Tobi TobidieTopfpflanze

Block Storage & Network Protocol Changes

Paletted chunks & removing BlockIDs brings a few big changes to how blocks are represented. In Bedrock, Blocks used to be represented by their 8 bit ID and 4 bit data; this means that we can only represent 256 blocks and 16 variants for each block. As it happens we ran out of IDs in Update Aquatic, so we had to do something about it :)

After this change, we can represent infinite types of Blocks and infinite BlockStates, just like in Java. BlockStates are what is sent over the network as they are roughly equivalent to the old ID+data information, eg. they're all the information attached to a block.

BlockStates are serialized in two ways:

PersistentID: a PersistentID is a NBT tag containing the BlockState name and its variant number; for example

Client Blob Cache

What's the Client Blob Cache

The Client Blob Cache is a new Bedrock optimization - it allows blocks and biomes to be cached on Clients to avoid resending identical chunks over and over. Chunks and biomes make up the vast majority of network traffic in a lot of common cases (eg. login, teleport or dimension switches) but at the same time, they rarely change. Allowing the Client to reuse chunks it has seen in the past can save a ton of traffic and latency!

The Client Cache is a Content Addressed Storage (a bit like git) that stores Blobs and retrieves them based on their full hashes (BlobIds). This means that the cache doesn't actually know about Chunks - in the future, we might start using it for more types of data, like skins or data driven entities.

A nice thing we get from the CAS approach is that the cache is persistent: returning players will be able to reuse content that was sent them in previous sessions or even previous sessions in different servers as long as tha

Research about the ESP32-S2 Camera Interface

I am very interested in the ESP32-S2's camera port and the possibility of using it for a variety of MicroPython\CircuitPython projects. My hope is that the ESP32-S2 will the ability to do do things similiar to what is possible on the Raspberry Pi. Today there is no ESP32-S2 board available which exposes this port, and no camera modeles, but I wanted to understand the hardware capabilities to understand what might be possible and just as important, what is not.

This write up is based on solely on a morning's worth of research. If there are errors

Bedrock `.mcstructure` files

Saving and Loading

mcstructure files are created by the Export button in a structure block. To load them in game with a load structure block, the files must be placed in a behavior pack. The path determines the structure identifier, which is typed into the structure block to load the structure.

Examples:

	ZigZag-Encoding
	---------------

	Maps negative values to positive values while going back and
	forth (0 = 0, -1 = 1, 1 = 2, -2 = 3, 2 = 4, -3 = 5, 3 = 6 ...)

	(i >> bitlength-1) ^ (i << 1)

	with "i" being the number to be encoded, "^" being
	XOR-operation and ">>" would be arithemtic shifting-operation

	#!/bin/bash

	version="$1"
	major=0
	minor=0
	build=0

	# break down the version number into it's components
	regex="([0-9]+).([0-9]+).([0-9]+)"
	if [[ $version =~ $regex ]]; then

	[
	{
	"data": 0,
	"id": 0,
	"name": "minecraft:air",
	"runtimeID": 0
	},
	{
	"data": 0,
	"id": 1,