New Realtime Map!

[Pri]

You guys probably know about http://map.renmx.com it's a great resource to view our map. Well today I have upgraded our map with insanely high detail.

Here is what our map looked like yesterday when zoomed in all the way:


And this is what it looks like now!


Pretty impressive hey? I'm sure you'll all find this useful for looking at your builds online. It looks even better zoomed out but I thought a really close zoomed in view would be the best way to show you the quality difference.

EDIT:// I should have mentioned, this is only for our survival server and the map may look a little funky for the next 1-2 days as the map is still rendering and with quality this high it takes a very long time.

[freakboy31]

Wow.

Is Creative included in this update too? It is 10 times larger than Survival.

EDIT: It only applies on Survival server.

[Psico45]

Niiiiiiiiiice!!!!!!

[Skeletonrooster]

Amazing

[Pri]

As you guys have probably noticed it is taking a much longer time to render the map than originally thought. I severly underestimated just how intensive this map generation would be.

The server has literally been rendering every minute for the past 5 days and I don't think it's even close to being finished. The main issue appears to be that it first saves everything at the closest zoom level in the normal flat orientation (bird eye view). Then it loads every single one of those images in larger segments and renders them together as a zoomed out perspective.

So essentially instead of just rendering the chunks and saving them it is also loading them again, making more images then saving those, then it does it again and again and again for each zoom out level. This is all considerably intensive on our hard disk where I store the Dynmaps. I don't store them on an SSD because the storage use is just so high (300GB+).

So anyway what does this mean? Well it means the servers performance is going to be a little sucky until it's done. The hard disks are way overloaded due to all the file reads and writes being performed. And when the disk gets overloaded the RAM on the server starts to fill up because it uses the RAM as a caching mechanism for performance. This has the negative affect of making the server run poorly as obviously when you get to 99% RAM usage things tend to slow down while the operating system tries to flush stuff out to other disks in the system to make free space for applications to run.

But the good news is the new map looks awesome and once this initial full render is complete we wont have any more issues. So I'm going to wait it out. If I were to cancel the render now and go back to a lower quality it would still take several days to render so I think we'll just wait for this to be done and then reap the benefits.

I know right now the map has rendered a square within our circle and appears to have stopped rendering but it's actually just the highest zoom out level which hasn't got the extra data at the edges right now. The map is still rendering those parts at the higher zoom out levels and it's still doing the side ways render, cave render and the heatmap renders too.

So this is just an update on what's going on bare with me