5.8.md

5.8.0

Released 1st November 2023.

Borked release, forgot to merge branches.

5.8.1

Released 1st November 2023.

For Minecraft: Bedrock Edition 1.20.40

This is a minor feature release, including new gameplay features, various performance improvements to internal World and Block systems, and changes to the API.

Plugin compatibility: Plugins for previous 5.x versions will run unchanged on this release, unless they use internal APIs, reflection, or packages like the pocketmine\network\mcpe or pocketmine\data namespace. Do not update plugin minimum API versions unless you need new features added in this release.

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.

General

• Neighbour block updates now have a separate timer for timings. Previously, these were counted under Scheduled Block Updates, which was misleading.

Performance

• LightUpdate now avoids attempting to propagate back in the same direction the light came from. This produces a small performance improvement of around 6% in light propagation.
• Improved worst-case (non-cached) performance of World::getCollisionBlocks() (and its successor World::getBlockCollisionBlocks()).
  • While 5.5.0 introduced caching at the World level for AABBs, the cache was rarely useful due to entity and player movement being too unpredictable. This meant that most users saw a performance degradation with lots of moving entities, except in specific situations.
  • Performance for fetching non-cached AABBs for a cell is now improved by 2x. Overall performance benefit to a server depends on the number of entities and players.
• Added cache for hydrated farmland blocks to remember the last known location of nearby water.
  • If nearby water sources are not changed, this cache allows hydrated farmland to completely avoid checking up to 161 nearby blocks for water after the first check.
  • Tests with large wheat farms showed a 25% performance improvement in overall server performance compared to previous 5.x versions.
• Migrated various internal enums to native PHP 8.1 enums. Bypassing magic __callStatic() accessors improved performance in many areas, although it's hard to quantify the exact benefit.
• Made use of Facing::OFFSET constant in various places to avoid unnecessary Vector3 and Position object allocations. Many pathways benefit from this, including neighbour block updates (due to faster Block::getSide() and less useless objects).
• Avoided clearing block AABB caches except when strictly necessary. Previously, the cache was wiped every time blocks were read from the world, making them mostly useless.
• Avoided random updates on blocks which have reached their final state, such as fully-grown crops. This produces a minimal performance improvement.
• Removed useless checks in some World hot paths.

API

General

• All enums have been migrated to native PHP 8.1 enums.
  • For now, the old APIs and accessors are still usable (via LegacyEnumShimTrait), but these will be removed in the next major release.
  • EnumTrait has been deprecated, and will be removed in the next major release.
  • Migration for most plugin developers will simply involve deleting () from the end of enum case usages, which is a trivial change and also improves performance.
  • Plugin usages of EnumTrait are encouraged to move to native enums, optionally using LegacyEnumShimTrait to provide backwards compatibility.
    • See this code for an example of how to associate properties with enum cases (since native enums don't support this directly).
  • Thanks to improvements in RuntimeDataDescriber, any native enum can now be used as a custom block's state property.

pocketmine\block

• The following classes have been added:
  • utils\AgeableTrait - used by blocks which have an age property, such as crops
  • utils\StaticSupportTrait - used by blocks which have the same support requirements regardless of their state, such as crops

pocketmine\data\runtime

• The following API methods have been added:
  • public RuntimeDataDescriber->boundedIntAuto(int $min, int $max, int &$value) : void - similar to boundedInt(), but automatically calculates the needed number of bits based on the given min/max
  • public RuntimeDataDescriber->enum(T extends \UnitEnum &$case) : void - describes any native PHP 8.1 enum case
  • public RuntimeDataDescriber->enumSet(array<int, T extends \UnitEnum> &$set, array<int, T extends \UnitEnum> $allCases) : void - describes a set of enum cases (similar to bitflags)
• The following API methods have been deprecated:
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->bellAttachmentType() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->boundedInt() - use boundedIntAuto() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->brewingStandSlots() - use enumSet() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->copperOxidation() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->coralType() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->dirtType() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->dripleafState() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->dyeColor() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->froglightType() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->leverFacing() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->medicineType() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->mobHeadType() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->mushroomBlockType() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->potionType() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->slabType() - use enum() instead
  • RuntimeDataDescriber->suspiciousStewType() - use enum() instead

pocketmine\player

• TitleID is now included in PlayerInfo metadata for plugin consumption.

pocketmine\world

• The following API methods have been added:
  • public World->getBlockCollisionBoxes(AxisAlignedBB $bb) : list<AxisAlignedBB> - similar to getCollisionBoxes but exclusively for blocks, avoiding the need for conditionally useless parameters
• The following API methods have been deprecated:
  • World->getCollisionBoxes() - use getBlockCollisionBoxes() instead (alongside getCollidingEntities() if entity collision boxes are also required)

pocketmine\utils

• The following classes have been deprecated:
  • EnumTrait - use native PHP 8.1 enums instead
• The following classes have been added:
  • LegacyEnumShimTrait - can be used by native PHP 8.1 enums to provide the same API as EnumTrait

Gameplay

Blocks

• Implemented the following blocks:
  • Amethyst
  • Amethyst Cluster
  • Chiseled Bookshelf
  • Crimson Roots
  • Pitcher Crop
  • Pitcher Plant
  • Torchflower
  • Torchflower Crop
  • Warped Roots

Items

• Implemented the following items:
  • Pitcher Pod
  • Torchflower Seeds

Internals

• Farmland block now has an extra property (waterPositionIndex) stored in its blockstate ID to track the position of nearby water. This property is not saved to disk, and is only used for caching.
• The format of internal blockstate ID has been updated.
  • The lower 11 bits are now reserved for state data (previously 8 bits). This increase facilitates the new cache for Farmland blocks.
  • The state data bits are now XOR'd with the xxh3 of the block's type ID, instead of being directly XOR'd with the type ID.
    • This XOR improves the distribution of the lower bits of the blockstate ID, which is important for hashtable indexing to minimize collisions.
    • Previously, the lower bits were XOR'd with the type ID directly, but the effectiveness of this reduced as more state data bits were added.
    • xxh3 produces consistently good results for this purpose regardless of the number of state data bits allocated.
    • Hash collisions with blockstate IDs are reduced by 50% with this change, which is a happy side effect.
  • This is backwards-incompatible, so anyone saving internal blockstate IDs on disk or in a DB will be burned by this change (though they shouldn't have been doing that anyway).
• Removed code generation step for RuntimeDataDescriber enum serialization. All described enums now use PHP 8.1 native enums, which can be described without codegen using RuntimeDataDescriber->enum().
• Added DeprecatedLegacyEnumAccessRule custom PHPStan rule to flag legacy EnumTrait case accessors.
• Cleaned up remaining hardcoded Config keys in SetupWizard. These usages now use auto-generated constants like the rest of the codebase.

5.8.2

Released 9th November 2023.

Performance

• Improved performance of small packet zero-compression (unintended use of slow zlib compressor instead of fast libdeflate one).
  • This affected the majority of outbound packets, as most packets are below the 256-byte threshold for compression.
  • This faster method is over 20x faster than the old method, producing noticeable performance gains for large servers.

Fixes

• Fixed melons and pumpkins not growing.
• Fixed melon and pumpkin stems not attaching to the grown melon/pumpkin.
• Fixed iron and gold ores not being affected by the Fortune enchantment.
• Fixed ancient debris burning in lava.
• Fixed sign (front) text loading from vanilla world saves (back text is not yet supported).

Internals

• Removed bogus optimization from tools/generate-blockstate-upgrade-schema.php that could cause incorrect remappedStates generation when some of the states stayed under the old ID.
• Fixed possible crash in BlockStateUpgrader name flattening rule handling with invalid blockstate NBT data.