Spigot still maintains some partial implementation of "tick skipping", a
practice in which the MinecraftServer.currentTick field is updated not
by an increment of one per actual tick, but instead set to
System.currentTimeMillis() / 50. This behaviour means that the tracked
tick may "skip" a tick value in case a previous tick took more than the
expected 50ms.
To compensate for this in important paths, spigot/craftbukkit
implements "wall-time". Instead of incrementing/decrementing ticks on
block entities/entities by one for each call to their tick() method,
they instead increment/decrement important values, like
an ItemEntity's age or pickupDelay, by the difference of
`currentTick - lastTick`, where `lastTick` is the value of
`currentTick` during the last tick() call.
These "fixes" however do not play nicely with minecraft's simulation
distance as entities/block entities implementing the above behaviour
would "catch up" their values when moving from a non-ticking chunk to a
ticking one as their `lastTick` value remains stuck on the last tick in
a ticking chunk and hence lead to a large "catch up" once ticked again.
Paper completely removes the "tick skipping" behaviour (See patch
"Further-improve-server-tick-loop"), making the above precautions
completely unnecessary, which also rids paper of the previous described
incompatibility with non-ticking chunks.
Patch documentation to come
Issues with the old system that are fixed now:
- World generation does not scale with cpu cores effectively.
- Relies on the main thread for scheduling and maintaining chunk state, dropping chunk load/generate rates at lower tps.
- Unreliable prioritisation of chunk gen/load calls that block the main thread.
- Shutdown logic is utterly unreliable, as it has to wait for all chunks to unload - is it guaranteed that the chunk system is in a state on shutdown that it can reliably do this? Watchdog shutdown also typically failed due to thread checks, which is now resolved.
- Saving of data is not unified (i.e can save chunk data without saving entity data, poses problems for desync if shutdown is really abnormal.
- Entities are not loaded with chunks. This caused quite a bit of headache for Chunk#getEntities API, but now the new chunk system loads entities with chunks so that they are ready whenever the chunk loads in. Effectively brings the behavior back to 1.16 era, but still storing entities in their own separate regionfiles.
The above list is not complete. The patch documentation will complete it.
New chunk system hard relies on starlight and dataconverter, and most importantly the new concurrent utilities in ConcurrentUtil.
Some of the old async chunk i/o interface (i.e the old file io thread reroutes _some_ calls to the new file io thread) is kept for plugin compat reasons. It will be removed in the next major version of minecraft.
The old legacy chunk system patches have been moved to the removed folder in case we need them again.
