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I remember Notch talking about the lighting calculations being one of the hardest parts to program, so I can understand that being a challenge.

Mojang made large improvements to the lighting engine in 1.20, bringing it in line with the performance mods Phosphor[1] and Starlight[2]. Despite being deprecated now, they might still offer some useful insight into how to approach such a system in a performant way. You'll need to be mindful of the licenses, but it's likely easier than reverse-engineering Minecraft (even with mappings).

[1] https://github.com/CaffeineMC/phosphor-fabric

[2] https://github.com/PaperMC/Starlight

Please, just use one measurement unit across all measurements for easier comparison (i.e. RAM in MB, time in ms).

Wow. Pumpkin's runtime is way better (faster, much less RAM used) than the Java versions. Congrats.

I wonder what the Kotlin-based Minestom is doing differently that causes it to have numbers between Pumpkin and the Java versions.

For comparison's sake, do you have build times for Pumpkin? I'll assume that's where critics may target.

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I literally said Holy Shit out loud. This is an incredible improvement, and I'll refer to this in the future when I'm asked if we should make something new in Java.

Currently Pumpkin has not much multi-threading but we want to go all in. There is already a good structure for multi-threading, We want to make everything multi-threaded what benefits from it

The common problem with Minecraft server implementations is that they are not bug-for-bug compatible, which will lead to certain techniques (especially redstone contraptions) breaking. The technical Minecraft community depends on many implementation details which not all servers support

Minecraft has a lot of bugs or otherwise surprising behaviours that parts of the community have come to rely upon. This means that most non-vanilla minecraft servers aren't 100% drop in replacements. You have to make a decision what behaviours you want vs the performance and simplicity gains you will gain.

For example there there are tricks that allow you to delete bedrock blocks. Which then lets you either get onto the roof of the nether, or drop below the bottom of the world. Not all of these tricks will then work depending upon the specific minecraft server.

Another example is that in vanilla you can "bomb" people with experience orbs, the sheer number of orbs on the screen will grind their game to a halt since there are too many objects to track and render. Some minecraft servers work around this by grouping up experience orbs into a single bigger orb. That way you have fewer orbs on screen at once.

Does that mean there are open source clients that can connect to servers without a microsoft account?

If that's the case, how come nobody seems to be writing improved Minecraft clients?

Ever since I started playing it in the beta days I've been frustrated with how poorly Minecraft performs relative to what it's showing on the screen. (Not that that stopped me from pouring hundreds of hours into the damn thing.)

> "modern" as a value seems pretty loose, and it's often at least arguable whether it's objectively better!

Well, there is research on this!

https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-s... writes:

> vulnerabilities decay exponentially. They have a half-life. [...] A large-scale study of vulnerability lifetimes² published in 2022 in Usenix Security confirmed this phenomenon. Researchers found that the vast majority of vulnerabilities reside in new or recently modified code

Where ² goes to https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity22/presentat...

A study limitation is that they looked only at security-relevant bugs (vulnerabilities). As someone who writes code, I would tend to think that this also goes for bugs without a direct security impact, but I don't have the data to back that notion up

“Modern” more usually means some new JavaScript thing. In JS land, they consider anything that hasn’t had a commit on main branch in over 3 days to be a dead old project in need of being replaced with something new and “modern” that is up to date with the latest trends and breaking changes from the previous 24 hours of their world.

Usually the hyperbolic superlative for Rust projects is “blazing fast”. Of course, any kind of benchmarks or comparisons with other implementations are completely optional. It is simply enough to “cargo init” and start hammering out code. You don’t even need to consider the characteristics of the algorithms you choose to use! If it’s Rust, it’s “blazing fast”.

Sorry, I may should not used the term Modern, Lets say the foundation is newer and more optimized than from the Original Minecraft server. Mojang developers have strict deadlines and do not care about performance (like basicly any big Studio today). This results in bad ugly code which only purpose it is to work nothing more. Minecraft was created 2009 btw

> cool modern features like multi-threading

Java 6 had multi-threading

Your right

That's why I said "clean room implementation". Any reason why Pumpkin does not build on top of Valence? Would be great to see a more cohesive ecosystem for Minecraft servers in the rust community rather than reinventing the wheel

Tell you the truth, that doesn't help clarify to me much.

If it is compatible, then can't I 'drop it in'.

They sound like they are saying the same thing.

It is compatible so clients can connect to the server and be fully operational, and thus, I should be able to drop in this server, and use it as a server?

How can it be compatible if it doesn't maintain data, configuration, etc..

Edit: or is this about Pumpkin files. Pumpkin will maintain it's own files, data, configuration. So it can't just use existing Minecraft data files.

So if it was a new world, Pumpkin would generate new pumpkin formatted files. But couldn't just 'drop it in' on an existing world and use the existing Minecraft data files.

Not sure of long term viability as far as effort, but if it is files, couldn't a converter from MineCraft to Pumpkin file structure, make the server 'drop in'?

> i mean that if you just replace the existing server file with pumpkin, pumpkin will not load configs/plugins from vanilla/other servers

Will it ever though? Is this a goal?

Huh, if this exists and there’s already so many servers, maybe I should build a client instead.

Basically any significant Java software uses disproportionate amounts of RAM. My server can easily run a web server, database server, ftp server, memory cache, etc., times a few copies because various containers have their own web server or whatnot, all at the same time. But a single copy of Minecraft is too much, even when everything else is shut down.

That's why I struggle with the server: it's written in Java. Other game servers don't seem to have this problem. If the network protocol were all, that'd be great

(I didn't downvote any of your posts in case you now wonder if that was me)

Curious what protocol you would use, or how you would do it differently? Are there small enhancements to the existing protocol you would do? Genuine open question for the sake of learning.