Beacon Beam disappears while looking upwards from it

Sorry, rebuilt the setup in the picture with staned glass, able to reroduce now.

Strange. Perhaps it only happens when there's a lot of glass involved?

Exactly at -31.3 degrees, it stops showing the beam.
Edit: ...or 6 blocks away from the player... someone is being derpy today, sorry. 🙂

Confirmed. Only happens with colored beams at least 6 blocks away from the beacon beam

Also, the higher above a beacon you are, the lower the angle needs to be before the beam disappears. For example, 20 blocks above the beacon, the beam disappears before I even get to looking level much less looking up. At 26 blocks it's ~ -30 degrees (if 0 degrees is looking forward).

Reproduced.

Also works with regular beacons as well....

I can confirm this with regular beacons in 1.7.10.

Confirmed on 14w24c!
On 14w34b this isn´t an issue for me.

This bug is still present in 14w34d.

Confirmed en 14w34d

Confirmed

This issue is duplicated by MC-68523. Not sure if the duplicates should be reported or not, I haven't helped much on here yet. =)

Confirmed with 14W34D snapshot - looking at downward angle light appears, looking at or above beacons light disappears.

Confirmed. Looking downward works, level or upward doesn't.

Confirmed.

Bug is still present in 1.8-Pre1

Yep, I'm experiencing that one too in 1,8-pre. Looking down - beacon light there, looking up, beacon light gone.

Am I the only one who knows why this happens?
You know how item frames unload if your not looking at them....
Unload as in disappear
Item frames with Maps Unload, when you look away
This is why...
It's a Item Load Bug.
Happens with abunch of stuff!
If you would like me to list abunch of affected stuff I will, since Mojang most likely doesn't know.
Item frames unload since they came out, Beacons also can lag as in
You see the bottom and then it flickers on and off.
It's still unbelievable how these bugs are there and mojang doesn't know...

Thomas, that's incorrect. You're describing MC-1058, but beacons are not entities.

Definitely a big bug here. Would like to see fixed. The colored beacons are great, don't ruin them now.

Also, the beacons' movement is slower than usual, maybe even 2-3 fps. This was much less than the 96 fps I got otherwise.

That's MC-1279.

I'm pretty sure that what is happening here is that if the beacon block itself would be in the field of view of the player (ignoring anything in between / blocking it) then the beacon is visible. If the beacon would be off the screen (usually below the bottom edge of the screen) then the beacon disappears. I've got a deeply buried beacon, so this bug is extremely annoying!

Nope, just experimented. Beacon block definitely isn't in my field of view (I've got one running up inside a tower up to the world limit), but the beacon beam is visible as long as I look at a slight angle from above. So the bug doesn't have anything to do with if the beacon block is within what the screen is momentarily showing.

Confirmed for 1.8pre2

sleepyowlet, yes I agree. The place I was testing had a threshold close to that, but as I get higher, the problem occurs significantly before the block would be in the field of view.

I would say, however, that to reproduce this bug you should make sure the beacon you are testing with is significantly below your current altitude. If I am close in y value to the beacon, I don't notice a problem. The further above the beacon I am at, the bigger the problem seems to be. Since beacons are meant to be buried deeply (their area of affect is larger when they are deeply buried) this bug is likely to be frequently seen.

THis has been annoying me all day 😞

Dolphin263: Yes, I noticed that to. Also, the closer you are to the beam, the worse it gets. I've got a couple in and around really high towers as decoration, so I could fly around them and see what happens. The bug does seem to be connected to where you are yourself in relation to the beacon block, because if you happen to be below it, you can see the beam just fine when looking up.

I've also noticed that if you look at the beacon straight on, you are less likely to see it than if you looked further to the side,

Looks as though this won't even be fixed in 1.8. 😛

From what I can tell, it seems to happen because of chunk sections (16x16x16 parts of chunks) not rendering when outside of the player's view, and if the renderer doesn't know there's a beacon there, it doesn't render the beam. The other possibility is that the beam is rendered like an entity, and its location is set to be at the beacon block, so when you can't see the beacon, the beam is technically out of view, according to the entity renderer.

Still present in pre3, I have a Beacon in an underground area and when the Beacon source is out of my cone of vision, the beam disappears.

Conor McS, I was just going to post the same finding. I was playing with beacon colors (rainbow) and created 32 beacons in a line and found a bunch of beacon beams disappear at once, but not all of them or one at a time. I realized that they were disappearing in groups of 16 on chunk boundaries. I was testing in pre-3.

Reproduced. When the beacon isn't in the FOV, the beam disappears.

Confirmed for 1.8. This is a noticeable glitch and should be easy to fix, wonder how it got in the official update.

Yup, same here. Can only see beacon beam when looking down. Been like that through several snapshots and the pre-releases. I'm surprised it hasn't been fixed yet and made it into the 1.8 final. 😞

Big problem for me since my home is on an island and I use the beacon as a navigation marker to help me find my way.

Version: Minecraft 1.8
OS: Linux Mint-17 Mate
Intel Haswell based PC with Nvidia GTX 760 graphics card
Nvidia-331-updates (331.38-ubuntu7.1) graphics driver

Sadly, this bug makes completely useless to place a beacon at y=10, because the light isnt displayed for people walking as usual in the surface unless they intentionally look down... what kills the goal of the light.

Version: Minecraft 1.8
Graphic card: Nvidia GTX 560.

This breaks the appearance of my world as well, as beacons play an important part in it's design. Beacon beams should be excluded from the visibility culling code.

beacon pillar lights will disappear only if the beacon is not on screen (Or anywhere in the view of the rendering engine's frame where the player looks through from the real world), this is probably due to the whole cave rendering thing added in 1.8.

69 votes right now, so Mojang have probably seen the bug (though you never know...) and are working hard to fix it. No assignment yet, but I think they are. This will be fixed in 1.8.1, no doubt.

Something interesting (and maybe useful): under a certain setup, there are actually two ranges of angles causing the pillar to disappear (both narrow). That is, as I move the mouse up, it disappears for a second, then reappears, and disappears again when I'm almost looking straight up. I'm uploading all my screenshots for this.

In all screenshots (except the first) I'm standing atop the emerald pillar. As I move the camera up (screenshot 2~7), the light disappears, reappears, then disappear again.

Note: I'm using the default superflat world. There are 5 air blocks between the pyramid and the emerald pillar.

Here are 2 more examples right at the border of a section where it becomes really clearly visible.

Due to the new culling algorithm beacons aren't rendered anymore if the section they are in is out of view, unfortunately this often means that beacon beams become invisible since they reach far up into the sky. Breaks the asthetics of beacon beams completely.

Is this a recently introduced bug?

Pretty recent. Occurred as a result of the visibility culling code that was put in to improve performance in 1.8.

The reason this happens is that as Mojang introduced, chunks unload(sort of) while looking away... They should have thought it through a bit more.

Confirmed fixed in 1.8.1-pre1! Thanks!

I am still experiencing this bug.

I am attaching the screenshots that contain the coordinates for the beacon block, the coordinates and field of view numbers at which the beam appears, and the ones at which the beam disappears.

If you need specs, let me know. I'm playing in a supposedly "vanilla" server, but similar issues are present in my single player games.

I use the resource packs by mumbo jumbo.

Yass, you're playing on 1.8. This has been fixed for 1.8.1.