Can we turn this into a poll? I would personally hate to see aoe disappearing. For example, how would I mine the amount of soil I need to make bricks? Or the wood to make a giant boat? One of the very few things that take away the grind for me is the aoe. Sometimes it can be fun to take a speed brew and just blow through a cave with a hammer.
Retiring Aoe tools just doesn’t sit well for me and I’m trying to understand why it’s bad for the game.
release-notes from changes made as a result of the EXO-world AOE-spam-fest lag (will hopefully be in a release soon (not a trivial change, so needs a degree of testing…)):
server performance improvements for world-saving when there are large numbers of block changes at once, especially with respect to lodded chunks.
server performance improvement for block pick-up system so that users will always gather with the 2m base-radius, but the extended (forged-effect) radius of up to 8m will distribute its cost over 8 frames to help reduce spikiness (but will mean picking up block-drops from further away may take up to 0.5 a second).
improvements to block-pickup system to use the same “smart” stacking methods used by quick-move system allowing much better insertion into your inventory when picking up other users drops that can be stacks or smart-stacks of items.
optimising block-pickup system so that when destroying blocks, the block-drops that result for a given player will be merged together with nearby recently created block-drops, massively reducing the amount of block-drops that get created in the first place by AOE spam-hammers. This will also improve client rendering performance. When a block-drop has something merged into it, a particle effect will play on the block-drop to show that it has occurred, and based on the number of items stored in a block-drop its size will subtly increase also.
optimising block-pickup system so that when there are drops lying around a player that cannot be picked up due to not having space in the inventory, they will after a short delay start being merged with already existing block-drops of the same item near the player, again with a particle-effect and visual size increase. This helps improve performance in the case of spam AOE mining creating large numbers of rocks not being collected for both the server and the client, though will not evaluate on block-drops too far from the player. Together with the previous block-drop merging logic, there will be far far less block-drops cluttering up the environment during AOE mining sessions, and better performance for everyone. Block-drops will only be merged if they have atleast 1 minute left before being removed.
the debug-window will now show some basic details about the selected entity, not just the selected block. For block-drops will show the item type/color and its stored count, as well as its expiration time before it is removed from the worl
Huh, look at that! So the swirling blocks is more of a client thing and the server lag is caused by changes to the world so the proposal in the OP wouldn’t have helped with the servers.
Who would have thought huh? Oh wait!
Excellent changes Luca! Less swirling stuff will make it easier to continue mining at speed and optimisations all around is perfect!
This is some absolutely needed and wanted changes to the loot/merge system. Thank you so much. Especially the particle effect. If as described, then this is great. Save my tired eyes some time when trying to find a changed stack.
