PocketMine-MP/changelogs/4.21.md

For Minecraft: Bedrock Edition 1.19.80

Note about API versions

Plugins which don't touch the pocketmine\network\mcpe namespace, and don't use reflection or any internal methods, will also run on these releases and do not need API bumps. Plugin developers should only update their required API to this version if you need the changes in this build.

WARNING: If your plugin uses the pocketmine\network\mcpe namespace, you're not shielded by API change constraints. Consider using the mcpe-protocol directive in plugin.yml as a constraint if you're using packets directly.

4.21.0

Released 17th May 2023.

General

• PHP 8.1 is now required. Most plugins should run without changes, but some might need to be updated due to language-level deprecations.
• Ticking chunk count is now shown separately from loaded chunk count in the /status command, providing useful performance information.
• Further improved performance of ticking chunk selection.
• Improved performance of some inventory functions.
• Reduced server memory footprint in most cases by ~9 MB per thread.
• Due to large overhead, async network compression is now only used for packets larger than 10 KB by default.

Configuration

• Added the following new pocketmine.yml configuration options:
  • network.async-compression-threshold - minimum size of packet which will be compressed using AsyncTask
    • Default is 10 KB, which means that very few packets will use async compression in practice. This is because the overhead of compressing async is currently so high that it's not worth it for smaller packets.

Timings

• Timings reports no longer include the unused metadata fields Entities and LivingEntities.
• Timings reports now correctly calculate the peak time of a timer.
  • Previously it was incorrectly recorded as the longest time spent in a single tick, rather than the longest time spent in a single activation.
  • Timings report version has been bumped to 2 to reflect this change.
• All world-specific timers now have generic aggregate timings, making it much easier to locate performance patterns across all worlds.

Gameplay

• Players in spectator mode are no longer able to pick blocks, and now have finite resources similar to survival mode.

API

pocketmine\world

• The following API methods have been added:
  • public World->getTickingChunks() : list<int> - returns a list of chunk position hashes (a la World::chunkHash()) which are currently valid for random ticking

pocketmine\inventory

• The following API methods have been added:
  • protected BaseInventory->getMatchingItemCount(int $slot, Item $test, bool $checkDamage, bool $checkTags) : int - returns the number of items in the given stack if the content of the slot matches the test item, or zero otherwise
    • This should be overridden if directly extending BaseInventory to provide a performance-optimised version. A slow default implementation is provided, but it will be removed in the future.

Internals

Entity

• Unused NameTag tag is no longer saved for Human entities.

Inventory

• BaseInventory now uses a new internal method getMatchingItemCount() to locate items in the inventory without useless cloning. This improves performance of various API methods, such as addItem(), contains(), and more.
• Specialization of Inventory->isSlotEmpty() in BaseInventory subclasses has been added to improve performance of some API methods.

Network

• RuntimeBlockMapping no longer keeps all block palette NBT data in memory.
  • This significantly reduces server idle memory footprint.
  • For multi-version implementations, this will have a significant impact on memory usage, since a different block palette is often required to support each version.
  • NBT will be lazy-loaded into memory and cached if getBedrockKnownStates() is called. However, this is not used by PocketMine-MP under normal circumstances.
• Removed unnecessary usage of Utils::validateCallableSignature() from some internal network pathways, improving performance.

Scheduler

• AsyncPool no longer double-checks progress updates on completed tasks.

World

• Ticking chunks are now tracked in World->validTickingChunks and World->recheckTickingChunks.
  • This allows avoiding rechecking every ticking chunk for validity during ticking chunk selection, improving performance.
  • In some cases, this allows bypassing chunk selection entirely, reducing selection cost to zero.
• Registered but ineligible ticking chunks are no longer rechecked every tick.
  • This was causing wasted cycles during async worker backlog.
  • The internal system must call markTickingChunkForRecheck() whenever a ticking chunk's eligibility for ticking has potentially changed, rather than just when it has changed from a yes to a no.

4.21.1

Released 30th May 2023.

Fixes

• Fixed server crash due to a bug in upstream dependency netresearch/jsonmapper.