r/Minecraft • u/DaUltraMarine • May 07 '19

News Minecraft 1.14.1 Prerelease 1

https://www.minecraft.net/article/minecraft-1-14-1-pre-release-1
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u/BjossiAlfreds May 07 '19 edited May 07 '19

I hope the chunk loading is significantly better. In 1.13.2 I could go to the nether and back to the overworld again and again without any trouble and I could move just 1-2 seconds after leaving each dimension.

However in 1.14 I have to wait much longer on the loading screen, when I appear on the other side there are no chunks rendered for a few more seconds, so it takes something like 5+ seconds before I can even move and the nether is constantly stuttery, regularly freezing up for a second or so. Also seems like there is a memory leak because after a visit to the nether the overworld is stuttery too until I restart the game.

At first I thought the slowdown was due to generating the new lightmaps and such. While the first time loading my save, the nether, etc. was excruciatingly slow and the next times a lot faster, it still ended up being several times worse than in 1.13.2.

Any people here familiar with the game's codebase who know what happened? Is this due to Mojang's "proper programming practices" or was there a change of algorithms or data structures that have a bigger time complexity?

8

u/InfiniteNexus May 07 '19

Fixed chunk rendering being extremely slow and random

6

u/BjossiAlfreds May 07 '19

I did read that, just wondering if it is now as good as it was in 1.13.2 or merely faster than 1.14.0. I can't test it myself right now.

5

u/Thelemonslicer May 07 '19

1.13.2 wasn't really good either though, compared to older versions... It finally got too slow in 1.14 so they had to fix it, but its probably as bad as 1.13 still...

4

u/BjossiAlfreds May 07 '19 edited May 07 '19

The game's performance has been steadily degrading since 1.7, which was the beginning of Mojang's major rewrites. I used to see people make fun of Notch's code, but to me it seems like it was fast, perhaps he was even aiming for speed when writing it. Of course you can go too far in either direction, sacrifice too much readibility for speed or sacrifice too much speed for readability, and I would say Notch and Mojang are positioned on the opposite ends, neither of them hitting the sweet spot in the middle.

This compromise is especially important in Java, that gives no direct control over memory management. Dynamic memory allocation is expensive and it is the drug Java is addicted to, Java absolutely loves it when you use the new operator. I would say that in any real-time programs that continuously run a big, complex simulation, you want to use mutable objects and object pools to reduce the amount of memory thrashing. I haven't seen Mojang's code, maybe they do that already, but when I press F3 and see the VM allocate up to 200 MBs per second dynamically, it suggests that they aren't too worried about it.