Reliability of Minecraft and mods

[DaedalusAlpha]

[Sorontar: This thread was originally part of the http://www.theoldergamers.com/forum/...-requests.html, where a discussion on the problems with FTB started]

Yeah I can imagine the whole backend being one big kludge. And I agree, it's amazing it even starts

Though I would have preferred if the FTB guys sort of added one mod at a time making sure everything works before adding another one, instead of trying to cram as much stuff as possible in there at once.

[DarkDuck]

well thats what they have tried to do, they have tried to get compatible mods (hence the use of Forge) and mods that work together ie buildcraft/IC/Grags/Forestry but also fulfill people's likes ie Factorisation and Portal.

It's a delicate balance, and Tekkit had big shoes to fill, with the exclusion of EE alot of people were annoyed, but imagine chucking condensors etc in the mix ARGH

[DaedalusAlpha]

Well it's not only the FTB guys fault. I think a lot of these mods are very poorly optimized, not taking performance into consideration. The very basics of buildcraft, the pipes, for example, are crazy from a performance perspective. A smarter thing would be to have the pipes opaque as that would make item transfer so much easier to do and does not have to show a model for each damn item going through it. It looks good, but it just doesn't scale very well in a client-server environment.

The basic problem is that I think a lot of the developers of mods are not very skilled programmers. Not that I don't think they have made great accomplishments, but it could often be made in a more efficient manner, at least from a server-client perspective.

[DarkDuck]

But the problem truely lies with Java, it's an inefficent programme to make a full on sandbox game, it's not an ideal choice, Minecraft itself, as notch has admitted is not the best written, it also does not truely allow modding.

Mods are a sort of Hack, and bot h Bukkit and Forge are almost 3rd party fixes.

The pipes are great and while thre is limited system issues, The rendering of a single item in the pipe I find effects my server or system very minimally, the problem comes in when items are left on the ground, whether they are from pipes, TNT, or mining, if items fall onto the ground then thats when things get lageriffic for me.

and sadly thats a minecraft issue not buildcraft.

The other limitation is the way the chunks are handled, and of course how the server works. Remember that minecraft has been developed as a single player, Mojong then hacked in a multiplayer component. The thing is that the server side of things is horridly written and is just a hacked and heavily modded single player version. this results in errors, hence the joining of Mojong and Bukkit, they are working on rewriting all the code to make not only modding better, but to make the memory leaks a thing of the past and improve general system performance.

if you want to see what Minecraft can be like, Minecraft for Xbox is stable, stream lined and beautiful, however thats a complete rewrite non java based game. The mods sadly are sometimes better than Mojong at the programming, but they are doing the best they can, with what they have.

[AdmiralTriggerH]

I sometimes think they should back port the Xbox or Pocket version to Windows and Mac OS X.
Write in C++ or Objective C instead of Java and things get more efficient and less likely to memory leak but that would a lot of work to do at this point and I suspect that the Mojang devs aren't very skilled in anything but Java as the Xbox and Pocket versions are being built by other people.