Bukkit

Introduction

The lighting component can:

• Prevent client lag caused by faulty lighting in chunks
• Automatically fix lighting as chunks are generated
• Fix lighting on demand

Fixing lighting?

You may not completely understand what I mean by this. Lighting bugs? How do you mean? Well, after the beta versions of Minecraft a new lighting model was introduced. It takes care of lighting changes during sunsets to make it more realistic. While this is all working, it left some pretty severe bugs behind. For one, it causes dark shadows nearby cliffs, in cave entrances, in water pools and other places. This previously caused a lot of client lag, this is now less, but still noticeable.

How is lighting fixed?

First of all, it takes all chunks to be fixed and invalidates all current lighting. It basically clears all currently set lighting for all blocks, and re-calculates the hotspots. For example, a GlowStone or Lava block is added as one 15-level hotspot. The same is done for sky light. Then this lighting is smoothed out. This means that around every block in every chunk it is checked if lighting is higher than it currently is. This is the most intensive operation. Finally, the chunks are re-sent to all clients. Fixing is done on another thread, as it takes pretty long to do.

Manual fixing

You can use /lag fix to make the plugin re-calculate all lighting in the chunks around you. This may take several seconds to minutes for it to take effect. You can use /lag fix [distance] to fix chunks on a set view distance around you. For example, a distance of 1 will fix the lighting of a 3x3 area around you.

To fix all the lighting of a given world, use /lag fixall world, or /lag fixall for the current world. Note that this operation may take fairly long depending on how large the world is.

Should I use it?

If you run pre-generated worlds, you can make it fix the servers once and then just disable it. Lighting bugs usually don't re-appear after it is fixed just once, as it is a generate-time bug. If you run a server where new chunks are generated all the time, it may be useful to run this plugin. If you don't like the idea of new chunks getting fixed all the time, without you knowing it, you can disable the automatic fixing in the configuration.