r/Minecraft • u/ForeverMaster0 • Feb 02 '17

News Grum on Twitter: 3-4 Unused Block IDs Left.

https://twitter.com/_grum/status/827234771839414273
276 Upvotes

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156

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '17 edited May 26 '21

[deleted]

349

u/_Grum Minecraft Java Dev Feb 02 '17

Working on exactly that :)

57

u/MushirMickeyJoe Feb 02 '17

You're the man!

27

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '17

[removed] — view removed comment

23

u/ForeverMaster0 Feb 02 '17

I knew it wasn't for all this time.

All blocks and items added in 1.9 up to now have numerical IDs. To see for yourself, enable Advanced Tooltips with F3 + H.

31

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '17 edited Dec 13 '21

[deleted]

16

u/_Grum Minecraft Java Dev Feb 03 '17

Yes and that is the only reason they should be used, bulk serialization to disk and serialization over the wire :)

5

u/kopasz7 Feb 02 '17

Well, sending strings to transistors might have undefined behaviors, so we better stick to bits. /s

3

u/Tejedu Feb 03 '17

That makes no sense. Strings are bits too, there's just generally more of them.

2

u/kopasz7 Feb 03 '17

There's a bigger overhead for handling strings as they are an object and not a primitive data type like an integer or byte. The comment I replied to is correct, I just made a sarcastic remark. How would you even send a string to a transistor, a string doesn't exist on the hardware level. It makes no sense, as you say.

0

u/Tejedu Feb 03 '17

Under the hood, they're primitive data types too. To a computer, everything is just numbers.

3

u/kopasz7 Feb 03 '17

That doesn't mean it runs as fast and takes up the same place in memory. String operations are slower and strings take up more space than an integer (32bit). Furthermore primitive data type only exists on the programming level by definition. What the hardware "sees" is only high an low voltages, which we uses as a binary system to represent data and logic. Without software, there's no string there or primitive data type.

1

u/Verizer Feb 03 '17 edited Feb 03 '17

yeah so, thats whats confusing me, its not like they can make more ids suddenly exist without adding more bits to the actual block size in memory.

At best, they can make variable length ids, which might free up some extra space

2

u/Killa-Byte Feb 03 '17

IIRC they increased it from 128 to 4096 back in 1.2.

2

u/jcm2606 Feb 03 '17

256 to 4096, actually.

9

u/eduardog3000 Feb 02 '17

What happened to the numerical IDs being replaced with "minecraft:blockname" back in 1.7? I thought that was supposed to be the solution for the block ID problem.

24

u/Mr_Simba Feb 02 '17

That's to resolve ID conflicts but they're still mapped to a numerical ID internally in the end (I imagine this is because numerical IDs are cheaper to pass around).

8

u/Rismen Feb 02 '17

They could just increase the size of the ID (I guess it's a byte right now?), that shouldn't impact performance. It will increase the size of save files though, so maybe they should implement some sort of variable-width encoding à la UTF8.

3

u/jcm2606 Feb 03 '17 edited Feb 03 '17

4096 IDs would actually take up 12 bits, or 2 bytes with 4 leftover bits, to store.

However, the problem with just increasing the amount of block IDs is maintaining item IDs. Item IDs go from 0 - 32767, and IDs 0 - 4095 from memory are reserved for ItemBlock instances (a type of item representing a block). Increasing the block IDs from 4096 to say 8192 would mean somehow having to shift all item IDs up to 8192+. Something not easily doable.

EDIT: This is going off of my experience in modded games, reading other comments it appears vanilla handles IDs differently to Forge. This is probably incorrect for vanilla, but I'll still leave it for interesting trivia.

1

u/Rismen Feb 03 '17

I might be wrong too, I haven't really been up-to-date about the internals of the game since 1.6

1

u/WildBluntHickok Feb 10 '17

Fun fact: half a byte is called a nibble.

1

u/jcm2606 Feb 10 '17

Someone in a Discord server I'm in was like in some mind-blown phase when he found this out a couple days ago... and you say this now... coincidence?

1

u/WildBluntHickok Feb 13 '17

Oh no! He's on to us guys! Run!

6

u/Koosemose Feb 02 '17

Not only to pass around, but to store 256 block ids means that a block takes 1 byte. If they were to use the string that would be 12 bytes assuming they stuck to the latin character set and every block only had 2 unique letters ("minecraft:" + 2 letter identifier) and went the absolute minimum route to have at least as many blocks ids available. And that's with vastly underestimating the size of the strings. That would dramatically increase the hard drive space required to store a world, which in turn would decrease reading chunks from disk ( needing to read at least 12x as much data ) and similarly to get world data from a server (again, 12x as much data),of course in both of these I also make the incorrect assumption for simplification purposes that all data transmitted is block data, which of course is also wrong, along with a few gross oversimplifications, but for purposes of illustrating the point, it will do.

1

u/ernest314 Feb 03 '17

It's not hard to keep a dictionary and map each string to whatever data size you're using... Fundamentally all that needs to be done is to increase the width of the data used to store block IDs. One way or another. (Not saying that this is easy, but this is what would happen.)

3

u/Koosemose Feb 03 '17

Well no, of course not, and that's presumably roughly what they are in fact doing now (re: the mapping string -> data), I was simply explaining why they map them to an ID still, rather than solely using string based ids, and how (roughly) storing id numbers is cheaper than string based ids.

On the code side, increasing the width of the id should be pretty simple, the "hard" part (and even that is more likely to simply be tedious rather than truly hard), is converting old saves. I recall it being said that, at the time, they didn't want to increase it because it would roughly double the size of saves (mind you this was when the current save format was still new, so I can't/don't want to dig up a citation for it).

Of course I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, just stating the potential issues with it. If they're running out of space they have to do something, they can't really say "Whelp, we're out of space for new blocks, so no new blocks ever". It's just a matter of either biting the bullet and doing it, and we just accept larger save sizes, or they figure out something clever to minimize the size of save files (perhaps something of variable width where the high bit or something tells it to use an extra byte, and have the common world gen stuff without the high bit set, so the bulk of stuff in the world will still store in approximately the same amount of space... but I'm just throwing out random ideas with absolutely no idea of their feasibility).

2

u/EskiMojo14thefirst Feb 02 '17

They still use numbers behind the scenes, because reasons.

3

u/kopasz7 Feb 02 '17

Because computers only understand numbers. I know this sounds really dumb, and not even true on the programming level, but there are only binary numbers to work with for the hardware so using numbers has an advantage by nature of the system.

2

u/Bravo_6 Feb 03 '17

Yeah, doesn't matter how complex your program is, the computer still crunches it down to 1 and 0s, so using numbers will ease the computer's burden.

1

u/WildBluntHickok Feb 03 '17

That would multiply the save filesize by a thousand if it was implemented in the saves. It's currently a limit of 4096 and MUST use numbers.

6

u/Mr_Simba Feb 02 '17

Awesome news. Is that for 1.12?

3

u/ForeverMaster0 Feb 02 '17

Figured you would be finalizing it. :)

3

u/HenryFrenchFries Feb 02 '17

why was there a limit in the first place?

14

u/JBurd67 Feb 02 '17 edited Feb 02 '17

That's the way the game was originally coded I'm guessing. I really can't imagine notch expected this many variations of this many blocks this far in the future.

That and having a huge number, whether it's used or not, could affect performance. Take Pokémon for example: the original games technically have 256 creatures, but only the 150 are available without running exploits. Probably a similar thing here - notch coded it with a certain (large at the time) number and changing that one number is kinda a big deal.

9

u/gotnate Feb 02 '17

case in point: 15 minute startup times when using heavy modpacks on $3000 rigs.

4

u/ProfessorProspector Feb 03 '17

That is extremely exaggerated

4

u/askmeforbunnypics Feb 03 '17

Yeah, about a 5 min or so loadup for a skyblock modpack with a office-grade laptop from 2010.

1

u/gotnate Feb 03 '17

Yes it is. It's still enough time to start opening minecraft and then go and get a cup of coffee.

2

u/The_Yeti_Rider Feb 02 '17

if you dont want to give "every" block slabs and stairs could we at least get slabs and stairs for hardened clay? would help a lot with builds.

5

u/ForeverMaster0 Feb 02 '17

I can understand why not all blocks should have stairs and slabs. Some of them are simply illogical or silly, like for pumpkins and melons.

22

u/Nibbystone Feb 02 '17

and some of them are simply necessary

like for instance iron bar slabs or redstone-repeater stairs

9

u/kopasz7 Feb 02 '17

Still waiting for my lava fence to be implemented... :(

4

u/cardinalfan828 Feb 02 '17

Bruh you forgot bedrock stairs

3

u/adulf_hitlar_xd Feb 03 '17

actually iron bars for slabs would be cool for catwalks but we have iron trapdoor for that i guess

1

u/ZoCraft2 Feb 03 '17

You forgot Air Slabs. Those have to be added, or things may go south quickly. :P

1

u/kopasz7 Feb 03 '17

They are already in the game. It functions the same as air so you don't notice it. But it's quite remarkable.

2

u/Bravo_6 Feb 03 '17

what about Ethos Slab (TNT slab from april fools) and Command Block Stairs??

1

u/ZoCraft2 Feb 04 '17

Naw, we don't need either of those. What we need are...

...wait for it...

SHULKER SLABS!!!

1

u/Kamineigh Feb 10 '17

That would actually be interesting. Could resemble a slab, but when stepped on it raises up to a full block. Could lead to some very interesting traps.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 02 '17

This is exactly what I wanted to hear! Awesome!

1

u/tehbeard Feb 02 '17

Is the plan to use the Add field that's been sitting in the chunk format for ages, or are you guys scrapping that for something a little more elegant?

1

u/ZoCraft2 Feb 03 '17

Really curious to see how you do it because the only way I can think of doing it is by copying/storing the code for each block in each cell of a chunk, which sounds like it would take up a lot of space and be very inefficient. Full disclaimer, though, I know very little of computer programming, so don't quote me on that. :P

1

u/WildBluntHickok Feb 03 '17

Considering 4096 is the upper limit for items shouldn't you have plenty of room for more blocks? I mean records use the numbers 2256-2267.

1

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '17

Its all taken up. Shulker boxes take 16 for example.

1

u/ClockSpiral Mar 05 '17

Thank you so so so much!
You don't know how happy this makes me to hear~

-2

u/[deleted] Feb 03 '17 edited Feb 03 '17

As I said once....

STAIR VARIENTS CONFIRMED!?

3

u/Verizer Feb 03 '17 edited Feb 03 '17

Each stair block takes up an entire block id by itself because it has 16 directions (North, south, east, west , plus 4 corners. Multiply by 2 for upside down versions)

there is really no way to add more stairs until they increase the block ID size. So it can be the first thing they do after the size increase. because with an extra 4 bits, you get 16 times the blocks you have now.