FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

When using sand, desert sand, or gravel to fill in and drain liquids, and re-mining said node, I often find I have less than nodes than when I started. In addition, whenever someone on a server I'm playing on has been working with sand, desert sand, or gravel, some of those nodes will start popping up where other people are building, mining, or whatever, sometimes even replacing other nodes. From what we can piece together, we think there is something wrong with falling nodes, and that when they fall, they are sometimes placed at drastically incorrect coordinates. Because they only seem to show up where people are working, I think that if the falling node is incorrectly placed in a section of the map that isn't loaded, it just disappears forever, but if it lands in a section that is in use, correctly or incorrectly, it goes back to being a regular node.

I don't know if this has been reported yet, but I didn't see a topic about it. It seemed to have started with the release or 0.4.4 though. I've just been to lazy to post about it.

maybe you should PM Moderator Paste This Post And Send

This happens because when a sand/gravel/etc node is updated (for example, when you dig or place a node next to them) they temporarily become an entity (since nodes aren't capable of smooth movement). When they hit the floor the code places the original node at that pos, and removes the entity.
Now, it you logout while there are such entities lying around (before it hits the floor or in some bugs I've also been experiencing), some entities are "teleported" to the location of the player when they login again. When this happens, the entity hits the floor and BAM! It is as if the falling node was there the whole time.

kaeza wrote:This happens because when a sand/gravel/etc node is updated (for example, when you dig or place a node next to them) they temporarily become an entity (since nodes aren't capable of smooth movement). When they hit the floor the code places the original node at that pos, and removes the entity.
Now, it you logout while there are such entities lying around (before it hits the floor or in some bugs I've also been experiencing), some entities are "teleported" to the location of the player when they login again. When this happens, the entity hits the floor and BAM! It is as if the falling node was there the whole time.

With wich version of Minetest did you experienced this?

PilzAdam wrote:With wich version of Minetest did you experienced this?

I started to notice it somewhere in 0.4.4 (can't remember dev version).
As another example, all the "unknown object" markers that appears when you remove a mod and there are leftover entities, and the markers used by the worldedit mod, appear at my position when I logout/login.
This bug manifested a few times in singleplayer, but it's hard to reproduce.
It should be noted that it still happens in latest git (although somewhat at a smaller rate).

kaeza wrote:This happens because when a sand/gravel/etc node is updated (for example, when you dig or place a node next to them) they temporarily become an entity (since nodes aren't capable of smooth movement). When they hit the floor the code places the original node at that pos, and removes the entity.
Now, it you logout while there are such entities lying around (before it hits the floor or in some bugs I've also been experiencing), some entities are "teleported" to the location of the player when they login again. When this happens, the entity hits the floor and BAM! It is as if the falling node was there the whole time.

I understand that falling nodes are entities. However, the error occurs even when no one is logging in or out. Also, it seems to teleport the falling nodes to OTHER players. For example, I was digging gravel in one spot, and the falling nodes were teleported to Rarkenin, who was about 15000 nodes (about a quarter of the map size) away, a couple even taking the place of some of his glass. Later, he was digging sand somewhere, and some sand ended up in my wall, removing the cobble that had been there.

0gb.us wrote:

kaeza wrote:This happens because when a sand/gravel/etc node is updated (for example, when you dig or place a node next to them) they temporarily become an entity (since nodes aren't capable of smooth movement). When they hit the floor the code places the original node at that pos, and removes the entity.
Now, it you logout while there are such entities lying around (before it hits the floor or in some bugs I've also been experiencing), some entities are "teleported" to the location of the player when they login again. When this happens, the entity hits the floor and BAM! It is as if the falling node was there the whole time.

I understand that falling nodes are entities. However, the error occurs even when no one is logging in or out. Also, it seems to teleport the falling nodes to OTHER players. For example, I was digging gravel in one spot, and the falling nodes were teleported to Rarkenin, who was about 15000 nodes (about a quarter of the map size) away, a couple even taking the place of some of his glass. Later, he was digging sand somewhere, and some sand ended up in my wall, removing the cobble that had been there.

What version of Minetest are you using (only the one that runs on the server is interesting).

This seems to be the old attachment bug... that was caused by uninitialised stuff.
Update to the latest git and it should be fixed.

PilzAdam wrote:What version of Minetest are you using (only the one that runs on the server is interesting).

All servers that have his issus seem to be running the latest stable version, 0.4.4.

Zeg9 wrote:This seems to be the old attachment bug... that was caused by uninitialised stuff.
Update to the latest git and it should be fixed.

So it's been fixed in the unstable version? Okay, great. I guess I wait for 0.4.5 then. Thanks!

0gb.us wrote:

kaeza wrote:This happens because when a sand/gravel/etc node is updated (for example, when you dig or place a node next to them) they temporarily become an entity (since nodes aren't capable of smooth movement). When they hit the floor the code places the original node at that pos, and removes the entity.
Now, it you logout while there are such entities lying around (before it hits the floor or in some bugs I've also been experiencing), some entities are "teleported" to the location of the player when they login again. When this happens, the entity hits the floor and BAM! It is as if the falling node was there the whole time.

I understand that falling nodes are entities. However, the error occurs even when no one is logging in or out. Also, it seems to teleport the falling nodes to OTHER players. For example, I was digging gravel in one spot, and the falling nodes were teleported to Rarkenin, who was about 15000 nodes (about a quarter of the map size) away, a couple even taking the place of some of his glass. Later, he was digging sand somewhere, and some sand ended up in my wall, removing the cobble that had been there.

The thing, is, the gravel popped up in glass, but not necessarily where I was digging. I was simply descending a long spiral staircase when I found that the glass got replaced by gravel, which subsequently fell.