06-20-2014, 12:46 PM
Ok, so here is a thought that just came right out of the blue for me. I don't know if it's viable or not; let me know what you think:
The thing that takes up the most space on the hard drive for minecraft is the world files. They contain all of the chunk data. However, it is a proven fact that we can generate the same terrain over and over again without getting a single block out of place, so storing data we can reproduce is kind of redundant other than to save on processor time.
What if instead of saving the entire chunk we only stored block changes? When a chunk was needed, we could generate it and then apply the changes necessary to transform it into what it was when the chunk was saved last. And we could still store data about entities and such no problem. This could allow for extremely large worlds with small data files.
Chunk Generation could be farmed out to multiple threads to decrease loads times.
Let me know what y'all think.
The thing that takes up the most space on the hard drive for minecraft is the world files. They contain all of the chunk data. However, it is a proven fact that we can generate the same terrain over and over again without getting a single block out of place, so storing data we can reproduce is kind of redundant other than to save on processor time.
What if instead of saving the entire chunk we only stored block changes? When a chunk was needed, we could generate it and then apply the changes necessary to transform it into what it was when the chunk was saved last. And we could still store data about entities and such no problem. This could allow for extremely large worlds with small data files.
Chunk Generation could be farmed out to multiple threads to decrease loads times.
Let me know what y'all think.