Mine Mine no Mi 0.10.0 #30 (Patreon)

The challenges are starting to get finished one by one, as of right now Higuma, Morgan, Arlong, Chew, Kuroobi, Mr 1, Mr 3, Mr 5 and Miss Valentine are about 90% complete, with that 10% left being their arenas needing some more touchups or taking care of some edge cases regarding potential cheesing or issues in their AIs, but overall playable and quite fun.

The following ones will be worked on next and will be part of 0.10.0 on release: Alvida, Kuro, Nyanban Brothers, Don Krieg, Gin, Pearl and Crocodile.

(These include both Standard and Hard difficulties)

So this puts the total number of unique challenges at 17 and 34 total if we split the Standard and Hard difficulties.

Sadly a bit shy of the 20 promised but I had to cut down a few obvious ones (like Hachi or Miss Doublefinger) for lack of pretty much everything regarding them. They will get added in future 0.10.x patches for sure however.

Mr 3 (and some others in the future) got a new fun taunt showcasing (if nothing else) all the details that went into these fights, if you're stuck by his candle lock he'll just dodge all your attacks while sneaking, its a small thing but it shows how they interact with the players based on their status, distance and environment:

Morgan and Higuma got the Muster ability during their Hard fights with Morgan in particular summoning a bunch of Marine Sniper NPCs:

But overall its pretty hard to show off particular things, as the fun of the fights is the complete package of how the boss uses their abilities depending on their surroundings.

Arenas got some updates too with some more small detail variations and extra details.

They're not going to win any originality or creativity awards for sure and thats by design, there's a really long rant at the bottom on why certain things have to be this way thanks to how Minecraft works. There is a planned datapack that will replace these arenas with some high quality ones however the tl;dr is that those would take a long time to build, the current ones are done purely for gameplay reasons with the visuals taking a hit. These small variations are just for that, small variations in the landscape, they'll be usually on the sides and their impact on the fight should be as minimal as possible.

RANT STARTS HERE

Ok so lets bust up the math a bit... a single block takes about ~6000 nanoseconds to be placed (on average might take less might take more with a range of between 1000ns to 120000ns observed during my tests). That might sound pretty fast...that is 0.006 milliseconds after all, however it very quickly adds up, and one thing people are not realizing is that minecraft structures are huge in terms of block numbers (3d perspective of blocks is insane, a 5x5x5 hole holds 125 blocks) an average "simple" structure that I'm using for these fights sits at around 250000-400000 blocks, now we do some quick math and realize that building those 250k blocks takes about 12 seconds (400000 x 0.006 => 2400 ms / 1000 => ~2.5 seconds). Main issue with this is not really the player waiting, I'm sure most people would be more than fine with a 10-15 second delay between starting a challenge, issue is due to how minecraft works thats 2.5 seconds where the server gets stuck, its 100% busy building the arena and thus lag starts to show up, this lag adds up with every player trying to start a challenge and thus servers start to drop ticks

Now obviously there's a lot of optimizations that go towards these arenas being spawned, and for the most part (see note.1) they will be built within 1-2 seconds top. However a 2nd issue occurs which is that of space, placing a block no matter if manually via code or by reading a template file will always take the same amount of time (maybe with a bit of overhead when reading the file but thats done at startup anyway so its not exactly visible during gameplay), however, storing said file means a bunch of bytes, quite a lot of bytes, 1 arena reaching between 1 and 2 MB, sure for a game worth gigabytes this is almost nothing however the entire mod is (at the time of writing this) around 20MB and its currently planned to add around 8 arenas for this update, this would mean, in worst case possible an extra 16MB added to the file size, almost doubling the mod's size and this is only for the first batch of bosses which doesn't even reach Drum Island...before the timeskip alone we'll have 100MB+ worth of arenas...which is not something I'm fond of, I'd much rather use those 16MBs to add more sounds if anything _wink wink nudge nudge_.

Moral of the story ? Erm...absolutely fuck how things are and how impossible it is to spawn large structures without killing the game I guess ?...there's no moral I just felt like ranting after the last 2 or so weeks in which Ive been stuck in this shithole called optimizing structure spawn times....sorry for the rant :(

(note.1 When opening the world spawning a challenge might take a couple seconds more depending on arena and specs, times vary wildly between 5s and 30s but this is mostly a first time thing and every challenge done after that first load time should only take 1-2 seconds to generate)