&mut Self in Entity & dynamic Downcasting

[unschlagbar]

The goal of the pr

The current entities system tries to avoid deadlocks and a well thought computation order by making all entities completely interior mutable. part of the reason is probably also that most of the devs come from pumpkin where it was practiced similar. The idea is also that all threads can access all entities without having to worry that data may be inaccessible.

Chunk gen in steel is already very fast and very strong parallelized, the speed however comes from the fact that multiple threads can work on there own chunk, there is basically no dependency between the chunks for the heavy part. If multiple threads would work on the same chunk, the sync cost would be almost larger than the multi threading advantage. The same thing applies to entities as well. Entities are a complete unit just like a chunk. for every tick one entities is supposed to only tick from one thread. the interactions between the entities are up to 3 extra locks for complex entities. compared to way over 10 locks and an ugly amount of atomics loads and cell locks.

In my opinion this new entity handling way, is the most important thing that would easily lift steel up to the best mc rust server with a future where writing new and custom entities is just as fun as writing other rust code.

Implementation

SharedEntity is now Arc<EntityBase>. Having an arc here means that this is the root of the entity.
EntityBase now has two more members:

pub struct EntityBase {
   ...
    /// The concrete entity implementation. Empty until `attach_entity` is called.
    entity: OnceLock<Box<SyncMutex<dyn Entity>>>,
    /// Set only for player bases. Like every other entity, a player is reached
    /// mutably by locking; `with_entity`/`with_entity` lock through this weak
    /// reference. Kept separate from the `entity` slot only because the player is
    /// owned by `ServerPlayer`
    player: Weak<SyncMutex<Player>>,
}

For normal Entities the entity member gets the inner entity assign at the initialization. It doesnt need to be an arc since its not the root and the dyn Entity is not supposed to be stored any where. So the entities gets stored as SharedEntities but in fns params its often &mut dyn Entity, just not in the fns where you need a downcast (more on that later).

Players are not owned by the SharedEntity. Since player have parts that can and must be accessed by multiple thread, i moved all these part into a new Struct ServerPlayer (name comes from vanilla). ServerPlayer is the root and owns the player, so thats why SharedEntity only has a weak to it. its not final what is supposed to be in ServerPlayer and what in player (AI decided it for now). Player also has an Weak to ServerPlayer. The goal on that part is to move all network handling to ServerPlayer or maybe even to connection (to replicated vanillas ServerGamePacketListenerImpl) that would also allow for better custom protocols like suggested here: Issue 79.
You can think of Player as the entity part of the player that ticks movement and that stuff, ServerPlayer is the other part that has more power and is interior mutable.

There is a new dowcasting system that removes the need for entity trait methods like: as_experience_orb, as_item_entity.
Its available to use through let entity: Option<T> = entity_base.lock_entity().downcast::<T>(). To verify that self actually is T we take the EntityType of self and compare the identifier to the identifier derive by this macro

for entities where the identifier is different than the class

#[entity_behavior(class = "minecart_chest", identifier = "chest_minecart")]
pub struct ChestMinecartEntity

for entities where its the same

#[entity_behavior(class = "end_crystal")]
pub struct EndCrystalEntity

that also means that it is going to be forbidden, that future mods implement the same entity with the same namespace, just like vanilla.

How to take care of correct order

With this pr, we must make sure for entity x that in its tick function there is no re locking like this self.base().lock_entity() in the entire call chain. That means no all functions in the chain should take &mut dyn Entity if entity specific methods are called otherwise EntityBase is fine.

Todo

Now that i have the diff i should be able to clean every mess up that ai leaved (over 300 entity tests that ai fixed).

The first and best thing is to iterate on this until im satisfied, no idea what exactly needs to be done. Going to update the description once i have it more specifically.

• Remove every single Mutex from LivingEntityBase, reorder/group members to align with vanilla and change the signature of every affected method to take mut.

• Bring this pr up to date with Master

[github-actions]

This pull request has conflicts with the base branch "master". Please resolve those so we can test out your changes.

[coco875]

entity refactor have been merge already

[github-actions]

Conflicts have been resolved! 🎉

[github-actions]

This pull request has conflicts with the base branch "master". Please resolve those so we can test out your changes.

[tn-lorenz]

Bump, because I really want this to be merged

[coco875]

it's marked as draft so not ready to be merged x)

[github-actions]

Conflicts have been resolved! 🎉

[github-actions]

This pull request has conflicts with the base branch "master". Please resolve those so we can test out your changes.