Exploring in minecraft is one of the greatest features, wandering around finding new random structures and with a server of 3 or 4 people you can easily rack up gigs of data over a couple weeks that can be very unwieldy to work with as a server operator. Expense of storage, time required to download a backup of the world, or even worse the time required to UPLOAD the world from a personal computer with typical slow home internet up-bandwidth.
It occurred to me that you could massively reduce file size by saving only deltas (changes) to the randomly generated world rather than saving the entire contents of each chunk. There are a couple of major downsides to this approach however, and I believe it would have to be an optional mode of operation, which might be a maintenance nightmare having two different code paths for saving world state. But, I float the idea anyway:
Downside 1: Increased CPU load. Revisiting explored chunks will require generating them again, which is a large CPU load. This can be mitigated greatly by keeping a cache of recently visited and/or nearby chunks. Reserve X megs of cache for nearby/recently visited chunks and server performance should be fine.
Downside 2: Adding mods that affect world generation to a server already in operation would change the state of already visited chunks. This would be highly undesirable to many. You go to revisit a nice lake you had scouted out earlier only to find wasteland, or a battle tower. Oops. Can't think of many ways to mitigate this problem gracefully.
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It occurred to me that you could massively reduce file size by saving only deltas (changes) to the randomly generated world rather than saving the entire contents of each chunk. There are a couple of major downsides to this approach however, and I believe it would have to be an optional mode of operation, which might be a maintenance nightmare having two different code paths for saving world state. But, I float the idea anyway:
Downside 1: Increased CPU load. Revisiting explored chunks will require generating them again, which is a large CPU load. This can be mitigated greatly by keeping a cache of recently visited and/or nearby chunks. Reserve X megs of cache for nearby/recently visited chunks and server performance should be fine.
Downside 2: Adding mods that affect world generation to a server already in operation would change the state of already visited chunks. This would be highly undesirable to many. You go to revisit a nice lake you had scouted out earlier only to find wasteland, or a battle tower. Oops. Can't think of many ways to mitigate this problem gracefully.