AI Improvements

Note[1]: If you have performance issues not covered feel free to make a request.

Note[2]: It is not expected this mod improves performance in all cases. Make sure to test your results to see if you require it.

Discord: https://discord.gg/hNBXPp45Zc

About

Simplified AI modification mod focused on performance and low-level modifications to AIs in the game. Picking up the slack for the base game and improving it for a modded ecosystem. Handling common problems such as too many animals, performance hits from swarms of zombies, and simple remove tasks skipped by larger optimization mods.

Story

AI Improvements was born out of the need to solve server performance for heavily modded packs. As a server's TPS is eaten away by mods all trying to fight over resources. Users often attack this problem by trimming mods and restricting content./functionality Rather than going after the mods I started to look at Minecraft itself. Focusing down on how it was designed to work and how it lent to performance problems.

I found that as a server's population grows so does the amount of entities and geographic load requirements. First thought would be to cut down spawn rates and limit over all entity counts. Yet testing shows minimal benefit especially given how quickly users complain about farms. Eventually after a few other fruitless config solutions I took a look at AI functionality. Quickly it became clear just how poorly optimize the AIs are in the game. After exploring 100s of profiler dumps and testing theories we ended up with AI improvements. With the very first improvement being optimizing math used by AI. Seeing rather massive improvements... especially in regard to player farms :D

Goal

Focus of this mod will always be performance first and low level adjustments second. This is to keep the mod small and easy to manage over the life time of minecraft. For other features we may publish additional mods but recommend some of the wonderful mods already present in the community.

https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/in-control

FAQ

I installed but didn't see a large gain as promised?

Newer versions of MC implement fixes for the AI. With the last few versions, the rotation fix was implemented in addition to other fixes. Thus, the impact of this mod is much lower than in older versions.

Can this be installed on the server only?

Yes, the mod is coded to function without it being client side

Can this be installed on the client only?

Yes, though it may not do much to improve fps.

Where is the config?

1.12.2-: '.minecraft/config/bbm/AI_Improvements.cfg'
1.14+: '.minecraft/config/aiimprovements-common.toml'

What will happen if I disable the EntityLookHelper replacement?

You're not going to see much of an improvement in the AI code. However, if you enabled the other disable configs it should be fine.

How does this mod work for fixing performance?

It depends on the feature and version of Minecraft. Most of the performance comes from caching heavily calculated values. This has the result of reducing CPU time at the cost of an ignorable amount of RAM. See feature list for exacts...

Current Features

Config to disable AI Watch Closest Entity

By default the config is set to false and will not do anything. When changed to true it will remove an AI segment called EntityAIWatchClosest. This AI segment handles the coded AIs use to rotate their head towards a nearby entity.Visually this will cause a few odd issues. However, for the CPU this frees up a lot of usage caused by entities.

Config to disable AI look random, config is not enabled by default

By default the config is set to false and will not do anything. Setting the config to true will cause entities to no longer use the 'look idle' AI code. This can improve performance for servers will large populations. As almost every entity on the map will use this when not doing anything important. Visually this can cause the entities head to not rotate sometimes but mostly goes unnoticed.

Config to replace EntityLookHelper with a more efficient version, config is enabled by default

This is the main feature of the mod and can greatly improve CPU performance at a small cost to RAM. How this works is MC's look helper code is replaced with a custom version. The custom version stores some data that makes it faster to get the angle for a location. Through some testing with VisualVM result have shown a 50% to 80% decrease in CPU usage by the AI code. For a server with 25 people on constantly this resulted in a gain from 5 to 7 tps.

Modpack Policy

So long as downloads come from CurseForge or our mirror on Modrinth, it is fine. Any external modpacks need to ask permission via Discord.

Contact

Join us on Discord: https://discord.gg/kVT6dpz