Modnote
Please do not use the comments to discuss, take discussion to the discussions page on reddit.
As weighted pressure plates have to be changed now that the decision about this gamerule seems final, please participate in a discussion in this Reddit-thread here what your ideas for a change for weighted pressure plates would be so they'd be of use again for the technical community.
1.11 will introduce the new gamerule "maxentityCramming" which will be "ON" by default and set to "24".
With this default-ON-gamerule not more than 24 entities at one time will be able to be in one spot, more than 24 will suffocate and die.
"maxentityCramming" is a pure performance gamerule.
While it is very useful for the Creative community and also for servers which suffer from entity lag, it should be set to "0" by default = OFF.
Reasons
As it's only a performance gamerule, servers and singleplayers who use commands should set the amount of wanted entities in one spot on their own account, if they want to do so.
As there are also players and servers though which are "dedicated decidedly Vanilla Survival" and do not make use of any commands including gamerules as this would go against "Vanilla Survival", this will force them to play with that gamerule and its 24 default entities in one spot.
Those Vanilla players and servers will not be able anymore to e.g. make proper Elytra boosters, Elytra Launcher stations across their world (mainly Overworld+The End dimension), which will be a negative change for those Vanilla players and servers and their infrastructure by losing this awesome feature.
Elytra is very much loved, but only with Elytra Launcher stations they can be really enjoyed and can be practically used on Vanilla Survival servers and Singleplayer worlds.
As 24 entities will basically never be in one spot without a player being responsible for it, "maxentityCramming" gamerule should be OFF by default, as it's only really useful for non-Vanilla-servers and the Creative Tech community. If a player is willingly responsible for the accumulation of mobs in one spot, it's up to their decision how to deal with possible lag and, dependent on the quality of their hardware, set maxentityCramming accordingly. If a player willingly accumulates mobs in one spot and does not want to use that gamerule, it is, including possible lag, also their very own decision. This highly individual adjustment and decision should not be pre-made for them.
Again: The gamerule can absolutely help servers regarding their performance if they want to.
Servers that use plugins and/or commandblocks do have admins who also know commands well enough and can set "maxentityCramming" themself if they see the need for it.
*Also, what are iron pressure plates then still for?*
An iron/heavyweighted pressure plate changes the signal strength it gives off depending on the number of entities on it.
Signal strength of 15 is reached with 141+ entities.
The default of 24 entities with the "maxentityCramming" gamerule renders them pretty much useless, even more so as golden/lightweighted pressure plates detect only up to 15 entities.
There was the argument that at least those pressure plates would work as intended for those people who use commands to turn off that gamerule.
As the technical community is the main target group to use these pressure plates, and as those who really can make use of those pressure plates are nearly all "decidedly Vanilla" players who would never use commands for their Vanilla worlds, it makes no sense to deprive them from making use of those pressure plates, as they are nearly the only ones using them in the first place, as highly technical players with "many entities being crammed in one spot intentionally".
I'm not a native English speaker so I cannot word it so well like @unknown can, whose comment over on Mojira-Reddit I will thus mostly quote, as he mentioned many things I and some of my technical-player-friends I showed it agree to:
Regardless of if the gamerule's primary objective is to boost performance or affect gameplay, it's not taking into consideration that it's blocking another feature that already existed.
Why have weighted iron plates in the game if, by default, 12 of its 15 states cannot be used without cheating?
Not to mention that gold plates already encompass some of the remaining available states for iron, even further reducing the usefulness.
A singleplayer-playing, cheats-off player taking notice of the useless weighted plate feature has no way of fixing it without using a third-party tool, which does not mean that that player knows that such tools exist and how to use them. Nor does that necessarily mean they are even aware that there is a way of fixing it.
Driving the player to using a third-party tool to fix a feature (that was previously fully available and could otherwise have been defaulted to fully available) is not something that should happen.
That also does not mean that players should "learn" to enable cheats on world creation.
Enabling cheats is optional, not a requirement for being able to fully access all survival features.
Weighted pressure plates were not cheating, after all.
The primary issue I have with it is that a cheat, by default and with no recourse for some, blocks a survival feature that was previously accessible, and requires cheating or (for some) requires third-party tools to access it again.
Keep in mind that weighted plates are not restricted to the technical community.
Everybody has access to this feature, not just a single sub-community, so it does impact everybody (including non-technical players following a tutorial that makes use of weighted iron plates).
An existing and intended feature (weighted iron pressure plates) is being hindered by default for everybody and requires cheats to access them fully again.
Possible solutions to this issue are to change the default value of the gamerule up to the highest value that iron plates can detect.
The popular solution is to change the default of the gamerule to 0 and let players/server admins decide when to use it, while iron plates become fully accessible again.
However, none of those solutions work when the gamerule is changed.
What would probably be an unpopular solution is to remove iron plates entirely, since in their current state, they are near-useless.
I'd like to add to SkylinerW's last sentence here that a removal of weighted pressure plates in favour of the "maxentityCramming" as default-on-gamerule would not only make all technical contraptions which make use of them void, but I'm sure that the reaction of the community would be even more negative than it already is, and they'd oppose that gamerule in the way it is planned of being implemented even more.
Furthermore, as we can see in MC-107171 this gamerule is bugged, entities also take too much damage etc., so it needs to be changed anyway already.
Possible Compromise
As suggested by @unknown:
I think a good case can be made for defaulting to 0 for existing worlds, to avoid damaging contraptions that players have already made. |
I personally could live with that, but I'm not going to have the arrogance to want to decide this for everyone, I only try to mediate between the community and Mojang/Microsoft.
Thus:
Addition to the compromise
Upon creating a world in 1.11+, one could have an option to chose whether maxentityCramming should be OFF/0, or default/24, or, if also possible, inserting an individual value.
In order to figure whether or not the community would be fine with Torabi's idea, I created a poll.
Poll for "worlds created prior to 1.11 should have "maxentityCramming" default-off"
https://twitter.com/LapisDemon/status/784755247596134401
If there is an important reason which I don't see, why "maxentityCramming" was introduced as default-on with the value of 24, and not as an option, please do tell.
On which grounds has it to be "on" and set to "24"?
I know many not only Vanilla Survival players would like Mojang to reconsider adding this gamerule in 1.11 as default "on".
If possible code-wise and if the community would be fine with it, please consider adding some sort of gamerule-selection for this for worlds being created in 1.11+.
Thank you in advance for considering it.
Linked issues
Comments 23
@unknown I have to disagree with you, for the first time };]
people most in need of performance options will also be those least likely to be able to find them, and thus they should be on by default |
People who don't know about this gamerule will even more so not be capable of creating a system where so many mobs are crowded in one single spot.
I also wouldn't take them as not as smart as they are or can be. If a newbie experiences problems, they will very likely ask in the community, their friends etc., and in the end they'll know about that gamerule, via forums and the likes. More and more people, also young people and newbies, use Youtube and Minecraft forums and the likes as general platform to search for.
People nowadays, including newbies, are not as ignorant as they were a few years ago still.
But again: I argue that people who don't know commands are not versed enough to create systems which contain a big amount of entities in one spot.
Servers which suffer from entity lag the most are usually also those who are so big that they got capable admins who do know about such a basic gamerule very well and can take measures however they see fit.
Servers which suffer from entity lag also do fairly know where it comes from.
Again: Entity lag is in nearly 100% of the cases player-induced, willingly and knowingly.
By making this gamerule default-on with a set amount of entities, it's taking away the Vanilla players' individual decision and patronizing them.
To decide this per default for "decidedly Vanilla" players and servers who cannot use any gamerules is depriving them of their gaming experience.
I'd argue that an individual decision has to prioritized over those very few cases where this gamerule can help newbies.
Again: Newbies play the game "as intended" and in the most cases don't do anything that can cause entity lag.
And what about the heavy- and lightweighted pressure plates?
There is a reason why they were implemented.
That default-on-gamerule is taking away for decidedly Vanilla players the majority of the reasoning why they were implemented in the first place.
We are quite aware of the ability of young people and newbies to use youtube and forums to find all sort of "cool" ways to exploit the game's behavior. We see it firsthand when we get a wave of bug reports about the same bizarre thing. People are perfectly capable of mimicking behavior without understanding it, and causing problems for themselves and others.
This absolutely should be the server administrator/owner's decision, and not that of individual players. Making it enabled by default means that players must discuss it with the server administrator first if they wish to exploit the game in this way, rather than players deciding to do it on their own, and the server administrator having to deal with it afterwards. The size of the server is irrelevant – it only takes one player to create a contraption that harms the experience of others, whether it be through monopolizing mob spawns, or causing lag. A smaller server is less likely to have the knowledge or the hardware to deal with the problem, but not necessarily less likely to experience it in the first place.
It's the developer's sole right to determine what "vanilla" behavior is. This particular decision is no different from any other. The developers were nice enough to make it an option, for people who want to have a non-vanilla experience. As you say, if some player knows enough to create such a system, then they should be able to find out about the gamerule as well. The only people this hurts are those who wish to abuse it without the server administrator's permission, and those who don't want to admit to themselves that they're exploiting the game engine in an unintended way.
If players want to play vanilla, then they have to abide by the rules set by the developers. If they want to do something beyond that, they'll have to find a server of like-minded people, rather than imposing their individual decisions on others. If their own self-imposed rules "deprive them of their gaming experience", that's their own problem.
Weighted pressure plates still work with the gamerule enabled. Would you prefer that their full range of output only be supported under the default value of maxentityCramming, or that they remain useful at values outside the default?
Full range of output from weighted pressure plates should still work by default. If a new gamerule limits its ability to function as intended in default settings, then that should be revised. Were there any feature-limiting gamerules that were enabled by default in past updates? Gamerules such as time, weather or keep inventory were disabled by default in order to not interfere with intended features, and to avoid confusion from updates
The default value does not change who makes the decision, because owners will change it however they want regardless of the default settings. Any owner who care for their server would decide on the gamerule settings before updating and implementing the gamerule. As many people have pointed it out, changing a gamerule is trivial. It doesn't take a lot to change the settings before updating the server, so I have no idea what makes you think smaller servers' hardware is relevant to the discussion.
So let me ask you this question: Why should this gamerule be on by default, when it causes confusion, restricts intended features, and confuses the majority of the playerbase, while server admins will make use the gamerule regardless of the default value?
Two important preceding cases:
Quasiconnectivity was originally an unintended behaviour of the engine. Due to the massive demand of it by players, it was kept in the PC version, albeit removed in the "Innovation" codebase. Grum has confirmed that it was, indeed, a "bug turned feature".
Minecart boosting was originally a bug in the engine related to minecart bounding boxes. Upon the addition of powered rails, which effectively deprecated them, it was removed.
In other words, Minecraft has had cases of both bugs becoming features and bugs not becoming features.
So the gamerule (and it's default value) were added to increase performance and/or break farms?
Just as an idea, how about a behaviour like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-38UPTj-Nl4
Weighted pressure plates still would need to be redefined, but maxentityCramming has this issue as well anyway.
This idea might even be more controversial than the gamerule, so please keep in mind that this is not a discussion forum and take discussion to the Reddit.
We've been talking about this problem for several years, so my only regret is that we didn't add this sooner.
The pressure plate issue is a valid point and their design should be re-evaluated.
@unknown What problem? Farms or performance?
Your answer seems very vague and doesn't answer the question of those asking why this decision has been made in the first place.
I'm curious how you'll re-evaluate the design of weighted pressure plates, given the maximum of entities of 24 in one spot, so they can be used in a technical way like before.
(Of course I'm not going to use this bugpost anymore to discuss that decision, I just felt I had to reply to it one last time.)
Do not change pressure plates. You can still get about 100 mobs on one pressure plate by separating 24 in each corner with glass (that will give power of 10).
Please, make this gamerule optional with default off or default 150 to keep old behaviour of iron pressure plate without using glass pane.
@unknown I'll try to collect the community's input about the weighted pressure plates, maybe you'd want to have a look at it in a few days, unless you already got an idea yourself about their future design: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/56y4nv/maxentitycramming_gamerule_remains_defaulton
One thing I always thought was "expensive" in terms of performance was to have stacked items countable, because it changed at some point when items stacked together; turns out, after I asked a coder, it apparently wouldn't be a strain on performance, so that'd be one of the things that would be great if it could be re-added to the game, after the change that stacked same items couldn't be counted individually anymore.
Maybe that's how the plates could be different: One that counts stacked items and maybe even mobs of the same type, and the other plate doesn't, or the plates weigh different types of entities on them, e.g. items, mobs, XP orbs; but I'll wait for the input of the tech community, they might come up with more sophisticated ideas.
In general, the people most in need of performance options will also be those least likely to be able to find them, and thus they should be on by default unless they have a serious impact on compatibility or the intended game experience. People with better hardware, or who explicitly desire something different from the defaults have the option of changing it.
It should be clear that these Elytra boosters or launchers are not intended vanilla gameplay, and are an abuse of the game engine. If someone wants to create such a thing, they would still have the option, but they'll have to decide which is more important to them: playing pure vanilla, or abusing the game engine to create a contraption.