I wonder what else causes the so-called leaking world issue... the excessive lag sounds VERY similar to what I experienced those couple evenings on my server where tickrates went crazy and I had to just restart the server to clear it up.
@Gurrok: Did you also import the lizard as creature instead of monster, or try both ways? I've messed with the overrides a bit mostly with ambient vs. creature though. It seems to have an impact, but it's hard to quantify or describe the overall global spawning trends to say exactly what it's doing. I think I have some mismatches in my config where generally not hostile mobs are listed as creature or the opposite, I'll have to double check and make sure to watch for that and correct any that seem to not be spawning as intended.
I didn't import it as creature, but it was available as a creature via the MSC GUI. Looking through my files, I've never imported the PZ lizard via MSCOverrides. Don't have direct access to server, so I couldn't make the change.
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Just curious, but with the issues you've encountered recently with Java's garbage collection and "leaking worlds", why add a new mob to the mix that is known to have a similar problem? Isn't that just making the leaking worlds issue more prominent?
Empirical evidence is our friend.
Yes, adding a mob that contributes to the "leaking worlds" problem does seem a bit counterproductive. But at the same time, it was in the course of coding the hunter that I figured out part of the problem, and was able to correct for it in the lizalfos.
The hunter does still seem to leak, but it is infrequent, and - due to that infrequency - its helped me narrow down when and where it's happening. I imagine that, given more time and perhaps a bit more information from the modding community, I will be able to completely resolve the problem.
Also I'll point out that this problem isn't specific to me, a number of other mods are also suffering from the leaking worlds problem. As I said, though, the people who figured out the problem and added the error reporting to Forge have been rather reclusive and seem unwilling to provide more solid assistance to modders in ferreting out the problem.
I wonder what else causes the so-called leaking world issue... the excessive lag sounds VERY similar to what I experienced those couple evenings on my server where tickrates went crazy and I had to just restart the server to clear it up.
I'm honestly not sure. I have a vague notion of what the problem is - basically, Java's garbage collection kind of sucks. With Dungeon Mobs, the primary problem seemed to be that various mobs weren't releasing lists of entities taken from the world, which carried over when the world object got "refreshed" or something: this leads to memory having two copies of the world object in it, the main one and the one the mob was carrying around with it. My fix largely involves making sure to set any lists of object pointers to null when I'm done with them, and that seems to get rid of most of the instances of the problem.
I've noticed that, in SSP, it seems that the world object gets reset or something upon player death, which is presently the primary source of leaking worlds for my hunter mob (but it doesn't happen all the time, so I'm not sure). I'm not sure if that happens in SMP, though, because that makes less sense to me.
I didn't import it as creature, but it was available as a creature via the MSC GUI. Looking through my files, I've never imported the PZ lizard via MSCOverrides. Don't have direct access to server, so I couldn't make the change.
They'd be available in creture because for some reason their default creature type (which happened to be use for spawnList in 1.4.7) was creature. So MSC would have read the spawn list and automagically added them to creature. I would guess that maybe becuase they implement IMob (and thus were part of the monsters spawnCap) MSC detected them and allowed their entry into Monsters in addition to Creature.
Also I'll point out that this problem isn't specific to me, a number of other mods are also suffering from the leaking worlds problem. As I said, though, the people who figured out the problem and added the error reporting to Forge have been rather reclusive and seem unwilling to provide more solid assistance to modders in ferreting out the problem.
It does need to be pointed out that the check that was added can and does often enough print false positives. It was mentioned when it was first commited. It is useful for the legitamate times where a leak is occuring and should thus be taken with a large grain of salt.
Java's garbage collection kind of sucks. With Dungeon Mobs, the primary problem seemed to be that various mobs weren't releasing lists of entities taken from the world, which carried over when the world object got "refreshed" or something:
Have you considered/do you use weak/soft references for your lists/maps? The idea behind them is that they alone cannot keep the object from being garbage collected. Thus once the world list removes them, your own will be garbage collected.
It does need to be pointed out that the check that was added can and does often enough print false positives. It was mentioned when it was first commited. It is useful for the legitamate times where a leak is occuring and should thus be taken with a large grain of salt.
Given the problems folks have had with lag - which can now be associated with the appearance of the leaking worlds report - I'd say that no, it's most definitely not a false positive.
Have you considered/do you use weak/soft references for your lists/maps? The idea behind them is that they alone cannot keep the object from being garbage collected. Thus once the world list removes them, your own will be garbage collected.
...huh. That might do it.
At this point I've got the problem figured out, it's just a matter of resolving it, which - at the moment - I'm not sure I have the skills or knowledge necessary to do so. Your links might prove helpful in that matter, though, so thank you for those.
Given the problems folks have had with lag - which can now be associated with the appearance of the leaking worlds report - I'd say that no, it's most definitely not a false positive.
Wasn't trying to imply your issue wasn't real. Was just drawing caution towards those reading your more general statement regarding a large number of mods. Though I'm sure a fair number do legitimately suffer from real leaks as well.
Ah, fair enough, sorry. I've been doing as much studying on this topic as time allows, and I'm aware of a number of mods that cause this problem. But you're right, it is possible that a given mod that throws the leaking worlds flag isn't actually causing a problem. Seems safe to say, though, that if a mod is causing massive lag and throwing that flag, that it is the problem.
Yes, adding a mob that contributes to the "leaking worlds" problem does seem a bit counterproductive. But at the same time, it was in the course of coding the hunter that I figured out part of the problem, and was able to correct for it in the lizalfos.
The hunter does still seem to leak, but it is infrequent, and - due to that infrequency - its helped me narrow down when and where it's happening. I imagine that, given more time and perhaps a bit more information from the modding community, I will be able to completely resolve the problem.
That's quite clever, and a great opportunity to hopefully squash a nasty bug!
I'll have a talk with my friend and see if he'll download and install the newest Dungeon Mobs for 1.4.7 for the server. Even IF there's issues, it would be immensely helpful in ironing out what they are for SMP.
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The Log itself is too big for pastebin, but I can send it by email if you want. Two cockatrices exploding almost simultaneously killing two players.
Well, it's been fixed in the latest updates, but I'm still confused as to why they were literally exploding from the problem. That just seems... so nonsensical.
That's quite clever, and a great opportunity to hopefully squash a nasty bug!
To be honest, at this point I'm half convinced there's a problem in vanilla in 1.5.1.
I implemented weak references for both hunters and lizalfos. Lizalfos are working perfectly fine, but hunters are still being a massive pain in the rear, and I'm not sure why. At this point the only time the "leaking worlds" problem shows up is after player death in SSP, at which point the hunter and his wolves seem to have a chance to randomly disappear from the server, but not the client, and if they do they cause the problem. I spent a few hours wrestling with that problem before I just decided to say "screw it" and dummied out the hunter in the version for 1.5.1.
I tried getting help from some other folks to comb through the code and see if a set of fresh eyes could see something I was missing, but that didn't go so well. And there is definitely a dearth of information - let alone helpful info - around for dealing with this particular problem.
OK, I have an SMP update as well as some general information to pass along.
First off, while trying to find a fix for creatures not spawning, I found this video:
Note: that vid is about an hour long, and some parts you might want to replay to better understand what's being discussed, so make sure you have time set aside to watch.
Yes, the video was made for 1.3.2, but not a lot has changed since then in terms of mob spawning, and from what I can tell the vast majority of it still applies today. If you've read the MC wiki on spawning, you've probably got all the info you need and don't really need to check this out...
...unless you want to know why mobs spawn mainly in tight clusters, or how come wolves AND other animals (totalling more than 4) can be found in one chunk generation, and other tidbits like that.
I asked Davidee to check and see if anything might be amiss with MSC not spawning new creatures after a certain period of time, his response was that all looked good on his end. The only thing he could come up with was perhaps something going awry in Forge itself, so *shrug*.
My "server admin" was around today, and I told him what was going on. He tried restarting the server, no change. I then suggested removing MSC and seeing if anything would spawn without it (even with the low vanilla creature cap, there's nothing around atm to fill it). After removal and restart, he found a few PZ birds in nearby biomes, but that was it. Really at a loss here as to what's going on.
I'd like to replicate the same conditions in SSP and see if it happens there, but that would require being logged in for at least 24 hours straight... which isn't really feasible.
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I've gotten considerably better results in the past day or two but sadly had to completely omit DivineRPG's overworld mobs because I believe sirdave is correct in saying they're non-despawning. With the Divine mobs (only caveclops and enthralled dramcryx) inserted into the surrounding biomes, spawns all but ceased in less than 40 minutes of testing with only two players on the server. Without those and using some tweaked spawn weights with a larger cap we saw spawns continue to work normally for several hours before I had to call it a night. I'll be leaving the config as is this evening for a longer test run.
At one point I thought I saw spawns taper off, but as soon as I moved away from the swamp I was mining under they fired back up. No new chunks were generated, all the area had been previously explored on the surface. None the less it does seem like staying in one spot for longer than 45 minutes to an hour almost forces you to move to a new biome to kick the spawns back in.
If I don't find better solutions to this I may just take the CMS only route myself. I think the reason I avoided Highlands initially is that CMS doesn't seem to spawn anything in the Highlands biomes, but I could be wrong there. There was a reason I went with ExtraBiomesXL initially and I seem to recall it involving mob spawns since Mo'Creatures was the first thing I installed on the server. If CMS works okay with Highlands I'll give it a shot though.
Yeah, it's really hard to understand what people are trying to say sometimes for long-term effects until you experience it for yourself. In the short-term, MSC seems to do fine, so I didn't see any death of spawns... but with my friend's server up for several days, it was very noticeable.
Unfortunately, not having a spawn mod simply doesn't cut it. Vanilla isn't designed to handle more than their basic non-despawning creatures, so you're not going to see much else without a way to modify those settings. Monsters, water, and ambient spawn just fine really, but vanilla's cap of 15 creatures pretty much nixes any chance of seeing mod-added creature mobs.
Wait, just got an idea. What if I reversed the situation involving the PZ lizards? By that I mean adding creatures to the monster spawn list. PZ lizards (who were allowed to spawn in daylight) were hogging the monster spawn cap in the day, but placing them on the creature list stopped them from spawning. If one was to add the creatures into the monster list, the creatures (who can spawn in the day) would spawn as long as the monster cap wasn't reached. In daytime, they'd be limited if underground monsters capped out (which doesn't usually happen often), and they would have little chance of spawning at night (pretty much the same as normal there), but that's way better than not spawning at all!
In other news, I found out about another issue in W&M. ArchGaden reports that Knights spawned by spawners do not despawn, and actually did a bit of "creative editing" to disable his knight spawners. I'm pretty certain that non-despawning hostiles can cause major spawn issues... You can read the full info here.
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I've been testing the idea I brought up above, and preliminary tests are looking good! As usual though, long-term effects may be much different than short-term success, so the jury's still out on it.
Here's my setup for this test:
1) imported all mod creatures as Monsters in MSCOverrides
2) opened the SpawnConfiguration and copy/pasted all non-despawning creatures into the monster list (while keeping them in creature list as well) for each biome.
I started a new world (SP). Game was kind of laggy, mostly due to the biome I spawned into (one of the huge trees EBXL ones). I waited for the lag to subside then moved away from the biome to an EBXL Rainforest. Saw a nice mix of creatures with the occasional monster in a dark area/cave opening. Had a lag spike about 2 minutes in from load, and F3 screen registered over 700 entities(!) for a moment, then dropped sharply off to about 300 in about 30 seconds.
Moving on to a Savanna, again the land was plentiful with the right creatures for the biome, and after 5 minutes my entities hovered around 180 (total caps = 215, so that looked healthy), with some monsters spawning underground as well.
As night fell, the entity total came down again to roughly 165. True monsters started spawning, though the animals were still decent. I checked some caves, and only found actual monsters except for one butterfly (who wasn't far from a tunnel entry so could've came in from there).
There is a downside however. Mobs spawning via the monster cycle ignore your MSC min/max settings, so special mobs like the Summoner from Primitive Mobs can appear in up to groups of 4. It's a tradeoff, and one I'll accept if it means no death of spawns. Time will tell however whether this setup works for long-term situations. Hopefully, I'll be able to test this on server soon.
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Cap sizes should help modify the numbers just fine. I have a bit too many myself now atm in SP, so gonna pull the numbers down a bit (FYI spawning is still consistent with roughly 150 entities up at my current caps).
Summoners spawn on the creature cap from what I can tell. They're villager-types that will sell you random spawn eggs... and they hold a dark secret that allows you to bring up a miniboss fight of sorts. Obviously, you wouldn't want those spawning often or in groups, thus having them on the monster list (with the pack size regulations in vanilla) isn't desirable. Still, it's better than not seeing them at all.
For the longest time, I was certain that min/max worked for all mob lists, but that does not seem to be the case. It certainly does not work for the monster spawns, as a 1/1/1 for Summoners is now giving me packs of Summoners when they do spawn. It didn't seem to be a problem when they were set as creatures (and the creature spawns actually work that is).
My vanilla animals aren't as prolific as a plain vanilla setup, but I do have them enabled (as creatures only) at 1/1/1. Note that I also make use of that 1-100 scale for item weight in MSC as well with my common mobs sitting at 70, uncommon around 30, and rares typically 10 and lower. With so much competition from mod mobs, it seems to keep the vanilla animals chance to spawn at pretty rare. Most biomes don't even have all vanilla animals enabled, and the particularly harsh biomes (wasteland, tundra, etc) have no vanilla animals enabled.
I tried DRPG the other day, and found it caused me a low /tps along with lag. Also, be aware that most mobs from that mod are insanely difficult (we're talking health higher than vanilla bosses), because they have a scaling ore/armor/weapon system to go with it. If you're running Thaumcraft or something with powerful weapons, you'll probably enjoy DRPG mobs pretty well.
According to what I've read, each mob has a ton of optional settings that may or may not be implemented by the person creating the mob. In turn, the author can optionally add the used options to a config, allowing end users to change the settings as well, though this is very rare. Crudedragos offers far more options in his PZ mobs than any modder's work I've seen thusfar, and the majority of modders only give you a spawn=true/false and maybe a frequency=1-10... if they give you any config options at all. Anyway, one of those options are despawn=true/false, though many modders configure this as they see fit and give you no option to change it. Not usually a problem, unless they decide to go despawn=false, then there's issues.
In regards to getting any changes (if needed) for DRPG, I wish you luck. From what I've read, sweeping changes like that come few and far between.
Im now wondering if the spawn tick frequency setting also applies to creatures and monsters equally. I figure it does. If mo creatures does allow per entity usage of CMS (I hope but I doubt, Ill consider myself lucky if i get to use it for creatures and not for hostiles) then maybe non despawning monsters could be viable in a long term world the same way vanilla creatures are (in my experience).
I assume you mean CMS for spawn tick frequency? Considering Mo'C animals spawn fine using CMS, I would tend to agree. Vanilla settings are quite different, with the monster spawn cycle at 20x/second and creature spawn cycle at once every 20 seconds.
I've no clue on what bukkit is capable of, but would consider trying it if there's good spawning options available!
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Sheepman Invasion!!! Awesome pic btw! So yeah idk how you'd get 500+ like that. MSC 1/1/1 for them is great, but which list(s) are you enabling them on, and do those lists have other mobs too?
btw - readding Mo' Creatures and CMS in my SP test world, but will be running everything thru MSC. If I've truly fixed the problem, Mo'C should be no problem to add back into the mix.
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@sirdave79 - yes, my main issue with Mo'C&CMS was that is _seemed_ to be my death of spawns for animals. As soon as I removed it, creature spawns reappeared, so I dusted my hands off and said "well that's that".
Last week though, the server was having death of creature spawns on a fresh install that never included MoC/CMS. That's when I had a WTF moment, and was lost on what to do to remedy it.
My friend just logged in and has updated the server with the new MSC settings. Hopefully the long term will look good, right now he's reporting a nice mix of creatures!
*off to go play.... err, TEST, ya that's the ticket*
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Been on the server since last post till now. The results are good, in fact maybe too good...
The desert and surrounding forest is alive and kicking with all the correct animals. The home base in the plains (or is it meadow, I forget), is flooded with creatures even with our farm animals there. In fact, we've had to add separate fences around farmland to keep rabbits from jumping all over the crops. Also, something's ripping through and eating our grass blocks, causing a huge mess. I'm guessing rabbits and/or cave worms and will have to figure out how to combat this.
When I logged off, (was the last person on for about an hour by myself) there were 280+ entities, and I was lagging from all the mobs. Going to ask my friend to turn down the MSC creature spawn frequency, as it's really not necessary. Monster spawner's doing all the work!
Also, the farm area's not flooded with extra vanilla animals either. I've had a few too many Atmos bison, but I think I mistakenly added them to the monster spawn list and will fix that tomorrow. The special mobs like PM summoners and travelling merchants are spawning in 1-4 size packs, but I'll tinker with that later once I know everything else is going well.
Not sure if it will keep up like it is now, only a few more days uptime will reveal that. Here's to hoping this is the solution though!
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Which if Primitive mobs sheepmen etc are based on them, that would explain why I just got 700 in one biome, and no effect on other creature or mob spawns! plus - are these things actually breeding too?
I can understand them not affecting the mob caps, being they are based on testificates. Not sure why so many would spawn though. They're breeding? I'm guessing they could in theory populate a village just like any other testificates, but I'd think they would join the village population already in place (if there is one that is) quickly cutting off any need for more villagers. Leaves me scratching my head.
Thanks for the config tips. Definitely gonna stop the rabbits and beavers from destroying things. Jury's still out on cave worms - Since they dig mostly underground it hasn't been a problem -yet-. They have made some pretty funky tunnels though.
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Yeah, we thought the tunnels were funky too, until we noticed the massive lack of ores.....................
Sheepy breeding doesnt explain the HUGE numbers that spawn as you fly across a biome in creative, or just wander in in single player. My conclusion is that Primitive mobs and W&M are sharing some method of spawning that completely sidesteps everything.
Hmm. Of all the oddities I've found recently, unchecked mob spawning hasn't really happened yet. I'm actually a big fan of Primitive Mobs because it's been the most stable and cooperative mob mod I've used to date. If PM mobs are spawning unchecked (which is glaringly evident by the Sheepman invasion you're experiencing), I'd like to think it was the side effect of something else.
Even with the small experience I had with W&M, I did not experience unauthorized spawns. I haven't used that mod in a while though, so there may have been some code changes I am unaware of. Are there any other mods you have that could possibly be doing something like this? Are any mobs more prevalent than others (Sheepmen obviously)?
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I haven't been to the Nether much recently, but on the few small trips I have made, I have not found any Sheepmen. I set them to only spawn in the Nether (as mentioned in the PM description) as a creature. The creature spawn list includes both Sheepman and Smith (weights 5 and 1 respectively), Atmos Pheonix (weight 1), and the Atmos Salamander as a heavily dominant spawn (weight 70). Unfortunately, I've seen nothing but salamanders so far for creatures but again I haven't been there very long.
Given the information and observations, I'd come to the same conclusion as you, MohawkyMagoo. That is a rather unique situation with little else to explain what's happening.
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@sirdave79 - I did not know of that. Thanks for the heads up, I'll have to do some work on caps for that then... hmmm...
Anyway, quick update on the "creatures on the monster spawn list" setup. TOO MANY CREATURES!!! While mining, I started getting major lag. Checking the debug screen I had over 600 entities up, and enabling entity radar in Rei's confirmed mobs everywhere.
I made my way back up to the surface to see what mobs in particular were there (hoping it wasn't a mass of PM villager types lol), and found a plethora of creatures from all mods (Atmosmobs, Primitive Mobs, Project Zulu, and Mo' Creatures with just a few vanilla, who seem mostly chunk generated). It was wild friggin' kingdom out there!
My guess is that since I didn't change the spawn weights, actual monsters are losing the competition with all the animal spawns and the monster cap isn't filling up. So I'm going to lower the item weights of all the animals in hopes the monsters actually have a chance to spawn again.
I didn't import it as creature, but it was available as a creature via the MSC GUI. Looking through my files, I've never imported the PZ lizard via MSCOverrides. Don't have direct access to server, so I couldn't make the change.
Empirical evidence is our friend.
Yes, adding a mob that contributes to the "leaking worlds" problem does seem a bit counterproductive. But at the same time, it was in the course of coding the hunter that I figured out part of the problem, and was able to correct for it in the lizalfos.
The hunter does still seem to leak, but it is infrequent, and - due to that infrequency - its helped me narrow down when and where it's happening. I imagine that, given more time and perhaps a bit more information from the modding community, I will be able to completely resolve the problem.
Also I'll point out that this problem isn't specific to me, a number of other mods are also suffering from the leaking worlds problem. As I said, though, the people who figured out the problem and added the error reporting to Forge have been rather reclusive and seem unwilling to provide more solid assistance to modders in ferreting out the problem.
I'm honestly not sure. I have a vague notion of what the problem is - basically, Java's garbage collection kind of sucks. With Dungeon Mobs, the primary problem seemed to be that various mobs weren't releasing lists of entities taken from the world, which carried over when the world object got "refreshed" or something: this leads to memory having two copies of the world object in it, the main one and the one the mob was carrying around with it. My fix largely involves making sure to set any lists of object pointers to null when I'm done with them, and that seems to get rid of most of the instances of the problem.
I've noticed that, in SSP, it seems that the world object gets reset or something upon player death, which is presently the primary source of leaking worlds for my hunter mob (but it doesn't happen all the time, so I'm not sure). I'm not sure if that happens in SMP, though, because that makes less sense to me.
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They'd be available in creture because for some reason their default creature type (which happened to be use for spawnList in 1.4.7) was creature. So MSC would have read the spawn list and automagically added them to creature. I would guess that maybe becuase they implement IMob (and thus were part of the monsters spawnCap) MSC detected them and allowed their entry into Monsters in addition to Creature.
It does need to be pointed out that the check that was added can and does often enough print false positives. It was mentioned when it was first commited. It is useful for the legitamate times where a leak is occuring and should thus be taken with a large grain of salt.
Have you considered/do you use weak/soft references for your lists/maps? The idea behind them is that they alone cannot keep the object from being garbage collected. Thus once the world list removes them, your own will be garbage collected.
Excellent Article: http://weblogs.java....weak-references
Best Stackerflow I could find: http://stackoverflow...ference-in-java
Given the problems folks have had with lag - which can now be associated with the appearance of the leaking worlds report - I'd say that no, it's most definitely not a false positive.
...huh. That might do it.
At this point I've got the problem figured out, it's just a matter of resolving it, which - at the moment - I'm not sure I have the skills or knowledge necessary to do so. Your links might prove helpful in that matter, though, so thank you for those.
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Wasn't trying to imply your issue wasn't real. Was just drawing caution towards those reading your more general statement regarding a large number of mods. Though I'm sure a fair number do legitimately suffer from real leaks as well.
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That's quite clever, and a great opportunity to hopefully squash a nasty bug!
I'll have a talk with my friend and see if he'll download and install the newest Dungeon Mobs for 1.4.7 for the server. Even IF there's issues, it would be immensely helpful in ironing out what they are for SMP.
Well, it's been fixed in the latest updates, but I'm still confused as to why they were literally exploding from the problem. That just seems... so nonsensical.
To be honest, at this point I'm half convinced there's a problem in vanilla in 1.5.1.
I implemented weak references for both hunters and lizalfos. Lizalfos are working perfectly fine, but hunters are still being a massive pain in the rear, and I'm not sure why. At this point the only time the "leaking worlds" problem shows up is after player death in SSP, at which point the hunter and his wolves seem to have a chance to randomly disappear from the server, but not the client, and if they do they cause the problem. I spent a few hours wrestling with that problem before I just decided to say "screw it" and dummied out the hunter in the version for 1.5.1.
I tried getting help from some other folks to comb through the code and see if a set of fresh eyes could see something I was missing, but that didn't go so well. And there is definitely a dearth of information - let alone helpful info - around for dealing with this particular problem.
This is getting a bit off-topic, though.
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First off, while trying to find a fix for creatures not spawning, I found this video: Note: that vid is about an hour long, and some parts you might want to replay to better understand what's being discussed, so make sure you have time set aside to watch.
Yes, the video was made for 1.3.2, but not a lot has changed since then in terms of mob spawning, and from what I can tell the vast majority of it still applies today. If you've read the MC wiki on spawning, you've probably got all the info you need and don't really need to check this out...
...unless you want to know why mobs spawn mainly in tight clusters, or how come wolves AND other animals (totalling more than 4) can be found in one chunk generation, and other tidbits like that.
I asked Davidee to check and see if anything might be amiss with MSC not spawning new creatures after a certain period of time, his response was that all looked good on his end. The only thing he could come up with was perhaps something going awry in Forge itself, so *shrug*.
My "server admin" was around today, and I told him what was going on. He tried restarting the server, no change. I then suggested removing MSC and seeing if anything would spawn without it (even with the low vanilla creature cap, there's nothing around atm to fill it). After removal and restart, he found a few PZ birds in nearby biomes, but that was it. Really at a loss here as to what's going on.
I'd like to replicate the same conditions in SSP and see if it happens there, but that would require being logged in for at least 24 hours straight... which isn't really feasible.
At one point I thought I saw spawns taper off, but as soon as I moved away from the swamp I was mining under they fired back up. No new chunks were generated, all the area had been previously explored on the surface. None the less it does seem like staying in one spot for longer than 45 minutes to an hour almost forces you to move to a new biome to kick the spawns back in.
If I don't find better solutions to this I may just take the CMS only route myself. I think the reason I avoided Highlands initially is that CMS doesn't seem to spawn anything in the Highlands biomes, but I could be wrong there. There was a reason I went with ExtraBiomesXL initially and I seem to recall it involving mob spawns since Mo'Creatures was the first thing I installed on the server. If CMS works okay with Highlands I'll give it a shot though.
Unfortunately, not having a spawn mod simply doesn't cut it. Vanilla isn't designed to handle more than their basic non-despawning creatures, so you're not going to see much else without a way to modify those settings. Monsters, water, and ambient spawn just fine really, but vanilla's cap of 15 creatures pretty much nixes any chance of seeing mod-added creature mobs.
Wait, just got an idea. What if I reversed the situation involving the PZ lizards? By that I mean adding creatures to the monster spawn list. PZ lizards (who were allowed to spawn in daylight) were hogging the monster spawn cap in the day, but placing them on the creature list stopped them from spawning. If one was to add the creatures into the monster list, the creatures (who can spawn in the day) would spawn as long as the monster cap wasn't reached. In daytime, they'd be limited if underground monsters capped out (which doesn't usually happen often), and they would have little chance of spawning at night (pretty much the same as normal there), but that's way better than not spawning at all!
In other news, I found out about another issue in W&M. ArchGaden reports that Knights spawned by spawners do not despawn, and actually did a bit of "creative editing" to disable his knight spawners. I'm pretty certain that non-despawning hostiles can cause major spawn issues... You can read the full info here.
Here's my setup for this test:
1) imported all mod creatures as Monsters in MSCOverrides
2) opened the SpawnConfiguration and copy/pasted all non-despawning creatures into the monster list (while keeping them in creature list as well) for each biome.
I started a new world (SP). Game was kind of laggy, mostly due to the biome I spawned into (one of the huge trees EBXL ones). I waited for the lag to subside then moved away from the biome to an EBXL Rainforest. Saw a nice mix of creatures with the occasional monster in a dark area/cave opening. Had a lag spike about 2 minutes in from load, and F3 screen registered over 700 entities(!) for a moment, then dropped sharply off to about 300 in about 30 seconds.
Moving on to a Savanna, again the land was plentiful with the right creatures for the biome, and after 5 minutes my entities hovered around 180 (total caps = 215, so that looked healthy), with some monsters spawning underground as well.
As night fell, the entity total came down again to roughly 165. True monsters started spawning, though the animals were still decent. I checked some caves, and only found actual monsters except for one butterfly (who wasn't far from a tunnel entry so could've came in from there).
There is a downside however. Mobs spawning via the monster cycle ignore your MSC min/max settings, so special mobs like the Summoner from Primitive Mobs can appear in up to groups of 4. It's a tradeoff, and one I'll accept if it means no death of spawns. Time will tell however whether this setup works for long-term situations. Hopefully, I'll be able to test this on server soon.
Summoners spawn on the creature cap from what I can tell. They're villager-types that will sell you random spawn eggs... and they hold a dark secret that allows you to bring up a miniboss fight of sorts. Obviously, you wouldn't want those spawning often or in groups, thus having them on the monster list (with the pack size regulations in vanilla) isn't desirable. Still, it's better than not seeing them at all.
For the longest time, I was certain that min/max worked for all mob lists, but that does not seem to be the case. It certainly does not work for the monster spawns, as a 1/1/1 for Summoners is now giving me packs of Summoners when they do spawn. It didn't seem to be a problem when they were set as creatures (and the creature spawns actually work that is).
My vanilla animals aren't as prolific as a plain vanilla setup, but I do have them enabled (as creatures only) at 1/1/1. Note that I also make use of that 1-100 scale for item weight in MSC as well with my common mobs sitting at 70, uncommon around 30, and rares typically 10 and lower. With so much competition from mod mobs, it seems to keep the vanilla animals chance to spawn at pretty rare. Most biomes don't even have all vanilla animals enabled, and the particularly harsh biomes (wasteland, tundra, etc) have no vanilla animals enabled.
I tried DRPG the other day, and found it caused me a low /tps along with lag. Also, be aware that most mobs from that mod are insanely difficult (we're talking health higher than vanilla bosses), because they have a scaling ore/armor/weapon system to go with it. If you're running Thaumcraft or something with powerful weapons, you'll probably enjoy DRPG mobs pretty well.
According to what I've read, each mob has a ton of optional settings that may or may not be implemented by the person creating the mob. In turn, the author can optionally add the used options to a config, allowing end users to change the settings as well, though this is very rare. Crudedragos offers far more options in his PZ mobs than any modder's work I've seen thusfar, and the majority of modders only give you a spawn=true/false and maybe a frequency=1-10... if they give you any config options at all. Anyway, one of those options are despawn=true/false, though many modders configure this as they see fit and give you no option to change it. Not usually a problem, unless they decide to go despawn=false, then there's issues.
In regards to getting any changes (if needed) for DRPG, I wish you luck. From what I've read, sweeping changes like that come few and far between.
I assume you mean CMS for spawn tick frequency? Considering Mo'C animals spawn fine using CMS, I would tend to agree. Vanilla settings are quite different, with the monster spawn cycle at 20x/second and creature spawn cycle at once every 20 seconds.
I've no clue on what bukkit is capable of, but would consider trying it if there's good spawning options available!
btw - readding Mo' Creatures and CMS in my SP test world, but will be running everything thru MSC. If I've truly fixed the problem, Mo'C should be no problem to add back into the mix.
Last week though, the server was having death of creature spawns on a fresh install that never included MoC/CMS. That's when I had a WTF moment, and was lost on what to do to remedy it.
My friend just logged in and has updated the server with the new MSC settings. Hopefully the long term will look good, right now he's reporting a nice mix of creatures!
*off to go play.... err, TEST, ya that's the ticket*
The desert and surrounding forest is alive and kicking with all the correct animals. The home base in the plains (or is it meadow, I forget), is flooded with creatures even with our farm animals there. In fact, we've had to add separate fences around farmland to keep rabbits from jumping all over the crops. Also, something's ripping through and eating our grass blocks, causing a huge mess. I'm guessing rabbits and/or cave worms and will have to figure out how to combat this.
When I logged off, (was the last person on for about an hour by myself) there were 280+ entities, and I was lagging from all the mobs. Going to ask my friend to turn down the MSC creature spawn frequency, as it's really not necessary. Monster spawner's doing all the work!
Also, the farm area's not flooded with extra vanilla animals either. I've had a few too many Atmos bison, but I think I mistakenly added them to the monster spawn list and will fix that tomorrow. The special mobs like PM summoners and travelling merchants are spawning in 1-4 size packs, but I'll tinker with that later once I know everything else is going well.
Not sure if it will keep up like it is now, only a few more days uptime will reveal that. Here's to hoping this is the solution though!
I can understand them not affecting the mob caps, being they are based on testificates. Not sure why so many would spawn though. They're breeding? I'm guessing they could in theory populate a village just like any other testificates, but I'd think they would join the village population already in place (if there is one that is) quickly cutting off any need for more villagers. Leaves me scratching my head.
Thanks for the config tips. Definitely gonna stop the rabbits and beavers from destroying things. Jury's still out on cave worms - Since they dig mostly underground it hasn't been a problem -yet-. They have made some pretty funky tunnels though.
Hmm. Of all the oddities I've found recently, unchecked mob spawning hasn't really happened yet. I'm actually a big fan of Primitive Mobs because it's been the most stable and cooperative mob mod I've used to date. If PM mobs are spawning unchecked (which is glaringly evident by the Sheepman invasion you're experiencing), I'd like to think it was the side effect of something else.
Even with the small experience I had with W&M, I did not experience unauthorized spawns. I haven't used that mod in a while though, so there may have been some code changes I am unaware of. Are there any other mods you have that could possibly be doing something like this? Are any mobs more prevalent than others (Sheepmen obviously)?
Given the information and observations, I'd come to the same conclusion as you, MohawkyMagoo. That is a rather unique situation with little else to explain what's happening.
Anyway, quick update on the "creatures on the monster spawn list" setup. TOO MANY CREATURES!!! While mining, I started getting major lag. Checking the debug screen I had over 600 entities up, and enabling entity radar in Rei's confirmed mobs everywhere.
I made my way back up to the surface to see what mobs in particular were there (hoping it wasn't a mass of PM villager types lol), and found a plethora of creatures from all mods (Atmosmobs, Primitive Mobs, Project Zulu, and Mo' Creatures with just a few vanilla, who seem mostly chunk generated). It was wild friggin' kingdom out there!
My guess is that since I didn't change the spawn weights, actual monsters are losing the competition with all the animal spawns and the monster cap isn't filling up. So I'm going to lower the item weights of all the animals in hopes the monsters actually have a chance to spawn again.
Otherwise, I feel I'm on the right track!