This isn't something that has been talked about a lot but it is what makes minecraft pc incredible to me. Will there be an update to the xbox that makes worlds infinitely generating and if so when?
This has been brought up several times a month for the last year and a half. The 360 can't handle 'infinite' worlds, period. And that means the PS3 & Vita won't be able to either.
Even the One and PS4 versions are only planned to have 'bigger' worlds (exact size TBD), not 'infinite'.
However, could they eventually have infinite worlds in the next-gen consoles? Good question, but answering "when" is even gooder. If it does happen, I wouldn't count on it anytime soon.
Bottom line: if infinite worlds are your thing- stick with the PC.
the way the "infinite" worlds are created for the pc is due to the virtual memory system they use.
may i also say how much i hate the term "infinite" applied to this, there are no infinite worlds. to have infinite worlds you would need an infinite source of memory, not to mention the processing power you'd have to have access to to keep all those chunks loading and unloading, and you would need infinite ram as well(yes ram is memory used for a dedicated purpose so it falls under the infinite memory as well, but i feel the need to specify for those who don't instantly relate RAM to memory)
so PC doesn't have infinite worlds either they can just more efficiently load and unload chunks allowing for them to store more total chunks, in fact i don't believe the Xbox "unloads" chunks period, once you load up a game it starts loading them as you move and keeps them loaded until you quit, im sure youve seen how much that cna bog down the system, especially in multiplayer.
what it boils down to is cost effectiveness and limitations of technology. not that technology is limited to the standards of the xbox, or even most pc's. they tend to do what is cheapest and simplest to get the job done. but there are more expensive and sometimes more complex ways that things can be done.
basically without some major change in technology their is not such thing as infinite, since no matter how much of something you have unless it is in fact endless it is an infinite amount away from infinite. this of course speaks only of technology and not of nature.
Technically, to all the Nay Sayers... you are grossly incorrect.
Although I agree, there is no such thing as infinite, the xBox 'can' handle a much larger world IF the system makes use of paging, and does it by piecemeal separate worlds.
If the system only has to load one map/world at a time, there is absolutely no technical reason why a programmatic strategy cannot be used to import your Character from one world into the next.
Your limitation would effectively be your hard drive storage space on your xBox360.
Now, there may be other reasons why it may or may not be implemented, and it certainly cannot be implemented in the 'same' way as on the PC, but it is not because it cannot be done.
Actually most of what has been discussed is only 'partially' correct or more so misleading. The biggest issue here is that Minecraft on the Xbox has both the client and server rolled into one executable. The xbox is quite capable of handling paged or virtual memory and could in theory have worlds that are as big as the PC. BTW the PC version is not 'infinite' but its pretty damn big, if you walk continuously true north you will in time end up back where you started.
Anyhow point is 4J probably chose to keep all chunks loaded for ease of development, they were after all under a tight deadline to get it to the market awhile back, and the virtual road also meant much bigger save files, which also leads us to another issue. XBLA titles have limits on the size of save files they can generate, which may have been lifted for Minecraft, I'm not really sure and quite frankly too lazy to research.
Anyone with developer knowledge knows that 4J is likely using the exact same code base for the next gen consoles, most likely arrays have been increased and defined for each platform to specify the map sizes, but I'm willing to bet that they too keep all chunks loaded just like the 360 version, and this is what defines our limits. Keeping the entire map loaded is whats using up the consoles memory, and there are both pros and cons to this, first pro is that we more or less have an entire map which is a 'spawn chunk', things continue to grown and function in all chunks even when we are on the other side of the map.
Virtual memory would have gave us unlimited size worlds but chunk loading and unloading maybe too slow, or risky, not really sure as i haven't done any development for the xbox platform. Its possible that the overhead for handling virtual memory just might not allow enough chunks loaded to allow the console version to work correctly. I'm sure 4J have their reasons for the road that they chose, I only hope that down the road as things develop that we get alternate means to handling things that we can do on PC currently, for example 'piping items to unloaded chunks to save them for later pickup'
Personally i don't see the demand for creating bigger worlds hell even on the PC i don't have worlds as big as a 360 map, with the exception of playing on servers with multiple people.
I appreciate the help and understanding. Its really disappointing that this isn't possible. Also I understand that the worlds aren't literally infinite, but saying infinite just makes them easier to describe just because. I meant to mean that the worlds would keep going on for thousands and thousands of chunks.
I've gone back in their Twitter account to April- 4J has never mentioned anything about increasing the world size beyond the already known "increase to 36 times bigger"
The console MC is different than PC or phone versions. I know, everyone wants the console versions to have everything the PC does.... without losing any of the console features, of course. You can't have it all.
The consoles may never have 'infinite' worlds, just like the PC may never have Quick Crafting.
It's sad that a phone can't do what a console does.
(Out of all the features of all the systems I still don't understand the obsession with infinite worlds. It just not that important. It's a mental thing more than a useful thing. I mean, has anybody ever seen or used more than 5% of an infinite world?)
I have a world on PC that I play nomad-style. I just walk in one direction with no real home. It's fun, challenging, and let's you see new stuff all the time.
I have a world on PC that I play nomad-style. I just walk in one direction with no real home. It's fun, challenging, and let's you see new stuff all the time.
Let's put this in perspective, just for fun.
PC MC worlds aren't really "infinite", but it's been said that they're roughly the size of 3 Earths.
France (a fair size country) is 260.5 thousand square miles.
The Earth is about 197 million square miles.
So France is only about 5.8% of a MC (infinite) world.
Think about that. You would have to explore every square foot of an area the size of France (heaven forbid build the whole thing over!).... and then you would only see 5.8% of the MC world!
That's why I said it's a mental thing more than anything. There's a big difference between getting a warm, fuzzy feeling thinking "I can just keep going" and actually having enough hours in the day to actually do it. I've done a fair amount of exploring myself, but MC isn't just about exploring.
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I think that they should just wrap the world... keep heading north, you end up on the south end of the map. Keep heading west, you end up on the east end of the map. Then there's no more room for expansion and people will shut up about it already.
Let's put this in perspective, just for fun.
PC MC worlds aren't really "infinite", but it's been said that they're roughly the size of 3 Earths.
France (a fair size country) is 260.5 thousand square miles.
The Earth is about 197 million square miles.
So France is only about 5.8% of a MC (infinite) world.
Think about that. You would have to explore every square foot of an area the size of France (heaven forbid build the whole thing over!).... and then you would only see 5.8% of the MC world!
That's why I said it's a mental thing more than anything. There's a big difference between getting a warm, fuzzy feeling thinking "I can just keep going" and actually having enough hours in the day to actually do it. I've done a fair amount of exploring myself, but MC isn't just about exploring.
Good point but people like me are using the comparison more than specifics. I only have the 2 extremes to compare. 'Infinite/ PC world or very finite xbox world. On multiplayer servers things get crowded. After about a month on a new seed on a 24/7 server people start complaining about people building right next to them. The neighbors may be 100 blocks away but people have expansion plans. And most people like particular biomes to build in so things are not evenly spread. Players who like to mine will literally mine from edge of map to edge of map at level 12 and just keep going back and forth which of course ends up mining under other peoples homes.
I really think the xbox one 36x world will be a good balance. But it all depends on several issues. Having a world that is 36x bigger but has just as much lag would be crap. Having low multiplayer limits like 8 or 12 would be crap. Not getting better anti-griefing tools would be crap. Overall I am hopeful for the new consoles but the existing ones just are not going to get that much better. They can't even handle what they have now. 4 or 5 players in multiplayer is about all you can do without excessive lag.
And I get your point too (really), but on the other hand you want a big enough world where several people can spread out far enough that they aren't 'bothered' with seeing or dealing with other players? Then why are they playing multiplayer? Isn't that the whole point of multiplayer- the interaction?
Anyway, the 'infinite' mindset people will never be satisfied with '36X', or '100X', or '10,000X'. As long as there's a limit to world size, they'll never be happy. Which is funny, because MC itself puts thousands of other limits on a player (the wiki is nothing but a list and explanation of all the limits), so I don't understand why the world size limit is such a big deal.
I, too, can't wait for the One version. There have been many of the same suggestions on how to 'expand' 360 worlds- by 'linking' worlds together. Now we'll get our wish- 35 more (360 size) worlds 'linked' together! You'll see just how huge a world that is when you fire it up.
That should satisfy 99% of us.
The other 1% will never be happy.
No really, 5,000 blocks is a HUGE area to cover. Just walking 1,000 blocks takes a long time and we can't even walk that in a straight line now. Geneo is right in saying that about 99% of 'infinite' worlders will be satisfied. There will always be those others...
well the pocket edition has been officially confirmed that they will be having infinite world
so will console one day, also 4j said they will be releasing updates to make the worlds bigger
I believe you are mixing things up a bit - effectively reviving an old thread with misinformation, eh?. The worlds on the Xbox One will be 36 times larger than the Xbox 360 worlds. The Xbox 360 worlds are staying the same size as they have always been. There is talk about being able to enlarge an Xbox 360 world to the Xbox One szie when transferring it onto the Xbox One.
Good point but people like me are using the comparison more than specifics. I only have the 2 extremes to compare. 'Infinite/ PC world or very finite xbox world. On multiplayer servers things get crowded. After about a month on a new seed on a 24/7 server people start complaining about people building right next to them. The neighbors may be 100 blocks away but people have expansion plans. And most people like particular biomes to build in so things are not evenly spread. Players who like to mine will literally mine from edge of map to edge of map at level 12 and just keep going back and forth which of course ends up mining under other peoples homes.
I really think the xbox one 36x world will be a good balance. But it all depends on several issues. Having a world that is 36x bigger but has just as much lag would be crap. Having low multiplayer limits like 8 or 12 would be crap. Not getting better anti-griefing tools would be crap. Overall I am hopeful for the new consoles but the existing ones just are not going to get that much better. They can't even handle what they have now. 4 or 5 players in multiplayer is about all you can do without excessive lag.
Geneo makes a good point - the point of playing multiplayer is to play together. Developing social skills like being good neighbours within Minecraft isn't a bad idea... it just changes the objectives of the game (rather than acquire and hoard everything... it becomes more about fostering cooperation when resources are in short supply). A small world size would foster that need better than an "infinitely" large one where everyone just spreads out and gets greedier anyways.
I do agree with you that lag (or lack thereof) and better anti-griefing measures are more important issues for enjoying multiplayer games.
Even the One and PS4 versions are only planned to have 'bigger' worlds (exact size TBD), not 'infinite'.
However, could they eventually have infinite worlds in the next-gen consoles? Good question, but answering "when" is even gooder.
If it does happen, I wouldn't count on it anytime soon.
Bottom line: if infinite worlds are your thing- stick with the PC.
the way the "infinite" worlds are created for the pc is due to the virtual memory system they use.
may i also say how much i hate the term "infinite" applied to this, there are no infinite worlds. to have infinite worlds you would need an infinite source of memory, not to mention the processing power you'd have to have access to to keep all those chunks loading and unloading, and you would need infinite ram as well(yes ram is memory used for a dedicated purpose so it falls under the infinite memory as well, but i feel the need to specify for those who don't instantly relate RAM to memory)
so PC doesn't have infinite worlds either they can just more efficiently load and unload chunks allowing for them to store more total chunks, in fact i don't believe the Xbox "unloads" chunks period, once you load up a game it starts loading them as you move and keeps them loaded until you quit, im sure youve seen how much that cna bog down the system, especially in multiplayer.
what it boils down to is cost effectiveness and limitations of technology. not that technology is limited to the standards of the xbox, or even most pc's. they tend to do what is cheapest and simplest to get the job done. but there are more expensive and sometimes more complex ways that things can be done.
basically without some major change in technology their is not such thing as infinite, since no matter how much of something you have unless it is in fact endless it is an infinite amount away from infinite. this of course speaks only of technology and not of nature.
Although I agree, there is no such thing as infinite, the xBox 'can' handle a much larger world IF the system makes use of paging, and does it by piecemeal separate worlds.
If the system only has to load one map/world at a time, there is absolutely no technical reason why a programmatic strategy cannot be used to import your Character from one world into the next.
Your limitation would effectively be your hard drive storage space on your xBox360.
Now, there may be other reasons why it may or may not be implemented, and it certainly cannot be implemented in the 'same' way as on the PC, but it is not because it cannot be done.
Anyhow point is 4J probably chose to keep all chunks loaded for ease of development, they were after all under a tight deadline to get it to the market awhile back, and the virtual road also meant much bigger save files, which also leads us to another issue. XBLA titles have limits on the size of save files they can generate, which may have been lifted for Minecraft, I'm not really sure and quite frankly too lazy to research.
Anyone with developer knowledge knows that 4J is likely using the exact same code base for the next gen consoles, most likely arrays have been increased and defined for each platform to specify the map sizes, but I'm willing to bet that they too keep all chunks loaded just like the 360 version, and this is what defines our limits. Keeping the entire map loaded is whats using up the consoles memory, and there are both pros and cons to this, first pro is that we more or less have an entire map which is a 'spawn chunk', things continue to grown and function in all chunks even when we are on the other side of the map.
Virtual memory would have gave us unlimited size worlds but chunk loading and unloading maybe too slow, or risky, not really sure as i haven't done any development for the xbox platform. Its possible that the overhead for handling virtual memory just might not allow enough chunks loaded to allow the console version to work correctly. I'm sure 4J have their reasons for the road that they chose, I only hope that down the road as things develop that we get alternate means to handling things that we can do on PC currently, for example 'piping items to unloaded chunks to save them for later pickup'
Personally i don't see the demand for creating bigger worlds hell even on the PC i don't have worlds as big as a 360 map, with the exception of playing on servers with multiple people.
The console MC is different than PC or phone versions. I know, everyone wants the console versions to have everything the PC does.... without losing any of the console features, of course.
You can't have it all.
The consoles may never have 'infinite' worlds, just like the PC may never have Quick Crafting.
(Out of all the features of all the systems I still don't understand the obsession with infinite worlds. It just not that important. It's a mental thing more than a useful thing. I mean, has anybody ever seen or used more than 5% of an infinite world?)
Let's put this in perspective, just for fun.
PC MC worlds aren't really "infinite", but it's been said that they're roughly the size of 3 Earths.
France (a fair size country) is 260.5 thousand square miles.
The Earth is about 197 million square miles.
So France is only about 5.8% of a MC (infinite) world.
Think about that. You would have to explore every square foot of an area the size of France (heaven forbid build the whole thing over!).... and then you would only see 5.8% of the MC world!
That's why I said it's a mental thing more than anything. There's a big difference between getting a warm, fuzzy feeling thinking "I can just keep going" and actually having enough hours in the day to actually do it. I've done a fair amount of exploring myself, but MC isn't just about exploring.
Good point but people like me are using the comparison more than specifics. I only have the 2 extremes to compare. 'Infinite/ PC world or very finite xbox world. On multiplayer servers things get crowded. After about a month on a new seed on a 24/7 server people start complaining about people building right next to them. The neighbors may be 100 blocks away but people have expansion plans. And most people like particular biomes to build in so things are not evenly spread. Players who like to mine will literally mine from edge of map to edge of map at level 12 and just keep going back and forth which of course ends up mining under other peoples homes.
I really think the xbox one 36x world will be a good balance. But it all depends on several issues. Having a world that is 36x bigger but has just as much lag would be crap. Having low multiplayer limits like 8 or 12 would be crap. Not getting better anti-griefing tools would be crap. Overall I am hopeful for the new consoles but the existing ones just are not going to get that much better. They can't even handle what they have now. 4 or 5 players in multiplayer is about all you can do without excessive lag.
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Anyway, the 'infinite' mindset people will never be satisfied with '36X', or '100X', or '10,000X'. As long as there's a limit to world size, they'll never be happy. Which is funny, because MC itself puts thousands of other limits on a player (the wiki is nothing but a list and explanation of all the limits), so I don't understand why the world size limit is such a big deal.
I, too, can't wait for the One version. There have been many of the same suggestions on how to 'expand' 360 worlds- by 'linking' worlds together. Now we'll get our wish- 35 more (360 size) worlds 'linked' together! You'll see just how huge a world that is when you fire it up.
That should satisfy 99% of us.
The other 1% will never be happy.
I believe you are mixing things up a bit - effectively reviving an old thread with misinformation, eh?. The worlds on the Xbox One will be 36 times larger than the Xbox 360 worlds. The Xbox 360 worlds are staying the same size as they have always been. There is talk about being able to enlarge an Xbox 360 world to the Xbox One szie when transferring it onto the Xbox One.
Geneo makes a good point - the point of playing multiplayer is to play together. Developing social skills like being good neighbours within Minecraft isn't a bad idea... it just changes the objectives of the game (rather than acquire and hoard everything... it becomes more about fostering cooperation when resources are in short supply). A small world size would foster that need better than an "infinitely" large one where everyone just spreads out and gets greedier anyways.
I do agree with you that lag (or lack thereof) and better anti-griefing measures are more important issues for enjoying multiplayer games.