v1.20.11: Purely performance

Dear Extraordinary Survivalists 
v1.20.11, a stable release, can now be downloaded through the account manager.

This release has no new gameplay features BUT a few fixes compared with v1.20.10.  As well as that, on multiplayer servers, it significantly improves performance and reduces RAM utilization, especially with higher player numbers:

• A large multiplayer server running this release should perform up to approximately twice as good - twice as many ticks-per-second - when large numbers of players (more than 30) are online
• Different results may be seen with different player counts, adjusted servermagicnumbers.json, different creature numbers compared with the vanilla defaults, or modded games, but all servers should see some improvement
• This release also uses approximately 10%-20% less RAM, in both single-player and multiplayer games.

Screenshot by bens, shared on #screenshots on Discord

Game Updates

• Changes in 1.20.11
  • Tweak: Improve client<->server connection stability. (Technical Info: Added server health check for UDP since some ISP's may block randomly some UDP, this may cause desync between entities or dropped items. So now if there was no UDP received from a client for 30 seconds the server will fall back to TCP automatically for that client and tell it to also fall back to send only TCP which should fix the desync. Further you can now set forceUdpOverTcp in clientsettings.json or using ".cf forceUdpOverTcp on" command, then just rejoin and you have permanently enabled to only use TCP.)
  • Fixed: Rare exceptions in 1.20.11-rc.1 when a server loads mapchunks at the world border
  • Fixed: Containers spawned in using the /giveblock command without adding the type attribute would allow you to place them in a boat storage slot but would crash your client. If this was done on a server you may end up crashing as soon as you join again.
  • Fixed: Redwood tree generation destroys translocators
• Changes already in 1.20.11-rc.1
  • Tweak: Multiplayer server performance substantially improved in many areas
    • Improved TPS from entity ticking (especially if MaxPhysicsThreads exceeds 1: on large servers please experiment with setting that in the range 2-5, in servermagicnumbers.json)
    • Improved TPS from entity spawning (testing of spawn positions now runs on a separate thread)
    • Improved TPS from player and entity physics and animations updates on the server
    • Reduced peak RAM requirements for server packet sending
    • Reduced peak RAM requirements for server game autosaving
  • Tweak: Map and minimap performance improvements (client side changes)
    • Map now drawn up to 10x faster when panning or zooming into previously mapped areas
    • Areas of the map which are moved off-screen are now preserved for longer without re-draw
    • Reduced heavy multiplayer lag after panning in the world map (greatly reduced client-server network traffic from panning)
  • Tweak: Reduced RAM requirements on both server and client for animations
  • Tweak: Thrown stones, snowballs and other thrown projectiles now have smoother motion
  • Tweak: For hardware constrained servers, new optional VintagestoryServer.exe command line argument --reducedThreads to reduce the number of threads used overall (detail: may help servers which have hardware thread count limits, at the cost of some worsening of ticks per second and game startup time)

Note for modders:

It is possible that v1.20.11 will cause mod breakage for a very small number of coded mods, although most mods built for v1.20.10 should still work just the same. Mods which only add content using JSON or patches should all be okay. For coded mods, if you experience any new mod issues (not present in v.1.20.10), please do report them and meanwhile continue using game version v1.20.10.  [For coders: we did not change the API, but if your mod's code references ServerMain.Clients with VintagestoryLib.dll as a dependency, you will likely need to recompile against the 1.20.11 version of VintagestoryLib.dll. Harmony patches which make code changes deep within VintagestoryLib might also need attention: most of the entity physics, animations and general entity ticking code in the engine has been changed.]