Low/incorrect chunk load distance on far view setting

Reproduced in 1.6.2

I'm surprised so few people have noticed this. But then I didn't report it for the longest time, either.

It seems the server tries to take into account the render distance, but misinterprets the value. The client sends far=0, normal=1, short=2, tiny=3. The server calculates distance=256>>value, which becomes far=256, normal=128, short=64, tiny=32. So far, so good. But at that point it interprets it as a number of chunks, only applying it if it's in the range (3, 15), i.e. never. So the server always uses 10 chunks, or whatever is in its configuration file. It's odd that there's a setting at all when it should really be irrelevant, had the extant code to use the client's value worked properly. What did Mojang really want to do?

You can work around it by running a dedicated server with view-distance=15. You can still easily see the edges, but at least there are more chunks. The integrated server can't be persuaded without modding it.

This is still an issue in 13w38c, even with the new "render distance" slider. Any option beyond 10 chunks remains at 10.