Quote from retroMinecrafter»
I'm curious as to which OS you are (and were) using during your time creating TMCW?
I had Windows 7, though the system (before my father gave it to me) likely originally had XP since the CPU/GPU were from 2005/2006; I got in in 2010 and used it until 2016; as noted in threads like "why do I still play in 1.6.4" this was a major factor in not updating to newer versions, it ran 1.6 decently well, mainly limited by VRAM (only 256 MB), Optifine reduced stutters due to chunk updates but otherwise had no impact on FPS (the "Advanced OpenGL" option did though, doubling it when enabled). Versions since 1.7 introduced a strange stuttering issue where every 10th frame seemed to take half the total frametime, halving FPS from 1.6, with a very noticeable stutter, which worsened in 1.8 due to generally lower FPS (at the time a majority said that 1.8 worsened performance, though these days it seems to be the opposite (at least when it comes to chunk rendering performance, it is true that 1.7.10 and earlier had issues, e.g. with Vsync enabled and a bug where the game simply forgot to render chunks, but I think some people place way too much importance on that single metric, plus the bugs are easy to fix). 1.7 itself also had a known issue that caused freezes and lag spikes, influencing perspectives since most would probably be comparing 1.7 and 1.8):
Another example from "double height terrain", early on I also used Forge with a handful of mods (backpacks, amethyst armor/tools, mini map, plus my own "jar" mods; apparently I thought you made Forge mods by directly editing the source it provides but they obviously didn't work in the mods folder, but did when added manually, and they had the necessary Forge patches so there were no compatibility issues (Optifine does a similar thing to make itself compatible, it is a bit complicated though since you can't just directly reference Forge if you want to be compatible with vanilla by itself):
An example of VRAM exhaustion due to setting leaves to Fancy (even now I still set them to Fast because I prefer their appearance, with some tweaks to the textures so they are more vivid, the black spaces are colored. There is also the option to remove ambient occlusion (shadows) from leaves, as some say they prefer this look (older Alpha/Beta versions didn't have smooth lighting on leaves, making them brighter):
The 1.7+ stuttering was completely independent of any settings, suggesting some weirdness going on in the code or how something the game does interacts with the system/driver (aside from the single frame spikes there was also a distinct sine wave pattern of frametime rising and falling, also visible as a speedup/slowdown):
One thing I find quite interesting about this is that the "C: rendered/total" value is so high, in 1.8 Mojang replaced "Advanced OpenGL" (hardware occlusion queries, albeit not supported well on non-NVIDIA hardware) with their own "Advanced Cave Culling Algorithm", yet it didn't seem to actually cull that much (in fact, there are more sections being rendered than in any of the previous three images, all at the same render distance. the cave I'm in isn't exactly vanilla but not really that big either):
Perhaps the oddest thing about 1.8 is the insane performance drop when going underwater, all the way down to 1-2 FPS, with no possible explanation I could think of (somebody said it had to do with changes to water physics due to ocean monuments, but what changes? The change so water no longer renders its top face below solid blocks? If anything, that should help by culling those faces, though I later heard it had to do with particle rendering, but such a drop never occurred in older versions:
For comparison, this is with and without void fog and/or particles, only the particles caused a significant drop, but still nowhere near as much as water in 1.8 (the particles are essentially the same, void particles are also created much faster and consistently reach the particle limit, the game is creating many more that are just discarded):
Void fog and particles (the apparent decline in memory usage with each successive screenshot is coincidental, though particle creation does increase allocation rate):
No fog (but particles):
Neither (or no particles, fog itself had no noticeable impact, I also disabled all fog, not just void fog, as Optifine didn't have an option for just the latter without also disabling particles):
I've since upgraded computers twice, if still behind current technology; I have Windows 10 (on the last two systems) and it tells me I can't update to Windows 11 but I'm not interested in doing so; likewise, my reason for not updating to newer versions of the game is the lack of any content that interests me, and all the changes I dislike; sure, some could be easily changed with mods (until 1.13 I made "old caves" mods that reverted the changes to caves in 1.7, I also made a mod for 1.8 that reverted the changes to anvils (they removed renaming to keep the cost down), and a "random biomes" mod that removed the "climate" system) but at that point, considering how I play, I may as well just mod any version and it is much easier to stay on the same code base (e.g. all the mods that stopped updating at 1.7.10, 1.12.2, etc), even versions like Beta and older are popular for similar reasons (the most famous example of a "total conversion" / "alternate development path" / "fork" mod being "Better Than Wolves", which did update to 1.5.2 before staying on it until the original creator discontinued it, the Beta 1.7.3 version seems to be the most popular though).
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This is by far the greatest Minecraft version of all time...😌!