Not really. We'd all be so screwed I'd be in the Guinness Book of Records.
Have you seen any server plugins relating to reminding you how long you've been playing for?
So like players can do a /dailylimit 120 and then after a total of two hours in any 24 hour period it starts telling you to get off and do other stuff?
Ha, no, but that is a good one. "Do some fucking work"
Wow, that's a speedy process isn't it! All for what? A few new monsters and a higher sky? Whoop whoop!
It's not affecting the monsters, and it's more than just adding height.
It's a complete change of how the data is stored, which makes it more efficient and more flexible for mod authors.
It shouldn't take as long as it is, but I guess that's a combination of:
1a) Minecraft storing each region (512x512 block areas) in individual files;
1b) Us lot having explored and built things across relatively vast area;
1c) the server being Windows, which isn't great at handling large numbers of files;
2) Mojang not bothering to performance test the process on non-small worlds, and thus putting little/no effort into optimising the code once it was completed.
(Mostly I suspect it's down to reason 2 there.)
I was being a bit facetious there Pete. But yeah I agree it's probably #2 mostly. It's a fun game but I don't think I understand why it's written in Java.
Simple: because Notch knew Java.
And that's not really the problem - Java is perfectly capable of being fast enough.
Assuming the in-game converter uses the same code as the standalone tool, which I just had a quick look at, then the slowness probably comes from a bunch of debugging functions left turned on, (and using an exponentially slow method of concatenating strings for some of them).
*shrug* Oh well.
Yup. Oh well. Better than I can do.