. Item drops are rendered, rotated, and bobbed on the client-side.
and items older than 5 minutes would be, in all probability, immobile items that the player clients already know about, thus zero extra server processing here
Those "immobile" items still need their game tick called to determine when they would despawn. Most of the overhead from more items is in the function call overhead, not the fictional overhead you are assigning it here that has to do with some weird method where the server actually keeps track of item rotation and bob information.
and would probably be items which probably won't move until picked up or despawning.
Movement is irrelevant. The gametick would still need to be called, which is where the extra overhead lies. I believe the gametick adds the velocity to the location regardless. Only difference is the game does three additions and an assignment whereas you want three comparisons and- if all those comparisons go through- then the additions and an assignment. The best case scenario in such a case ironically becomes when whatever coordinate is first compared to zero is non-zero. And either way, it's still a unnecessary branch.
Why? Simple: Currently, when two floating items '"merge" together, it seems the resulting floating item "pile" is treated as a new item and that resets its despawn time (or at the very least, sets it to the new item that which has more despawning time left).
When two stacks are merged, their "lifespan" is set to the minimum of the two stacks. Directly from EntityItem.java:
So in an environment where new items of the same time are constantly added, like in the gatling-ass-egg-laying-rates of chickens, this means the piles of eggs have a tendency to almost never disappear.
Nope. Explained above. When Stacks combine, their remaining lifespan is set to the lifespan of the oldest item. if a fresh cobblestone block combines with a stack from 4 minutes ago, it will despawn with the rest of them in a minute. Same story with eggs.
It should NOT be this way:
Timestamp = 10 minutes
Situation = [new egg with 5 minutes remaining] added very near {pile of 12 eggs with 1 minute remaining}.
Timestamp = 10 minutes + 1 tick
New Situation = items merged together to get {pile of 13 eggs with '5 minutes minus 1 tick' remaining}.
It is not done this way.
See how these mergings can eternally "reset" the despawning of old items?
Yes. Thankfully, it's not done this way.
The item pile of items should not have a single despawn time, but instead have an ordered list of times, each entry listing how many of its items will despawn at which time
This would defeat the purpose of combining item stacks. The purpose is to reduce server workload by preventing excessive Updates to Item Entities. This would simply shift the work from the loop that iterates through entities to an inner loop within the update logic of a single item to check if parts of it are going away. Complexity goes from O(1) to O(n), fundamentally.
and exactly enough entry to cover the total amounts of items in the pile.
Humourously, this is even worse than I imagined it. I was imagining a custom class data structure that stored a number of items and the time they expire, at which point the update logic would simply decrement it's stack size by the appropriate amount and Dequeue the item.
And thus, getting stacks of eggs from only a few chickens packed together, wouldn't happen anymore.
It already doesn't happen outside of fantasy land; or, to be precise, if this is happening, it's not because of stack combining logic that was mentioned, which doesn't exist in the game.
Summary: your suggestion and bug fix are based on a apparent inability to comprehend basic temporal relationships, as well as coming to foregone conclusions that are easily falsified by simply looking at what the game does- at the code level- rather than creating conclusions to explain perceived errant behaviour.
First, personally I'd prefer if if you die you IMMEDIATELY lose all your stuff.
Wait, so you want us to lose EVERYTHING upon death? That is sorta pushing it.... And if you want upon death items to wait a different amount of time, please specify. Even if it only checks the most recent for despawning, it would still make some lag. So far, big stacks only need to have posistion, what item, how many, and 1 despawn time. This would make it so it would have to store more data. With the rest it really depends on how laggy it would be, I guess.... But with that.... Mojang would lose tons of money. Why? Well, think of it this way "OMFG THEY MADE ME LOOZE ALL MAH STUFF I NO GO TO MINECON!" Or "Wait, now you lose EVERYTHING if you die? No way I'm buying minecraft!"
tl;dr I'm fine with the rest of it, but not the part about loosing everything on death, really depends on lag, as long as death item time is the same. And you would still get tons of eggs from chicken farms, with items lasting 20 minutes instead of 5.
Meh. I've never had a problem with losing a bunch of wood, even when cutting down a huge forest. I would say I maybe lose less than 1% of all wood dropped, and that isn't with me waiting around to pick every little piece up. I simply run up to the tree, cut the 2nd and 3rd logs, jump on the bottom one, and cut the rest, so most of them land on me. Then I cut the bottom one. I do lose a lot more saplings, but you only need one sapling for each tree you cut down to replenish a forest, and most trees drop 3+ Saplings. So unless I feel like being a super pack rat it isn't an issue.
The same with mining out a large room. I never lose any resources unless I accidentally hit Lava. Why? Because I am never more than 2-3 blocks away from where I am mining. And I follow a simple back and forth or spiral pattern so I am always running over the stuff I mine. I can maybe see this with a large cavern or ravine but it also only takes about 30 seconds to get the items and get back up. That plus the fact that Stone and Dirt are everywhere, I only bother going after ores that drop. I know you already addressed that different materials may be valued differently to different people, but anyone who spends 10 minutes in a strip mine will have plenty of Cobblestone. Your subjective value may be high, but the objective value based on abundance, time it takes to acquire more, and renewability makes it exceedingly low.
Finally, the short despawn time does not discourage exploration because if you unload the chunk by dying (for example, if you are several thousand blocks away from your spawn) the items don't count down until you load that chunk again, so it is really only a risk if you were in a cave where you could get lost. It's more of an inconvenience really. Besides, if you are going to be doing work really far away, why wouldn't you bring a bed? Beds are cheap and useful.
As for the whole item stack thing, this has never really been an issue for me either. If I have more eggs than I need I destroy them. It takes an entire 10 seconds to drop them or chuck them into lava. Hell, most of the time I just automate my Chickens and make eggs go to either a fire pit to be destroyed or to a collection point, changeable with the flick of a lever. Or I just use Hoppers and make them totally automatic. No issues for me.
Would I mind if this stuff is changed? Not really. But to be honest, and definitely not trying to be mean, it sounds like you just want the game to cater to your extremely inefficient or absent minded play style.
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BC_Pro, I’m sorry to inform you that I find you as a disagreable person (at last, towards me) (I hope you work to improve that!), and unfortunately do not seem to be star programmer material either (that one, you entirely did yourself!).
The way you play is not the only way. We like to take our time to design our stuff at a leisurely pace. Lots of people are bad at multitasking, or like to chat with friends to ask their advice on their little current pet projet or yesterday’s movie so yeah the speed they accomplish stuff can drop a lot. Lots of players don’t have trigger-happy reflexes or perfect pathing skills or even like to have optimized farm designs. Or always think to bring enough tools with them. Or reach decisions in split seconds. Or use the best tools. Or don’t get momentarily distracted/sidetracked by little stuff while doing something else. In short, many players apparently don’t play anywhere near as fast as you. So you definitely should not be using your own performance as a counterpoint example or as a baseline of what should be. We think the game design values should cover say 95% of playstyles, and not just « super efficient » players.
You seem more intent on nitpicking on my actual number of trees in my (admiteddly quite weak) example and to insult my intelligence, than to try to get the main gist of my message, which is that 5 minutes is so short we feel like we don’t get to finish anything before stuff despawns. When doing something, it feels like the pace of cleaning up is imposed upon us by an artificially short timeout, rather than by what we get to do it in what would feel « natural » : to pick stuff up only *between* sub-goals that got just accomplished, not in the *middle* of subgoals.
Subgoals I find usually take somewhat more than 5 minutes for most players, and are defined by real elements in the game, not by arbitrary timeouts. A subgoal would be for example « build this wall ». Making say a 2 story house 20x20x12 is a big project, not a subgoal. Making a wall for that house, say 20x6, is a small project, but is a subgoal of the larger project. Making only two layers of that wall, or reaching one or two decisions upon what combinations of materials to choose to best make that wall, and how to pattern them for best effect, those are not small goals, those aren’t even subgoals, those are fractions of a small goal, those just things that are part of actual subgoals.
We assert that for an average player the game’s 5 minutes despawn is sufficient for those « parts of small goals » things, but not for most actual (small) goals found in normal situations. Thus, the « pace » of the game is imposing an artificial timeout limit rather than using the natural « feel » of accomplishing subgoals within larger goals at the average pace of normal (or maybe a bit on the slow side) players. As for myself, I’m a slowpoke player, and if the despawn time was adjusted to *me* specifically, it would be 1 hour, not 20 minutes, and even less 5 minutes.
For example our (me and my girl) little forest farm is a sparsely populated glade of several tree types, with lots of flowers and cute paths. Designed for looks, not efficiency! And *we* find that fun. (we as in "me and my friends", and not as in "I consider myself important", but your post had so many happenstances of you interpreting what I said the wrong way that I prefer not to take a chance here). We definitely are far from alone playing that way. Someone else can be efficient, and find that fun, and that’s okay too. but I would feel sorry for whomever thinks games should be more about being efficient than having fun, and I would be angry at someone saying our way of playing is wrong.
You seem to have a great ability to make false assumptions about what is being said (well, written actually) by changing or even directly inverting the meaning of things. You also don’t back anything of what you say up and the one time you do, you prove yourself wrong without realizing it, because, again, you read what you want to see and interpret it your own way, instead of reading whats there and nothing more. Mostly, a thing that I would want to be otherwise but that I seem unable to see in another way, you also seem to have a tendency to accuse others of stuff in a condescending tone while at the very same time doing the very thing you accuse them of. That makes you look bad, so I kind of pity you a little. I’m sure you’re usually better than the appearance you gave off here.
And now the hammers :
*** Hammer 1 *** (1st suggestion - despawning is too fast!) : The « can’t grasp the concept of time » accusation.
You claim you cut a 30 x 36 tree farm then retrace your steps and don’t lose stuff from the 5 minutes despawning. I know how to read and you "cut the tress" and *then* retrace your steps. All in 5 minutes tops. That is what you claim.
30 times 36 trees times an average 6 blocks per tree = 6480 blocks at 0,4 seconds per block = 43 minutes 12 seconds with a vanilla diamond axe. Wayyy beyond the 5 minutes limit. Even with Efficiency V, this is cut down to 11 minutes 40 seconds. Stil over twice the limit.
Pray tell please share with the rest of the world how a normal player (not uberman you!) in a normal situation (without mods or costly enchanted items) performing normally (not madly optimizing each fraction of a second), would manage to duplicate your feat of cutting down that 30x36 tree farm and then retracing his steps without losing items before they despawn. I must say, I'm a bit curious.
And you’re the one that is accusing me of being unable to grasp the concept of time. Or of not checking my stuff before posting.
I don’t have to tell you the exact number of trees in my rows to prove my point, for it does no need proof just to be told. That is : I feel that the 5 minutes limit is too short for most small ordinary goals in ordinary situations. Feel. Opinion. No proof needed. You can’t remove that from me for it is a player’s right to feel such things. It’s based on impressions. Impressions also chave that nice little quality to them that one does not actually need to back them up, either.
However, your own claims are easily broken by mere Minecraft wikipedia facts and easy maths. You don’t claim it feels too long, like I did. Which was a generic statement, You instead claim it takes you less than 5 minutes to do so as some form of proof to in the end try to ridicule me. My post never attacked anyone. You’re the one that is the kind of person that accused me of stuff, and I think I have a right to defend myself here. So accuation wise, why don’t get into the habit of checking the aftertaste of your own soup’s ingredients *before* sending it to others? That would be greatly appreciated.
Okay, so yeah surely my numbers were on the low side of things, but you, with your kind of « focusing on the nitpickinglibable details not the main message » thing, that is not a good way to make new friends. Trying to disprove a generic suggestion with a specially modded performance using only one’s own way of playing as basis (the « let’s prove X as a law by using up my specific example » human habit) , is even less good. And accusing someone of being unable to grasp the concept of time while being *yourself* completely off the vanilla charts, is even more so.
*** Hammer 2 *** (2nd suggestion - fix the merging despawn times!) « It’s the opposite of what you say! »
Again, someone making lots of assumptions and not bothering to check.
Tested & Verified in version 1.4.7 Survival by yours truly, chronometer in hand :
Made a simple water channel. Dropped Cobble #1 in there. After 4 minutes, I drop Cobble #2. It merges with Cobble #1, forming a « cobble pair » item. After 4 minutes, I drop Cobble #3. Merge again. I repeat 3 more times with Cobble #4, #5 and #6. Then after the 6th merge, the shown item at the end of the water channel is a « cobblestone trio » item. I pick up the item, and I get all 6 cobblestones back. Total "Cobble#1" survival time : over 20 minutes.
Yes, please finish eating your own foot, you seem to have left left a bit of meat on the bones there.
*** Hammer 3 *** (again, 2nd part - The Badly Coded Merging Thing)
Code Proof : (yes the EXACT same code you used to bash me!) (only, with better digging to really understand it).
026 /**
027 * The age of this EntityItem (used to animate it up and down as well as expire it)
028 */
029 public int age;
. . .
038 /**
039 * The maximum age of this EntityItem. The item is expired once this is reached.
040 */
041 public int lifespan = 6000;
. . .
par1EntityItem.age = Math.min(par1EntityItem.age, this.age);
Now, only someone who can’t read low level code would fail to see that age here is *really* the age of the item i.e. starts at zero, finishes at 6000 tick, and that the new merged item is the *minimum* of the ages of the two source items. Meaning, the merged item becomes the age of the youngest of the two items i.e. the one with the smallest age, obviously the one with the most time remaining before it despawns.
Wait, so you want us to lose EVERYTHING upon death? That is sorta pushing it.... ...
And you would still get tons of eggs from chicken farms, with items lasting 20 minutes instead of 5.
Lol yeah I agree it's pushing it a lot. I never said it should be like that, just that I *personally* would prefer it that way, you're quite right about the amount of rage quits it could potentially cause lol. Personnally I find the game way too easy so yeah its only a personal choice not something I think should be added.
Yeah, it would be more data stored. But stored once to avoid 6000 increases, each tick. Nah, it would not be laggy at all if coded properly. But from the few pages of Minecraft code I've seen, I'm no so sure. Because there's really weird coding choices all over! *BUT* I would never say hey you, MC coders, you bad! For I think guru programmers could never have thought up the game that is Minecraft, so I'm actually happy that a gang of friendly basement-coding youngsters (well, youngsters relative to my own age, I think, I'm not saying they're actually very young) did spaghetti code (Notch himself said sometihng akin to that about his own coding) to create Minecraft, and are constantly working (at a leasurely place just like my playing) to add features for *free*. That's quite admirable.
Yeah, the chickens with their current gatling-gun-egg-laying posteriors, that would just go from a bad to worse situation lol. Maybe fix the egg laying speed?
Your idea that item despawns should vary according to what event type spawned them is a good one I think. Chicken eggs, stuff dropped from death, could be faster, while items you broke "legally" could stick around longer.
Hum, nah, I don't want the game to cater only to my admittely inefficient slowpokeness (slowpokitude? slowpokishisism? slowpokability? ), I just checked the "average" time people take on smallish-yet-real goals/tasks they set themselves to, or how they "cut into simple steps" somewhat-larger projects (not uber projects but common stuff like making a normally sized house, etc.), and for most players it seems that this is by chunks that are over 5 minutes at a time, that's for sure. 20 minutes would cover most players needs except mine, because yes I'm really slow (case in point: always last in shooter games with a beautiful score of zero kills ok not true once I got *a few* points, but it was a 2 hours long game, and anyway I got killed hundreds of times).
Yeah, I'm a pack rat too lol good estimate.
You seem to have made up a quite nice summary of the current "average player situation facing item despawning", especially with your first paragraph, and you're right the situation is not *that* bad lol. I just stretched it for too long maybe sorry...
EDIT: I've made some edits to the below after the revelation that I was, in fact Wrong, I Apologize. I'll put this on top, and follow it with a more on-topic post with regards to the new information.
and unfortunately do not seem to be star programmer material either (that one, you entirely did yourself!).
Microsoft evidently disagrees.. Or at least hte people in charge of the Awards. I'm not really sure what this has to do with.... well... anything, actually.
EDIT: Ahh, I see- the one time the MCP team actually gives something a name that makes perfect sense rather than having some lovable backstory, fair enough. This why I hate MCP, Forge, and basically Minecraft Modding outside of Bukkit. I'd also note that I've been awake for about two days straight at this point as well for reasons that are of course outside the scope of this thread/post.
The way you play is not the only way. We like to take our time to design our stuff at a leisurely pace. Lots of people are bad at multitasking, or like to chat with friends to ask their advice on their little current pet project or yesterday’s movie so yeah the speed they accomplish stuff can drop a lot.
You say My Way is not the only way to play them game- and then suggest the game be changed for your play style.
Lots of players don’t have trigger-happy reflexes or perfect pathing skills or even like to have optimized farm designs.
Who said anything about an optimized farm? I certainly didn't.
In short, many players apparently don’t play anywhere near as fast as you.
So... what are you saying? People cut down trees from a distance, only to leave the drops behind and complain when they despawn? Because all I can really think of for this are a few contrived scenarios.
So you definitely should not be using your own performance as a counterpoint example or as a baseline of what should be.
I never said anything about my performance. I just took three bone meal, three saplings, grew the trees, started a timer, and chopped them down. That was 10 seconds. then I decided that wouldn't be a fair test, since I would, even unconsciously, be going for speed. So I instead grabbed an old Video I had recorded for unrelated reasons and looked for parts where I chopped down trees. Seemed to take about 15 seconds a tree.
We think the game design values should cover say 95% of playstyles, and not just « super efficient » players.
My entire point is you don't have to be super efficient- you just have to be less lethargic than a depressed snail. Not that difficult by any stretch of the imagination.
You seem more intent on nitpicking on my actual number of trees in my (admiteddly quite weak) example and to insult my intelligence, than to try to get the main gist of my message, which is that 5 minutes is so short we feel like we don’t get to finish anything before stuff despawns.
I didn't say anything about the number of trees you had. I mentioned that I don't know how your farm is setup. I don't. I'd say it doesn't matter, but you used it, explicitly, as a barometer of measure- I don't know how big one of your "rows of trees" are in this farm. But I do know that if you have to stop after 2 or 3 trees to pick up the drops- because it takes 5 minutes for you to chop down a few trees, the problem is with YOU. Not the game. Arguing that the game should cater to lazy individuals is a silly request, because in some ways it already does- Creative mode. I don't need to insult your intelligence. You do an admirable job of creating your own detraction. The main gist of your message was what I was responding to.
We assert that for an average player the game’s 5 minutes despawn is sufficient for those « parts of small goals » things, but not for most actual (small) goals found in normal situations.
You keep talking about a "we" and an "us".... Who is that? What "normal" situations? Where is your sample data.
As for myself, I’m a slowpoke player, and if the despawn time was adjusted to *me* specifically, it would be 1 hour, not 20 minutes, and even less 5 minutes.
We definitely are far from alone playing that way. Someone else can be efficient, and find that fun, and that’s okay too. but I would feel sorry for whomever thinks games should be more about being efficient than having fun, and I would be angry at someone saying our way of playing is wrong.
Look, I never said anything about being efficient. The timed segment? That was me talking about something, with another person in skype, while cutting down trees in Beta 1.7.3 with a Diamond Axe. Three trees took around 20 seconds, meaning it would take around 15-17 trees for things to start despawning (tree decay being considered), by which time I would generally already need to consider heading back to store what I gathered. Or might have already headed back.
You also don’t back anything of what you say up
Onus of proof is on the original claimant. That aside, The only thing I can really think of is:
1. The despawning items being reset.
You said that when Item stacks merged, they lasted longer because they were "refreshed". This is based on nothing, and you have no facts to back it up. My evidence is in the source code. I gave the source file itself- EntityItem.java quite clearly sets the remaining lifespan to be the minimum of the two merged stacks. Not the inverse, as was suggested. ED: Evidently, it was I who was wrong about this. Sorry about that. I could make an excuse as I do further down that this was actually a bug at one point in the game that I didn't even know- up to today- was not a feature. I just remember seeing it demonstrated in one of Etho's Videos, and that particular implementation stuck, thus recoloring my interpretation of the code later on. I'll leave the original because it's rather funny in it's ignorance.
And now the hammers
Hammers?
You claim you cut a 30 x 36 tree farm then retrace your steps and don’t lose stuff from the 5 minutes despawning. I know how to read and you "cut the tress" and *then* retrace your steps. All in 5 minutes tops. That is what you claim.
Ahh, but- I never said I did it in under 5 minutes. I said that I don't think I ever lost items as a result of the 5 minute despawn time- which is disjoint- all those items don't despawn 5 minutes after I started. I get the wood as I cut it down, so it's just saplings and Apples that Drop. Generally, I cut down a row, do a "u-turn" and cut down another row, grabbing any Apples that dropped from the previous row along the way. When I've gone through them all I have to replant them, so I'll see if there were any other fun surprises. Usually, all the saplings are still there. Usually I don't use a tree farm, I just bound into a forest and chop trees until my inventory is full of wood, then double back and pick up any Apples on the way.
30 times 36 trees times an average 6 blocks per tree = 6480 blocks at 0,4 seconds per block = 43 minutes 12 seconds with a vanilla diamond axe. Wayyy beyond the 5 minutes limit. Even with Efficiency V, this is cut down to 11 minutes 40 seconds. Stil over twice the limit.
You're right- it's nowhere near 30x36. It's quite a bit smaller. if it was any bigger I don't think I'd ever bother to cut it down. Sort of like my giant farms that I made for mass production that I never use because replanting is such a PITA. I'm thinking MAYBE the farm is 10x10. I haven't been to that particular base for a while. I usually just go the "chop trees down until inventory is full, go back and store it, repeat" until I get bored of chopping trees down. Perhaps this is also the result of me not really caring if things despawn in the meantime.
Pray tell please share with the rest of the world how a normal player (not uberman you!) in a normal situation (without mods or costly enchanted items) performing normally (not madly optimizing each fraction of a second), would manage to duplicate your feat of cutting down that 30x36 tree farm and then retracing his steps without losing items before they despawn. I must say, I'm a bit curious.
The farm is almost certainly not 30x36. That seems hella-big. I haven't actually played Minecraft for a few weeks, and haven't been to that particular place for longer. the farm is big enough to be a bit of a- as you may express- side-goal, of sorts. Maybe I don't notice despawns because I just don't care if they despawn. If I grab the apples, cool. if I don't... meh. Usually there is nothing left lying about, though. And I don't think it takes 5 minutes. (The result of it being a fair lot smaller than I initialler proffered. (normally I prefer deforestation, so I can pretend it was a hillside and it never had trees and what no I totally did not cause an ecological disaster).
And you’re the one that is accusing me of being unable to grasp the concept of time.
Fair point... However my error was in the size of the farm, not in how long it took to complete. Still a substantial metric though.
Or not checking my stuff before posting. Well, you're either that *or* an ass for using performance from a modded game as a counterpoint in a vanilla discussion (or both, so I used *or* not *xor*).
I don’t have to tell you the exact number of trees in my rows to prove my point
Indeed. That is why I never asked for it. My statement that you didn't say how big it was was not intended in that fashion- that information isn't really needed.
I feel that the 5 minutes limit is too short for most small ordinary goals in ordinary situations. Feel. Opinion. No proof needed. You can’t remove that from me for it is a player’s right to feel such things. It’s based on impressions. Impressions also chave that nice little quality to them that one does not actually need to back them up, either.
Fair enough. However, you are suggesting that everybody's game experience should be changed. That's more or less what I take issue with here. A lot of the things like this really ought to be configurable, but in "non-standard" ways, such as editing options.txt or something, but their values are instead compiled into the resulting program, which is a shame.
You instead claim it takes you less than 5 minutes to do so as some form of proof to in the end try to ridicule me.
No I didn't. How would you know what my intent was? I also never said it took me less than 5 minutes. I said I never lost anything- as far as I'm aware- to the 5 minute despawn, at least, nothing that I wouldn't have also lost to a longer one, because I just didn't care about them.
Okay, so yeah surely my numbers were on the low side of things
And Mine (tree farm size) were on the high side.
that is not a good way to make new friends.
To be fair, this has NEVER been my goal.
specially modded performance using only one’s own way of playing as basis (the « let’s prove X as a law by using up my specific example » human habit) , is even less good. And accusing someone of being unable to grasp the concept of time while being *yourself* completely off the vanilla charts, is even more so.
You've repeated yourself several times so far.... as have I. As noted, though, my error was in regards to the size of my tree farm. Also, the fact that I never really use it. Just that, when I do, I don't notice any portions that have despawned by the time I am ready to replant them. I used a few subjective qualifiers for good reason.
Again, someone making lots of assumptions and not bothering to check.
Tested & Verified in version 1.4.7 Survival by yours truly, chronometer in hand :
Made a simple water channel. Dropped Cobble #1 in there. After 4 minutes, I drop Cobble #2. It merges with Cobble #1, forming a « cobble pair » item. After 4 minutes, I drop Cobble #3. Merge again. I repeat 3 more times with Cobble #4, #5 and #6. Then after the 6th merge, the shown item at the end of the water channel is a « cobblestone trio » item. I pick up the item, and I get all 6 cobblestones back. Total "Cobble#1" survival time : over 20 minutes.
Yes, please finish eating your own foot, you seem to have left left a bit of meat on the bones there.
This is interesting. I recall Etho showign a video that had the exact opposite behaviour. Standing around in a creative world for five minutes is not something I really want to do at the moment, but I have no reason to doubt your results in this instance. I believe the early implementation had this 'feature' as a bug whci hwas subsequently fixed. I doubted the names of the MCP decompiled name (age) because often they accidentally flip the meaning, so I made the incorrect connection that it was the live time of the item- as in, how much time it has left to live, rather than the other way around, which appears to be the case. (I was also unaware that this was actually a bug at the time I originally saw it (1.3.2, I believe had the bug, as a result of the LACK of the line I quoted- resulting in the merged stack being the first one iterated on which inevitably was the older one. This is good news, I always thought that was an intended feature, and I didn't like it, apparently it was in fact a bug that was fixed quite awhile ago.
Now, only someone who can’t read low level code would fail to see that age here is *really* the age of the item i.e. starts at zero, finishes at 6000 tick, and that the new merged item is the *MINIMUM* of the ages of the two source items. Meaning, the merged item becomes the age of the YOUNGEST of the two items i.e. the one with the smallest age, obviously the the one with the MOST time remaining before it despawns.
Many of the fields from MCP have stupid names that have no bearing on their function, and a lot of tick-based features (like age) have the opposite name. I was actually working (obviously) on a preconception that the behaviour existed, and was an intended feature. Therefore, as an intended feature, it would have code dealing with it- this my foregone conclusion that age was in fact a mis-re-labelled TTL field (Time To Live). Apologies for my transgression. (It's worth noting this isn't Low-Level code at all... C is low level code- and I try to spend as little time as possible in things like forge and MCP, because fields are so badly named- to the point where having a fitting name get's me by surprise
Hum, nah, I don't want the game to cater only to my admittely inefficient slowpokeness (slowpokitude? slowpokishisism? slowpokability? ), I just checked the "average" time people take on smallish-yet-real goals/tasks they set themselves to, or how they "cut into simple steps" somewhat-larger projects (not uber projects but common stuff like making a normally sized house, etc.), and for most players it seems that this is by chunks that are over 5 minutes at a time, that's for sure. 20 minutes would cover most players needs except mine, because yes I'm really slow (case in point: always last in shooter games with a beautiful score of zero kills ok not true once I got *a few* points, but it was a 2 hours long game, and anyway I got killed hundreds of times).
Yeah, I'm a pack rat too lol good estimate.
You seem to have made up a quite nice summary of the current "average player situation facing item despawning", especially with your first paragraph, and you're right the situation is not *that* bad lol. I just stretched it for too long maybe sorry...
Thanks for a well thought out reply.
It's not that hard to gather materials you may drop. If I (and I'm sure many others do this) drop something down a really deep hole or ravine, I'll just dig down or water bucket down to get it and that takes about a minute to a minute and a half. So really in all, you're just bad at collecting your items/materials.
First Suggestion: Disagree. I don't think despawn times should be changed.
Second Suggestion: This could probably be changed. I'm not sure HOW though, Maybe make some items never combine? Or maybe the lifespan could be set to the average instead of the youngest one.
(Side note: to address the problem more specifically, you can always use hoppers. Then have lava setup so extra eggs from the chickens are destroyed.
Another thing I think is noteworthy: they don't really last forever, but until they hit their max stack size, at which point they will despawn after 5 more minutes.
I think others have pointed out that the two suggestions are sort of in conflict in some ways.
Ouatcheur seems to be really overreacting. I mean, I am terrible at Minecraft, and having 5 minutes to go get things is not a big deal. I don't really see a point to increasing the despawn time by 2, let alone 4. Anyway, you might say, oh it won't lag, because then the new despawn time will let me get it! There are also natural item-dropping events, such as leaf decay and eggs. If it was 5 minutes, it really isn't a problem. However quadrupling the despawn rate will also quadruple the lag. For people who don't have uber god computers, they will suffer greatly.
You also must realize I do not excel in coding, (unlike BC), so please do not use that as grounds to insult my intelligence.
I'd also note that I've been awake for about two days straight at this point as well for reasons that are of course outside the scope of this thread/post.
Ah, I also tend to have a short straw at such times. Take care, man. Microsoft wouldn't want a coder doing noob mistakes like confusing min with max, or without testing the software before putting their money on it, so get some sleep to get back to tip top shape! Glad for you that you make a lot of $$$ at Microsoft, probably something like 3 times my own salary, or more, but hey, I couldn't stay a programmer, because I need my beauty sleep. Yeah too true - I need 9-10 hours sleep per night otherwise I become a Minecraft Villager Zombie -- slow to game, slow to live, lol -- That last year that I worked in that field, I went cardiac from multiple "program this for yesterday!" stress attacks, so I realized I needed a way more laidback job... I miss the dough, tho.
You say My Way is not the only way to play them game- and then suggest the game be changed for your play style.
Nope, again you assume and quote me wrong for the nth time. lol I think I'm starting to get used to it. I said the game should be changed to accomodate the playstyles of the main 95% of players, and not only for the top 5% of fastest, most efficient players. I even said in this thread above here that if the game was changed for *my* playstyle, then the despawn time would be 1 hour, not 20 minutes.
Who said anything about an optimized farm? I certainly didn't.
I'm limited to saying things you said first? I was obviously just listing all the ways I could think of that players could play in a slower way. Stop taking everything "a contrario"? Yeah like I'm placed to tell that to others lol.
You keep talking about a "we" and an "us".... Who is that?
If you read correctly the entire post before answering, you'd have seen a few paragraphs later, that this "us" is me my girl and/or my friends (okay, only 2 Minecraft friends).
As for posting my data, come on, are you what a mad archivist or evil empire bureaucrat or something? Instead of just giving out my impressions of my countless hours (or, maybe not countless, more like I don't remember how many, ok?) of observations from play, go back in time and put on tape so that they are properly presented to you with proof and structure the way you'd like, and all that in triplicate with sugar? No problem, just lemme grab my Delorean! Seriously, my posts are already more than long enough that half the people on this forum probably think my nick should become "TLDR" or something, so no, I think I've provided enough data. And btw, look who's talking? Maybe you are looking at all this a bit too seriously or something. It's not work where people have to submit progress reports and test specs and the like. It's just a stupid waste of time on a very fun and useful forum.
I also tend to do the mistake of starting to reply first, as I read on. But little useful trick I learned the hard way: Even when I'm like a brain dead zombie from lack of sleep I go back and delete everything that doesn't fit anymore after a the full re-reading, before doing the actual posting. Especially for posts longer than a few lines. Meaning (unfortunately) nearly all my posts.
Look, I never said anything about being efficient.
Oops yes, sorry bout that assumption on my part I hate it when I do that.
...Three trees took around 20 seconds, meaning it would take around 15-17 trees for things to start despawning...
Now you're talking, that's solid. Meaning: 2 rows of an 8x8 farm with a diamond axe. With a stone axe, only 1 row. And for a slowpoke player, maybe two third of that (stone axe, when I fell great), and for a slug like me, a third of that (when I don't feel so great). Now I see where my "only a couple trees" seems to have come from...
Onus of proof is on the original claimant.
Of each argument, that I agree on. But my original claim is two parts:
a) a statement that I feel the spawn rate is too fast. Which, based on a mere opinion of observation, is not something that really needs to be accompanyied with a "data proof". But which seems to not be shared by the majority, so yeah, no problem, put back in the box.
The more important half, a statement that because of merging algorthm, "eternal objects" (well, not eternal, just way longer than 5 minutes) are created, which shows up particularly strongly with densely packed chicken coops. To which I only offered as proof my own statement that it occured, and later on, a "hammer" "undeniable" proof.
Overall that quite covers the entire thing, The rest of the entire posting is more like sugar powder on a cake. Enough sugar powder to hide the entire cake, tough. Maybe even the table it's been placed on. lol.
I'll leave the original because it's rather funny in it's ignorance.
Wow, chapeau! That's quite a deft way to grab an omelette that fell to the ground and put it back inside the eggshells. (sincerely!)
You're right about the interpretation thing: it also happened to me too often: "Ah I already know that piece of code!" (starts reading diagonally... starts coding upon it... guess what happens after the compile? "wtf another bug why?" Cause I badly read the thing in the first place, of course. Common noob coder mistake. Also, common guru coder mistake. Nor common pro coder mistake, though, unless apparently they've been up two night in a row for some torturous reasons.
Hammers?
I like to joke, a lot. Even when I seem angry or to take things seriously, I'm not really. So hammers as in '"wham, three unavoidable arguments!" Just a figure of speech, really. I'm now even sure its properly translatable. Anyway not important.
Ahh, but- I never said I did it in under 5 minutes.
Well, sorry if I read it litterally then:
snip: With my tree farm (30x36 birch trees) I cut their trunks down, then retrace my steps and pick up the saplings and apples that drop when the leaves despawn. Unless I purposely abandon it, I don't think I've lost anything to the 5 minute mark
To me this sentences did read as
"With my farm, I did woodcutting, then cleanup, without losing stuff before 5 minutes occured."
I did not read it as:
"With my farm, I do woodcutting and then do u-turns and sidesteps along the way to cleanup stuff so that I don't lose stuff every 5 minutes".
Which is kind of near my entire point why I think 20 minutes despawn would be overall better than 5 minutes one. On normal farms, on course, not on a 30x36 one lol. And the advantage of a big aligned farm is that you can do this kind of easy u turn because overall the task is simple. It's a simplest scenario. Now try building a house floor near the sky limit, while not being sure which pattern of diamonds, glass, gold and lapis lazuli blocks would look the best and trying several ones because you're with 2 friends with those 2 friends each having his own ideas... Think you'll have time to actually finish before anything despawns? Would you really want to habe to go down to ground level every five minutes? Even if you put another floor right under there to catch everything falling from your little small project (its just a small floor after all!), you'll still have to pick up stuff several times before finishing. Almost nobody likes to lose gold and lapis blocks and especially not diamonds.
Anyway, I see quite clearly I'm a very minor minority voice here so not much use repeating the same stuff again just slightly differently lol.
I'm thinking MAYBE the farm is 10x10
Well of course if we base our analysises on wrong base data then everything flies out the window. My number of trees in my example was a tad too small by a factor of 3 to 6 (I said about 3 trees when I should have meant an entire row, maybe even two.)
Which is a _SO_ weak. Your example had 1080 instead of a "mere" 100 trees. So let's also ignore this "little" factor of a mere 10 times too big... (I'd like my boss to make that kind of mistake when paying my paycheck, though). For a diamond-using "pro" player, I agree that its *possible* to farm an entire 10x10 optimized tree farm - but just barely, before things start despawning. Still, that's cutting it close. Of course, using the u-turn technique, then its probably easy to do, maybe even for me. And not caring about a bit of the secondary stuff (like saplings and apples) despawning too, would also help a huge lot making the whole point totally irrelevant! Pack rats like me have a hard time with that concept I know lol.
A lot of the things like this really ought to be configurable, but in "non-standard" ways, such as editing options.txt or something, but their values are instead compiled into the resulting program, which is a shame
I Agree.
But even with configurable options, it wouldn't change the multiplayer default from 5 minutes. At 5 minutes I feel like the despawn rate is too fast for the average player (definitely wayyyy too fast for me). Now, I don't want to impose anything on anyone. But if a community of 10 players each need varying times from say 1 to 10 minutes, then the game is actually adressing only half those players, the other half will feel despawning is faster than their work speed. But most of those will simply just adapt their own playstyle to start the habit of stopping regulargly what they are doing to pick up stuff more frequently and not be bothered at all by it in the end, so it can be said that "in a way" their needs are also covered. But how many would prefer having the time to complete s small goal without stopping in the middle? Unknown, and maybe there is no way to know. So what is the true best despawn time threshold? The one that will cover the playstyle of 95% of players? I have no idea, yet I still can't help but feel that the despawn time should be "an entire minecraft day".
That's more or less what I take issue with here.
That I can quite understand. Even though it would be secondary, it would not be a small change. It would directly change the way all players interact with the game. Some of those in the habit of putting their current little goal on pause every couple minutes might even hate having more time, because they would have the tendency to simply forget, at the end of their little goal, to pick their stuff up, while currently, they don't forget because its a near-constant reminder. So that is a factor also.
To be fair, this has NEVER been my goal.
Don't worry, i didn't take it personally, you more than made up for it fast enough, and to be also fair, I'm not such a chariasmatic social star myself. And yes, you're right, I tend to repeat myself gaaah what kind of mumbling old man will I become? Sorry.
To be also fair on all your assumptions, its true that you seem to have had LOTS of contrary-data and the too frequent weird minecraft-name-coding-choices that supported your initial interpretation of the algorithm. To be frank I rarely saw a "bug-turned-feature" then turned around 180 degrees back as a bugfix again, just like that! Usually, when a big potato head (i.e. marketing. management, etc.) decides that the "bug" should be a "feature", they don't afterwards change their minds. Ever. For it would be like admitting that they were wrong before. It'll rain in hell before that happens. Minecraft guys may make really inefficient and weird code choices sometimes, but dang they got real guts and I like them a lot.
Don't worry man, all is forgiven in fact I apologize myself too, doubly so for good measure.
It's not that hard to gather materials you may drop. If I (and I'm sure many others do this) drop something down a really deep hole or ravine, I'll just dig down or water bucket down to get it and that takes about a minute to a minute and a half. So really in all, you're just bad at collecting your items/materials.
Well, my main mistake weas using the tree farm as my primary example, while in fact those occurs way more when doing building with a friend, where some discussion and thought and planning are required, and trying different things too of course, and whenb the broken blocks don' just fall right at your feet but wayyyyy out theeere. Then its an annoyance because you can't concentratre on anything or do anything for say 15 minutes in a row (the usual average amount of time it takes for one clear step of a project) without having those interruptions.
And a "proof" that it is annoying, is that when I play on a server, other pro players, which find me of course kinda slow (and thus "in the way") when high up on the house roof, always want me to grab their fallen blocks for them, like a real gofer man. I do it nicely then when I'm tired I tell them to just do it themselves, but its still a "proof", if you will, that, for a lot of players, a short despawn time comes as source of constant interruption in their projects. An annoyance.
This sounds like a "I'm a lazy and inefficient player, please change the game specifically for me" request.
Sorry if you think that, especially since that is not the case.
Also, the despawn timer doesn't mean a lot when you die, especially if you're far from home. The timer only counts down in active chunks; if you die miles from home then you've got an infinite amount of time to get within a few chunks of them before the timer even starts. I would even say this encourages players to explore further out since it means that you can take your time picking up some replacement gear for the trip instead of having to panic-dash back to your death point empty-handed.
Ah, yes, thanks for reminding me of that. Extremely valid point. Yes, it effectively means "Just don't lose sigh of WHERE you are in these tunnels, so that you can find your stuff back."
Having items immediately despawn on death would actually make it a lot less likely that players would explore at all, not induce them to go further out. If there's no chance of ever recovering your items then nobody would ever go anywhere where there's the remotest chance of dieing.
Well, thinking about it again, I finally agree with you that insta-despawn would go against exploration. But you'd be surprised at how many players would still work right beside lava anyway...
Anyway, no support. How about you practice and improve at the game instead of asking the devs to change it to compensate for your laziness?
Currently, floating items despawn after 5 minutes.
First suggestion:
Personally I'd prefer it if the delay was more like 20 minutes, so that i have time to finish whatever I'm doing, like cutting down that single giant oak tree, mining out that small room, placing my farm fence, before I have to think about having to go pick up the pieces left over from my work laying all around right and left, before they despawn.
Currently, I have to constantly think about items despawning, it's a real concentration breaker. It's often "Gee, I must go pick up those blocks quickly, then come back to continue my work right after." Several times per even simple tasks. With a 20 minutes despawn delay, I would have time to have a breather while mining/farming/building. It would be instead "Ok, must not forget to pick up items once I'm finished with this part here".
I could finish cutting down an entire row of trees from my tree farm, before having to pick up the wood, and THEN start the next row, instead of having to constantly stop every 2 or 3 trees and thus be forced to move around a lot. I could finish cutting down a giant oak then pick up the wood, instead of having to jump down and climb back up about thrice before finishing the tree. I could finish mining a 12x12x6 room in one go without having to stop once. In short, I could complete a DECENTLY SIZED "little chunk" of work without frequent interruptions. I'd be starting to pick things up at my own pace, instead of having that pace forced upon me at a rate so high that I can't do anything for more than a couple few minutes at a time without interruptions.
Mostly, if I'm working mining *and* building over a big chasm, I don't want to take *1 minute out of every 4 or 5* to get down to the bottom of the chasm, grab whatever fell, then come back up. I'd like to be able to finish mbuilding my little bridge or what-have-you before being forced to come down. "Meh, why don't you just ignore the falling cobble, man, anytway its worthless". Well yeah, that may very well be worthless to you, but who says its worthless to me? Who says its actually a cobblestone bridge and that whatever is falling down from my "trial and error bridge building" couldn't be muchg more valuable than cobble? (because of course almost nobody gets it perfectly right the 1st time especially when youre in a "let's try to see if this way would look better" mood. I could put my full concentration on building without being force to worrying as much about item drops.
It would really improve the freedom I feel from the game if done this way.
And now, please, if someone tells me that this would effectively quadruple the number of floating items on the server and thus create mucho lag, I'd wish they'd use their brains instead and not assume that:
- ...ALL the players on the server are currently ALL doing "itemd-ropping tasks" (like mining or tree farming), and ALL of them are doing more than small amount of that task (so that items will accumulate mor than 5 minutes), and that NONE of them likes to pick up the dropped items frequently. Reality is very far from that picture. It wouldn't even double the number of floating items, much less quadruple them.
- ...ALL of the new "later than 5 minutes" items are dropped away from the previous ones so that they don't merge into single item stack, which don't take up any more processing. While this may be true for collecting tress in a long row, it is not true of collecting the wood (and falling saplings) from a big oak, and not always true when digging a large room, and is only negligible for items drops from fixing small errors during construction projects, that you just won't have to pick up immediately is all.
- ...ALL floating items take processing. Once a floating item is "immobile" (stops dropping, stops being pushed by water, etc.), it should simply become "anchored" into the block it is inside of, and stay that way until something happens (like in a block update). The client would add the rotating and wobbling item effect, who cares if I see a rotating pumpkin facing left on highest wobbling position, while you see it facing toward you at at bottomest wobbling position? That would just be nitpicking over a small graphical mismatch that has zero effect on gameplay. Immobile items wouldn't take any server processing, they'd just be there. Yes, it would add *some* overhead (nearby players loading the chunks would load more numerous floating items), but new items dropping would still be broadcasted to the same number of nearby players, and items older than 5 minutes would be, in all probability, immobile items that the player clients already know about, thus zero extra server processing here, and would probably be items which probably won't move until picked up or despawning. So no, there would NOT be a "quadruple server lag" because of Not even twice as much. Maybe a few percents, nothing more.
EDIT:
Observant posters said this would affect the time to retrieve yout stuff from death before it despawns. On that point, I completely agree that 5 minutes is enough time. *IF* (and only if!) it is *impossible* to spawn items such that their despawn times is not "always" 5 minutes, then this 1st suggestion of this post becomes invalid. anyway I find the 2nd half more important.
Second suggestion, which I find extremely MORE important than the previous one:
Before, when I checked my chicken farms, I usually got a LOT of eggs per visit, nearly half as many eggs as chickens sometimes.
But now, I get twice or three times as many eggs for the same number of chickens!
Why? Simple: Currently, when two floating items '"merge" together, it seems the resulting floating item "pile" is treated as a new item and that resets its despawn time (or at the very least, sets it to the new item that which has more despawning time left). So in an environment where new items of the same time are constantly added, like in the gatling-ass-egg-laying-rates of chickens, this means the piles of eggs have a tendency to almost never disappear.
It should NOT be this way:
Timestamp = 10 minutes
Situation = [new egg with 5 minutes remaining] added very near {pile of 12 eggs with 1 minute remaining}.
Timestamp = 10 minutes + 1 tick
New Situation = items merged together to get {pile of 13 eggs with '5 minutes minus 1 tick' remaining}.
See how these mergings can eternally "reset" the despawning of old items?
The item pile of items should not have a single despawn time, but instead have an ordered list of times, each entry listing how many of its items will despawn at which time, and exactly enough entry to cover the total amounts of items in the pile. And of course upon despawning the floating items icon will update (only if necessary, like for example if the number goes from 6+ to under 6, then the icon would be changed to go from a "3 items" thingy to a "2 items" thingy) http://www.minecraft...i/Item_(entity)
And thus, getting stacks of eggs from only a few chickens packed together, wouldn't happen anymore.
And for those who still have their eyes glitching madly about the 1st suggestion, applying this 2nd suggestion fix would remove a LOT of those egg "stacks" that are floating around seemingly forever.
EDIT:
Those saying it would add lag are in error. Only the 1st "soonest to despawn" entry in the pile would be checked for despawning, so it would stay the same amount of time. Some knowledge of programming sorted lists, b-trees, and N-order-algorithms, may be required here to understand why the processing added would be very slight and negligible.
Onto the first one.... 5 minutes is quite balanced. If you die, should you get over an ingame day to go recover your stuff? No! It's life-or-death! You have to race there, or lose all your stuff. I agree in certain situations it would be useful, but in certain situations it could be quite laggy too.
No, it would not be laggy at all. Currently, the server checks the item pile for despawning, yes? It would not start checking EACH entry in the item pile for despawning, only the 1st one. Thus, it would take the same time.
First, personally I'd prefer if if you die you IMMEDIATELY lose all your stuff.
Why? Because this "if you die run to save your stuff" thing encourages players to stay very close to their spawn (or at least move their beds around a lot).
Because it is a feature which discourages exploration (which requires going faraway). Just like thre new biomes all looking the same also tended to discourage exploration.
If stuff despawned immediately upon death (effectively, not even spawning out of the invetory at all, just deleted directly of the inventory, which takes much less processing than creating the items out of the inventory then despawning less at most 1 tick later), you wouldn't have this (and less gried over stolen stuff). (and also less lag in case of massive player deaths somewhere). Since all items are despawned upon death it would laso be much easier to "log in" the equipment at time of death (on servers which would use the info I mean) and avoid "duplicating" items on death on such servers that choose to restore a players equipment on death from grief or whatever reasons. For example, if a server made a "lava parcour park atttaction", players wouldn't have to unequip before playing.
And if I am to play in a map with this chance to get my stuff back upon death, then gee, I'd like to be able to not have to stick so close to spawn. Also, the 5 minutes is irrelevant because all you have todo is place more beds and use the closest one.
Also, it would be EXTREMELY easy to make it so that "items dropped when dying last only 5 minutes" and all other items from working last 20 minutes.
I thought about this death issue before you posted and really its a non issue here.
And my post is NOT about the 5 minutes being 20 minutes to have more time to get your stuff back when you die. For that I agree 5 minutes is *more* than enough and people really lose stuff only to lava and mostly only if they are inexperienced enough not to use beds when deeply mining or away from their home base.
One could even say that even with 20 minutes to find your stuff back, if you haven't found it in the first 5 minutes it's probably because you did NOT use a bed, you did NOT trace your path properly, and you probably lost it in a maze of tunnels somewhere, and if you *do* manage to find it back anyway, you still have lost up to 15 minutes of your time *only* to find your stuff back, well I'd say that player deserves his reward.
But my post is about having 20 minutes before NORMAL items despawn, and not "upon death" items, which is another situation completely different altogether.
Because they have opposite effect in that specific case doesn't make them "overall obsolete".
Yeah, you'd have a lot, but that is only because chickens poop out eggs as such a quick rate. We already have too much lol. I'd lower the chicken egg laying by a factor of 8. Since the eggs would stick around four times as long, overall you'd have slightly half as many eggs to pick up in an average chicken coop.
Another way to reduce "uber concentration" of mobs would be that the breeding algorithm doesn't work 100% of the time when there are more than X mobs nearby.
Anyway despite the looks of things, it is the 2nd part of my suggestion which I deem, by far, the most important. The 1st part is just *my* preferred way of playing, while the 2nd part is actually a glitch in the game.
No. it's not a bug fix request. Learn what a Bug is. it's unintended behaviour in the game. Now, from where I'm standing, they set items to despawn in 5 minutes. They despawn in 5 minutes. That isn't a bug. It's entirely intended.
20 minutes is not infinitely larger than 5 minutes, so I'm not sure what real difference this would make.
Uh... what? This seems more like you aren't aware of how long 5 minutes is.
And... You can do that now. Unless you are really slow or you are working on a big project or task... but then again that just means the "required" despawn time suddenly scales with the project.
You have to seriously come to grips with how long 5 minutes is. I don't know what your tree farm layout is, but it takes me 15 seconds to cut down three oak trees. I can see maybe a bit longer if they were big oak trees. It took 15 seconds to cut down one average jungle tree.
With my tree farm (30x36 birch trees) I cut their trunks down, then retrace my steps and pick up the saplings and apples that drop when the leaves despawn. Unless I purposely abandon it, I don't think I've lost anything to the 5 minute mark- certainly nothing that I wouldn't have also lost at the 20 minute mark.
You don't have to worry about the item drops. The way you are presenting it, it's like it's some sort of race against time to get them. I've had similar situations with various items from mining falling to the bottom of a pit when there was more to collect. I simply noted that would be my next destination and mined out the ravine. The drop was still there when I finished. 5 minutes is not as short as you seem to imply.
You are assuming that items are even going to be picked up. Some people will mine through hundreds of blocks of cobble to build a tunnel, and won't pick it up because their inventory is full. 5 minutes worth of such activity is going to be four times less than 20 minutes of it.
No idea what you are saying here.... This time limit applies to 'new' items, now?
Or, the gametick handler for item drops can remain as it is now and not be slowed down by that method.
The game already does this. Item drops are rendered, rotated, and bobbed on the client-side.
Those "immobile" items still need their game tick called to determine when they would despawn. Most of the overhead from more items is in the function call overhead, not the fictional overhead you are assigning it here that has to do with some weird method where the server actually keeps track of item rotation and bob information.
Movement is irrelevant. The gametick would still need to be called, which is where the extra overhead lies. I believe the gametick adds the velocity to the location regardless. Only difference is the game does three additions and an assignment whereas you want three comparisons and- if all those comparisons go through- then the additions and an assignment. The best case scenario in such a case ironically becomes when whatever coordinate is first compared to zero is non-zero. And either way, it's still a unnecessary branch.
When two stacks are merged, their "lifespan" is set to the minimum of the two stacks. Directly from EntityItem.java:
Basically- your logic is completely wrong.
Nope. Explained above. When Stacks combine, their remaining lifespan is set to the lifespan of the oldest item. if a fresh cobblestone block combines with a stack from 4 minutes ago, it will despawn with the rest of them in a minute. Same story with eggs.
It is not done this way.
Yes. Thankfully, it's not done this way.
This would defeat the purpose of combining item stacks. The purpose is to reduce server workload by preventing excessive Updates to Item Entities. This would simply shift the work from the loop that iterates through entities to an inner loop within the update logic of a single item to check if parts of it are going away. Complexity goes from O(1) to O(n), fundamentally.
Humourously, this is even worse than I imagined it. I was imagining a custom class data structure that stored a number of items and the time they expire, at which point the update logic would simply decrement it's stack size by the appropriate amount and Dequeue the item.
It already doesn't happen outside of fantasy land; or, to be precise, if this is happening, it's not because of stack combining logic that was mentioned, which doesn't exist in the game.
Summary: your suggestion and bug fix are based on a apparent inability to comprehend basic temporal relationships, as well as coming to foregone conclusions that are easily falsified by simply looking at what the game does- at the code level- rather than creating conclusions to explain perceived errant behaviour.
Wait, so you want us to lose EVERYTHING upon death? That is sorta pushing it.... And if you want upon death items to wait a different amount of time, please specify. Even if it only checks the most recent for despawning, it would still make some lag. So far, big stacks only need to have posistion, what item, how many, and 1 despawn time. This would make it so it would have to store more data. With the rest it really depends on how laggy it would be, I guess.... But with that.... Mojang would lose tons of money. Why? Well, think of it this way "OMFG THEY MADE ME LOOZE ALL MAH STUFF I NO GO TO MINECON!" Or "Wait, now you lose EVERYTHING if you die? No way I'm buying minecraft!"
tl;dr I'm fine with the rest of it, but not the part about loosing everything on death, really depends on lag, as long as death item time is the same. And you would still get tons of eggs from chicken farms, with items lasting 20 minutes instead of 5.
The same with mining out a large room. I never lose any resources unless I accidentally hit Lava. Why? Because I am never more than 2-3 blocks away from where I am mining. And I follow a simple back and forth or spiral pattern so I am always running over the stuff I mine. I can maybe see this with a large cavern or ravine but it also only takes about 30 seconds to get the items and get back up. That plus the fact that Stone and Dirt are everywhere, I only bother going after ores that drop. I know you already addressed that different materials may be valued differently to different people, but anyone who spends 10 minutes in a strip mine will have plenty of Cobblestone. Your subjective value may be high, but the objective value based on abundance, time it takes to acquire more, and renewability makes it exceedingly low.
Finally, the short despawn time does not discourage exploration because if you unload the chunk by dying (for example, if you are several thousand blocks away from your spawn) the items don't count down until you load that chunk again, so it is really only a risk if you were in a cave where you could get lost. It's more of an inconvenience really. Besides, if you are going to be doing work really far away, why wouldn't you bring a bed? Beds are cheap and useful.
As for the whole item stack thing, this has never really been an issue for me either. If I have more eggs than I need I destroy them. It takes an entire 10 seconds to drop them or chuck them into lava. Hell, most of the time I just automate my Chickens and make eggs go to either a fire pit to be destroyed or to a collection point, changeable with the flick of a lever. Or I just use Hoppers and make them totally automatic. No issues for me.
Would I mind if this stuff is changed? Not really. But to be honest, and definitely not trying to be mean, it sounds like you just want the game to cater to your extremely inefficient or absent minded play style.
Want some advice on how to thrive in the Suggestions section? Check this handy list of guidelines and tips for posting your ideas and responding to the ideas of others!
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/suggestions/2775557-guidelines-for-the-suggestions-forum
BC_Pro, I’m sorry to inform you that I find you as a disagreable person (at last, towards me) (I hope you work to improve that!), and unfortunately do not seem to be star programmer material either (that one, you entirely did yourself!).
The way you play is not the only way. We like to take our time to design our stuff at a leisurely pace. Lots of people are bad at multitasking, or like to chat with friends to ask their advice on their little current pet projet or yesterday’s movie so yeah the speed they accomplish stuff can drop a lot. Lots of players don’t have trigger-happy reflexes or perfect pathing skills or even like to have optimized farm designs. Or always think to bring enough tools with them. Or reach decisions in split seconds. Or use the best tools. Or don’t get momentarily distracted/sidetracked by little stuff while doing something else. In short, many players apparently don’t play anywhere near as fast as you. So you definitely should not be using your own performance as a counterpoint example or as a baseline of what should be. We think the game design values should cover say 95% of playstyles, and not just « super efficient » players.
You seem more intent on nitpicking on my actual number of trees in my (admiteddly quite weak) example and to insult my intelligence, than to try to get the main gist of my message, which is that 5 minutes is so short we feel like we don’t get to finish anything before stuff despawns. When doing something, it feels like the pace of cleaning up is imposed upon us by an artificially short timeout, rather than by what we get to do it in what would feel « natural » : to pick stuff up only *between* sub-goals that got just accomplished, not in the *middle* of subgoals.
Subgoals I find usually take somewhat more than 5 minutes for most players, and are defined by real elements in the game, not by arbitrary timeouts. A subgoal would be for example « build this wall ». Making say a 2 story house 20x20x12 is a big project, not a subgoal. Making a wall for that house, say 20x6, is a small project, but is a subgoal of the larger project. Making only two layers of that wall, or reaching one or two decisions upon what combinations of materials to choose to best make that wall, and how to pattern them for best effect, those are not small goals, those aren’t even subgoals, those are fractions of a small goal, those just things that are part of actual subgoals.
We assert that for an average player the game’s 5 minutes despawn is sufficient for those « parts of small goals » things, but not for most actual (small) goals found in normal situations. Thus, the « pace » of the game is imposing an artificial timeout limit rather than using the natural « feel » of accomplishing subgoals within larger goals at the average pace of normal (or maybe a bit on the slow side) players. As for myself, I’m a slowpoke player, and if the despawn time was adjusted to *me* specifically, it would be 1 hour, not 20 minutes, and even less 5 minutes.
For example our (me and my girl) little forest farm is a sparsely populated glade of several tree types, with lots of flowers and cute paths. Designed for looks, not efficiency! And *we* find that fun. (we as in "me and my friends", and not as in "I consider myself important", but your post had so many happenstances of you interpreting what I said the wrong way that I prefer not to take a chance here). We definitely are far from alone playing that way. Someone else can be efficient, and find that fun, and that’s okay too. but I would feel sorry for whomever thinks games should be more about being efficient than having fun, and I would be angry at someone saying our way of playing is wrong.
You seem to have a great ability to make false assumptions about what is being said (well, written actually) by changing or even directly inverting the meaning of things. You also don’t back anything of what you say up and the one time you do, you prove yourself wrong without realizing it, because, again, you read what you want to see and interpret it your own way, instead of reading whats there and nothing more. Mostly, a thing that I would want to be otherwise but that I seem unable to see in another way, you also seem to have a tendency to accuse others of stuff in a condescending tone while at the very same time doing the very thing you accuse them of. That makes you look bad, so I kind of pity you a little. I’m sure you’re usually better than the appearance you gave off here.
And now the hammers :
*** Hammer 1 *** (1st suggestion - despawning is too fast!) : The « can’t grasp the concept of time » accusation.
You claim you cut a 30 x 36 tree farm then retrace your steps and don’t lose stuff from the 5 minutes despawning. I know how to read and you "cut the tress" and *then* retrace your steps. All in 5 minutes tops. That is what you claim.
30 times 36 trees times an average 6 blocks per tree = 6480 blocks at 0,4 seconds per block = 43 minutes 12 seconds with a vanilla diamond axe. Wayyy beyond the 5 minutes limit. Even with Efficiency V, this is cut down to 11 minutes 40 seconds. Stil over twice the limit.
Pray tell please share with the rest of the world how a normal player (not uberman you!) in a normal situation (without mods or costly enchanted items) performing normally (not madly optimizing each fraction of a second), would manage to duplicate your feat of cutting down that 30x36 tree farm and then retracing his steps without losing items before they despawn. I must say, I'm a bit curious.
And you’re the one that is accusing me of being unable to grasp the concept of time. Or of not checking my stuff before posting.
I don’t have to tell you the exact number of trees in my rows to prove my point, for it does no need proof just to be told. That is : I feel that the 5 minutes limit is too short for most small ordinary goals in ordinary situations. Feel. Opinion. No proof needed. You can’t remove that from me for it is a player’s right to feel such things. It’s based on impressions. Impressions also chave that nice little quality to them that one does not actually need to back them up, either.
However, your own claims are easily broken by mere Minecraft wikipedia facts and easy maths. You don’t claim it feels too long, like I did. Which was a generic statement, You instead claim it takes you less than 5 minutes to do so as some form of proof to in the end try to ridicule me. My post never attacked anyone. You’re the one that is the kind of person that accused me of stuff, and I think I have a right to defend myself here. So accuation wise, why don’t get into the habit of checking the aftertaste of your own soup’s ingredients *before* sending it to others? That would be greatly appreciated.
Okay, so yeah surely my numbers were on the low side of things, but you, with your kind of « focusing on the nitpickinglibable details not the main message » thing, that is not a good way to make new friends. Trying to disprove a generic suggestion with a specially modded performance using only one’s own way of playing as basis (the « let’s prove X as a law by using up my specific example » human habit) , is even less good. And accusing someone of being unable to grasp the concept of time while being *yourself* completely off the vanilla charts, is even more so.
*** Hammer 2 *** (2nd suggestion - fix the merging despawn times!) « It’s the opposite of what you say! »
Again, someone making lots of assumptions and not bothering to check.
Tested & Verified in version 1.4.7 Survival by yours truly, chronometer in hand :
Made a simple water channel. Dropped Cobble #1 in there. After 4 minutes, I drop Cobble #2. It merges with Cobble #1, forming a « cobble pair » item. After 4 minutes, I drop Cobble #3. Merge again. I repeat 3 more times with Cobble #4, #5 and #6. Then after the 6th merge, the shown item at the end of the water channel is a « cobblestone trio » item. I pick up the item, and I get all 6 cobblestones back. Total "Cobble#1" survival time : over 20 minutes.
Yes, please finish eating your own foot, you seem to have left left a bit of meat on the bones there.
*** Hammer 3 *** (again, 2nd part - The Badly Coded Merging Thing)
Code Proof : (yes the EXACT same code you used to bash me!) (only, with better digging to really understand it).
Now, only someone who can’t read low level code would fail to see that age here is *really* the age of the item i.e. starts at zero, finishes at 6000 tick, and that the new merged item is the *minimum* of the ages of the two source items. Meaning, the merged item becomes the age of the youngest of the two items i.e. the one with the smallest age, obviously the one with the most time remaining before it despawns.
*Poof*
Lol yeah I agree it's pushing it a lot. I never said it should be like that, just that I *personally* would prefer it that way, you're quite right about the amount of rage quits it could potentially cause lol. Personnally I find the game way too easy so yeah its only a personal choice not something I think should be added.
Yeah, it would be more data stored. But stored once to avoid 6000 increases, each tick. Nah, it would not be laggy at all if coded properly. But from the few pages of Minecraft code I've seen, I'm no so sure. Because there's really weird coding choices all over! *BUT* I would never say hey you, MC coders, you bad! For I think guru programmers could never have thought up the game that is Minecraft, so I'm actually happy that a gang of friendly basement-coding youngsters (well, youngsters relative to my own age, I think, I'm not saying they're actually very young) did spaghetti code (Notch himself said sometihng akin to that about his own coding) to create Minecraft, and are constantly working (at a leasurely place just like my playing) to add features for *free*. That's quite admirable.
Yeah, the chickens with their current gatling-gun-egg-laying posteriors, that would just go from a bad to worse situation lol. Maybe fix the egg laying speed?
Your idea that item despawns should vary according to what event type spawned them is a good one I think. Chicken eggs, stuff dropped from death, could be faster, while items you broke "legally" could stick around longer.
Hum, nah, I don't want the game to cater only to my admittely inefficient slowpokeness (slowpokitude? slowpokishisism? slowpokability? ), I just checked the "average" time people take on smallish-yet-real goals/tasks they set themselves to, or how they "cut into simple steps" somewhat-larger projects (not uber projects but common stuff like making a normally sized house, etc.), and for most players it seems that this is by chunks that are over 5 minutes at a time, that's for sure. 20 minutes would cover most players needs except mine, because yes I'm really slow (case in point: always last in shooter games with a beautiful score of zero kills ok not true once I got *a few* points, but it was a 2 hours long game, and anyway I got killed hundreds of times).
Yeah, I'm a pack rat too lol good estimate.
You seem to have made up a quite nice summary of the current "average player situation facing item despawning", especially with your first paragraph, and you're right the situation is not *that* bad lol. I just stretched it for too long maybe sorry...
Thanks for a well thought out reply.
Microsoft evidently disagrees.. Or at least hte people in charge of the Awards. I'm not really sure what this has to do with.... well... anything, actually.
EDIT: Ahh, I see- the one time the MCP team actually gives something a name that makes perfect sense rather than having some lovable backstory, fair enough. This why I hate MCP, Forge, and basically Minecraft Modding outside of Bukkit. I'd also note that I've been awake for about two days straight at this point as well for reasons that are of course outside the scope of this thread/post.
You say My Way is not the only way to play them game- and then suggest the game be changed for your play style.
Who said anything about an optimized farm? I certainly didn't.
So... what are you saying? People cut down trees from a distance, only to leave the drops behind and complain when they despawn? Because all I can really think of for this are a few contrived scenarios.
I never said anything about my performance. I just took three bone meal, three saplings, grew the trees, started a timer, and chopped them down. That was 10 seconds. then I decided that wouldn't be a fair test, since I would, even unconsciously, be going for speed. So I instead grabbed an old Video I had recorded for unrelated reasons and looked for parts where I chopped down trees. Seemed to take about 15 seconds a tree.
My entire point is you don't have to be super efficient- you just have to be less lethargic than a depressed snail. Not that difficult by any stretch of the imagination.
I didn't say anything about the number of trees you had. I mentioned that I don't know how your farm is setup. I don't. I'd say it doesn't matter, but you used it, explicitly, as a barometer of measure- I don't know how big one of your "rows of trees" are in this farm. But I do know that if you have to stop after 2 or 3 trees to pick up the drops- because it takes 5 minutes for you to chop down a few trees, the problem is with YOU. Not the game. Arguing that the game should cater to lazy individuals is a silly request, because in some ways it already does- Creative mode. I don't need to insult your intelligence. You do an admirable job of creating your own detraction. The main gist of your message was what I was responding to.
You keep talking about a "we" and an "us".... Who is that? What "normal" situations? Where is your sample data.
Look, I never said anything about being efficient. The timed segment? That was me talking about something, with another person in skype, while cutting down trees in Beta 1.7.3 with a Diamond Axe. Three trees took around 20 seconds, meaning it would take around 15-17 trees for things to start despawning (tree decay being considered), by which time I would generally already need to consider heading back to store what I gathered. Or might have already headed back.
Onus of proof is on the original claimant. That aside, The only thing I can really think of is:
1. The despawning items being reset.
You said that when Item stacks merged, they lasted longer because they were "refreshed". This is based on nothing, and you have no facts to back it up. My evidence is in the source code. I gave the source file itself- EntityItem.java quite clearly sets the remaining lifespan to be the minimum of the two merged stacks. Not the inverse, as was suggested. ED: Evidently, it was I who was wrong about this. Sorry about that. I could make an excuse as I do further down that this was actually a bug at one point in the game that I didn't even know- up to today- was not a feature. I just remember seeing it demonstrated in one of Etho's Videos, and that particular implementation stuck, thus recoloring my interpretation of the code later on. I'll leave the original because it's rather funny in it's ignorance.
Hammers?
Ahh, but- I never said I did it in under 5 minutes. I said that I don't think I ever lost items as a result of the 5 minute despawn time- which is disjoint- all those items don't despawn 5 minutes after I started. I get the wood as I cut it down, so it's just saplings and Apples that Drop. Generally, I cut down a row, do a "u-turn" and cut down another row, grabbing any Apples that dropped from the previous row along the way. When I've gone through them all I have to replant them, so I'll see if there were any other fun surprises. Usually, all the saplings are still there. Usually I don't use a tree farm, I just bound into a forest and chop trees until my inventory is full of wood, then double back and pick up any Apples on the way.
You're right- it's nowhere near 30x36. It's quite a bit smaller. if it was any bigger I don't think I'd ever bother to cut it down. Sort of like my giant farms that I made for mass production that I never use because replanting is such a PITA. I'm thinking MAYBE the farm is 10x10. I haven't been to that particular base for a while. I usually just go the "chop trees down until inventory is full, go back and store it, repeat" until I get bored of chopping trees down. Perhaps this is also the result of me not really caring if things despawn in the meantime.
The farm is almost certainly not 30x36. That seems hella-big. I haven't actually played Minecraft for a few weeks, and haven't been to that particular place for longer. the farm is big enough to be a bit of a- as you may express- side-goal, of sorts. Maybe I don't notice despawns because I just don't care if they despawn. If I grab the apples, cool. if I don't... meh. Usually there is nothing left lying about, though. And I don't think it takes 5 minutes. (The result of it being a fair lot smaller than I initialler proffered. (normally I prefer deforestation, so I can pretend it was a hillside and it never had trees and what no I totally did not cause an ecological disaster).
Fair point... However my error was in the size of the farm, not in how long it took to complete. Still a substantial metric though.
Indeed. That is why I never asked for it. My statement that you didn't say how big it was was not intended in that fashion- that information isn't really needed.
Fair enough. However, you are suggesting that everybody's game experience should be changed. That's more or less what I take issue with here. A lot of the things like this really ought to be configurable, but in "non-standard" ways, such as editing options.txt or something, but their values are instead compiled into the resulting program, which is a shame.
No I didn't. How would you know what my intent was? I also never said it took me less than 5 minutes. I said I never lost anything- as far as I'm aware- to the 5 minute despawn, at least, nothing that I wouldn't have also lost to a longer one, because I just didn't care about them.
And Mine (tree farm size) were on the high side.
To be fair, this has NEVER been my goal.
You've repeated yourself several times so far.... as have I. As noted, though, my error was in regards to the size of my tree farm. Also, the fact that I never really use it. Just that, when I do, I don't notice any portions that have despawned by the time I am ready to replant them. I used a few subjective qualifiers for good reason.
Again, someone making lots of assumptions and not bothering to check.
This is interesting. I recall Etho showign a video that had the exact opposite behaviour. Standing around in a creative world for five minutes is not something I really want to do at the moment, but I have no reason to doubt your results in this instance. I believe the early implementation had this 'feature' as a bug whci hwas subsequently fixed. I doubted the names of the MCP decompiled name (age) because often they accidentally flip the meaning, so I made the incorrect connection that it was the live time of the item- as in, how much time it has left to live, rather than the other way around, which appears to be the case. (I was also unaware that this was actually a bug at the time I originally saw it (1.3.2, I believe had the bug, as a result of the LACK of the line I quoted- resulting in the merged stack being the first one iterated on which inevitably was the older one. This is good news, I always thought that was an intended feature, and I didn't like it, apparently it was in fact a bug that was fixed quite awhile ago.
Many of the fields from MCP have stupid names that have no bearing on their function, and a lot of tick-based features (like age) have the opposite name. I was actually working (obviously) on a preconception that the behaviour existed, and was an intended feature. Therefore, as an intended feature, it would have code dealing with it- this my foregone conclusion that age was in fact a mis-re-labelled TTL field (Time To Live). Apologies for my transgression. (It's worth noting this isn't Low-Level code at all... C is low level code- and I try to spend as little time as possible in things like forge and MCP, because fields are so badly named- to the point where having a fitting name get's me by surprise
It's not that hard to gather materials you may drop. If I (and I'm sure many others do this) drop something down a really deep hole or ravine, I'll just dig down or water bucket down to get it and that takes about a minute to a minute and a half. So really in all, you're just bad at collecting your items/materials.
First Suggestion: Disagree. I don't think despawn times should be changed.
Second Suggestion: This could probably be changed. I'm not sure HOW though, Maybe make some items never combine? Or maybe the lifespan could be set to the average instead of the youngest one.
(Side note: to address the problem more specifically, you can always use hoppers. Then have lava setup so extra eggs from the chickens are destroyed.
Another thing I think is noteworthy: they don't really last forever, but until they hit their max stack size, at which point they will despawn after 5 more minutes.
I think others have pointed out that the two suggestions are sort of in conflict in some ways.
You also must realize I do not excel in coding, (unlike BC), so please do not use that as grounds to insult my intelligence.
Ah, I also tend to have a short straw at such times. Take care, man. Microsoft wouldn't want a coder doing noob mistakes like confusing min with max, or without testing the software before putting their money on it, so get some sleep to get back to tip top shape! Glad for you that you make a lot of $$$ at Microsoft, probably something like 3 times my own salary, or more, but hey, I couldn't stay a programmer, because I need my beauty sleep. Yeah too true - I need 9-10 hours sleep per night otherwise I become a Minecraft Villager Zombie -- slow to game, slow to live, lol -- That last year that I worked in that field, I went cardiac from multiple "program this for yesterday!" stress attacks, so I realized I needed a way more laidback job... I miss the dough, tho.
Nope, again you assume and quote me wrong for the nth time. lol I think I'm starting to get used to it. I said the game should be changed to accomodate the playstyles of the main 95% of players, and not only for the top 5% of fastest, most efficient players. I even said in this thread above here that if the game was changed for *my* playstyle, then the despawn time would be 1 hour, not 20 minutes.
I'm limited to saying things you said first? I was obviously just listing all the ways I could think of that players could play in a slower way. Stop taking everything "a contrario"? Yeah like I'm placed to tell that to others lol.
If you read correctly the entire post before answering, you'd have seen a few paragraphs later, that this "us" is me my girl and/or my friends (okay, only 2 Minecraft friends).
As for posting my data, come on, are you what a mad archivist or evil empire bureaucrat or something? Instead of just giving out my impressions of my countless hours (or, maybe not countless, more like I don't remember how many, ok?) of observations from play, go back in time and put on tape so that they are properly presented to you with proof and structure the way you'd like, and all that in triplicate with sugar? No problem, just lemme grab my Delorean! Seriously, my posts are already more than long enough that half the people on this forum probably think my nick should become "TLDR" or something, so no, I think I've provided enough data. And btw, look who's talking? Maybe you are looking at all this a bit too seriously or something. It's not work where people have to submit progress reports and test specs and the like. It's just a stupid waste of time on a very fun and useful forum.
I also tend to do the mistake of starting to reply first, as I read on. But little useful trick I learned the hard way: Even when I'm like a brain dead zombie from lack of sleep I go back and delete everything that doesn't fit anymore after a the full re-reading, before doing the actual posting. Especially for posts longer than a few lines. Meaning (unfortunately) nearly all my posts.
Oops yes, sorry bout that assumption on my part I hate it when I do that.
Now you're talking, that's solid. Meaning: 2 rows of an 8x8 farm with a diamond axe. With a stone axe, only 1 row. And for a slowpoke player, maybe two third of that (stone axe, when I fell great), and for a slug like me, a third of that (when I don't feel so great). Now I see where my "only a couple trees" seems to have come from...
Of each argument, that I agree on. But my original claim is two parts:
a) a statement that I feel the spawn rate is too fast. Which, based on a mere opinion of observation, is not something that really needs to be accompanyied with a "data proof". But which seems to not be shared by the majority, so yeah, no problem, put back in the box.
The more important half, a statement that because of merging algorthm, "eternal objects" (well, not eternal, just way longer than 5 minutes) are created, which shows up particularly strongly with densely packed chicken coops. To which I only offered as proof my own statement that it occured, and later on, a "hammer" "undeniable" proof.
Overall that quite covers the entire thing, The rest of the entire posting is more like sugar powder on a cake. Enough sugar powder to hide the entire cake, tough. Maybe even the table it's been placed on. lol.
Wow, chapeau! That's quite a deft way to grab an omelette that fell to the ground and put it back inside the eggshells. (sincerely!)
You're right about the interpretation thing: it also happened to me too often: "Ah I already know that piece of code!" (starts reading diagonally... starts coding upon it... guess what happens after the compile? "wtf another bug why?" Cause I badly read the thing in the first place, of course. Common noob coder mistake. Also, common guru coder mistake. Nor common pro coder mistake, though, unless apparently they've been up two night in a row for some torturous reasons.
I like to joke, a lot. Even when I seem angry or to take things seriously, I'm not really. So hammers as in '"wham, three unavoidable arguments!" Just a figure of speech, really. I'm now even sure its properly translatable. Anyway not important.
Well, sorry if I read it litterally then:
To me this sentences did read as
"With my farm, I did woodcutting, then cleanup, without losing stuff before 5 minutes occured."
I did not read it as:
"With my farm, I do woodcutting and then do u-turns and sidesteps along the way to cleanup stuff so that I don't lose stuff every 5 minutes".
Which is kind of near my entire point why I think 20 minutes despawn would be overall better than 5 minutes one. On normal farms, on course, not on a 30x36 one lol. And the advantage of a big aligned farm is that you can do this kind of easy u turn because overall the task is simple. It's a simplest scenario. Now try building a house floor near the sky limit, while not being sure which pattern of diamonds, glass, gold and lapis lazuli blocks would look the best and trying several ones because you're with 2 friends with those 2 friends each having his own ideas... Think you'll have time to actually finish before anything despawns? Would you really want to habe to go down to ground level every five minutes? Even if you put another floor right under there to catch everything falling from your little small project (its just a small floor after all!), you'll still have to pick up stuff several times before finishing. Almost nobody likes to lose gold and lapis blocks and especially not diamonds.
Anyway, I see quite clearly I'm a very minor minority voice here so not much use repeating the same stuff again just slightly differently lol.
Well of course if we base our analysises on wrong base data then everything flies out the window. My number of trees in my example was a tad too small by a factor of 3 to 6 (I said about 3 trees when I should have meant an entire row, maybe even two.)
Which is a _SO_ weak. Your example had 1080 instead of a "mere" 100 trees. So let's also ignore this "little" factor of a mere 10 times too big... (I'd like my boss to make that kind of mistake when paying my paycheck, though). For a diamond-using "pro" player, I agree that its *possible* to farm an entire 10x10 optimized tree farm - but just barely, before things start despawning. Still, that's cutting it close. Of course, using the u-turn technique, then its probably easy to do, maybe even for me. And not caring about a bit of the secondary stuff (like saplings and apples) despawning too, would also help a huge lot making the whole point totally irrelevant! Pack rats like me have a hard time with that concept I know lol.
I Agree.
But even with configurable options, it wouldn't change the multiplayer default from 5 minutes. At 5 minutes I feel like the despawn rate is too fast for the average player (definitely wayyyy too fast for me). Now, I don't want to impose anything on anyone. But if a community of 10 players each need varying times from say 1 to 10 minutes, then the game is actually adressing only half those players, the other half will feel despawning is faster than their work speed. But most of those will simply just adapt their own playstyle to start the habit of stopping regulargly what they are doing to pick up stuff more frequently and not be bothered at all by it in the end, so it can be said that "in a way" their needs are also covered. But how many would prefer having the time to complete s small goal without stopping in the middle? Unknown, and maybe there is no way to know. So what is the true best despawn time threshold? The one that will cover the playstyle of 95% of players? I have no idea, yet I still can't help but feel that the despawn time should be "an entire minecraft day".
That I can quite understand. Even though it would be secondary, it would not be a small change. It would directly change the way all players interact with the game. Some of those in the habit of putting their current little goal on pause every couple minutes might even hate having more time, because they would have the tendency to simply forget, at the end of their little goal, to pick their stuff up, while currently, they don't forget because its a near-constant reminder. So that is a factor also.
Don't worry, i didn't take it personally, you more than made up for it fast enough, and to be also fair, I'm not such a chariasmatic social star myself. And yes, you're right, I tend to repeat myself gaaah what kind of mumbling old man will I become? Sorry.
To be also fair on all your assumptions, its true that you seem to have had LOTS of contrary-data and the too frequent weird minecraft-name-coding-choices that supported your initial interpretation of the algorithm. To be frank I rarely saw a "bug-turned-feature" then turned around 180 degrees back as a bugfix again, just like that! Usually, when a big potato head (i.e. marketing. management, etc.) decides that the "bug" should be a "feature", they don't afterwards change their minds. Ever. For it would be like admitting that they were wrong before. It'll rain in hell before that happens. Minecraft guys may make really inefficient and weird code choices sometimes, but dang they got real guts and I like them a lot.
Don't worry man, all is forgiven in fact I apologize myself too, doubly so for good measure.
Just get a good night's sleep and take care!
Well, my main mistake weas using the tree farm as my primary example, while in fact those occurs way more when doing building with a friend, where some discussion and thought and planning are required, and trying different things too of course, and whenb the broken blocks don' just fall right at your feet but wayyyyy out theeere. Then its an annoyance because you can't concentratre on anything or do anything for say 15 minutes in a row (the usual average amount of time it takes for one clear step of a project) without having those interruptions.
And a "proof" that it is annoying, is that when I play on a server, other pro players, which find me of course kinda slow (and thus "in the way") when high up on the house roof, always want me to grab their fallen blocks for them, like a real gofer man. I do it nicely then when I'm tired I tell them to just do it themselves, but its still a "proof", if you will, that, for a lot of players, a short despawn time comes as source of constant interruption in their projects. An annoyance.
Sorry if you think that, especially since that is not the case.
Ah, yes, thanks for reminding me of that. Extremely valid point. Yes, it effectively means "Just don't lose sigh of WHERE you are in these tunnels, so that you can find your stuff back."
Well, thinking about it again, I finally agree with you that insta-despawn would go against exploration. But you'd be surprised at how many players would still work right beside lava anyway...
Laziness? Rash, man, so rash.