Board Thread:Suggestions forum/@comment-26553378-20170706192152/@comment-31421070-20170707232840

LOTRMod wrote: This (larger banner sizes) would require a complete rework of how banners function. At the moment, anything much bigger than the gold banner's range is unviable. Banners only protect terrain if the banner itself is loaded into the world, which most of the time is fine, because the banner will be close enough to have been loaded by the time you've reached the terrain you're trying to modify.

But with larger banner ranges, you might be able to stand at a point within the banner's 'protection range' without actually loading the chunk of the banner itself.

To change this, either banners would have to act as persistent chunk loaders ( = really, really, really bad news for any server of notable size) or they would have to somehow save their locations external to the chunk saved data, in some kind of database, which would then be queried for banner protection instead of checking for nearby banner entities in the world. But that would come with problems of its own. Banner protection would persist if something goes wrong and the banner entity is deleted without the mod knowing (by a /butcher command, a corrupt chunk, a terrain reset, or any number of unforeseen bugs) and then it would be very difficult for an admin to actually remove the protection on that terrain. Which, incidentally, is very similar to the reason why we can't have a cap on the number of hired units. In theory, you could spend some time reworking chunk save data, maybe change the save format a little so that the banner data saves alongside the normal terrain data, and add a function where the banner protection area in the file checks every minute for a single second for the banner, by loading said banner once for that single and then de-loading it, simply to prevent the little issue of banner protection remaining behind long after the banner is gone.