Time  Nick        Message
00:05 VanessaE    ok, part of the problem I'm having with server lockups:
00:09 VanessaE    packets are still being received to my client (per the second F5 display) at about a rate of 1 per second instead of 10, mapgen is totally hung up, but the server is writing to its log file periodically.  RTT on the client reads 0.000.  Occasionally it'll just inexplicably unlock and drop back to <20% CPU.  Every time I move around enough to normally cause more of the map to load or if someone else is on and they do so, the
00:09 VanessaE    server hangs again
00:10 VanessaE    the only way out has been to restart the server.
00:12 VanessaE    if I sign my client out, wait some time (several minutes?) and then sign back in, the server will usually complete the sign-in process but it will take a few minutes just waiting to get past the receipt of nodes and item defs
00:13 VanessaE    right now it's been hung up off and on for about an hour now, without a restart.
00:14 VanessaE    (I'm hoping to collect some stats via thexyz's profiler, just in case it's a mod causing it)
00:15 VanessaE    when the server drops back to <100%, I start seeing normal events around the world such as particles spawning on torches, and the packet stream returns to the usual ~10 packets/second
00:15 VanessaE    hence the server just unlocked.  I grabbed my mouse and simply panned to the right.  the server is now hung at 100% again
00:16 VanessaE    and the packet stream has dropped to about 3/second
00:17 VanessaE    at the time that the server un-hung, I saw a huge dump (several hundred lines) of stuff like this:  19:14:33: INFO[ServerThread]: Server::ProcessData(): Cancelling: peer 5 not found
00:18 VanessaE    interspersed with things like:
00:18 VanessaE    19:14:33: VERBOSE[ServerThread]: Server::peerAdded(): peer->id=6
00:18 VanessaE    19:14:33: VERBOSE[ServerThread]: Server: Handling peer change: id=6, timeout=0
00:20 VanessaE    all the while that the server is hung up, the log entries show ABM activity (usually a total usage of just over 200 mS)
00:53 VanessaE    and then for an equally-non-apparent reason, it just stops locking up at all and people can sign in and play normally as if nothing happened.
01:52 BackupCoder ve makes similar to ores right?
01:56 VanessaE    BackupCoder: eh?
01:56 VanessaE    you mean the mese thing?  sorta similar.
02:05 BackupCoder :-)
02:52 OldCoder    Hi
08:17 hmmmm       hrm
08:18 hmmmm       I sort of gave up so i started digging around in minecraft's mapgen
08:18 hmmmm       it's funny, their implementation is _almost_ the same as mine
08:19 hmmmm       except they don't have the concept of biome groups
08:19 hmmmm       so I'm not sure how they ensure that an ocean is next to a beach and a desert is next to a mountain range etc.
08:22 hmmmm       what's clever is that they made a 64x64 table that maps a combination of humidity/temperature to a specific biome so you can avoid having to iterate through each like i do
08:23 hmmmm       the obvious disadvantage to this is that their temperature and humidity have only 64 different ranges; but that's rather acceptable
08:24 hmmmm       i can't do this since i have the third parameter to choose a biome, that is, the biome group
08:33 hmmmm       hah
08:34 hmmmm       also their variation of MapNode is 8 bytes
09:01 hmmmm       I think what i'm going to do is make water occur simply at any point below water_level that isn't air like in the previous mapgen, but keep trying to work with the height interpolation between biomes
09:01 hmmmm       that might help matters a bit
09:02 celeron56   sounds like a good plan
09:04 celeron56   oh by the way, if they choose the biome based on a 2d table, don't they implicitly get the transitions from it?
09:06 OldCoder    WeAreAnonymous, hello
09:08 hmmmm       no
09:10 hmmmm       how the biome terrain height selection works is still unclear; this is what you'd need to look at to figure it out though:  http://pastebin.com/k2CReQuu
09:11 hmmmm       (by the way, i didn't annotate it, but byte0 there is WATER_LEVEL)
09:12 hmmmm       'night
16:27 thexyz      celeron55: just built minetest with your patch, and http://i.imgur.com/GfRSd.png
16:30 celeron55   so that is a patched server?
16:32 thexyz      yes
16:32 celeron55   no luck then
20:22 hmmmm       welp
20:22 hmmmm       that height interpolation between biomes didn't exactly work out
20:22 hmmmm       it looks like crap
20:23 hmmmm       back to the drawing board
20:50 hmmmm       i keep looking at real life landscapes like this  http://images.4chan.org/adv/src/1355945509014.jpg  and i keep wondering how on earth can you possibly replicate that with perlin noise
20:51 hmmmm       like i guess you can create the rough outline with noise from 3-4 octaves, and then fill in any completely interior points that are missing from the blob
20:52 hmmmm       and then the roughness of the coastline
20:53 hmmmm       see, i have no idea how to do that.... my first reaction would be to have a 1d perlin noise to shape how much a piece of land sticks "in" or "out"
20:53 hmmmm       following the entire coastline
20:53 hmmmm       but in order to translate that into "is there a block at point x,z" would require a lot of math and is inherently incompatible with the way the coastline is generated
20:54 jin_xi      is that the tip of a volcano?
20:54 hmmmm       i don't know what it is, but it looks neat
20:54 VanessaE    looks more like a meteorite impact to me
20:54 jin_xi      anyway, my point is it looks more "procedural" than noisy... + erosion
20:55 hmmmm       the core problem with perlin noise is that that's all it is - noise - it's way better at generating things like clouds
20:55 hmmmm       and i mean sure it's okay for just plain old terrain, but this...
20:55 celeron55   that photo looks like the tip of a huge volcano
20:55 hmmmm       when you want a certain feature to be present in "the big picture"
20:55 hmmmm       it's nearly impossible
20:55 celeron55   which quite simply makes that shape in a very nonlinear way when looked from that point
20:55 jin_xi      i think stuff like caves worm hole caves and volcanoes would be more readily special cased
20:57 hmmmm       i might have some idea on how to vary height without making those huge "cliffs" in between biomes
20:57 celeron55   hmmmm: to get natural looking huge features that fit the big picture and still are interesting in a very close level, you need dwarf fortress like generation
20:57 celeron55   that is, take minutes to generate all of the huge world at once
20:57 celeron55   8)
20:57 hmmmm       the surface height will be max{base_terrain, high_terrain}
20:57 celeron55   using erosion and all that
20:57 hmmmm       which i think you did in fact
20:58 hmmmm       well
20:58 hmmmm       it would be acceptable i think
20:58 hmmmm       i'm gonna be honest here - minecraft too - blows
20:58 celeron55   well, it needs a limited scale, and would make the game quite different to play
20:58 celeron55   but it's doable if one decides to do it so
20:59 celeron55   you could generate one huge area initially, and do some extensions to it more half-assedly when the player moves closer to some limit of it
20:59 celeron55   ...or something
20:59 celeron55   dunno
21:00 hmmmm       i'd have to say that's fundamentally incompatible with the way the mapgen works
21:00 celeron55   there are huge amounts of unthinked design territory in that
21:00 celeron55   nobody is going to whip it up in one go like a minecraft-like generator
21:00 hmmmm       you're right
21:00 celeron55   it's probably some minetest 0.huge number thing once again
21:01 hmmmm       this is a limitation with perlin noise perhaps
21:01 hmmmm       no amount of cleverness can fix this
21:01 hmmmm       regardless i'll try my best to approximate something that looks OK
21:01 celeron55   games are about cheating in every aspect to make something simple seem clever and interesting
21:01 celeron55   practically always
21:01 hmmmm       that's true
21:01 celeron55   nothing in games is what it looks 8)
21:02 * VanessaE  looks down at the mossy cobble below her...so this is actually sand or something? :D
21:02 hmmmm       huh
21:03 celeron55   it's two triangles, that are quite unrelated to the collision detector that keeps you on top of them
21:03 celeron55   8)
21:03 VanessaE    heh
21:04 celeron55   actually
21:04 celeron55   they're probably not even two triangles per block
21:04 celeron55   :D
21:04 celeron55   the mesh optimizer has probably kicked in and they are some stretched rectangles
21:05 hmmmm       alright so i think i'm going to stop working on the new mapgen and modularize the old ones like i was talking about yesterday around the same time
21:05 celeron55   i mean, triangles
21:05 hmmmm       the sooner my changes can get in, the better, because then i won't be working with such an outdated version
21:05 hmmmm       i feel like my changes are already going to be difficult to merge
21:06 celeron55   it's probably a good idea to rebase the current generator on top of the fast noises and the relevant parts of the frameworkish stuff
21:06 VanessaE    I don't mean to change the subject, but did either of you see my "report" earlier? (around 21 hours ago)
21:06 hmmmm       i am going to read up more on prodecural generation
21:06 hmmmm       celeron, yes, that's the plan..
21:07 hmmmm       you know it's funny, every day is like a cycle.. i wake up, browse some websites, think "i'm going to try something different in the mapgen, maybe i can come up with a breakthrough", then roughly around 4-5PM i give up and say "i'm going to put that aside and work on something i can be productive with"
21:08 celeron55   VanessaE: yes; it doesn't bring anything useful to mind
21:08 VanessaE    ok
21:08 celeron55   if you count the breakthroughs per year in the world, and then count the people in the world, you get sad numbers
21:08 celeron55   8)
21:09 VanessaE    output from thexyz's profiler basically says that my mods are a little CPU-heavy, but not nearly enough to cause the issue.
21:09 hmmmm       hrmm, vanessa, you mean the freezing issue?
21:09 VanessaE    so I was speculating earlier whether some recent change to the engine may be the cause
21:09 VanessaE    hmmmm: yeah
21:09 hmmmm       I witnessed that twice
21:09 hmmmm       but this was a while back
21:09 hmmmm       no idea on where to even begin to look
21:09 VanessaE    first thing I thought of, and this is probably wrong, is that change that is supposed to suppress network activity when none should be needed
21:10 VanessaE    but I'm sure I'm wrong about that
21:11 VanessaE    hmmmm: well at least it isn't just me then
21:12 VanessaE    players havefly and noclip by default - could their flying around be trigging some obscure race condition in the map generator?
21:13 VanessaE    s/generator/generator or loader/
21:14 VanessaE    anyway, end of unintentional topic digression
21:33 hmmmm       hmm, nope
21:33 hmmmm       well
21:33 hmmmm       flying around means that way more blocks get added to the emerge queue
21:34 hmmmm       it getting filled faster is what causes the race condition (it might be a race condition or might not), not the flying
23:42 VanessaE    hmmmm: short of noclip or just disabling flying altogether, is there anything I can do on my end?
23:42 VanessaE    some setting I've overlooked, etc
23:56 hmmmm       well wait is it consistently happening?
23:58 VanessaE    it's intermittent, random - but it is more prevalent when there are at least a few players online - and when I see it unlock itself?  if I move or turn to get the mapgen/loader to supply more blocks, it deadlocks again for a while
23:58 VanessaE    (usually anywhere from about 7 minutes to half an hour at a time from my testing)
23:59 hmmmm       hmmm
23:59 VanessaE    which is why I've been sorta fixated on the map loader - this happens even in areas of the map that are guaranteed to be fully generated e.g. the spawn