FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I set up a local server for testing. Just a few mods including mob redo and mobs monsters

I logged in from a second PC in my LAN and play a little bit. I run into an oerkki. I punched him, but nothing happens. Suddenly bones appear in front of the oerkki, but still nothing else happen. Then the oerkki got some damage and then I got damage, seconds after the bones appear.

I don't want to know how I can solve the actual problem, but I want to discuss what's needed to solve the problem in general, because I know that the engine is the problem. I don't think, that this can be solved in a mod

I recently had big issues with our LAN Raspberry Pi server. I was thinking the mobs redo might be a bit too heavy for it, but it turned out to be a really freak thing with the wireless network cards for all three of our kids (same model) computers. Once I found out the real cause and resolved it, the Pi server runs excellent. With mobs redo and about 20 other mods.
So you may want to consider other possibilities as well before judging too quickly.

And what was the cause, and how you resolved it?
Justly wondering...

MineYoshi wrote:And what was the cause, and how you resolved it?
Justly wondering...

All three of the kids computers had built in wireless lan cards. Desktops with laptop lan cards actually. Only one antenna wire was used on each of them. Plus I believe the performance was poor anyway. I did a speedtest on them and they were getting 4 mibs down and 1 mibs up. On my 2008 laptop on wireless, I get 15 mibs down and 7 mibs up. So I ran cat6 to each of their rooms and got them on wire. I wanted to anyway as I believe there to be way too many wireless devices on our network. It has to be very congested.
The Pi (minetest server) hasn't crashed since until a little bit ago. My daughter had unknowingly selected her wireless connection and crashed the Pi minetest server twice before I discovered what she had done. Tomorrow I will be pulling those damn wifi cards out and stomping on them.

Why I even mention this, is when the server was lagging and acting up, and then finally crashing. The mobs were destroying us and we couldn't fight back. I could even hear, but not see the spider, and taking damage. That sucked. But like I mentioned, now that all is well, the mobs are performing excellent considering we are using a Pi with 5 clients. The only time any lag is sorta noticed is when several clients are exploring new territory in different directions.

burli: it's not just network speed that affects lag, graphics can also slow things down during the game so maybe turning shaders OFF and smooth lighting will help gameplay also.

TenPlus1 wrote:burli: it's not just network speed that affects lag, graphics can also slow things down during the game so maybe turning shaders OFF and smooth lighting will help gameplay also.

I always play without shaders, being sincerely that helps a lot!

MineYoshi wrote:I always play without shaders, being sincerely that helps a lot!

Without the tone mapping shader Minetest looks pale. And my PC should be fast enough to handle this. And why should effect a graphics shader the server?

My daughter has a much older PC and she plays Star Stable on Linux. This game has a more complex graphic then minetest, but run's with a similar or better performance then minetest.

The problem is, that minetest doesn't use the resources of the PC. Minetest uses just two of my six cores, if I run client and server on the same PC. If the mapgen has a lot of work the entities have to wait. Entities should be called much more often or, much better, run in a separate thread.

Paramat said in another thread, that 3d noises in v7 mapgen are not eased because it takes 10ms extra, which is huge, he said. But on the other hand a lot of stuff (caverealms, mines etc) has to be added with lua mapgens. Each chunk has an extra cost of ~50ms just to write the voxel manip back plus the generation itself, which is often faster than the vm write.

My problem is the relation. I don't want to choose between a pale and boring graphic, but responsive mobs or nice landscape, but lagging mobs. My PC has enough power to get both.

So lets come back to my question: what has to be done to get both?

Add this line to your minetest.conf file which should help stop mobs from overpopulating server and slowing things down:

remove_far_mobs = true

burli - specs of machines please? minetest versions? mods installed? platform? 'top' output?

We're clutching at straws and hypothesizing so far...

taikedz wrote:burli - specs of machines please? minetest versions? mods installed? platform? 'top' output?

Server is a AMD FX-6300 with Nvidia GTX750OC2GB, 8GB Ram and a fast SSD.

Client was in this case an older Core2Duo with 4GB Ram and a Nvidia GT210

Both PCs run Ubuntu 64 Bit. I don't remember which mods was installed, but only a few and nothing heavy. And this situation was in a cave, so only a view range of a few nodes and only stone. Even the old PC can handle this with 40FPS and more.

But I run the server from the GUI including the client. I'm not sure, but maybe I hit ESC before I go to the other PC. Maybe this was the reason? But why should a client in the escape menu effect the server?

TenPlus1 wrote:Add this line to your minetest.conf file which should help stop mobs from overpopulating server and slowing things down:

remove_far_mobs = true

This does help, thanks. I think the rest of my lag issues are just mapgen slowdown. I may have to strip all the cave generation out of fun_caves to deal with it. (How's that for irony?)

I have a PC (specs are FX 6300, 6GB RAM, HDD, and a GTX 750 Ti), and my clients are about the same as yours, and it works great, I don't have any mob mods yet, so that could be what is making it slow.
P.S. Minetest runs much better on linux then windows, I'd suggest Xubuntu on the clients, and Kubuntu on the server, that is what I do.