Speeding up the start of Tectonicus

I'm tired of waiting up to 2hours (over 600regions or 700k chunks) till the program loaded up all the world chunks. It'S a waste of time, because you want to update a small part of the world which takes maybe like 5mins and have to wait 2hours.

The idea is easy.. Cache the CRC32 checksums of region files and only check the chunks if the region checksum differs.

I wrote a small program in C# to check the times it needs to generate the checksum for each region file. and... its faster by... a milion times.

[File1] r.-1.-1.mcr CRC32: 2786436216 CRC32-Time: 158ms

[File2] r.-1.-10.mcr CRC32: 4235360696 CRC32-Time: 198ms

[File3] r.-1.-11.mcr CRC32: 3941753380 CRC32-Time: 212ms

[File4] r.-1.-2.mcr CRC32: 1823457973 CRC32-Time: 150ms

[File5] r.-1.-3.mcr CRC32: 1804083063 CRC32-Time: 153ms

...

...

...

[File619] r.9.6.mcr CRC32: 3032659949 CRC32-Time: 254ms

[File620] r.9.7.mcr CRC32: 2776096317 CRC32-Time: 243ms

[File621] r.9.8.mcr CRC32: 3554020377 CRC32-Time: 237ms

[File622] r.9.9.mcr CRC32: 1066933652 CRC32-Time: 225ms

====================

Time Elapsed: 00h 02m 16s

Average Checksum generation time per region: 212,8215ms

It took for 622 Regions (each of them has 1024chunks -> 636928 Chunks) only 2 1/4min... instead of 1h30min...

Please update Tectonicus because it is a really nice program, just the start time bugs me...

Headless Linux Box Support

Currently there are workarounds available for certain distributions of Linux (involving xRandr and patching it) to allow for Tectonicus to run on 'headless' linux systems.

A feature I would like is to be able to render the Tectonicus map on a headless system without having to use the oddity of xRandr which appear to be buggy and not work on all distro's (such as ArchLinux).

Player Positioning

Would love an option to leave it running to pull player position info and update the map in real/near-real time with their current position. Also, if much later even, perhaps a function where it monitors where players are and if there is no record of a render for that area, "short render" that area and update the map for just those new (emphasis on new to cut down overall rendering/re-rendering of existing areas) areas live. If we want to update existing rendered areas we can just do a full update render.

Woo real-time mapping? *crosses fingers*

Option to change background color

I would like the ability to change background color (the color of the empty space 'behind' the map) to whatever color I like.

New command to enable changed tiles output to a "Changed" folder in addition to regular...

see my post here:

http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1022&t=95739&sid=e8f21368770860011af7c6746ba9295c&start=2370#p4007335

Basically you can have an additional parameter that copies the changed/new tiles to a "Changed" folder very much like how the cache works and changed.txt. Since the changed.txt knows what is new/changed, why not have the ability to also have those tiles output to a seperate folder for ease of use in copying only the new tiles to a new location (eg: via FTP)

Since I image the "Changed" folder retaining the normal file structure, all you would have to do would transfer the contents of the folder to the new location and overwrite the existing files. This way you don't need to copy the whole map every time.

Add feature to determine if last render was successful

Sometimes, something catastrophic happens and tectonicus is killed halfway through a render. I'd like to see tectonicus have the ability to tell if it shut down cleanly and/or successfully rendered the last time it was ran. Currently, if tectonicus dies, I have to re-render my entire map. It'd be nice for some error recovery, or at least abandon the cache automatically.

Add last online time and inventory to player tooltip

As the title says, I think it would be useful if you added the time the player was last online and the inventory to the tooltip of the player.

OpenGL

Please add the option to switch to software rendering for us stuck working over RDP on Windows Server 2k8...

In Browser Rotation

I would like to see a rotate view button(s). Although, if implemented this would obviously multiply the time it takes to render each map by the amount of rotations. If there were 4 views (90º rotation) then you could see an object from all angles.

Get link outputs wrong coordinates.

When clicking the get link button on the bottom right and visit the URL it gave me, the position is totally off, not even close. Usually out of bounds of the map.

The often you get a new link and visit it the further away you get.

First time "get link" outputs:

worldX=-384&worldY=0&worldZ=1821&zoom=8

After visiting it and clicking "get link" again now outputs:

worldX=-745&worldY=0&worldZ=1432&zoom=8

Even though It's supposed to be at X -384, Z 1821