I was very specifically talking about how I see Mob Spawn Controls interact with the world. If I am mistaken about how DZ's custom spawner works then that is my fault. I am speaking solely from the observations of others. I will say without hesitation that I can not code, have not looked at code, and do not have a huge interest in trying to code a system for this myself. There are imminently more qualified people who can fix it. What I'm hoping to do is give input based on tons of hours of just playing with various creature mods and custom spawners. When I saw custom spawners I am specifically talking about Mob Spawn Controls (davidee), Custom Mob Spawner (zhark), and Spawn Rules (budd). I do understand that each of these is just interacting with the vanilla spawner in different ways...
Today I ran about 20 simulations over 4 hours to see if I could get any expected output whatsoever from using davidees mod alongside zulu, atmos, and witches and more. I was unable to get any reliable results
I want to be of assistance to this topic without seeming demanding or entitled, but I can't do much more than test and observe and draw conclusions based on that!
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So, bottom line, where-in lies any hope for stable controllable spawning of both mod and vanilla spawns?
Mojang?
Zhark?
MSC?
Forge?
A completely different source?
I was very specifically talking about how I see Mob Spawn Controls interact with the world. If I am mistaken about how DZ's custom spawner works then that is my fault.
Oh, if those questions were asking how CMS works, then you should disregard them. I have litle to no idea of the internals of the system he's written. Though some quantities are still relevant, the vanilla spawner will still check the creatures based on their class, and forbid other creatures accordingly.
I am speaking solely from the observations of others. I will say without hesitation that I can not code, have not looked at code, and do not have a huge interest in trying to code a system for this myself. There are imminently more qualified people who can fix it. What I'm hoping to do is give input based on tons of hours of just playing with various creature mods and custom spawners.
Ah, I was not trying to suggest that you should code a solution, or that you need to. An understanding of the mechanics though, is fundamental. The thread purpose is to discuss and consider the shortfalls of the spawning system. This obviously requries observation of what actually happens, which is realistically the most important part. But if we're going to figure out the specific problems, we need to figure out exactly what the shortcomings those observations must be put into context of what the system is trying to do.
I do feel that harmony most conveniently will come from a tool like MSC or Spawn Rules. Mod Configs can be effective, but with each author supporting only certain options and each in a different style it is bound to be confusing and difficult to use. The modders themselves cannot be counted on to balance their mods for every user preference or mod setup.
One of the issues Rhaz has noted is that the monsters always seem to spawn in groups of 4, which seem to cause clumps. The reason is obvious, the min/max don't effect monsters. There is a setting in the creature, but it's inaccesible to MSC. Long term, this looks like something we'd want (and possibly able to get) a hook for into forge so that MSC or a similar tool can be made to allow it to be user configurable.
I've been thinking lately on the creature type issue and think I might have a good idea of where to place a hook for that.
When I saw custom spawners I am specifically talking about Mob Spawn Controls (davidee), Custom Mob Spawner (zhark), and Spawn Rules (budd).
I can see where I was confused. MSC and Spawn Rules aren't seperate spawning systems. They are more like GUI Configs on steroids. Instead of altering the internals of the spawn system or creating their own spawn system, they allow you to manage the creatures/properties in said system. Thus we can determine their capabilities / limitations by the known "vanilla/forge" properties.
I want to be of assistance to this topic without seeming demanding or entitled, but I can't do much more than test and observe and draw conclusions based on that!
Today I ran about 20 simulations over 4 hours to see if I could get any expected output whatsoever from using davidees mod alongside zulu, atmos, and witches and more. I was unable to get any reliable results
Your contributions are welcome. More details on your 20 simulations would be nice. What were you specifically trying to achieve and how was it failing? Too many of a particular creature, not spread out enough, continuously spawning until your drowing in rabbits? Reis mini-map seems a useful tools to see what is spawning.
Also as you noted correctly earlier, there are known issues with Zulu that, while solved in the most recent version, cannot be solved pre-1.5. I would not recommend testing the adequacy of the MSC controls with it. I posted the MSC and Atmosmobs creature types in the pastebins above, make sure the spawnList type matches the creature type.
Yes, using Rei's with entity radar to check stuff out. I should also note that ambients and animals spawn in clusters the same way as monsters but my only gripe is with monsters showing up in groups It is worth noting the pattern though given the info from Crudedragos on how the spawner code just happens to make four spawn pass attempts and that's almost always the size of the groups of any mob. I guess add "make spawns spread out a bit" to my list of things to fix in the future.
Progress, but still haven't found what's bottlenecking things just yet.
Bottleneck: You mean so many monsters somewhere that no more are spawning above ground? Basic question, but are they getting stuck underground? Have you tried repeatedly setting the time so that it is night, such that above and below have equal chance.
Crudedragos I couldnt resist. I had a look at dr zharks. The insects are creatures (as I suspected at least by default). Strange how rhaz's experience of them is that they dont spawn like your project z finches ? Ill have to have a play with ambient and insects. TBH I was mostly concerned with getting the creatures right and failed so i didnt get that far. Ill try to stick to monsterl/creature/ambient/water terminology for the sake of clarity (I think those are the terms I have been using happily as this is how the caps are labelled in MSC as much as aything else).
As an aside im sorry i asked you to do custom mob drops. Davey wont do it for atmosmobs as he doesnt want people setting diamonds to drop off his mobs and it looks like im gonna need to use MCPC+ and a plugin to pick the drops for all mobs across the board. So thanks for indulging me and I hope I havent wasted too much of your time.
Features are features. I'm sure someone will find them useful. Interesting that he would be concerned, the server would still need to set the config properly. Not sure that it matters if someone wants to ruin their SSP by making mobs drop diamonds. Sad to see you leave our fair forge shores.
I am amazed by the amount of information here... between the observations of the testers and code breakdowns from the modders, there's so much to take in!
@sirdave79 - Yeah, I ditched Mo'C due to both the misinformation of settings as well as the MSC overwrite bug. Here I thought it was CMS that was changing the numbers, but if Mo'C 4.5.0 is working for you, then I'll be sure to give it a shot. It's helpful to read the proper settings from someone who actually knows what's working!
W&M however shall not return to my Minecraftia until something can be done about the seasonal change. My friend's server redlines with W&M installed, and is fine when it's not. Even in the red, the game seems to run alright with W&M until A) someone finds Median blocks or the season is about to change. Then it's lagfest for everyone with the server stressed to the breakpoint. There's a couple more mods out there with game-crashing bugs (one crashed the server recently), but I'm a bit off-topic as it is.
Showmonsters -might- work for modded mobs, though what I got from reading some of the thread questions was that mod mobs typically appear in yellow text in the results (which means Showmonsters found them in a spawn list/configuration, but isn't sure if it's actually correct. aka the 'idunno, maybe' result).
@Wylker - While I dislike the features of Custom Mob Spawner (in it's current form anyway), there's no denying that others feel differently, especially those that enjoyed the former spawn habits of vanilla animals (similar to monsters in that they spawned and despawned over time).
Crudedragos has a valid point concerning the adjustment of things spawning and/or despawning in that Minecraft was built to allow for alterations by independent parties. Without it, there would be no mods (or heavily restricted ones similar to add-ons for other games). Forge and the like are aiming to make mods more cross-compatible, and I think it wise on behalf of modders to accept these as standard if they want to have a large following (as it seems mods are like Lays potato chips - there's no stopping at just one!). That said, if a modder still wants to go their own way design-wise, nobody can really stop and make them follow the rest of the pack. I for one will not be joining them on their journey, but I wish them luck nonetheless.
For what it's worth, you haven't come across as demeaning or entitled to me, Wylker. Like the rest of us, you're here to figure out what works and what doesn't, and how/why this is. I fail to see how wanting to better understand a process constitutes entitlement. As for the Zhark comment, I may partially be to blame. I recall writing a post about CMS changing the settings of MSC, and the difficulty in getting spawns to work if you remove CMS from your setup. In light of sirdave79's information however, it seems that the bug was only in the 4.5.1 version and that a workaround is indeed possible.
@Nozgo - Hate to say it, but the answer atm seems to be either a perfectly-tuned mix of CMS/MSC (given sirdave79's findings), or there currently is no correct answer, but one may be coming soon. I would, however, not look to Mojang to fix this issue - by and large, they allow mods to change the game, but it's not really their job to support it. Don't take that as a diss on Mojang, though. That would be a heavy burden to lay on anyone.
I have high hopes for the new hook Crudedragos got into Forge, as well as the upcoming releases of all 3 spawn controller mods. Davidee, Zhark and bloodshot, and Budd all sound pretty busy right now. I can only imagine this amount of work from 3 different parties that something good will come as a result.
@Rhaz - what's the bottleneck precisely? Details may shed some light on the subject.
@Crudedragos - I don't think sirdave79 is leaving forge at all. From what I understand, MCPC+ is Bukkit that allows Forge and mods that run on Forge. It sounds quite complicated, really.
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This is odd. I have no problems with Mo Creatures spawns through MSC now. Using v4.5.1 with the Mo Creatures config set to Read Only so I havent experienced the mo Creatures changing MSC settings problem.
At the moment I have the following mods supplying mobs and creatures and co-existing quite happily through MSC (old version)
Mo Creatures 4.5.1, Project Zulu, Dungeon Mobs, AtmosMobs, PrimitiveMobs, Witches & More (under test), Ars Magica, Goblins, Mutant Creatures, Twilight Forest. Until recently when the modder abandoned his mod I also had Skyrim working too.
I've tried various methods to enhace their behavior - Herd mod - is too buggy and broken at the moment and isnt being updated because the modder is busy with real life at the mo. Zombie Awareness - caused massive lag, and the behaviour was just crazy, at one point 75 mobs were pursuing me - I felt like an extra in a zombie movie - the one who is going to die fairly early on.
Mob Mods I cant get to gel without causing crashes: Mincecraft Comes Alive, DivineRPG, Father Toasts mods, Fossils & Archeology.
Goblins works on a server? i was under the impression it had no multiplayer support (and I check it regularly as I found it interesting - who doesn't like goblins?).
Fossils & Archeology had some problems for me too. Something about their mobs in-game lags things incredibly - after some testing. we discovered their presence alone grinds things to a halt. In addition, the mobs seem to have a wide roaming area and from what I gather do not despawn. I've only seen F&A dinos spawn as babies (sabers and mammoths are full grown however). This leads me to believe that the mobs don't despawn, or else you would never encounter anything but baby dinos. Just theorizing here, but non-despawning mobs, each with their own built-in timer to progress to adulthood... might be the reason for all the lag.
There's a big issue with Dungeon Mobs as well. Several have reported lag with certain mobs (Cockatrice, Lizalfos to name a few), weird behaviors (Cockatice exploding like a mega creeper - MohawkyMagoo I think posted that actually), and in my experience a server crash when I started adding mobs to the MSC spawn list via GUI. According to my friend, the log mentioned a packet error trying to spawn a mob... I'll have to see if he still has a copy of it.
I found out about a mod recently that may be useful in helping to figure out which mods lag your game. It's called Ticks Per Second. Works in SP/MP. Once installed, in-game you type /tps and get a readout of how many TPS you're actually getting as opposed to the 20 you should be getting. It shows results for all dimensions of the world. Seems useful for both testing a mod standalone for issues as well as keeping track of dimension-adding mods.
I know its off-topic, but I should say the only way I got it to work was by not letting the Median Biome spawn, and turning the seasonal change off in the config. Since I only ever wanted its spawing structures and inhabitants, this was fine for me.
There's an "off" setting for seasons now? How did I miss this?
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Wow, I just spent a goodly chunk of time reading the past page and catching up. It's good to see a few of us are making headway a little at a time in getting numerous mob mods working acceptably well!
@Mohawky - DivineRPG gives you issues? It was one of the first mods I added on my SMP server and hasn't caused any trouble combined with Twilight Forest, Mo'Creatures and Primitive Mobs. So far the only issues it may have been causing inadvertently was the deep cavern monsters spawning in less populous biomes (e.g. desert) because the spawner had nothing to pick from. I'm still working my way back to integrating those mobs (particularly since the dramcryx and Eye are kind of vital to DivineRPG progression) into more biomes but I'm being very careful about it.
In regards to what I've been calling the "bottleneck", I've been unable to find it. Rei's shows no unusual spawns in the area around the town we're building, yet after a few minecraft days we see fewer and fewer spawns, and even usual groups of 3 or 4 mobs will whittle down to lone single mob spawns until they basically stop. I went on a resource gathering expedition Thursday night (config unchanged since then) and noted that traveling some distance away seemed to spur on the spawns and give a lot more monsters at night, whereas my "home" area was much more sparse. My little work in progress down in in the middle of an Autumn Forest via Highlands, and after a server reboot or wiping out mobs with /butcher, the spawns will dot the forest around our clearing until whatever kicks in and chokes off spawning again.
After backing up my current config I may reintroduce Primitive Mobs after updating it or work on the DivineRPG mobs a bit. Animals in general seem to still be doing well with vanilla animals showing only in the conflicted "highlands" biome (present in both Twilight Forest and Highlands itself but named identically so Mob Spawn Controls can't apply its settings to it properly). Further testing on vanilla mobs too probably. When I say testing I'm talking real world playtime testing and noting results over a several hour server uptime, by the way. I'll leave the controlled and scientific testing to others
*edit: Tried bumping the spawn cap for monsters to 250 to see where things flooded into. Adding Enthralled Dramcryx and The Eye from DivineRPG caused a HUGE amount of them to spawn underground all at once and immediately hit the spawn cap within seconds. /butcher world hostile command reports 722 monsters removed, just in the few chunk area I was in!
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@sirdave79: Yes, I moved all insects as well as Mo'Creatures birds, turtles, bunnies and some other odds and ends to ambient. Let's use the Autumn Forest biome as an example because that's where my town is:
With these settings I see small groups of 1 to 3 ambient critters dot the area (still seeing the clustered spawn patterns regardless of category) with acceptable numbers. Nothing overruns or goes crazy, even in biomes with limited ambient mobs such as Badlands which have only flies and snakes.
Oh, the bats barely ever spawn. Not sure why, someone mentioned perhaps there's something that forces them to fail spawn checks to decrease their numbers which I think is an interesting theory.
I should note that the use of MSC overrides does not seem vital in this instance, because I set these same critters to ambient before I learned how to utilize overrides and got very similar if not identical results.
You'll notice I do have two Divine RPG mobs in there and have the Mo'Creatures werewolf as a rare spawn. Despite it's 6/6 setting, the Watchers only spawn individually. I have used min/max settings all over the place for various test runs and don't see a whole lot of practical differences. On the plus side the Enderman, Ender Spider, Werewolf and Ender Watcher ARE quite rare overall so that seems to be working acceptably. Zombies I have tried at 20 and 80 weight and did notice a difference in the variety of spawns leaning toward zombies first.
I just removed two of the "deep cave" monsters from DivineRPG which I had only in this one biome to test. I found that a LOT of red dots started appearing underground, so I suspect that's a culprit straight away and will need more testing. Since Divine mobs can spawn in any light level that may be contributing to the problem.
I'll look into downgrading Mo'Creatures to v4.5.0 and see if it changes results.
As of right now I have very little beyond the vanilla monsters spawning. Watchers, Ender Spiders, and in ice biomes the Frost and Glacon. In some biomes Mo'Creatures ogres spawn rarely, but I have yet to see one spawn. I have seen a witch spawn in the Bog biome once or twice, so they seem to be holding to the spawn weight.
EDIT: Also regarding moving elsewhere and seeing more spawns I also noticed that and have a theory for it. The spawner uses eligible chunks as described by the code breakdown posts earlier, so perhaps loading more chunks into memory and exploring is adding eligible chunks which then increases the spawn cap. Oversimplifying probably but that's the gist
The wyverns are not ready, I have the models, textures and animations ready, but I'm working on the AI and the Wyvern Lair dimension. Bloodshot is working on the new spawner code, with support for custom biomes. BlockDaddy has been under the weather lately
The big issue with vanilla spawns/despawns is going to be fixed with Minecraft 1.6 as Jeb (Mojang) will likely change the spawn settings of vanilla creatures. In the meantime, I'm exploring different options, the easiest one will be to make vanilla creatures despawn by default. That will render vanilla farms non viable until MC 1.6.
There is a huge bug in the MoCreatures mod right now that despawns tamed MoCreatures, I was really slow on catching it, my apologies. It has been fixed for the update.
Now regarding the update, I'll try to get everything ready for a quick update without the wyverns, just to make the mod compatible with MC 1.5
as people have asked about updates for 1.4.7, I'll try to release all the upcoming changes (including wyverns) for both 1.5 and 1.4.7 but It'll take longer.
Looks like sirdave79 beat me to the punch on some of the DrZhark news, but there's some other big news in the quote there. Unfortunately, it's not the news I was hoping for. Mojang is actually going to address spawning/despawning in 1.6 (according to DrZhark, no link/source), so there's a silver lining... but we'll have to wait a while longer.
I spent part of last night and most of today testing Mo'C 4.5.0, W&M with no seasons, and a promising WIP mod found here. Note that not all the tests had to do with just spawning, but I'm posting my results anyway.
Starting with Myths&Monsters (M&M), I loaded it with Forge (alongside some "essentials" like Optifine, Rei's Minimap, etc.) to test the mobs for any issues. They all worked quite well and had little to no lag even with a horde of wolpertingers, several hill giants and more. The mod reminds me a lot of W&M in flavor as it has several mobs that are actually hostile towards each other, creating a faction-like quality. I hope to see this mod grow and become very popular.
Today I loaded W&M (again with Forge and the essentials) and changed the config per MohawkyMagoo's post. Things went pretty smooth early on, as the mobs (spawned via "eggs") caused no issues. Fortunately, the test world was close to a mountainous region and a castle generated. I went to check it out and even after giving it a good deal of time to load, I noticed lag and my /tps was not good at all. Investigating the castle for the first time, I went in through the main entry and quickly found 4 golem spawners.
These are a bit different than your normal spawners - they each "build" a golem in several stages, starting with the feet and moving up to its head, at which point it activates soon after and actually spawns. Inside this room my lag was more pronounced, so I left the area and found a secluded spot with no mobs of any kind. Checked my /tps which wasn't perfect but reasonable and tossed down a few golem spawners. I found my culprits, and realized I'd have to disable the spawning of castles.
I then tried a few of the other W&M spawner blocks (which work much like vanilla spawners), and noticed they caused a little lag as well. That meant I'd have to disable more structures, basically any with spawners in them (unfortunately I don't know which structures have them and which don't).
Finally, I loaded up on Ender Eyes and hunted down the nearest stronghold so I could take a look at the new Land's End content added recently. Loading the End, I had very noticeable lag and set out to Land's End. Nearing the terrain, my game became progressively slower until I my FPS became FPM. Got to the outer edge of the area and decided to stop.
Reloaded MC without W&M and headed straight for the End on a new world. Went through the portal, and had no lag whatsoever. Checking the config, there's currently no way to disable Land's End... so basically Overworld is playable but the End is not with W&M (on my comp).
I went on to try Mo'C. After loading it and changing the settings, I reloaded the game with my other mods. I commented out my MSC Overrides so everything would load with no additonal changes. Started up a world and began changing the MSC lists for my current biomes. The monsters did fine, following my settings very well. I had to get rid of the vanilla animals, as they were preset in my config and thus populated to cap. Once that was taken care of, I saw a nice mix of Mo'C, PZ, Atmos, and M&M creatures... for one day.
I then realized that the M&M sandwyrms were not despawning (yay another issue)... so I removed M&M and restarted the game. This unfortunately didn't help, as no Creatures were spawning at all. I tried a doMobSpawning true, I tried changing the "Change Vanilla Spawns" in CMS, I checked MSC's lists (which were working just fine), I even traveled out a ways and came back... to no avail. I reset CMS, removed it and Mo'C, then reloaded the game. Immediately, PZ, Atmos, and a small amount of vanilla creatures began spawning!
I can only surmise that something is bugged in either Mo'C, CMS, or a cross-compatibility issue with MSC.
Kinda bummed really, because the last day's worth of testing I ended up with no playable content. Oh well, at least what I have now seems to work reasonably.
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Actually saw a bat for the first time during a long expedition last night. I decided to just go hog wild exploring and see how the server handled it with the current spawn settings, and got some interesting results...
At one point after wandering a good 1500 blocks due south and 500ish east of our town, the tick rate started getting squirrely. I was seeing the server ticks jump up to 40ms or higher and the server chugged to a crawl over the course of a couple minutes. Out of curiosity I flipped the server to Peaceful to clear the hostile spawns and ended up crashing it. Rebooting cleared everything up and tickrates resumed normal operating parameters.
By the time I had gotten to that point hostile spawns had all but ceased, with occasional loner spawns popping up as I explored. Running a /butcher world hostile command immediately caused new spawns to dot the map in their usual clusters, so I'm still seeking the fabled bottleneck it seems. Another observation is that running a radius butcher command to clear vanilla animals out of the conflicted highlands biome (which MSC cannot set spawns for due to both Highlands and Twilight Forest having the same biome name) it also immediately triggered a wave of hostile spawns once the spawns were freed up. Something is fishy there, when forcibly despawning a couple dozen sheep is freeing up the monster spawn cap...
I need to check and see if the Forge Essentials butcher command is smart enough to not remove pets. If I can run a /butcher world passive to clear out all the vanilla animals that have spawned in the highlands biome it may help going forward, but sadly there is a highlands plot not far from our town which will undoubtedly cause more vanilla spawns to crop up and eat up spawn cap. At the least it gives me the ability to wipe the slate clean without rebooting the server.
@sirdave79 - DivineRPG is neat because of the added progression, which is something most of us in my group feel the game lacks normally. My only real gripe with the mod is that the transition from overworld to Divine dimensions is very jarring, and the mobs they put in the overworld (crabs, dramcryx, etc) are overly powerful even for what would be end-game in vanilla. Despite that, the mod does had a LOT of useful utility features including storage blocks (3x3 grid solid block like iron, gold etc) for almost every building material, lots of new lamp types and the ability to dye many building materials. The summonable boss spawns are very cool as well for those who like more of a challenging RPG experience over peaceful building
All of that said it looks like you can definitely wipe the Divine mobs off the spawn list without issue. Currently I've had to do that because the aforementioned "deep cave" mobs spawning in all light levels seem to hog the spawn cap during the daylight hours when nothing else is eligible to spawn. I don't know why they decide it's okay to spawn 40 or 60 blocks underground far away from players though, it's very frustrating to deal with but I would hate to have to remove ALL of those mobs. They do serve an important function in the mod's progression toward delving the pocket dimensions.
Here I was thinking MCPC was Bukkit with a sprinkling of forge. It seems to be claiming many mods done need to be recompiled to be compatible. Looks interesting.
The EntitiyLiving Despawn Method:
Any creature that can despawn will
* Despawn if farther than 128 (16384.0 squared) from the nearest player
* Despawn if age is greater than 600 and farther than 32 (1024.0 squared) from the nearest player
Edit: The distance values here were changed to accurately represent that they are squared distances
If distance is less than 32 (1024.0 squared), the age of the entity is set at zero.
There is a persistance requried NBT which will override the above if true and the creature will never despawn.
There is the canDespawn() method which is usually overridden by creature type mobs to tell it to never despawn.
The EntityLiving Despawn method can be overriden by the creature if the modmaker desired to do so. And can therefore choose not to follow these conventions.
Also this talk of monsters spawning in 4s ? I never noticed when I was running MSC, I was looking at creatures but i would have noticed 4 of any type of mob spawning tight. I thought the min max did seem to have an effect but CD would know better than me.
What happens is that during th spawn loop it tries to spawn the selected monster 4 times. Any time it spawns succesfully it counts the successful attempts that calls a method in creature maxSpawnInChunk (which defaults to 4) to see if it should stop.
For Example, lets say maxSpawn In Chunk is 2. Any attempt could fail (for example, already occupired by a creature or in water)
A1: Fail, A2: Fail, A3: Success, A4: Success, Result: Two Spawned
A1: Success, A2: Fail, A3: Success, A4: Does Not Happen, Result: Two Spawned
A1: Success, A2: Success, A3: Does Not Happen, A4: Does Not Happen, Result: Two Spawned
A1: Fail, A2: Fail, A3: Fail, A4: Success, Result: One Spawned
I'll be exposing maxSpawnInChunk to the config in my mods official update.
Note that creature types, when spawning with the chunk, will respect the min/max you set with MSC.
Mojang is actually going to address spawning/despawning in 1.6, so there's a silver lining... but we'll have to wait a while longer.
Can I get a link/source? That does sound interesting. Hopefully they'll do something to differentiate above/below ground spawning. Or have the cap set in smaller chunk groups / per chunk.
Bats have a number of conditions to stop them from spawning. Chief amongst is anytime above y == 63 they fail. Also more likely to fail proportional to the light level. There is a calender in there which I assume is checking time. Day or night, not really sure?
"mo creatures insects (defined as creatures ?) spawning as ambient dont overspawn like finches ? I dont quite understand something it seems, but regardless looks like mo creatures insects are gonna work as ambient.
Rhaz does mention they don't appear to be adhering to the caps at all though. The degree is due to how the finch never stop on the ground. They happen to 'work' by chance. Hoping that they can be balanced by terrain features, spawn rates may work on occasion but will fail drastically other times.
I'm assuming he's still using the below by the way.
Currently I have most ambient "critters" from Mo'Creatures placed into that category with a flat 10/1/1 setting across all of them. It's giving good results when there's a fair variety of choose from in the category and the ambient cap fixed at 1. It doesn't honor that cap whatsoever, but given the information posted above regarding the cap checking routine it seems like it's doing one "pass" of spawning most or all the ambient creatures. Possibly per chunk? Definitely warrants further study.
I toyed with the idea of going MCPC+ or some kind of Bukkit/Forge combo, but it hardly seems worth it for me atm. Bukkit's plugins are great, especially for SMP options, but we don't have enough players to really warrant the addition (and frankly, I'm alright with that - if I wanted a larger server, I'd go find one already running to join). I don't recall the name of it, but there was at least one mob spawning plugin that boasted high configurability.
M&M's owner quickly replied, saying config options will be added, and creatures will despawn correctly in an update.
Got to admit that I too have passed on DivineRPG for now. A few of us on the server browsed their wiki, and we realized a few key hostile mobs spawning underground in any light level was too much hassle when we already had a huge underground complex built. That world is currently saved and on the back burner for now though. Also, the sheer size of the mod felt pretty intimidating. Seemed like a lot to throw at players all at once, so it's been sitting in the "someday, maybe" pile.
@MohawkyMagoo - I've never tried any of the AI mods, but I have a low-end computer. When I buy my next comp, I'll probably keep this one running to test things on. I'd rather test on an old PC anyway, as I can see the effects from the perspective of the lowest common denominator so to speak.
As for W&M spawning by itself, I haven't had that issue before. While I was testing it yesterday, my MSC was running but had literally nothing on its spawn list (another minor issue I've been having where in new worlds MSC often doesn't auto-activate mod mobs but definitely finds them, and sometimes ALL mobs are turned off including vanilla). Anyway, nothing from W&M spawned by itself so I have no clue what's going on there.
@Rhaz - this is a bit of a stretch, and not knowing the progression of DivineRPG or your server, it might not be useful at all... but would it be possible to remove the troublesome mobs, and sell whatever it is from the important ones (I'm assuming much-needed drops) somewhere in-game? It would take some redstone knowledge, but I'd think a command block and/or dispenser system (set to sell 1 item at a time so people don't raid the dispenser for the price of 1 item) could possibly work. Of course, that too has a number of drawbacks, and probably isn't even worth it for a small server.
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Can I get a link/source? That does sound interesting. Hopefully they'll do something to differentiate above/below ground spawning. Or have the cap set in smaller chunk groups / per chunk.
LOL how noob of me, lemme go check... ohhhhh snap! Zhark didn't leave a link/source, and googling turned up nothing. Will edit my above post and reply to Zhark's post asking for source.
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@Gurrok: I just realized that honestly the deep cave mobs are not VITAL so much as they accelerate progression to a degree by dropping some of the rare ingots such as Rupee. Accessing the pocket dimensions (Dravite Hills being the first) can be accomplished only by visiting the Nether and gathering Rupee in the overworld. You'd just need to spawn bosses to collect Divine Shards for the portal. So, it's safe to say that the deep cave mobs causing problems and spawning in any light level are 100% optional, in my opinion.
@Crudedragos: You're correct, I'm still using the same ambient settings. One of the spoiler tags in my above post has the exact settings from the biome our town in situated in, for reference. Those have largely remained unchanged in my experiments because ambient critters, bugs, etc are acceptable as is to me. They still exhibit the quirky behavior spawning in clusters and all of that but it's fine for those particular mobs to do so.
The spawn settings and caps seem to have some weirdness going on. Buried in one of my prior posts I mention having the DivineRPG "Ender Watcher" creature spawning with a min/max of 6/6, yet they always spawn one at a time no matter what. I'm not really sure what's up with the clustered spawning and mobs not adhering to the caps. I still need to roll back to v4.5.0 of Mo'Creatures and see what that does.
The spawn settings and caps seem to have some weirdness going on. Buried in one of my prior posts I mention having the DivineRPG "Ender Watcher" creature spawning with a min/max of 6/6, yet they always spawn one at a time no matter what. I'm not really sure what's up with the clustered spawning and mobs not adhering to the caps. I still need to roll back to v4.5.0 of Mo'Creatures and see what that does.
For your ambient, The Spawn Caps are not being adhered to at the least because none of the Mo'Creatures Creature Types: http://pastebin.com/y79L7fyc are ambient.
The spawn settings are similar. The min/mac or 6/6 only matter for Creature type if spawning with a chunk. Otherwise a different quantity is used which defaults to 4 but can be overriden by the modder. in the case of Ender Watcher I would assume this was set to 1. You could petition the relevent modders to place it into the config, the method for reference is getMaxSpawnedInChunk().
Also Mohawky Magoo uses noppes Custom NPC mod to sell items. I think they are pretty much fully customisable as vendors as well as "hunters" and I imagnie a few other purposes/types. I beleive currently they cannot be spawned apart from a player in creative mode. I dont know if CrudeDragos limited mob spawner could be made to spawn one but I assume not.
Assuming its configurable by NBT you should be able to. Doubt it'd be the prefered interface but it should be possible. Your biggest issue is knowing the fields apriori.
does any entitiy not on the ground not add to or respec tthe spawn cap ?
The spawn cap is irrelevant as we've established those entities wouldn't count anyway. Its about how fast they can spawn. More creatures on the ground lends to a significantly smaller spawn rate. It doesn't seem like something that would make such a huge difference, but it'd be what I noticed when I first created them. Couple that with an open biome and entity lag is sure to follow.
It didn't occur to me earlier, and I'm sure someone has mentioned it, but do the relevent Mo'C spawn in the same 'clumpy way' as most other creatures?
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Thus far in my testing all mobs regardless of what mod adds them will spawn in clusters. That includes DivineRPG, Twilight Forest and Mo'Creatures of all sorts hostile or passive.
@Crudedragos: I've used the MSC overrides to attempt importing all the listed mobs as ambient, but I assume somewhere along the line that isn't getting the job done. You'd know more about the process than I do, but it seems like both ways (explicitly imported as ambient vs. just throwing them in ambient and calling it done) give similar or identical results in practice.
For future modding consideration is it remotely possible to utilize a method of enumerating all the mobs, finding their relevant spawn settings and limitations and then making them configurable? I know it's possible to output a list, and I'm sure it'd be considerably more work to grab the settings and attempt to short-circuit mods' own spawning settings but perhaps sometime someone might be willing to take a crack at it. Then again I'm just a micromanager with my server settings and want to be able to tweak anything and everything when possible
mcmmo sounds interesting when dealing with tougher areas/mobs, so that combined with DRPG (especially with the "dangerous biomes" idea to limit early-game problems) sounds like pure awesome. I was attempting something like that the other week, but on a slightly smaller scale - using RPG Inventory to buff the players beyond diamond gear, then the dinos from Fossil & Archeology in a few select biomes for "big-game hunting". Unfortunately, F&A wasn't working quite how I hoped at that time (and their ancient sword is flippin' OP as all getout it seems).
Also, I forgot all about Custom NPCs! I've heard of it, but never tried it - sounds amazing... and way easier (and more flavorful) than a complicated redstone setup!
@sirdave79 - I recall there are a couple (they are rare though) mods out there to repair enchanted items without XP. One is called Craft and Enchant, whose main feature is changing up the enchantment process entirely, but allows you to break down old enchanted items (other than books) to get magic dust. The dust can be combined with each other in a normal craft table to make basic materials (4 gold gusts = a gold ingot, etc.), or you can use them to repair like-material weapons/tools/armor. As a side note, I had players complaining about the random factor of enchanting (Silk Touch, amirite?), but didn't want the "gimme" feature of Enchanting Plus. Craft and Enchant puts a step in between requiring certain materials to get your effects. Some are easy (iron ingot, feather, etc.), others not so much (ender eye, ghast tear, blaze powder, etc.). So far, the players seem to like it. Truth be told, I haven't repaired an item with dust yet... but I'm saving a level here and there by not having to hope for the right random enchant I want, allowing me to actually make use of the anvil and not feel starved for XP.
@Crudedragos - When I was using Mo'C, its mobs seemed to spawn like the rest (small clumps), both monsters and creatures.
@Rhaz - thanks for the DRPG info. As I said before, I was kind of intimidated to try it... but combining it with the ideas mentioned above sounds like a lot of fun!
*Runs off to check out DRPG and Custom NPCs*
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So... noob question here. Does anyone know offhand if Mo'Creatures caps are for just Mo'Creatures or does it take into account vanilla spawns and/or other mods spawns? I am talking about the "max animals" and "max mobs" settings in Mo'Creatures config file.
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I agree that for the moment disabling the Highlands conflicted biomes is the way to go, but given that at least two such biomes exist in the current world I guess I'll have to keep on top of pruning down vanilla animals At least this way there's some source for them, and the two spots are a fair distance from our home area as well.
Since we know from Crudedragos' posts that the ambient mobs I've imported do not internally count as "ambient" in regards to the spawn caps, I may undo that change and add them to the "animals" category. This would let me spread out spawn weights considerably and provide more mobs to sparse biomes like deserts where scorpions can flood the place easily.
If either of you guys (re: Mohawky and sirdave) drop in DivineRPG could you test the Mo'Creatures wraith mob and let me know if it spawns for you? It seems like Divine has a "wraith" as well that might be causing neither entity to spawn. It's not a huge issue because I can always use the flamewraith instead, I'm just wondering if it's that mod combo doing it or my config.
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@Mohawky - I also used EBXL at first but didn't like the extra blocks it added and thought a lot of the biomes were really an eyesore. When I got tired of trudging through "extreme _____" biomes and we decided to migrate to a new world I replaced it with Highlands and REALLY like most of the biomes. I mean, volcanic islands, how do you say no to that?
It seems like one of the Divine dimensions has a "Wraith" while Mo'Creatures has the "wraith". The only difference is the case, which isn't taken into account anywhere but the formal name of the entity I guess.
I went ahead and migrated my "ambient" critters (sans bats, they're ambient by default anyway) to the "creature" category and saw immediate changes in spawning behavior globally. I may need to increase the cap if these mobs are now correctly counting against the right category. I can definitely confirm that regardless of the MSC override, those mobs WILL be considered "creature" because Rei's Minimap will show them as white dots on the radar.
With the omission of vanilla animals in the spawn config (except the "highlands" biome as noted) I'm getting pretty solid results on animal spawns. I have to take an off day or weekend and run the server a long stretch of 6+ hours straight to see how long it takes to bottleneck. Hostile mobs seemed to be doing well but there is a distinct lack of spawns in certain biomes which I need to investigate. What good is a jungle with dangerous spawns if they never show up, right?
Last two days I had instances where the server tickrate plummeted (ticks reading 100-160ms per tick which is insane) leading to server crashes. Not sure of the cause yet but both cases involved lots of long distance exploring and chunk generating by at least 1 player.
For future modding consideration is it remotely possible to utilize a method of enumerating all the mobs, finding their relevant spawn settings and limitations and then making them configurable? I know it's possible to output a list, and I'm sure it'd be considerably more work to grab the settings and attempt to short-circuit mods' own spawning settings but perhaps sometime someone might be willing to take a crack at it. Then again I'm just a micromanager with my server settings and want to be able to tweak anything and everything when possible
To read the properties? Absolutely. To Alter them, no. Well, most of them you can, but not all. Minus the few properties it cannot access, this is what MSC does.
Global Propertes - These are not effective for each creature modders to control, but MSC can do well.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Property Name: spawnList Cap
MSC Access: Read/Write
Values: Seperate Cap for Monster, Creature, Ambient, WaterCreature
Property Name: spawnList Tick Frequency
MSC Access: Read/Write
Values: Seperate rate for Monster, Creature, Ambient, WaterCreature
Creature Properties - All of Thses can be accesed and made configurable by the creature-modder by definition
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Property Name: spawnList Type
MSC Access: Read/Write
Values: Monster, Creature, Ambient, WaterCreature
Use: If spawnList does not match Creature Type, the creature will not count towards the spawnList Cap
Property Name: creature Type
MSC Access: Read Only
Values: Monster, Creature, Ambient, WaterCreature
Use: If Creature Type does not match spawnList type it does not count towards the spawnList Cap
Property Name: MinInChunk
MSC Access: Read/Write
Property Name: MaxInChunk
MSC Access: Read/Write
Property Name: MaxSpawnInChunk
MSC Access: Read Only
Property Name: canDespawn()
MSC Access: Hacky, but can be Read/Write, subject to error. Likely better to get creature modders to implement.
Sadly, it doesn't look like we'll be able to get a 'creature Type' hook into forge. Which isn't realistically suprising considering where it would need to be. It technically should be possible if davidee wanted to create a core mod. I don't know if Davidee is familiar with ASM though and its non-trivial. It would likely be better for creature modders to expose it as a config option.
MaxSpawnInChunk should/may be possible, assuming Lex is in a good mood when I fix it up.
I dont actually believe that its possible to cure Minecrafts spawning problems in its present state. Or that a spawning system is the only way to tackle the problem.
There are some inherent limitation. Chunks being verticallaly infinite. Only 4 creature types. Honestly, additional creature types would probably be the greatest advantage to a custom system.
Today I ran about 20 simulations over 4 hours to see if I could get any expected output whatsoever from using davidees mod alongside zulu, atmos, and witches and more. I was unable to get any reliable results
I want to be of assistance to this topic without seeming demanding or entitled, but I can't do much more than test and observe and draw conclusions based on that!
Taking requests - PM me if you want me to spotlight your mod.
Mojang?
Zhark?
MSC?
Forge?
A completely different source?
Oh, if those questions were asking how CMS works, then you should disregard them. I have litle to no idea of the internals of the system he's written. Though some quantities are still relevant, the vanilla spawner will still check the creatures based on their class, and forbid other creatures accordingly.
Ah, I was not trying to suggest that you should code a solution, or that you need to. An understanding of the mechanics though, is fundamental. The thread purpose is to discuss and consider the shortfalls of the spawning system. This obviously requries observation of what actually happens, which is realistically the most important part. But if we're going to figure out the specific problems, we need to figure out exactly what the shortcomings those observations must be put into context of what the system is trying to do.
I do feel that harmony most conveniently will come from a tool like MSC or Spawn Rules. Mod Configs can be effective, but with each author supporting only certain options and each in a different style it is bound to be confusing and difficult to use. The modders themselves cannot be counted on to balance their mods for every user preference or mod setup.
One of the issues Rhaz has noted is that the monsters always seem to spawn in groups of 4, which seem to cause clumps. The reason is obvious, the min/max don't effect monsters. There is a setting in the creature, but it's inaccesible to MSC. Long term, this looks like something we'd want (and possibly able to get) a hook for into forge so that MSC or a similar tool can be made to allow it to be user configurable.
I've been thinking lately on the creature type issue and think I might have a good idea of where to place a hook for that.
I can see where I was confused. MSC and Spawn Rules aren't seperate spawning systems. They are more like GUI Configs on steroids. Instead of altering the internals of the spawn system or creating their own spawn system, they allow you to manage the creatures/properties in said system. Thus we can determine their capabilities / limitations by the known "vanilla/forge" properties.
Your contributions are welcome. More details on your 20 simulations would be nice. What were you specifically trying to achieve and how was it failing? Too many of a particular creature, not spread out enough, continuously spawning until your drowing in rabbits? Reis mini-map seems a useful tools to see what is spawning.
Also as you noted correctly earlier, there are known issues with Zulu that, while solved in the most recent version, cannot be solved pre-1.5. I would not recommend testing the adequacy of the MSC controls with it. I posted the MSC and Atmosmobs creature types in the pastebins above, make sure the spawnList type matches the creature type.
Bottleneck: You mean so many monsters somewhere that no more are spawning above ground? Basic question, but are they getting stuck underground? Have you tried repeatedly setting the time so that it is night, such that above and below have equal chance.
Features are features. I'm sure someone will find them useful. Interesting that he would be concerned, the server would still need to set the config properly. Not sure that it matters if someone wants to ruin their SSP by making mobs drop diamonds. Sad to see you leave our fair forge shores.
@sirdave79 - Yeah, I ditched Mo'C due to both the misinformation of settings as well as the MSC overwrite bug. Here I thought it was CMS that was changing the numbers, but if Mo'C 4.5.0 is working for you, then I'll be sure to give it a shot. It's helpful to read the proper settings from someone who actually knows what's working!
W&M however shall not return to my Minecraftia until something can be done about the seasonal change. My friend's server redlines with W&M installed, and is fine when it's not. Even in the red, the game seems to run alright with W&M until A) someone finds Median blocks or the season is about to change. Then it's lagfest for everyone with the server stressed to the breakpoint. There's a couple more mods out there with game-crashing bugs (one crashed the server recently), but I'm a bit off-topic as it is.
Showmonsters -might- work for modded mobs, though what I got from reading some of the thread questions was that mod mobs typically appear in yellow text in the results (which means Showmonsters found them in a spawn list/configuration, but isn't sure if it's actually correct. aka the 'idunno, maybe' result).
@Wylker - While I dislike the features of Custom Mob Spawner (in it's current form anyway), there's no denying that others feel differently, especially those that enjoyed the former spawn habits of vanilla animals (similar to monsters in that they spawned and despawned over time).
Crudedragos has a valid point concerning the adjustment of things spawning and/or despawning in that Minecraft was built to allow for alterations by independent parties. Without it, there would be no mods (or heavily restricted ones similar to add-ons for other games). Forge and the like are aiming to make mods more cross-compatible, and I think it wise on behalf of modders to accept these as standard if they want to have a large following (as it seems mods are like Lays potato chips - there's no stopping at just one!). That said, if a modder still wants to go their own way design-wise, nobody can really stop and make them follow the rest of the pack. I for one will not be joining them on their journey, but I wish them luck nonetheless.
For what it's worth, you haven't come across as demeaning or entitled to me, Wylker. Like the rest of us, you're here to figure out what works and what doesn't, and how/why this is. I fail to see how wanting to better understand a process constitutes entitlement. As for the Zhark comment, I may partially be to blame. I recall writing a post about CMS changing the settings of MSC, and the difficulty in getting spawns to work if you remove CMS from your setup. In light of sirdave79's information however, it seems that the bug was only in the 4.5.1 version and that a workaround is indeed possible.
@Nozgo - Hate to say it, but the answer atm seems to be either a perfectly-tuned mix of CMS/MSC (given sirdave79's findings), or there currently is no correct answer, but one may be coming soon. I would, however, not look to Mojang to fix this issue - by and large, they allow mods to change the game, but it's not really their job to support it. Don't take that as a diss on Mojang, though. That would be a heavy burden to lay on anyone.
I have high hopes for the new hook Crudedragos got into Forge, as well as the upcoming releases of all 3 spawn controller mods. Davidee, Zhark and bloodshot, and Budd all sound pretty busy right now. I can only imagine this amount of work from 3 different parties that something good will come as a result.
@Rhaz - what's the bottleneck precisely? Details may shed some light on the subject.
@Crudedragos - I don't think sirdave79 is leaving forge at all. From what I understand, MCPC+ is Bukkit that allows Forge and mods that run on Forge. It sounds quite complicated, really.
Goblins works on a server? i was under the impression it had no multiplayer support (and I check it regularly as I found it interesting - who doesn't like goblins?).
Fossils & Archeology had some problems for me too. Something about their mobs in-game lags things incredibly - after some testing. we discovered their presence alone grinds things to a halt. In addition, the mobs seem to have a wide roaming area and from what I gather do not despawn. I've only seen F&A dinos spawn as babies (sabers and mammoths are full grown however). This leads me to believe that the mobs don't despawn, or else you would never encounter anything but baby dinos. Just theorizing here, but non-despawning mobs, each with their own built-in timer to progress to adulthood... might be the reason for all the lag.
There's a big issue with Dungeon Mobs as well. Several have reported lag with certain mobs (Cockatrice, Lizalfos to name a few), weird behaviors (Cockatice exploding like a mega creeper - MohawkyMagoo I think posted that actually), and in my experience a server crash when I started adding mobs to the MSC spawn list via GUI. According to my friend, the log mentioned a packet error trying to spawn a mob... I'll have to see if he still has a copy of it.
I found out about a mod recently that may be useful in helping to figure out which mods lag your game. It's called Ticks Per Second. Works in SP/MP. Once installed, in-game you type /tps and get a readout of how many TPS you're actually getting as opposed to the 20 you should be getting. It shows results for all dimensions of the world. Seems useful for both testing a mod standalone for issues as well as keeping track of dimension-adding mods.
There's an "off" setting for seasons now? How did I miss this?
@Mohawky - DivineRPG gives you issues? It was one of the first mods I added on my SMP server and hasn't caused any trouble combined with Twilight Forest, Mo'Creatures and Primitive Mobs. So far the only issues it may have been causing inadvertently was the deep cavern monsters spawning in less populous biomes (e.g. desert) because the spawner had nothing to pick from. I'm still working my way back to integrating those mobs (particularly since the dramcryx and Eye are kind of vital to DivineRPG progression) into more biomes but I'm being very careful about it.
In regards to what I've been calling the "bottleneck", I've been unable to find it. Rei's shows no unusual spawns in the area around the town we're building, yet after a few minecraft days we see fewer and fewer spawns, and even usual groups of 3 or 4 mobs will whittle down to lone single mob spawns until they basically stop. I went on a resource gathering expedition Thursday night (config unchanged since then) and noted that traveling some distance away seemed to spur on the spawns and give a lot more monsters at night, whereas my "home" area was much more sparse. My little work in progress down in in the middle of an Autumn Forest via Highlands, and after a server reboot or wiping out mobs with /butcher, the spawns will dot the forest around our clearing until whatever kicks in and chokes off spawning again.
After backing up my current config I may reintroduce Primitive Mobs after updating it or work on the DivineRPG mobs a bit. Animals in general seem to still be doing well with vanilla animals showing only in the conflicted "highlands" biome (present in both Twilight Forest and Highlands itself but named identically so Mob Spawn Controls can't apply its settings to it properly). Further testing on vanilla mobs too probably. When I say testing I'm talking real world playtime testing and noting results over a several hour server uptime, by the way. I'll leave the controlled and scientific testing to others
*edit: Tried bumping the spawn cap for monsters to 250 to see where things flooded into. Adding Enthralled Dramcryx and The Eye from DivineRPG caused a HUGE amount of them to spawn underground all at once and immediately hit the spawn cap within seconds. /butcher world hostile command reports 722 monsters removed, just in the few chunk area I was in!
With these settings I see small groups of 1 to 3 ambient critters dot the area (still seeing the clustered spawn patterns regardless of category) with acceptable numbers. Nothing overruns or goes crazy, even in biomes with limited ambient mobs such as Badlands which have only flies and snakes.
Oh, the bats barely ever spawn. Not sure why, someone mentioned perhaps there's something that forces them to fail spawn checks to decrease their numbers which I think is an interesting theory.
I should note that the use of MSC overrides does not seem vital in this instance, because I set these same critters to ambient before I learned how to utilize overrides and got very similar if not identical results.
Now here's the same biome's monster config:
You'll notice I do have two Divine RPG mobs in there and have the Mo'Creatures werewolf as a rare spawn. Despite it's 6/6 setting, the Watchers only spawn individually. I have used min/max settings all over the place for various test runs and don't see a whole lot of practical differences. On the plus side the Enderman, Ender Spider, Werewolf and Ender Watcher ARE quite rare overall so that seems to be working acceptably. Zombies I have tried at 20 and 80 weight and did notice a difference in the variety of spawns leaning toward zombies first.
I just removed two of the "deep cave" monsters from DivineRPG which I had only in this one biome to test. I found that a LOT of red dots started appearing underground, so I suspect that's a culprit straight away and will need more testing. Since Divine mobs can spawn in any light level that may be contributing to the problem.
I'll look into downgrading Mo'Creatures to v4.5.0 and see if it changes results.
As of right now I have very little beyond the vanilla monsters spawning. Watchers, Ender Spiders, and in ice biomes the Frost and Glacon. In some biomes Mo'Creatures ogres spawn rarely, but I have yet to see one spawn. I have seen a witch spawn in the Bog biome once or twice, so they seem to be holding to the spawn weight.
EDIT: Also regarding moving elsewhere and seeing more spawns I also noticed that and have a theory for it. The spawner uses eligible chunks as described by the code breakdown posts earlier, so perhaps loading more chunks into memory and exploring is adding eligible chunks which then increases the spawn cap. Oversimplifying probably but that's the gist
Looks like sirdave79 beat me to the punch on some of the DrZhark news, but there's some other big news in the quote there. Unfortunately, it's not the news I was hoping for. Mojang is actually going to address spawning/despawning in 1.6 (according to DrZhark, no link/source), so there's a silver lining... but we'll have to wait a while longer.
I spent part of last night and most of today testing Mo'C 4.5.0, W&M with no seasons, and a promising WIP mod found here. Note that not all the tests had to do with just spawning, but I'm posting my results anyway.
Starting with Myths&Monsters (M&M), I loaded it with Forge (alongside some "essentials" like Optifine, Rei's Minimap, etc.) to test the mobs for any issues. They all worked quite well and had little to no lag even with a horde of wolpertingers, several hill giants and more. The mod reminds me a lot of W&M in flavor as it has several mobs that are actually hostile towards each other, creating a faction-like quality. I hope to see this mod grow and become very popular.
Today I loaded W&M (again with Forge and the essentials) and changed the config per MohawkyMagoo's post. Things went pretty smooth early on, as the mobs (spawned via "eggs") caused no issues. Fortunately, the test world was close to a mountainous region and a castle generated. I went to check it out and even after giving it a good deal of time to load, I noticed lag and my /tps was not good at all. Investigating the castle for the first time, I went in through the main entry and quickly found 4 golem spawners.
These are a bit different than your normal spawners - they each "build" a golem in several stages, starting with the feet and moving up to its head, at which point it activates soon after and actually spawns. Inside this room my lag was more pronounced, so I left the area and found a secluded spot with no mobs of any kind. Checked my /tps which wasn't perfect but reasonable and tossed down a few golem spawners. I found my culprits, and realized I'd have to disable the spawning of castles.
I then tried a few of the other W&M spawner blocks (which work much like vanilla spawners), and noticed they caused a little lag as well. That meant I'd have to disable more structures, basically any with spawners in them (unfortunately I don't know which structures have them and which don't).
Finally, I loaded up on Ender Eyes and hunted down the nearest stronghold so I could take a look at the new Land's End content added recently. Loading the End, I had very noticeable lag and set out to Land's End. Nearing the terrain, my game became progressively slower until I my FPS became FPM. Got to the outer edge of the area and decided to stop.
Reloaded MC without W&M and headed straight for the End on a new world. Went through the portal, and had no lag whatsoever. Checking the config, there's currently no way to disable Land's End... so basically Overworld is playable but the End is not with W&M (on my comp).
I went on to try Mo'C. After loading it and changing the settings, I reloaded the game with my other mods. I commented out my MSC Overrides so everything would load with no additonal changes. Started up a world and began changing the MSC lists for my current biomes. The monsters did fine, following my settings very well. I had to get rid of the vanilla animals, as they were preset in my config and thus populated to cap. Once that was taken care of, I saw a nice mix of Mo'C, PZ, Atmos, and M&M creatures... for one day.
I then realized that the M&M sandwyrms were not despawning (yay another issue)... so I removed M&M and restarted the game. This unfortunately didn't help, as no Creatures were spawning at all. I tried a doMobSpawning true, I tried changing the "Change Vanilla Spawns" in CMS, I checked MSC's lists (which were working just fine), I even traveled out a ways and came back... to no avail. I reset CMS, removed it and Mo'C, then reloaded the game. Immediately, PZ, Atmos, and a small amount of vanilla creatures began spawning!
I can only surmise that something is bugged in either Mo'C, CMS, or a cross-compatibility issue with MSC.
Kinda bummed really, because the last day's worth of testing I ended up with no playable content. Oh well, at least what I have now seems to work reasonably.
At one point after wandering a good 1500 blocks due south and 500ish east of our town, the tick rate started getting squirrely. I was seeing the server ticks jump up to 40ms or higher and the server chugged to a crawl over the course of a couple minutes. Out of curiosity I flipped the server to Peaceful to clear the hostile spawns and ended up crashing it. Rebooting cleared everything up and tickrates resumed normal operating parameters.
By the time I had gotten to that point hostile spawns had all but ceased, with occasional loner spawns popping up as I explored. Running a /butcher world hostile command immediately caused new spawns to dot the map in their usual clusters, so I'm still seeking the fabled bottleneck it seems. Another observation is that running a radius butcher command to clear vanilla animals out of the conflicted highlands biome (which MSC cannot set spawns for due to both Highlands and Twilight Forest having the same biome name) it also immediately triggered a wave of hostile spawns once the spawns were freed up. Something is fishy there, when forcibly despawning a couple dozen sheep is freeing up the monster spawn cap...
I need to check and see if the Forge Essentials butcher command is smart enough to not remove pets. If I can run a /butcher world passive to clear out all the vanilla animals that have spawned in the highlands biome it may help going forward, but sadly there is a highlands plot not far from our town which will undoubtedly cause more vanilla spawns to crop up and eat up spawn cap. At the least it gives me the ability to wipe the slate clean without rebooting the server.
@sirdave79 - DivineRPG is neat because of the added progression, which is something most of us in my group feel the game lacks normally. My only real gripe with the mod is that the transition from overworld to Divine dimensions is very jarring, and the mobs they put in the overworld (crabs, dramcryx, etc) are overly powerful even for what would be end-game in vanilla. Despite that, the mod does had a LOT of useful utility features including storage blocks (3x3 grid solid block like iron, gold etc) for almost every building material, lots of new lamp types and the ability to dye many building materials. The summonable boss spawns are very cool as well for those who like more of a challenging RPG experience over peaceful building
All of that said it looks like you can definitely wipe the Divine mobs off the spawn list without issue. Currently I've had to do that because the aforementioned "deep cave" mobs spawning in all light levels seem to hog the spawn cap during the daylight hours when nothing else is eligible to spawn. I don't know why they decide it's okay to spawn 40 or 60 blocks underground far away from players though, it's very frustrating to deal with but I would hate to have to remove ALL of those mobs. They do serve an important function in the mod's progression toward delving the pocket dimensions.
The EntitiyLiving Despawn Method:
Any creature that can despawn will
* Despawn if farther than 128 (16384.0 squared) from the nearest player
* Despawn if age is greater than 600 and farther than 32 (1024.0 squared) from the nearest player
Edit: The distance values here were changed to accurately represent that they are squared distances
If distance is less than 32 (1024.0 squared), the age of the entity is set at zero.
There is a persistance requried NBT which will override the above if true and the creature will never despawn.
There is the canDespawn() method which is usually overridden by creature type mobs to tell it to never despawn.
The EntityLiving Despawn method can be overriden by the creature if the modmaker desired to do so. And can therefore choose not to follow these conventions.
What happens is that during th spawn loop it tries to spawn the selected monster 4 times. Any time it spawns succesfully it counts the successful attempts that calls a method in creature maxSpawnInChunk (which defaults to 4) to see if it should stop.
For Example, lets say maxSpawn In Chunk is 2. Any attempt could fail (for example, already occupired by a creature or in water)
A1: Fail, A2: Fail, A3: Success, A4: Success, Result: Two Spawned
A1: Success, A2: Fail, A3: Success, A4: Does Not Happen, Result: Two Spawned
A1: Success, A2: Success, A3: Does Not Happen, A4: Does Not Happen, Result: Two Spawned
A1: Fail, A2: Fail, A3: Fail, A4: Success, Result: One Spawned
I'll be exposing maxSpawnInChunk to the config in my mods official update.
Note that creature types, when spawning with the chunk, will respect the min/max you set with MSC.
Can I get a link/source? That does sound interesting. Hopefully they'll do something to differentiate above/below ground spawning. Or have the cap set in smaller chunk groups / per chunk.
Bats have a number of conditions to stop them from spawning. Chief amongst is anytime above y == 63 they fail. Also more likely to fail proportional to the light level. There is a calender in there which I assume is checking time. Day or night, not really sure?
Rhaz does mention they don't appear to be adhering to the caps at all though. The degree is due to how the finch never stop on the ground. They happen to 'work' by chance. Hoping that they can be balanced by terrain features, spawn rates may work on occasion but will fail drastically other times.
I'm assuming he's still using the below by the way.
M&M's owner quickly replied, saying config options will be added, and creatures will despawn correctly in an update.
Got to admit that I too have passed on DivineRPG for now. A few of us on the server browsed their wiki, and we realized a few key hostile mobs spawning underground in any light level was too much hassle when we already had a huge underground complex built. That world is currently saved and on the back burner for now though. Also, the sheer size of the mod felt pretty intimidating. Seemed like a lot to throw at players all at once, so it's been sitting in the "someday, maybe" pile.
@MohawkyMagoo - I've never tried any of the AI mods, but I have a low-end computer. When I buy my next comp, I'll probably keep this one running to test things on. I'd rather test on an old PC anyway, as I can see the effects from the perspective of the lowest common denominator so to speak.
As for W&M spawning by itself, I haven't had that issue before. While I was testing it yesterday, my MSC was running but had literally nothing on its spawn list (another minor issue I've been having where in new worlds MSC often doesn't auto-activate mod mobs but definitely finds them, and sometimes ALL mobs are turned off including vanilla). Anyway, nothing from W&M spawned by itself so I have no clue what's going on there.
@Rhaz - this is a bit of a stretch, and not knowing the progression of DivineRPG or your server, it might not be useful at all... but would it be possible to remove the troublesome mobs, and sell whatever it is from the important ones (I'm assuming much-needed drops) somewhere in-game? It would take some redstone knowledge, but I'd think a command block and/or dispenser system (set to sell 1 item at a time so people don't raid the dispenser for the price of 1 item) could possibly work. Of course, that too has a number of drawbacks, and probably isn't even worth it for a small server.
LOL how noob of me, lemme go check... ohhhhh snap! Zhark didn't leave a link/source, and googling turned up nothing. Will edit my above post and reply to Zhark's post asking for source.
@Crudedragos: You're correct, I'm still using the same ambient settings. One of the spoiler tags in my above post has the exact settings from the biome our town in situated in, for reference. Those have largely remained unchanged in my experiments because ambient critters, bugs, etc are acceptable as is to me. They still exhibit the quirky behavior spawning in clusters and all of that but it's fine for those particular mobs to do so.
The spawn settings and caps seem to have some weirdness going on. Buried in one of my prior posts I mention having the DivineRPG "Ender Watcher" creature spawning with a min/max of 6/6, yet they always spawn one at a time no matter what. I'm not really sure what's up with the clustered spawning and mobs not adhering to the caps. I still need to roll back to v4.5.0 of Mo'Creatures and see what that does.
For your ambient, The Spawn Caps are not being adhered to at the least because none of the Mo'Creatures Creature Types: http://pastebin.com/y79L7fyc are ambient.
The spawn settings are similar. The min/mac or 6/6 only matter for Creature type if spawning with a chunk. Otherwise a different quantity is used which defaults to 4 but can be overriden by the modder. in the case of Ender Watcher I would assume this was set to 1. You could petition the relevent modders to place it into the config, the method for reference is getMaxSpawnedInChunk().
Assuming its configurable by NBT you should be able to. Doubt it'd be the prefered interface but it should be possible. Your biggest issue is knowing the fields apriori.
The spawn cap is irrelevant as we've established those entities wouldn't count anyway. Its about how fast they can spawn. More creatures on the ground lends to a significantly smaller spawn rate. It doesn't seem like something that would make such a huge difference, but it'd be what I noticed when I first created them. Couple that with an open biome and entity lag is sure to follow.
It didn't occur to me earlier, and I'm sure someone has mentioned it, but do the relevent Mo'C spawn in the same 'clumpy way' as most other creatures?
@Crudedragos: I've used the MSC overrides to attempt importing all the listed mobs as ambient, but I assume somewhere along the line that isn't getting the job done. You'd know more about the process than I do, but it seems like both ways (explicitly imported as ambient vs. just throwing them in ambient and calling it done) give similar or identical results in practice.
For future modding consideration is it remotely possible to utilize a method of enumerating all the mobs, finding their relevant spawn settings and limitations and then making them configurable? I know it's possible to output a list, and I'm sure it'd be considerably more work to grab the settings and attempt to short-circuit mods' own spawning settings but perhaps sometime someone might be willing to take a crack at it. Then again I'm just a micromanager with my server settings and want to be able to tweak anything and everything when possible
Also, I forgot all about Custom NPCs! I've heard of it, but never tried it - sounds amazing... and way easier (and more flavorful) than a complicated redstone setup!
@sirdave79 - I recall there are a couple (they are rare though) mods out there to repair enchanted items without XP. One is called Craft and Enchant, whose main feature is changing up the enchantment process entirely, but allows you to break down old enchanted items (other than books) to get magic dust. The dust can be combined with each other in a normal craft table to make basic materials (4 gold gusts = a gold ingot, etc.), or you can use them to repair like-material weapons/tools/armor. As a side note, I had players complaining about the random factor of enchanting (Silk Touch, amirite?), but didn't want the "gimme" feature of Enchanting Plus. Craft and Enchant puts a step in between requiring certain materials to get your effects. Some are easy (iron ingot, feather, etc.), others not so much (ender eye, ghast tear, blaze powder, etc.). So far, the players seem to like it. Truth be told, I haven't repaired an item with dust yet... but I'm saving a level here and there by not having to hope for the right random enchant I want, allowing me to actually make use of the anvil and not feel starved for XP.
@Crudedragos - When I was using Mo'C, its mobs seemed to spawn like the rest (small clumps), both monsters and creatures.
@Rhaz - thanks for the DRPG info. As I said before, I was kind of intimidated to try it... but combining it with the ideas mentioned above sounds like a lot of fun!
*Runs off to check out DRPG and Custom NPCs*
Since we know from Crudedragos' posts that the ambient mobs I've imported do not internally count as "ambient" in regards to the spawn caps, I may undo that change and add them to the "animals" category. This would let me spread out spawn weights considerably and provide more mobs to sparse biomes like deserts where scorpions can flood the place easily.
If either of you guys (re: Mohawky and sirdave) drop in DivineRPG could you test the Mo'Creatures wraith mob and let me know if it spawns for you? It seems like Divine has a "wraith" as well that might be causing neither entity to spawn. It's not a huge issue because I can always use the flamewraith instead, I'm just wondering if it's that mod combo doing it or my config.
It seems like one of the Divine dimensions has a "Wraith" while Mo'Creatures has the "wraith". The only difference is the case, which isn't taken into account anywhere but the formal name of the entity I guess.
I went ahead and migrated my "ambient" critters (sans bats, they're ambient by default anyway) to the "creature" category and saw immediate changes in spawning behavior globally. I may need to increase the cap if these mobs are now correctly counting against the right category. I can definitely confirm that regardless of the MSC override, those mobs WILL be considered "creature" because Rei's Minimap will show them as white dots on the radar.
With the omission of vanilla animals in the spawn config (except the "highlands" biome as noted) I'm getting pretty solid results on animal spawns. I have to take an off day or weekend and run the server a long stretch of 6+ hours straight to see how long it takes to bottleneck. Hostile mobs seemed to be doing well but there is a distinct lack of spawns in certain biomes which I need to investigate. What good is a jungle with dangerous spawns if they never show up, right?
Last two days I had instances where the server tickrate plummeted (ticks reading 100-160ms per tick which is insane) leading to server crashes. Not sure of the cause yet but both cases involved lots of long distance exploring and chunk generating by at least 1 player.
To read the properties? Absolutely. To Alter them, no. Well, most of them you can, but not all. Minus the few properties it cannot access, this is what MSC does.
Global Propertes - These are not effective for each creature modders to control, but MSC can do well.
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Property Name: spawnList Cap
MSC Access: Read/Write
Values: Seperate Cap for Monster, Creature, Ambient, WaterCreature
Property Name: spawnList Tick Frequency
MSC Access: Read/Write
Values: Seperate rate for Monster, Creature, Ambient, WaterCreature
Creature Properties - All of Thses can be accesed and made configurable by the creature-modder by definition
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Property Name: spawnList Type
MSC Access: Read/Write
Values: Monster, Creature, Ambient, WaterCreature
Use: If spawnList does not match Creature Type, the creature will not count towards the spawnList Cap
Property Name: creature Type
MSC Access: Read Only
Values: Monster, Creature, Ambient, WaterCreature
Use: If Creature Type does not match spawnList type it does not count towards the spawnList Cap
Property Name: MinInChunk
MSC Access: Read/Write
Property Name: MaxInChunk
MSC Access: Read/Write
Property Name: MaxSpawnInChunk
MSC Access: Read Only
Property Name: canDespawn()
MSC Access: Hacky, but can be Read/Write, subject to error. Likely better to get creature modders to implement.
Sadly, it doesn't look like we'll be able to get a 'creature Type' hook into forge. Which isn't realistically suprising considering where it would need to be. It technically should be possible if davidee wanted to create a core mod. I don't know if Davidee is familiar with ASM though and its non-trivial. It would likely be better for creature modders to expose it as a config option.
MaxSpawnInChunk should/may be possible, assuming Lex is in a good mood when I fix it up.
There are some inherent limitation. Chunks being verticallaly infinite. Only 4 creature types. Honestly, additional creature types would probably be the greatest advantage to a custom system.