SMP is still broken | BuildCraft

Just so that you know. SMP is still broken and I’m aware of it. Working on improving things here. If you are interested into a little bit of background, there is a bit of a technical breakthrough between the old and the new pipes implementation. In the old scheme, a pipe was using a block id. This was already a lot when just transporting items, but it became just unreasonable to keep up with that scheme with additional waterproof and conductive pipe.

Modders may be aware of the “metadata” method to extends block ids. That’s what is done for example for wool, where each colors corresponds to a different metadata. The issue is that there is only 16 values available for metadata, and that there are already used in some pipes (e.g., to determine the input of wooden pipes, or output of iron pipes).

So the new scheme relies on pipes ids that are actually item ids, maintained by the tiles. I won’t dive into more details, but in short, while this is very reliable in SSP, this bring up all kind of synchronization issues with SMP. Hence the many crashes that everybody is having.

So I’m still working on it, hoping to release a 2.2.3 soon that will fix there. Be patient though, remember that the 2.x branch is still a beta program – beta program that I’m hoping to get out soon!

15 thoughts on “SMP is still broken”

Thanks for the update on the issues at hand. If there is anyway the rest of the community is able to assist. I have a bunch of users willing to help out in testing. Please send me an email and I can email you back our server ip and port. Based on the video’s posted it would appear you also speak french based on your accent. I can communicate back with you in french as well.

Keep up the good work on BuildCraft. We expect great things from this! This has changed the game enough to make it even more interesting

I also have a server you can use for testing, I’m running blank vanilla with 2.2.1 at the moment, but just email me at htmlperson@gmail.com, and I’ll help you out as much as possible.
Jack.
(I speak IGCSE-level French too)

Thanks for the help offer guys! FWIW, I guess English would be just fine

The best help you can provide is help maintaining and populating the wiki page http://buildcraft.net.ms/wiki/index.php/Bugs, in particular with crashes. Really need to narrow these down!

Lquatre on October 16, 2011 at 7:03 pm said:

I’d like to help to translate the wiki in french.
How can I help ?
- Arrow768 on October 17, 2011 at 10:22 pm said:
  
  It is (currently) not planned to translage the wiki into a foreign language.
  Maybe we can think about translating the wiki into a foreign language when every page of the wiki is in a state, where we can say, that it is user-friendly and informational.
  I thought also about translating it into German, but there is enought work with keeping the english sites up2date.
p10jkle on October 16, 2011 at 8:01 pm said:

I’ve put my smp crash in, it occurs in different ways for 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 so I’ve put them both in.

isn;t notch working on more meta data options for future versions? with the enchants and all?

Awesome, keep up the good work!

Ok, I’m getting crashes galore. I’m posting them on the wiki, but is there any way we can chat so I can got through how I am getting them, etc.

Hah my quarry is still going after power is removed.

Interesting, this sounds very similar the method I implemented in Railcraft for defining rails. I have the BlockAdvancedRail with uses 1 block id and basically passes all functions to the tile entity associated with it. Each rail has its own TileEntity class. I had to implement a tile cache in the block class (the client likes to forget the tiles due to some strange code decisions related to BlockUpdate packets), but since then I’ve had no trouble with smp at all. Getting the correct item to drop when the rails were destroy was tricky too. The tile is removed before doItemDrop or onHarvestBlock is called. I eventually solved that with the tile cache too, but it would be better if all these functions were tile aware (hint). Additionally, I used the function getDescriptionPacket in TileEntity for all update needs since calling markBlockNeedsUpdate on the server is enough to make the game send a tile update to the correct clients. I’m not really sure how it handles massive worlds with a lot of rails though. =/

when the SMP update is finished will it reduce the amount of packets sent to players?
because when I turn on everything on the server players get a overflow error when joining and they may not be smart enough to change their MTU.(unless that is not the problem at all)

how can get the things that produce engergy in the 1.8.1 stable???

I love this mod. As soon as I saw it I got excited for minecraft all over again. I cant wait to team up with my buddies and MP the hell out of it!

I do hope you plan on extending and adding more functions to this mod. Possibly add in a auto-furnace or blue ray power storage. Maybe some kind of tier 3 mining system. A overflow pipe would be useful (if item enters a full chest then item exits through a over low pipe.)

Keep it up man. You have made yourself a fan!

Will there be a stable release of the 1.8.1 buildcraft thing the 2.2.2 wont work for me

drakowolf on October 16, 2011 at 12:14 am said:

Thanks for the update on the issues at hand. If there is anyway the rest of the community is able to assist. I have a bunch of users willing to help out in testing. Please send me an email and I can email you back our server ip and port. Based on the video’s posted it would appear you also speak french based on your accent. I can communicate back with you in french as well.

Keep up the good work on BuildCraft. We expect great things from this! This has changed the game enough to make it even more interesting
p10jkle on October 16, 2011 at 11:51 am said:

I also have a server you can use for testing, I’m running blank vanilla with 2.2.1 at the moment, but just email me at htmlperson@gmail.com, and I’ll help you out as much as possible.
Jack.
(I speak IGCSE-level French too)
SpaceToad on October 16, 2011 at 2:43 pm said:

Thanks for the help offer guys! FWIW, I guess English would be just fine

The best help you can provide is help maintaining and populating the wiki page http://buildcraft.net.ms/wiki/index.php/Bugs, in particular with crashes. Really need to narrow these down!
- Lquatre on October 16, 2011 at 7:03 pm said:
  
  I’d like to help to translate the wiki in french.
  How can I help ?
  - Arrow768 on October 17, 2011 at 10:22 pm said:
    
    It is (currently) not planned to translage the wiki into a foreign language.
    Maybe we can think about translating the wiki into a foreign language when every page of the wiki is in a state, where we can say, that it is user-friendly and informational.
    I thought also about translating it into German, but there is enought work with keeping the english sites up2date.
- p10jkle on October 16, 2011 at 8:01 pm said:
  
  I’ve put my smp crash in, it occurs in different ways for 2.2.1 and 2.2.2 so I’ve put them both in.
lahnee on October 16, 2011 at 2:51 pm said:

isn;t notch working on more meta data options for future versions? with the enchants and all?
Krapht on October 16, 2011 at 7:15 pm said:

Awesome, keep up the good work!
p10jkle on October 16, 2011 at 8:53 pm said:

Ok, I’m getting crashes galore. I’m posting them on the wiki, but is there any way we can chat so I can got through how I am getting them, etc.
p10jkle on October 16, 2011 at 9:02 pm said:

Hah my quarry is still going after power is removed.
CovertJaguar on October 16, 2011 at 11:58 pm said:

Interesting, this sounds very similar the method I implemented in Railcraft for defining rails. I have the BlockAdvancedRail with uses 1 block id and basically passes all functions to the tile entity associated with it. Each rail has its own TileEntity class. I had to implement a tile cache in the block class (the client likes to forget the tiles due to some strange code decisions related to BlockUpdate packets), but since then I’ve had no trouble with smp at all. Getting the correct item to drop when the rails were destroy was tricky too. The tile is removed before doItemDrop or onHarvestBlock is called. I eventually solved that with the tile cache too, but it would be better if all these functions were tile aware (hint). Additionally, I used the function getDescriptionPacket in TileEntity for all update needs since calling markBlockNeedsUpdate on the server is enough to make the game send a tile update to the correct clients. I’m not really sure how it handles massive worlds with a lot of rails though. =/
awolfgang on October 18, 2011 at 8:36 am said:

when the SMP update is finished will it reduce the amount of packets sent to players?
because when I turn on everything on the server players get a overflow error when joining and they may not be smart enough to change their MTU.(unless that is not the problem at all)
zhasonic on October 18, 2011 at 11:59 am said:

how can get the things that produce engergy in the 1.8.1 stable???
revelationsr on October 18, 2011 at 4:31 pm said:

I love this mod. As soon as I saw it I got excited for minecraft all over again. I cant wait to team up with my buddies and MP the hell out of it!

I do hope you plan on extending and adding more functions to this mod. Possibly add in a auto-furnace or blue ray power storage. Maybe some kind of tier 3 mining system. A overflow pipe would be useful (if item enters a full chest then item exits through a over low pipe.)

Keep it up man. You have made yourself a fan!
steve123 on October 18, 2011 at 8:10 pm said:

Will there be a stable release of the 1.8.1 buildcraft thing the 2.2.2 wont work for me