The nice thing about ready-made modpacks is you only need staff to run the server, and not use hours and hours to compile and what not to get it running. If we decide (Could do with a poll or something) to go for one I would suggest Resonant Rise. Biggest modpack atm with more than enough mods to choose from. Also, the modpack might be a little better optimized than a custom made.... Just sayin'.
1.6.4 modpack are easily fine. We could simply reuse alice 1.6, upgrade the mods witinh (bugfix) and we'll be fine too. I'm more into trimming down the current modpack and/or killing some feature that are source of high lagspike.
There isn't only one problem that has led to this situation. One of the issues may well be the actual server, meaning its hardware. There is surely a better option for a reasonable price, and I'm confident there are players who'd gladly contribute economically to mantain it. Next thing to discuss, and what I feel is the most important, is conscience, responsability. When I first joined SKCraft I was surprised by the lack of specific rules or guidelines other than trusting the players, which I thought was incredible, and I was eager to see the comunity. I got to know the community, and although it was mostly kind, helpful and caring, I couldn't help but notice how everyone had everything, and not only that, but massively and automated on all sorts of ways and levels. Which, don't get me wrong, is ok, but when it affects how others can play, maybe it's not that good. No one needs 2 million charcoal. And then there's the other issue that all packs have, you want to explore all mods if possible, but the tendency is to explore it and forget about it, but leave whatever blocks/structures in place, probably making the server work unnecesary. So, having rambled for a while now, my point is that a better server and/or a better, more respectful player base is really the solution, not really crippling the pack.
Last time I checked, we're running on a server with the best single-core performance out there (not single core processor) and it's quite expensive. I don't know why people always think you can get a top of the line server and run a 200 player modded Minecraft server for $20 a month. That's not how this works, that's not how any of this works. "Get a donation button and it'll pay for the server!" -> no it won't. let's face it, most of the community isn't exactly working a full time job to donate monthly. As for the pre-built modpack option, I don't really know why we haven't tried that yet. It would kind of ruin the SKCraft vibe of a 100% custom modpack and stuff, but a prebuilt modpack is better than no modpack. I wouldn't mind having the new Gregtech in it either
I was not saying we could get a server that could handle 200px for 20$ a month, because that's impossible (or a really bad deal from the providers side). But SK briefly mentioned the server specs one day while I was on, and though they were not at all bad, they didn't seem that great. As an example, I'm also in another community on which we run two vanilla servers and a modded one, and we don't get the brutal spikes that we were experiencing here lately. Specs for anyone who understands it: Intel i7 3930K Hexacore @3'2GHz 64GB DDR3 RAM 2x3Tb SATA 6Gbp/s 7200 rpm RAID 1 Hosted in Germany (Spanish community) About 100€ a month (paid quarterly by the comunity, system works pretty well).
We are currently using: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1270 V2 @ 3.50GHz 32 GB DDR3 @ 1333 Mhz SATA SSD for OS/the game servers, SATA 6Gbps/s 7200 RPM for on-site backups Our processor supposedly has better single core performance than the processor that you mention (but notably, our processor is only quad-core): http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=1969&cmp[]=902 The issue with 1.7 is that chunk loads ripple through the world through a chain reaction, due to how mods are written. Effectively, all chunks stay loaded, even if there are no chunk loaders active. This apparently was less of an issue on previous versions of Alice. The only feasible thing that we can do is remove mods that cause this, but most do to some degree, and it's not necessarily easy to identify which ones are the worst offenders. tl;dr when Alice boots, 1000-3000 chunks are loaded, and a very small fraction of these chunks are actually (directly) due to chunk loaders.
Why are those mods loading the chunks? Is it some simple reason? Mabye the source code could be changed?
Now i'm no expert on Code, but i believe Penagwin is right. theoretically though, is it not possible to Manually deload chunks? if not i feel as though it could be a vital plugin for us and perhaps many other modded gametypes around minecraft.
If there is/are mod/s that force load chunks then this will cause another type of infinite loop, probably something that will evenetually crash the server. This is where the prebuilt modpacks come in. We don't have the staff to effectivly maintain a custom modpack anymore, but we do have enough to run a server and maybe do some minor troubleshooting if needed. I've had an agrarian skies server running on my own PC so I could play with some friends and there was basicly no maintenance needed at all. For a bigger server like this I reckon there will be some maintenance needed since we are many who like to build perhaps a little too much? lol
*shrugs* Just because Toni left doesn't mean the rest of the MPT can't pick up where he left off. Yes Toni basically did all of the work (not trying to offend other mpt members...) but it's not like we don't have the staff for a custom modpack. The problem is that these mods end up ripple-loading chunks simply by having a block placed; it's not something that can be fixed easily without going through thousands of lines of code not only from the mods, but from Forge and FML as well (don't think that it's only the mods fault, Forge has its problems too) and also from Minecraft's weird chunk loading behaviour. But the big issue is how hard Minecraft mods actually are to write. Games such as Starbound, Prison Architect and Garry's Mod all have built-in plugin APIs, whereas Minecraft doesn't. This makes most of what Forge does extremely hacky as it tries to find a balance between usability and performance, whilst not being able to modify Minecraft's source code. Which brings me onto yet another problem. Minecraft isn't optimized in any way; a lot of contraptions that work fine in vanilla can turn a modded server into a huge laggy mess because of a bigger scale and interference of mods. Many functions called every tick that don't lag vanilla servers too much lag modded servers to hell, by querying a lot more blocks and items than are available in vanilla. Overall this is quite a mess.
A pre-built pack would have the same problems. Frankly we have a perfect storm of 1.7 mods being especially heavy and SKCraft people who love automating the hell out of everything (which there is nothing wrong with). However, we can have fewer mods and be a little more picky, or you can all love building things more than automating. Let me describe the chunk loading problem: You have block X in chunk A, which is adjacent to block Y in chunk B. X checks block Y to see if it has an inventory -- whoops chunk B isn't loaded yet! Minecraft auto-loads chunk B. Some time later, the game unloads chunk A, so block X has been unloaded. Y now checks for block X in chunk A -- uh oh! chunk A was unloaded. Minecraft auto-loads chunk A. The worst offenders would be pipe mods because they have sprawling networks. Some of them even teleport energy and other resources. To think about it, I think the issue here is that everyone stopped using BuildCraft. I recall BuildCraft explicitly not auto-loading chunks, and back then, everyone used BuildCraft. Possibly AE doesn't have this problem either. Remember how chunk boundaries used to be a real problem (along with pipe leaks...)? Nowadays, you don't hear about it as much because there's no chunk boundary issues when there's no such thing as an unloaded chunk.
This may be too complicated but I'm hoping not. Could we disable forge's implimentation of chunk loading and implement our own? If it is just a method call (again this could be way more complicated) then comment out the chunk loading bits, and make a new method that actually chunkloads, moving that method to everything that needs to actually load, players, chunkloaders, etc...
There's an option to disable implicit chunk loading. It breaks things. Chunks are not auto-loaded and the code doesn't do anything to actually load them, ever. That's not too bad in a lot of causes, but with, for example, ender quarries, they see an empty chunk so they think the quarry border is incomplete.
Didn't we use to have a BC pipe problem with people that doesn't know how to use it and leave stuff running and you end up with 20k items on the floor?
AE2 seems to also trigger the implicit chunk loading due to its wire network being rebuild and forge kindly loading all requested neighbor chunks. All "piping" mod and "inventory queryer" mod are culprits here : enderio, extra utils, tubes, etc. So imho let's disable the implicit chunk load. What will happens : + no more lagspike every 16 seconds + only chicken chunkloader (ccc) will maintain chunk loaded all time (to be confirmed) - all network/piping wont be able to query neighbor block/tile if they are on separate chunk (out of ccc) - many base will have to be redesigned in a 1-chunk or 3x3chunks design - wrong/old base design will end up with #tpskills or #harassthemodteam until explained/fixed - ender quarry would only work in the area covered by a ccc, an area smaller than BC quarry i vote "go for it"
If what proger suggests fixes this then it could open for a possible bigger area allowed to be loaded per player. (Please? <3 )
