Status Update (July 2022)

Hi everyone! It's just occurred to me that I haven't posted anything here at all, and that I probably should start posting periodic status updates on all of my projects so that y'all can see what I'm doing with your money :P

I'll just go over everything I've worked on for the past few months, and maybe mention some of the things I plan to do in the coming weeks.

Overview

I haven't really had time to work on very much in recent weeks, thanks to IRL commitments such as School™. However, I've now officially graduated from high school (yay!), and am on summer vacation. Aside from a 3-week vacation job, I should have plenty of time to work on my techie projects :D

FarPlaneTwo

I've been continuing my massive project to put enough layers of abstraction between FP2's core and Minecraft, with the end goal being to be able to support a huge number of Minecraft versions and mod loaders at once with minimal wasted effort and code duplication. I've now split off from this and begun working on the dev/abstract-storage branch, where I'll be working on abstracting and re-designing the storage internals to be more powerful and be able to make better use of rocksdb's capabilities. This'll eventually allow me to add some pretty useful features in the future, such as maintaining a dedicated index of region file modification timestamps (to detect potential terrain changes from external tools such as MCEdit), or building my own persistent surface tracking index which will make it much easier to deal with things such as calculating sky light levels with rough generators, or making heightmap mode with Cubic Chunks a lot less buggy.

Other notes:

• Added custom datastructure implementations (specifically: ArrayList and HashSet) optimized specifically for storing tile positions, which has made a lot of management and tile tracking code run a lot faster while using a lot less memory. Tile tracking is now so fast that I accidentally exposed a race condition in the tracking code, which had gone unnoticed until now because tracking had never been able to run fast enough for it to cause any issues :)
• I found another bug in rocksdb! (The first one is here, for those wondering)

Terra++

After a lot of cleanup work, I've finally added 1m elevation data for the Netherlands. 1m data for the region of Hessen (Germany) and a bunch of areas in Canada will hopefully drop later this month.

I've been thinking about how to deal with OSM geometry simplification in order to eventually make terra++ rough generation for FP2 a reality. Stay tuned for more updates on that front!

Hardware Stuff

I finally got a real server rack! This means I can finally start de-janking my whole server setup my moving out of the closet and into a real rack. I'm currently just waiting for stuff to arrive so I can finish the move: rack rails, more CAT5e cable, and an electrician to run electricity into my basement.

Also, I've now switched to a PowerEdge T620 as my main desktop PC. I got the thing for free a while back, and have done a few upgrades since. Current specs:

• 2x Intel Xeon E5-2687W (8 cores/16 threads each) (fairly cheap on ebay)
• 96GiB DDR3 (registered ECC) in 24x4GiB modules, all of which I got for free from an e-waste bin :D
• 8x600GB 15kRPM SAS HDDs (came for free with the thing), controlled by a PERC H710P which I've flashed to IT mode
• some random 128GB SATA SSD I had lying around
• GTX 1060 3GB (desktop)
• GTX 680 (NVENC/background compute)
• I wanted to get the fancy front fan assembly to get some airflow for the GPUs, but the part appears to be completely impossible to obtain, so I made it myself out of cardboard 

That's all for now! I'll try to make this a monthly thing, feel free to ping me if I forget about it. If you're interested in real-time updates (or just want to chat) you should check out my Discord server, where I frequently post screenshots of or chat about whatever I'm working on at the moment.