Map cache or such to spped things up?

[freejack]

Is there a way once an area is rendered that it could be cached so it doesn't have to render it again? I go back to areas and each time ti takes longer to render. I have killed moretrees, mob framework, and swamps. That has made a difference. This is a G5 DL360 Server with Dual Xeon Quad Cores with 12GB of ram. This should not be making this run like this. I have a minecraft server we run off this and when people are in it with 106 plugins it does not have this issue. I am prefering Minetest over Minecraft except for in the performance. I did the tweaks that are in the forum. it made a difference.

[PilzAdam]

1) The server doesnt affect the performance of clients when it comes to rendering.
2) The meshes of MapBlocks are cached when they are rendered.

[freejack]

Well for some reason it keeps respawning a village it already spawned over and over...........haven't found the reason for it yet.


A village spawned at: x=-324, z=269
A village spawned at: x=-324, z=269
A village spawned at: x=-324, z=269
12:14:21: ACTION[ServerThread]: Freejack places node default:torch at (-258,-153,215)
- default:torch 's place count is now 808
12:14:21: ACTION[ServerThread]: Freejack places node default:torch at (-260,-156,210)
- default:torch 's place count is now 809
12:14:21: ACTION[ServerThread]: Freejack places node default:torch at (-266,-159,208)
- default:torch 's place count is now 810
12:14:22: ACTION[ServerThread]: Freejack places node default:torch at (-268,-162,203)
- default:torch 's place count is now 811
12:14:22: ACTION[ServerThread]: Freejack places node default:torch at (-274,-164,201)
- default:torch 's place count is now 812
A village spawned at: x=-324, z=269
12:14:47: ACTION[ServerThread]: player Freejack crafts default:torch 4
12:14:47: ACTION[ServerThread]: player Freejack crafts default:torch 4
12:14:47: ACTION[ServerThread]: player Freejack crafts default:torch 4
A village spawned at: x=-324, z=269
A village spawned at: x=-324, z=269
12:15:11: ACTION[EmergeThread2]: Created mine at (-157,-177,367)
12:15:18: ACTION[ServerThread]: Freejack places node default:torch at (-276,-169,196)
- default:torch 's place count is now 813
12:15:29: ACTION[ServerThread]: Freejack places node default:torch at (-294,-149,260)

That is part of this slow up.....

[rubenwardy]

Post in the mod's thread.

[roku]

What we need is something like this:

https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/353

Basically clients should be able to cache the map, meaning the server would only need a fraction of the bandwidth it does now to host players.

[twoelk]

?
Clients do keep the parts of the map in memory that are relevant to the player.
Sometimes you can see how far chunks are unloaded from the cache to make room for new chunks that become relevant at the new position or direction of view.
The thing is players can change said map in realtime. All players at all times. Singleplayer maps are not the problem here.

This is fundamentally different to other games with large maps such as WOW or GTA or most FPS. There the map can be stored on the client and only the player position and action needs to be transfered. Maybe these maps offer some limited interaction with some objects but this usually is achieved with a fixed number of possible states wich are allready stored in a library on the client side. The changes to a map in these games are kept predictable to allow actions of a lot of players at the same time and yet if I remember correctly a lot of servers had difficulties with 50 or more players near each other at the same time, that value is probably higher now but there still are limits. (And yes SecondLife and derivates had similar problems)

Games such as Minetest are totally different. Any player can change any potential node position in a very large number of ways and can do pretty unpredictable things with some things such as mesecons, tubes or simply lava and water. On a server this multiplies rather quickly with the number of players that are present. Imagine ten players pillar-jumping within sight of each other at the same time - that would be a lot of map updates besides player position needed to be calculated and sent to each player at the same time and there is not much you can cache beforehand to help you speed things up. And now imagine each player is doing stupid stuff with lava and water while pillar jumping. As far as I know there is no easy way to get this to work without a lot of data transfer not to mention recalculating the view of each player at very short intervalls on the client side.

[sfan5]

1) The server doesnt affect the performance of clients when it comes to rendering.

but it affects the performance if chunks are loading or someone places nodes near you

Wrong, the server affects zero of the rendering performance on the client.

[roku]

Clients do keep the parts of the map in memory that are relevant to the player.

The caching isn't very good. You can leave an area of the map, come back, have absolutely nothing change in the few seconds you were gone, and the server is strained to resend those exact same chunks back to you.

Games such as Minetest are totally different.

I've seen people talk about this in other contexts and the general consensus is that miencraft can easily host 50+ players while minetest starts running into lag issues at less than 10 players. You can always tell when it's bandwidth related because that's when it starts taking extra time for the server to send you chunks.

[twoelk]

but it affects the performance if chunks are loading or someone places nodes near you

Wrong, the server affects zero of the rendering performance on the client.

ok, the client's minetest affects this while chunkloading and other things which change the map

PilzAdam/sfan5
yeah, yeah,
nothing the server does effects the rendering on the client.
For all the client cares the server is just a myth, it doesn't need it.
The client can just as well predict some action and render that.

Are you just argueing over the hyper correct wording and the exact and terminology for the explecit technical issue occurring?

sarcasm_end

If the client wants to render something he needs to know what and this information or updates on changes to known information come from the server. So if the server does not provide the correct information at the correct time the client runs into trouble no matter how fast or slow it can render. I cannot believe the exact technical proccess can be very much different from that except for beeing a lot more complicated but still beeing essentially the same problem.

So yes the actuall math performed locally to render my player's view is not the problem but the values coming from the server which collects it from other clients and map-changing-sources. The foreign values needed to be fed into my locally rendering math.