I know you are still working on the mod and you want it left in for debugging... but can you please add the "hide server spam" thing for those of us who aren't doing any debugging?
I think that if you are going to disable / allow for the disabling of the spawning messages that they should be added as a separate option to the full debug text. It is nice for troubleshooting and not having to have the full debug text on (which seems to lag me something fierce at times).
Also, now that I have confirmed that JAS is functioning as I wanted I have actually started to begin setting up the config files for a real game. This has given me more ideas and I am sure you just can't wait to hear them (by the way, please feel free to tell me to leave you alone)!
One would be the ability to ban the spawning of entities on certain blocks on a global scale. Not sure if this can be implemented as I believe it would effectively require you to customize all remaining spawn parameters yourself, since defining a custom spawn setting overwrites the default built-in mod settings as far as I know. Though if you are going to be editing most entities' spawn settings anyway then being able to specify "no entities can spawn on block 18" instead of having to specify it for each individual entity could save a lot of work. Ideally this functionality could be overwritten by explicitly defining that an entity could spawn on a banned block.
Another would be the ability to define spawn/despawn parameters for entities on a per-biome basis; maybe adding them to the spawnlist entry instead of the livinghandler entry. Again, ideally this would allow you to set a default for all entities of a particular type in the livinghandler and then override those settings with the ones in the spawnlist entry (say I want Zombies to be able to spawn above ground in most biomes but not in tundra, etc.).
I know that you do this in your free time and am very grateful for what you have done so far; I don't want to give the impression I am not appreciative (as far as I am concerned this is the best spawning mod out there). Just thought it would suggest some things and see what you thought.
All these options are equivalent to the modder getCanSpawnHere method. There is no "vanilla" equivalent. The obvious use case is farms, you can set the animals to despawn unless near some block. Imagine using fence blocks, sheep in the wild would despawn, but those in your farm would never despawn, unless you left the door open and they wandered away. The idea behind these tags is allow end-users to write equivalent spawn methods that mod authors can write. Which is obviously non-trivial.
Very interesting. Didn't think of it that way. I heard that Mo' Creatures was (at least at one point in time) using the whole vanilla animals don't despawn around fences thing. I had no idea it was possible to recreate that in JAS. Definitely opened my mind to some neat new possibilities!
It relies on utilizing methods in world. I used to use canBlockSeeTheSky, which consulted the heightMap. This had the problem of being below leaves would count as being below ground. I now use (as of 0.6.0? I think) getTopSolidOrLiquidBlock, which consults an internal storage array (which I don't know what they are) to get the top block and then iterates downwards till it find a solid block that is solid and not air, leaves or foliage. Solidity is determined by material.
A bit of an annoyance when using mods that add big trees to the game where there are often large branches of logs to block the sky check. If I thought there was the possibility of adding an 'above-ground' check I would request it, but with even my little knowledge of Minecraft modding and programming in general I highly doubt there is any way to reliably determine this.
It would be possible to create a sky method that allowed ignoring additional blocks. Though I think the sky method fulfills your needs. It would obviously be a seperate tag. Suggested name?
After a bit of pondering it would seem that ignoring a block outright would likely just lead to weirdness. If I were to for example prevent logs from being used in the sky check and then build my house out of them we would have trouble.
It might potentially be able to remove some of the annoyances with spawning. Then again, it could also introduce more. If I say ignore the 5 blocks above your head when checking for sky, while it might help with some of the large tree checks it could also again mess with interiors of structures or near-surface caves. Would probably require more thought (which I will try to put in to any future ideas before I post them ).
It doesn't bother me either way. Understanding of how vanilla works is unfortunately critical to doing anything of value. Even discussion of other mods is relevant, though in that case your chances of getting assistance would be better elsewhere.
Well then I guess I will stick around. Anyways, you seem to be one of the gifted few that actually has a grasp on how all this spawning stuff works; might as well consult an expert!
Now to an on-topic question regarding the BiomeGroups.cfg file. If I make an entry into a biomegroup and that entry is invalid will it simply be stripped away or will it throw an error? I am trying to make things easier on myself by setting up a master config which groups all available biomes from my selected biome mods, but the thing is I don't actually -use- every biome; some I set to not generate. Depending on the mod this may or may not remove the biome from the reference list. Also, it seems that the reference list is occasionally missing some biomes; would adding in a biome that is technically correct and valid yet not in the reference list be functional?
With a bit of testing the above seems to be working, so nevermind.
For {spawn], the block is the at the entities feet. For {despawn} it is by default a range of 3. The {:blockRange,} tag can set the isometric distance in any direction or each specific direction by providing additional arguments.
i.e. {:blockRange, isometricDistance} OR {:blockRange, xDistance, yDistance, zDistance}
Interesting. Is this vanilla behavior? Also, can you think of any benefits or disadvantages of setting this to 1?
Seems a little weird to me. I guess don't seem to really understand why it would be this way; what it is trying to accomplish or prevent. Of course you aren't usually going to have such an obvious case where this has an actual effect in a real game so it is mostly a moot point. I guess my interest in the matter is purely academic at this point since it is intended behavior that I doubt I will be altering.
On the subject of academic questions, could you explain how your {sky} check works? I haven't yet had time to play around with it much, but one of the things that irks me about the vanilla spawning system is getting mobs spawning beneath tress in forests during the daytime. If an entity is beneath, say, a single log block would this count as not being able to see the sky? If so, is there any possibility of a feature to perhaps configure blocks to be ignored during this check? So that if set - from the point of view of the sky check - all configured blocks would be counted as air instead?
Meh, maybe I am just babbling; it is early-ish. I need to go eat something.
Thanks again for putting up with all my nonsense!
EDIT:: After a few donuts, the idea of blacklisting certain blocks for the sky check probably isn't a good idea. Maybe an option configurable range to ignore above the entity? So for example the first 3 blocks wouldn't be checked.
Oh and maybe I shouldn't be cluttering up your thread with my general spawning questions and discussions, might be better suited to the mob spawning observations thread; let me know.
Has anyone had better luck getting the monsters to behave, and spawn in a more balanced fashion?
Not yet, but I have just recently started messing with my mob mods and spawn settings. Of course I am using JAS instead of CMS, which I have been able to effectively disable by setting the spawn-rates of all monsters to 1 and removing them from all biome-groups giving CMS no where to spawn them. In my few tests it also seems that CMS isn't altering the despawn behavior of JAS which is good.
Of course once the bug with simply disabling the use CMS is fixed so the game doesn't crash things should be much easier and not need a hackish workaround.
Now I am working on figuring out how I am going to divide and group all the biomes.
If JAS was attempting to spawn them then it would evidently not be true. That they are not spawning passively, I don't know. Maybe cap was already hit. Ensure non-zero wight in applicable biomes. Many small thing which could cause odd occurances. As you've had success apparently with horses and pigs this may be a moot point.
I can confirm that I had weights properly set for the biome I was testing as well as the cap had not been hit. Not sure what the issue is there.
It's essentially a race. Whoever decides to despawn the entity first despawns it. So that test should work. I can only assume that is what is happening with your failed chunk spawns. As "failing" isn't really possible. The only other thing that comes to mind is being on peaceful / below difficulty such that the entity insta-despawns.
I was testing on Hard so I don't think it was difficulty level causing instant despawning. Maybe CMS will insta-despawn any entity it controls that has its rate set to 0 if it should accidentally get spawned? Maybe this is deliberate workaround intended to counteract chunk-spawning (which it does). Lots of possibilities, who knows.
Right, but the despawner would / may be still trying to control said entities.
Good luck.
After a little bit of testing it doesn't seem like CMS is interfering with JAS in terms of despawning either vanilla or it's own creatures, which is good news. Of course I cannot say that for certain; just the result of a few little experiments I performed.
There is one thing weird I noticed during all of this. I haven't heard of this before, but is there a range around the block where entities are allowed to spawn / despawn? Kind of hard to put in to words so in the spoiler below are some pictures. In all the pictures zombies were spawned on top of ALL the sandstone / diamond blocks with the following settings used in the JAS config:
After spawning all the zombies, I moved far enough away for them to start despawning and waited. You can see from the pictures the results; it appears like there is a bit of a radius effect the diamond block (the only block on which zombies won't despawn) has on the surrounding area. Not sure if this is vanilla or related to your mod, nor if it is a bug or intended. Just thought I would share. Oh, and the fences in the second picture were just to prevent the zombies from trying to jump between platforms.
What I actually meant was, lets say i had PZ armdillos (non de spawning by default at the time) set to 4/1/1 and 5 other mobs all set to 10/1/1, what I actually saw was that armdillos seemed to spawn as expected but they semmed to prevent non despawning mobs from spawning and yes eventually taking over the cap as nothing else was spawning, but with all other mobs set to mroe than double the weight I would expect to see large numbers of other but actually did not see this.
When they were changed to despawn this effect went away.
The same was also true with chunk generation for vanilla. When they were set to anything other than 1/1/1 they seemed to prevent other mobs spawning.
Actually it might be non-despawning only and nothing to do with chunk gen because as I recall vanilla animals spawn "normally" under MSC continuing to spawn after chunk gen.
I also bserved this phenomenon with atmosmobs bison, all 3 examples being non despawning and in my experience prevented despawners from spawning in the first place.
Hmm. Lets see if I got this straight. You think that maybe non-despawning entities might have been getting preference over despawning entities regardless of weighting the despawners higher?
Given how crazy entity spawning is I have no idea if this is possible or not. Maybe it was just the fact that you saw less of the despawning entities, even with a higher weight, due to their despawning? If you have 3 of 'mob a' spawn and 2 of 'mob b,' and then one or two of 'mob a' despawned while 'mob b' was persistent it could give the appearance of a preference to the non-despawner even before the cap was reached; as far as I know despawning happens regardless of what the respective entity cap is at.
Meh, who knows (I sure don't, I am not a programmer or anything). All this spawning stuff is so hard to keep straight; makes my head spin at times.
Now off to try and see if I can determine if/how CMS despawning is interacting with JAS. Yay...
Disclaimer: ANy information I have about MSC/Mo'Creatures is second hand knowleadge and should be taken with a grain of salt.
I think someone said setting the spawn rate in mo'Creatures to 0 causes the entity to not be declared / registered in game. Which is the only way to prevent JAS from spawning something.
This is interesting if true because during my tests, as mentioned before, JAS was occasionally attempting to chunk-spawn mobs that had their spawn-rate set to 0 (in the MoC config) but it seemed to be failing. I was getting the messages in the console but when arriving at the given coordinates there was never anything there (also never seemed to show up on Rei's Minimap with EntityRadar on). Also, they are showing up in the console as being added to the BiomeGroup so it seems they are still being declared/registered. They just aren't being spawned passively (I get no messages that they are being spawned aside from occasionally via chunks) and chunk-spawning seems to be attempting but failing.
My main concern with keeping MSC enabled is that doens't MSC have some kind of custom despawner? I don't know how it works, but here are many ways they may not work well together. Technically, this should only result in entities despawning sooner than anticipated, not longer.
Hmm. This is where I am getting a bit confused. Firstly, I am not using MSC (Mob Spawn Controls) at all. So I am going to just assume that you meant to type CMS instead (quite possible because they are so similar) and go off that assumption. I apologize if I was unclear about this in my original posts.
I haven't done any testing with despawning yet and have no ideas how the internals of CMS would handle such a thing but it is something to consider. I will maybe see if I can figure out some reasonable way of testing to see if CMS is still despawning entities; maybe by setting an entity to have a custom {despawn} tag in JAS with a very unlikely criteria that should keep them spawned. If they do disappear without meeting said criteria (for example maybe something like don't despawn unless on diamond blocks or some such nonsense) then it would point to CMS interfering.
I've read the entities not in the MSC spawnlists (such as those from other mods) are not controlled by MSC but by the vanilla system. Couldn't you remove MoC in a identical way? As an FYI, JAS will print all spawnlist entries that it adds to biome groups at on world joining / startup: if it says [entity] in [biome group] there then it should spawn, otherwise it won't.
This is the method I am using to prevent CMS from spawning anything. It is technically enabled and has frequencies set to spawn; it just doesn't have any valid biomes to spawn them in, effectively rendering it useless as I intended. As for whether they are added to the vanilla system I haven't checked as I have been running all these tests with the vanilla spawn system disabled via emptying the spawnlist at start and setting doMobSpawning to false.
If I continue to run into any more trouble this may be what I have to end up doing, but for now with the little bit of testing of my workaround I have done it seems to be doing alright. Just need to see if it (CMS) is still attempting to control the despawn of entities.
Chunk spawning does not count towards caps, which is not something I feel should change.
Thus,
1. Chunk-only categories can be attained by setting cap to zero and enabling chunk spawns.
2. Ability to add user-defined Categories will be added in a future update, complete with spawning tag support to customize how things spawn.
Awesome, sounds good. Didn't think about setting the cap to zero to prevent passive spawning, might have to take over opensky or underground until user-defined categories are implemented.
Oh no! SirDave has become SirHumphrey - I've read that three times and still dont understand it
I believe the point was about how non-despawning creatures can take over the cap preventing creatures that do despawn from appearing. Of course I could be misinterpreting.
More news regarding the testing I have been doing of Mo' Creatures and Just Another Spawner together.
Firstly the problem I was having regarding Mo' Creatures mobs not spawning when they should have been using the basic "S:Horse=CREATURE-true" notation. The problem seems to stem from how I had my Mo' Creatures configuration file set up.
The short and sweet version is that if you have the mobs disabled in the Mo' Creatures config file by setting their frequencies to <0:0:0> then it is blocking JAS from spawning them as well if you try to spawn them using their default settings. By applying custom spawn settings using the {spawn} tag, you overwrite this behavior and they are capable of spawning once again; but this removes their in-built functionality to determine how and when to spawn.
The workaround I have found is to set the creatures' spawn frequencies to <1:0:0> in the configuration file and remove them from all CMS biome groups. This accomplishes two things: first it effectively disables CMS from running at all because while the mobs have frequencies set they have no biomes in which to spawn; this takes care of CMS interfering with JAS. Secondly, by having their spawn rates set to 1 JAS is capable of spawning the mobs using their default spawn restrictions.
So I think I have made some progress in terms of getting Mo' Creatures and JAS working together. In the spoiler below I describe my tests in much more detail.
Currently there is a bug where attempting to disable Custom Mob Spawner will cause the game to crash. Therefore I was trying to find a workaround to prevent CMS from spawning anything while avoiding said crash.
My first attempt was to simply leave CMS enabled but to disable all available options including despawn vanilla, modify vanilla spawns and allow spawns during world chunk loading. As well as the above changes, I changed the spawn frequencies in the configuration file to '<0:0:0>' for all mobs to prevent any spawning. This worked successfully; it prevented CMS from doing anything related to spawning while still allowing the game to run.
Then I tried to set up JAS to spawn Mo' Creatures mobs. I set their ShouldSpawn property to true along with all the vanilla creatures and went in game to test; only vanilla creatures were spawning. It should be noted that I had the configuration options to empty vanilla spawnlists and set gamerule doMobSpawning false at start both enabled. JAS would seem to attempt to chunk spawn Mo' Creatures mobs but they never showed up; I am unsure if it was falsely reporting the spawn or if the mob was despawning before I could find it. Vanilla mobs were chunk and passively spawning as anticipated.
To check this functionality I downloaded Project Zulu and tested with a mob from that. I set Blue Finches to spawn (again, not specifying any spawn conditions in order to preserve the defaults) and they spawned as anticipated. So it would seem that the problem was somewhere with Mo' Creatures.
After this I removed Project Zulu and went back to messing around with Mo' Creatures. I decided that maybe setting the frequency of spawns to 0 was effectively disabling the mob both for CMS and JAS. To test I set the frequency of horses to <1:0:0> and tested in-game. After this JAS appeared to be successfully spawning both vanilla creatures (I was testing with pigs) and horses. This introduced a new problem: with a frequency set and CMS unable to be truly disabled it was now spawning mobs as well.
To test this I disabled the spawning in JAS and went into a new world and sure enough there were horses. CMS was obviously working. After that I decided to see if removing the mob from all of the CMS biome-groups would prevent it from spawning under the assumption that if they have no biomes to spawn via CMS they would be essential disabled from spawning via CMS. This worked as anticipated: with the frequencies the same and JAS still disabled I created a new world and got no spawns (as it should be).
After this I re-enabled the spawning of both Vanilla pigs and Mo' Creatures horses in JAS again using no specific {spawn} rules so that their default rules would be used. I set both of their spawn rates in JAS to 100-1-0-0 and loaded up the world (the one that had nothing spawning in it previously). Success! I ended up getting 60 spawns at the start - I had the creatures cap set to 50 - and after some analysis I ended up with exactly 30 pigs and 30 horses as expected. Hopefully this puts me one step closer to finally wrangling Mo' Creatures into submission with JAS
One random thought I had while doing this testing that I would like to hear your thoughts on Crudedragos would be the addition of another custom CreatureType (like the opensky and underground types) that would allow mobs in said group to ONLY spawn during chunk-loading. As in somehow prevent any passive spawning of the members of this group. My thinking was that if you could do this you could set things such as the vanilla pigs/cows/chickens/sheep to this group in order to sort of get a finite population of these creatures. This would give them their own cap so they wouldn't interfere with others, allow them to still be spawned naturally so they could be collected and farmed without needing to worry about trying to get them to despawn as their numbers would be limited due to only ever spawning with a new chunk and with proper use of hunter creatures they would eventually be culled without being replaced.
That way if you need these animals, you can find them by exploring new chunks where they may spawn but don't need to set them to passively spawn where they could overpopulate and take over.
I haven't thought of a way to do this using currently existing functionality in JAS so thought I would see what you thought (of course I could be overlooking something simple; all this time messing with config files has kind of fried my brain). Oh and sorry for the long post, I can be quite talkative (type-ative?) at times.
I haven't tried any other entities from other mods yet but it seems to be some odd behavior; can't tell if it is related to Mo' Creatures specifically (I may download and give another mob mod a try later).
I just downloaded Project Zulu and tested with Blue Finches. Setting the config file to 'S:"ProjectZulu|Core.Blue Finch"=AMBIENT-true' causes the entities to spawn as anticipated. So maybe this is something related to Mo' Creatures only?
Thank you for providing a plethora of information. Very helpful.
It seems the later versions of Forge/MCP have changed the srg name, which is odd, but what can you do.
Should have some time in the next few hours to fix it. Annoyingly trivial bug indeed.
Not a problem. Looking forward to (hopefully) finally being able to vanquish the many-headed beast of doom that is mob spawning with many separate mob-mods; using JAS as my weapon of choice of course. Just now starting that battle and I know it is going to be a long one.
EDIT:: After a little messing around I noticed something that feels a bit strange.
Am I correct in assuming that the following entry should spawn bears using their default restrictions (light level, etc.) as coded in the originating mod?
"S:Bear=CREATURE-true"
After some testing, I found that while setting "S:Bear=CREATURE-true" and "S:Chicken=CREATURE-true", using both newly generated and existing worlds (with the configs updated of course) I am only getting chickens spawning. The MultiMC console is showing both passive and chunk spawning of chickens as expected, but it is not showing any passive spawning of bears. It will occasionally report that it has chunk-spawned a bear but when going to the given coordinates there is nothing. Either it is falsely reporting the spawn or it is being despawned before I can see it.
If I set the config file to "S:Bear=CREATURE-true{spawn}" bears seem to be both passively and chunk spawning as expected.
I haven't tried any other entities from other mods yet but it seems to be some odd behavior; can't tell if it is related to Mo' Creatures specifically (I may download and give another mob mod a try later).
Alright, just recently got the new computer I have been waiting on and am now putting together a new Minecraft instance. I just started adding mob mods and messing around with Just Another Spawner again and have come across what I believe to be a bug. The message posted below is being spammed to the MultiMC console whenever I set any of the vanilla creatures to despawn (example of the syntax I am using: "S:Cow=CREATURE-true{despawn}"). I think I remember this happening on another version a while ago and getting fixed.
Other potentially useful information:
Minecraft 1.5.1
Minecraft Forge 7.7.2.682
Just Another Spawner 0.6.0 for 1.5+ (downloaded today from link in OP)
Mo' Creatures 5.1.5
Custom Mob Spawner 1.12.5
(many additional mods, but I think these are likely the most relevant; let me know if you need a full list)
Also, I have Custom Mob Spawner enabled but with every available option such as "despawn vanilla" and "modify vanilla spawns" turned off with the spawn rates for every entity set to 0 in the config (so in theory, while it is 'enabled' in order to prevent a crash it shouldn't be -doing- anything).
Below is the message (again, just trying to post what seem to be the useful bits here; let me know if you want a more complete log).
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [SEVERE] [JAS] Obfuscation needs to be updated to access the field_82179_bU. Please notify modmaker Immediately.
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Can not set boolean field net.minecraft.entity.EntityLiving.field_82179_bU to java.lang.Integer
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at sun.reflect.UnsafeFieldAccessorImpl.throwSetIllegalArgumentException(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at sun.reflect.UnsafeFieldAccessorImpl.throwSetIllegalArgumentException(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at sun.reflect.UnsafeBooleanFieldAccessorImpl.set(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at java.lang.reflect.Field.set(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at jas.common.spawner.creature.handler.ReflectionHelper.setCatchableFieldUsingReflection(ReflectionHelper.java:71)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at jas.common.spawner.creature.handler.LivingHelper.setAge(LivingHelper.java:51)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at jas.common.spawner.creature.handler.LivingHandler.despawnEntity(LivingHandler.java:139)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at jas.common.EntityDespawner.despawner(EntityDespawner.java:18)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraftforge.event.ASMEventHandler_37_EntityDespawner_despawner_LivingUpdateEvent.invoke(.dynamic)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraftforge.event.ASMEventHandler.invoke(ASMEventHandler.java:35)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraftforge.event.EventBus.post(EventBus.java:103)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraftforge.common.ForgeHooks.onLivingUpdate(ForgeHooks.java:317)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor11.invoke(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at Reflector.callBoolean(Reflector.java:133)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.entity.EntityLiving.func_70071_h_(EntityLiving.java:776)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.world.World.func_72866_a(World.java:2336)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.world.WorldServer.func_72866_a(WorldServer.java:717)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.world.World.func_72870_g(World.java:2298)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.world.World.func_72939_s(World.java:2144)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.world.WorldServer.func_72939_s(WorldServer.java:546)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.server.MinecraftServer.func_71190_q(MinecraftServer.java:651)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.server.MinecraftServer.func_71217_p(MinecraftServer.java:570)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.server.integrated.IntegratedServer.func_71217_p(IntegratedServer.java:171)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.server.MinecraftServer.run(MinecraftServer.java:468)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.server.ThreadMinecraftServer.run(SourceFile:573)
As always thanks for all the work you have done and continue to do on this mod. It is very much appreciated!
NOTE: Just noticed this is already being discussed. Hopefully the additional information is helpful.
Lets say I just wanna play with zombies on easy, no other nucences.
Download and install Just Another Spawner
Start Minecraft
Enter a world
Exit Minecraft (this is just to generate config files)
Go to Just Another Spawner config files folder (.../.minecraft/config/JustAnotherSpawner)
Open the 'GlobalProperties.cfg' file in a text editor
Change the following options from false to true: "Empty Vanilla SpawnLists on Start" and "Gamerule doSpawning Off on Start"
Save and exit file
Find the 'Master' config folder (.../WorldSettings/Master)
Go into the ModEntitySettings folder
Open Vanilla.cfg in a text editor
Locate the desired entries in the 'livinghandler' section.
Change from -false to -true (ex. "S:Zombie=MONSTER-false" to "S:Zombie=MONSTER-true")
Save and exit file
Start Minecraft
Create new world.
By doing this, you are preventing vanilla Minecraft from spawning ANYTHING and telling Just Another Spawner which entities you want spawned by setting their ShouldSpawn value from false to true. You can do this for whichever creatures you wish.
Note that to have these settings apply to already created worlds you would need to delete their respective folder in the Just Another Spawner 'WorldSettings' directory (.../.minecraft/config/JustAnotherSpawner/WorldSettings/**world name here**) every time you altered the 'Master' config files.
This same basic method can be applied to mod entities as well. Note that some mod entities will show up in their own config files instead of "Vanilla.cfg." You could also change where certain mobs can spawn and how often by altering settings in the 'spawnlistentry' section of the above-mentioned config files.
If you are using this method along with Mo' Creatures you should also disable CMS to allow only JAS to spawn mobs.
Also note this is just one method of achieving your desired results. I am more familiar with JAS than other spawning mods which is why that is used in this example.
Edit: Sometimes certain categories will be able to propagate backwards from world to master (never the other way around). This can happen where a category that master doesn't use but world does. When world creates the group and it asks master for it even if master hasn't declared it, which creates the entry in master. Its not a problem, as master doesn't use it so if a world was created with the master settings it would just have a category in that never gets called. It still allows that category to be set as a default for a world that is set to read id. Just a useful little quirk with how configs are generated.
I believe this is what I was experiencing, as I edited the master file first, went in-game and then quit. After that, the master file had the edited biome groups in addition to the defaults. I had pre-generated the configs for the world I was testing with before editing the master so it must have pulled the defaults in from there. By removing the defaults from both the master and the world files they are both working as expected.
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I think that if you are going to disable / allow for the disabling of the spawning messages that they should be added as a separate option to the full debug text. It is nice for troubleshooting and not having to have the full debug text on (which seems to lag me something fierce at times).
Also, now that I have confirmed that JAS is functioning as I wanted I have actually started to begin setting up the config files for a real game. This has given me more ideas and I am sure you just can't wait to hear them (by the way, please feel free to tell me to leave you alone)!
One would be the ability to ban the spawning of entities on certain blocks on a global scale. Not sure if this can be implemented as I believe it would effectively require you to customize all remaining spawn parameters yourself, since defining a custom spawn setting overwrites the default built-in mod settings as far as I know. Though if you are going to be editing most entities' spawn settings anyway then being able to specify "no entities can spawn on block 18" instead of having to specify it for each individual entity could save a lot of work. Ideally this functionality could be overwritten by explicitly defining that an entity could spawn on a banned block.
Another would be the ability to define spawn/despawn parameters for entities on a per-biome basis; maybe adding them to the spawnlist entry instead of the livinghandler entry. Again, ideally this would allow you to set a default for all entities of a particular type in the livinghandler and then override those settings with the ones in the spawnlist entry (say I want Zombies to be able to spawn above ground in most biomes but not in tundra, etc.).
I know that you do this in your free time and am very grateful for what you have done so far; I don't want to give the impression I am not appreciative (as far as I am concerned this is the best spawning mod out there). Just thought it would suggest some things and see what you thought.
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Very interesting. Didn't think of it that way. I heard that Mo' Creatures was (at least at one point in time) using the whole vanilla animals don't despawn around fences thing. I had no idea it was possible to recreate that in JAS. Definitely opened my mind to some neat new possibilities!
Understood.
A bit of an annoyance when using mods that add big trees to the game where there are often large branches of logs to block the sky check. If I thought there was the possibility of adding an 'above-ground' check I would request it, but with even my little knowledge of Minecraft modding and programming in general I highly doubt there is any way to reliably determine this.
After a bit of pondering it would seem that ignoring a block outright would likely just lead to weirdness. If I were to for example prevent logs from being used in the sky check and then build my house out of them we would have trouble.
It might potentially be able to remove some of the annoyances with spawning. Then again, it could also introduce more. If I say ignore the 5 blocks above your head when checking for sky, while it might help with some of the large tree checks it could also again mess with interiors of structures or near-surface caves. Would probably require more thought (which I will try to put in to any future ideas before I post them
Well then I guess I will stick around.
Now to an on-topic question regarding the BiomeGroups.cfg file. If I make an entry into a biomegroup and that entry is invalid will it simply be stripped away or will it throw an error? I am trying to make things easier on myself by setting up a master config which groups all available biomes from my selected biome mods, but the thing is I don't actually -use- every biome; some I set to not generate. Depending on the mod this may or may not remove the biome from the reference list. Also, it seems that the reference list is occasionally missing some biomes; would adding in a biome that is technically correct and valid yet not in the reference list be functional?With a bit of testing the above seems to be working, so nevermind.
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Interesting. Is this vanilla behavior? Also, can you think of any benefits or disadvantages of setting this to 1?
Seems a little weird to me. I guess don't seem to really understand why it would be this way; what it is trying to accomplish or prevent. Of course you aren't usually going to have such an obvious case where this has an actual effect in a real game so it is mostly a moot point. I guess my interest in the matter is purely academic at this point since it is intended behavior that I doubt I will be altering.
On the subject of academic questions, could you explain how your {sky} check works? I haven't yet had time to play around with it much, but one of the things that irks me about the vanilla spawning system is getting mobs spawning beneath tress in forests during the daytime. If an entity is beneath, say, a single log block would this count as not being able to see the sky? If so, is there any possibility of a feature to perhaps configure blocks to be ignored during this check? So that if set - from the point of view of the sky check - all configured blocks would be counted as air instead?
Meh, maybe I am just babbling; it is early-ish. I need to go eat something.
Thanks again for putting up with all my nonsense!
EDIT:: After a few donuts, the idea of blacklisting certain blocks for the sky check probably isn't a good idea. Maybe an option configurable range to ignore above the entity? So for example the first 3 blocks wouldn't be checked.
Oh and maybe I shouldn't be cluttering up your thread with my general spawning questions and discussions, might be better suited to the mob spawning observations thread; let me know.
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Not yet, but I have just recently started messing with my mob mods and spawn settings. Of course I am using JAS instead of CMS, which I have been able to effectively disable by setting the spawn-rates of all monsters to 1 and removing them from all biome-groups giving CMS no where to spawn them. In my few tests it also seems that CMS isn't altering the despawn behavior of JAS which is good.
Of course once the bug with simply disabling the use CMS is fixed so the game doesn't crash things should be much easier and not need a hackish workaround.
Now I am working on figuring out how I am going to divide and group all the biomes.
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I can confirm that I had weights properly set for the biome I was testing as well as the cap had not been hit. Not sure what the issue is there.
I was testing on Hard so I don't think it was difficulty level causing instant despawning. Maybe CMS will insta-despawn any entity it controls that has its rate set to 0 if it should accidentally get spawned? Maybe this is deliberate workaround intended to counteract chunk-spawning (which it does). Lots of possibilities, who knows.
After a little bit of testing it doesn't seem like CMS is interfering with JAS in terms of despawning either vanilla or it's own creatures, which is good news. Of course I cannot say that for certain; just the result of a few little experiments I performed.
There is one thing weird I noticed during all of this. I haven't heard of this before, but is there a range around the block where entities are allowed to spawn / despawn? Kind of hard to put in to words so in the spoiler below are some pictures. In all the pictures zombies were spawned on top of ALL the sandstone / diamond blocks with the following settings used in the JAS config:
After spawning all the zombies, I moved far enough away for them to start despawning and waited. You can see from the pictures the results; it appears like there is a bit of a radius effect the diamond block (the only block on which zombies won't despawn) has on the surrounding area. Not sure if this is vanilla or related to your mod, nor if it is a bug or intended. Just thought I would share. Oh, and the fences in the second picture were just to prevent the zombies from trying to jump between platforms.
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Hmm. Lets see if I got this straight. You think that maybe non-despawning entities might have been getting preference over despawning entities regardless of weighting the despawners higher?
Given how crazy entity spawning is I have no idea if this is possible or not. Maybe it was just the fact that you saw less of the despawning entities, even with a higher weight, due to their despawning? If you have 3 of 'mob a' spawn and 2 of 'mob b,' and then one or two of 'mob a' despawned while 'mob b' was persistent it could give the appearance of a preference to the non-despawner even before the cap was reached; as far as I know despawning happens regardless of what the respective entity cap is at.
Meh, who knows (I sure don't, I am not a programmer or anything). All this spawning stuff is so hard to keep straight; makes my head spin at times.
Now off to try and see if I can determine if/how CMS despawning is interacting with JAS. Yay...
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This is interesting if true because during my tests, as mentioned before, JAS was occasionally attempting to chunk-spawn mobs that had their spawn-rate set to 0 (in the MoC config) but it seemed to be failing. I was getting the messages in the console but when arriving at the given coordinates there was never anything there (also never seemed to show up on Rei's Minimap with EntityRadar on). Also, they are showing up in the console as being added to the BiomeGroup so it seems they are still being declared/registered. They just aren't being spawned passively (I get no messages that they are being spawned aside from occasionally via chunks) and chunk-spawning seems to be attempting but failing.
Hmm. This is where I am getting a bit confused. Firstly, I am not using MSC (Mob Spawn Controls) at all. So I am going to just assume that you meant to type CMS instead (quite possible because they are so similar) and go off that assumption. I apologize if I was unclear about this in my original posts.
I haven't done any testing with despawning yet and have no ideas how the internals of CMS would handle such a thing but it is something to consider. I will maybe see if I can figure out some reasonable way of testing to see if CMS is still despawning entities; maybe by setting an entity to have a custom {despawn} tag in JAS with a very unlikely criteria that should keep them spawned. If they do disappear without meeting said criteria (for example maybe something like don't despawn unless on diamond blocks or some such nonsense) then it would point to CMS interfering.
This is the method I am using to prevent CMS from spawning anything. It is technically enabled and has frequencies set to spawn; it just doesn't have any valid biomes to spawn them in, effectively rendering it useless as I intended. As for whether they are added to the vanilla system I haven't checked as I have been running all these tests with the vanilla spawn system disabled via emptying the spawnlist at start and setting doMobSpawning to false.
If I continue to run into any more trouble this may be what I have to end up doing, but for now with the little bit of testing of my workaround I have done it seems to be doing alright. Just need to see if it (CMS) is still attempting to control the despawn of entities.
Awesome, sounds good. Didn't think about setting the cap to zero to prevent passive spawning, might have to take over opensky or underground until user-defined categories are implemented.
Thanks for everything so far!
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I believe the point was about how non-despawning creatures can take over the cap preventing creatures that do despawn from appearing. Of course I could be misinterpreting.
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Firstly the problem I was having regarding Mo' Creatures mobs not spawning when they should have been using the basic "S:Horse=CREATURE-true" notation. The problem seems to stem from how I had my Mo' Creatures configuration file set up.
The short and sweet version is that if you have the mobs disabled in the Mo' Creatures config file by setting their frequencies to <0:0:0> then it is blocking JAS from spawning them as well if you try to spawn them using their default settings. By applying custom spawn settings using the {spawn} tag, you overwrite this behavior and they are capable of spawning once again; but this removes their in-built functionality to determine how and when to spawn.
The workaround I have found is to set the creatures' spawn frequencies to <1:0:0> in the configuration file and remove them from all CMS biome groups. This accomplishes two things: first it effectively disables CMS from running at all because while the mobs have frequencies set they have no biomes in which to spawn; this takes care of CMS interfering with JAS. Secondly, by having their spawn rates set to 1 JAS is capable of spawning the mobs using their default spawn restrictions.
So I think I have made some progress in terms of getting Mo' Creatures and JAS working together. In the spoiler below I describe my tests in much more detail.
My first attempt was to simply leave CMS enabled but to disable all available options including despawn vanilla, modify vanilla spawns and allow spawns during world chunk loading. As well as the above changes, I changed the spawn frequencies in the configuration file to '<0:0:0>' for all mobs to prevent any spawning. This worked successfully; it prevented CMS from doing anything related to spawning while still allowing the game to run.
Then I tried to set up JAS to spawn Mo' Creatures mobs. I set their ShouldSpawn property to true along with all the vanilla creatures and went in game to test; only vanilla creatures were spawning. It should be noted that I had the configuration options to empty vanilla spawnlists and set gamerule doMobSpawning false at start both enabled. JAS would seem to attempt to chunk spawn Mo' Creatures mobs but they never showed up; I am unsure if it was falsely reporting the spawn or if the mob was despawning before I could find it. Vanilla mobs were chunk and passively spawning as anticipated.
To check this functionality I downloaded Project Zulu and tested with a mob from that. I set Blue Finches to spawn (again, not specifying any spawn conditions in order to preserve the defaults) and they spawned as anticipated. So it would seem that the problem was somewhere with Mo' Creatures.
After this I removed Project Zulu and went back to messing around with Mo' Creatures. I decided that maybe setting the frequency of spawns to 0 was effectively disabling the mob both for CMS and JAS. To test I set the frequency of horses to <1:0:0> and tested in-game. After this JAS appeared to be successfully spawning both vanilla creatures (I was testing with pigs) and horses. This introduced a new problem: with a frequency set and CMS unable to be truly disabled it was now spawning mobs as well.
To test this I disabled the spawning in JAS and went into a new world and sure enough there were horses. CMS was obviously working. After that I decided to see if removing the mob from all of the CMS biome-groups would prevent it from spawning under the assumption that if they have no biomes to spawn via CMS they would be essential disabled from spawning via CMS. This worked as anticipated: with the frequencies the same and JAS still disabled I created a new world and got no spawns (as it should be).
After this I re-enabled the spawning of both Vanilla pigs and Mo' Creatures horses in JAS again using no specific {spawn} rules so that their default rules would be used. I set both of their spawn rates in JAS to 100-1-0-0 and loaded up the world (the one that had nothing spawning in it previously). Success! I ended up getting 60 spawns at the start - I had the creatures cap set to 50 - and after some analysis I ended up with exactly 30 pigs and 30 horses as expected. Hopefully this puts me one step closer to finally wrangling Mo' Creatures into submission with JAS
One random thought I had while doing this testing that I would like to hear your thoughts on Crudedragos would be the addition of another custom CreatureType (like the opensky and underground types) that would allow mobs in said group to ONLY spawn during chunk-loading. As in somehow prevent any passive spawning of the members of this group. My thinking was that if you could do this you could set things such as the vanilla pigs/cows/chickens/sheep to this group in order to sort of get a finite population of these creatures. This would give them their own cap so they wouldn't interfere with others, allow them to still be spawned naturally so they could be collected and farmed without needing to worry about trying to get them to despawn as their numbers would be limited due to only ever spawning with a new chunk and with proper use of hunter creatures they would eventually be culled without being replaced.
That way if you need these animals, you can find them by exploring new chunks where they may spawn but don't need to set them to passively spawn where they could overpopulate and take over.
I haven't thought of a way to do this using currently existing functionality in JAS so thought I would see what you thought (of course I could be overlooking something simple; all this time messing with config files has kind of fried my brain). Oh and sorry for the long post, I can be quite talkative (type-ative?) at times.
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I just downloaded Project Zulu and tested with Blue Finches. Setting the config file to 'S:"ProjectZulu|Core.Blue Finch"=AMBIENT-true' causes the entities to spawn as anticipated. So maybe this is something related to Mo' Creatures only?
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Not a problem. Looking forward to (hopefully) finally being able to vanquish the many-headed beast of doom that is mob spawning with many separate mob-mods; using JAS as my weapon of choice of course. Just now starting that battle and I know it is going to be a long one.
EDIT:: After a little messing around I noticed something that feels a bit strange.
Am I correct in assuming that the following entry should spawn bears using their default restrictions (light level, etc.) as coded in the originating mod?
"S:Bear=CREATURE-true"
After some testing, I found that while setting "S:Bear=CREATURE-true" and "S:Chicken=CREATURE-true", using both newly generated and existing worlds (with the configs updated of course) I am only getting chickens spawning. The MultiMC console is showing both passive and chunk spawning of chickens as expected, but it is not showing any passive spawning of bears. It will occasionally report that it has chunk-spawned a bear but when going to the given coordinates there is nothing. Either it is falsely reporting the spawn or it is being despawned before I can see it.
If I set the config file to "S:Bear=CREATURE-true{spawn}" bears seem to be both passively and chunk spawning as expected.
I haven't tried any other entities from other mods yet but it seems to be some odd behavior; can't tell if it is related to Mo' Creatures specifically (I may download and give another mob mod a try later).
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Other potentially useful information:
- Minecraft 1.5.1
- Minecraft Forge 7.7.2.682
- Just Another Spawner 0.6.0 for 1.5+ (downloaded today from link in OP)
- Mo' Creatures 5.1.5
- Custom Mob Spawner 1.12.5
- (many additional mods, but I think these are likely the most relevant; let me know if you need a full list)
Also, I have Custom Mob Spawner enabled but with every available option such as "despawn vanilla" and "modify vanilla spawns" turned off with the spawn rates for every entity set to 0 in the config (so in theory, while it is 'enabled' in order to prevent a crash it shouldn't be -doing- anything).Below is the message (again, just trying to post what seem to be the useful bits here; let me know if you want a more complete log).
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Can not set boolean field net.minecraft.entity.EntityLiving.field_82179_bU to java.lang.Integer
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at sun.reflect.UnsafeFieldAccessorImpl.throwSetIllegalArgumentException(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at sun.reflect.UnsafeFieldAccessorImpl.throwSetIllegalArgumentException(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at sun.reflect.UnsafeBooleanFieldAccessorImpl.set(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at java.lang.reflect.Field.set(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at jas.common.spawner.creature.handler.ReflectionHelper.setCatchableFieldUsingReflection(ReflectionHelper.java:71)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at jas.common.spawner.creature.handler.LivingHelper.setAge(LivingHelper.java:51)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at jas.common.spawner.creature.handler.LivingHandler.despawnEntity(LivingHandler.java:139)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at jas.common.EntityDespawner.despawner(EntityDespawner.java:18)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraftforge.event.ASMEventHandler_37_EntityDespawner_despawner_LivingUpdateEvent.invoke(.dynamic)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraftforge.event.ASMEventHandler.invoke(ASMEventHandler.java:35)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraftforge.event.EventBus.post(EventBus.java:103)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraftforge.common.ForgeHooks.onLivingUpdate(ForgeHooks.java:317)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at sun.reflect.GeneratedMethodAccessor11.invoke(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at sun.reflect.DelegatingMethodAccessorImpl.invoke(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Unknown Source)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at Reflector.callBoolean(Reflector.java:133)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.entity.EntityLiving.func_70071_h_(EntityLiving.java:776)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.world.World.func_72866_a(World.java:2336)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.world.WorldServer.func_72866_a(WorldServer.java:717)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.world.World.func_72870_g(World.java:2298)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.world.World.func_72939_s(World.java:2144)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.world.WorldServer.func_72939_s(WorldServer.java:546)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.server.MinecraftServer.func_71190_q(MinecraftServer.java:651)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.server.MinecraftServer.func_71217_p(MinecraftServer.java:570)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.server.integrated.IntegratedServer.func_71217_p(IntegratedServer.java:171)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.server.MinecraftServer.run(MinecraftServer.java:468)
2013-05-08 17:37:44 [INFO] [STDERR] at net.minecraft.server.ThreadMinecraftServer.run(SourceFile:573)
As always thanks for all the work you have done and continue to do on this mod. It is very much appreciated!
NOTE: Just noticed this is already being discussed. Hopefully the additional information is helpful.
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- Download and install Just Another Spawner
- Start Minecraft
- Enter a world
- Exit Minecraft (this is just to generate config files)
- Go to Just Another Spawner config files folder (.../.minecraft/config/JustAnotherSpawner)
- Open the 'GlobalProperties.cfg' file in a text editor
- Change the following options from false to true: "Empty Vanilla SpawnLists on Start" and "Gamerule doSpawning Off on Start"
- Save and exit file
- Find the 'Master' config folder (.../WorldSettings/Master)
- Go into the ModEntitySettings folder
- Open Vanilla.cfg in a text editor
- Locate the desired entries in the 'livinghandler' section.
- Change from -false to -true (ex. "S:Zombie=MONSTER-false" to "S:Zombie=MONSTER-true")
- Save and exit file
- Start Minecraft
- Create new world.
By doing this, you are preventing vanilla Minecraft from spawning ANYTHING and telling Just Another Spawner which entities you want spawned by setting their ShouldSpawn value from false to true. You can do this for whichever creatures you wish.Note that to have these settings apply to already created worlds you would need to delete their respective folder in the Just Another Spawner 'WorldSettings' directory (.../.minecraft/config/JustAnotherSpawner/WorldSettings/**world name here**) every time you altered the 'Master' config files.
This same basic method can be applied to mod entities as well. Note that some mod entities will show up in their own config files instead of "Vanilla.cfg." You could also change where certain mobs can spawn and how often by altering settings in the 'spawnlistentry' section of the above-mentioned config files.
If you are using this method along with Mo' Creatures you should also disable CMS to allow only JAS to spawn mobs.
Also note this is just one method of achieving your desired results. I am more familiar with JAS than other spawning mods which is why that is used in this example.
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Very interesting feature, definitely going to have to play around with that.
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I believe this is what I was experiencing, as I edited the master file first, went in-game and then quit. After that, the master file had the edited biome groups in addition to the defaults. I had pre-generated the configs for the world I was testing with before editing the master so it must have pulled the defaults in from there. By removing the defaults from both the master and the world files they are both working as expected.