How is Cuberite better?

[Pocketkid2]

Hi, I've been interested in Minecraft clients and servers that aren't as terrible as the Mojang Java ones. This seems to be one of the best servers that's not in Java and is actively developed and has a lot of features currently. I'm wondering, how exactly is Cuberite better? What large scale benefits can be seen? What techniques make it run faster than the Java server, and are there any tests or benchmarks that show this? 

As another note, why does Cuberite provide slightly different features as compared to vanilla? Is there some reason why the exact functionality can't be emulated or copied? Thing is, I'd love to use a server like this and even develop for it, but it bugs me that I can't have a real vanilla experience right now. For example, the world generation in Cuberite is nothing like the actual Minecraft world generation. Is this the wrong place to look for such a thing?

[xoft]

Hello, welcome to the forum.

Mostly, we cannot have the very same features as vanilla, because we are doing a clean-room implementation - we don't look in vanilla's source code to avoid any possible copyright problems with Mojang.
That also explains why so many features are missing - we simply don't have the manpower to keep up with the pace vanilla is being developed. We try to focus on the main ones, but there are some that are traditionally "just bad".

As far as I know, there is no benchmark to show whether we're faster / less resource-intensive / whatever. I don't think any benchmark would be fair to both sides, anyway - the software is way too different. We like to say that we use less resources than vanilla, especially RAM. This could be seen to some point, since Cuberite runs perfectly fine on a Raspberry Pi (the old model 2, single-core with 512 MiB of RAM). But then, our redstone simulator doesn't have all the vanilla's quirks, and mob AI is pretty much non-existent, etc.

Your remark about world generation is a bit of a personal hurt to me, I've written most world generators for Cuberite and I liked to think they were pretty good, in some cases even better than vanilla. Yes, we sometimes lack the content, but on the other hand, the generators are highly configurable and we have lots of extra features that vanilla doesn't - such as custom (and customizable) generated structures. Can you elaborate a bit more about what you're missing and what you consider lacking in the worldgen?

[ShadowCone]

@xoft it may be a bit off topic, but please don't feel hurt. There are so many people (including me) who find world generation really cool and I think it's so much better than in Vanilla. Or at least equally good.

At least for me, that speech you gave at the "community meeting" in Germany was enlightening!

About the features, I would be glad to help or develop, but I fear this project is too big for me. I've never worked with such a big project before, I think I would need some help with reading and understanding the code.

[Pocketkid2]

I'm worried that coming from heavy knowledge and understanding of the vanilla mechanics and world, I feel like it would be hard to adjust to Cuberite. Not being able to build the same Redstone mechanics, not having worlds that feel comfortable and recognizable, and generally not being able to do the same things that a regular server would do. I like the idea of having a lightweight resource friendly server, but when I tried it out a couple times, it felt quite unfamiliar, like a different game almost. It didn't have that "Minecraft" feel, and it was almost like a barrier to me really taking an interest and getting into Cuberite.

I don't really hope to offend anyone, Cuberite isn't a bad project at all. I think it's a great project to show what kind of custom servers can be written.

I know I'm not very specific on details about what I am thinking about, but I hope someone can understand what I'm trying to say. I'd love to help make Cuberite feel more at home to people who are used to traditional Minecraft.

[yangm97]

The cuberite terrain generator reminds me when vanilla generator was cool. Nowadays vanilla generates plain boring worlds while Cuberite gives some pretty intensive ones. I like it.