This is better for performance because these then don't need to be reevaluated every time they are called.
When encountering an unqualified function or constant reference, PHP will first try to locate a symbol in the current namespace by that name, and then fall back to the global namespace.
This short-circuits the check, which has substantial performance effects in some cases - in particular, ord(), chr() and strlen() show ~1500x faster calls when they are fully qualified.
However, this doesn't mean that PM is getting a massive amount faster. In real world terms, this translates to about 10-15% performance improvement.
But before anyone gets excited, you should know that the CodeOptimizer in the PreProcessor repo has been applying fully-qualified symbol optimizations to Jenkins builds for years, which is one of the reasons why Jenkins builds have better performance than home-built or source installations.
We're choosing to do this for the sake of future SafePHP integration and also to be able to get rid of the buggy CodeOptimizer, so that phar and source are more consistent.
this parameter was previously used to send blocks with a different set of flags, immediately, to players. However, the flags have been demonstrated useless and the direct sending is pointless now since packets are buffered now per session, so we might as well take advantage of the batched block update sending.
This is a major change to the way block metadata is handled within the PM core. This separates variant metadata (which really ought to be part of the ID) from state metadata, and in a couple of cases flattens separate states of blocks together.
The result of this is that invalid variants can be much more easily detected, and additionally state handling is much cleaner since meta is only needed at the serialize layer instead of throughout the code.
long overdue... this isn't quite as extensible as the original api3/blocks system was, but this is primarily intended to replace Item->useOn(). If plugins want to use it it can be extended later on.
This allows the removal of lots of ugly code, and also exposes lots of similarities with how this update type was handled. This can be further improved in the future to more generically handle cases.
I realized in the process of changing this, that it might actually be simpler to treat to treat scheduled updates and neighbour updates as one and the same. They use the same mechanism for being saved on chunks (TileTicks),
and doing that would make updating only require one queue instead of two.
RedstoneOre: use onActivate() to trigger glowing
this is not technically correct behaviour, but this preserves the current behaviour.
getDrops() should now be overridden only for special cases. There are some non-trivial overrides left that are going to need some extra work to clean up.
