I agree with just about everything this topic has to do with.
Agree with everything you point out.
I did see a post on the forums in one thread (somewhere) that showed a cartogen of the current terrain generation and of the pre 1.8 and it was vastly different. the former being smooth and with more land mass, better transitioning and the latter being very static and jumbled in comparison, especially like you point out the clay/dirt/sand mess underwater was significantly noticeable.
If i find it again i'll quote it in this thread.
I know these are pre-releases but even 1.8 was bad like this and I do hope that its significantly worked one and some of the smoothness and consistency of the older generation returns.
I did see a post on the forums in one thread (somewhere) that showed a cartogen of the current terrain generation and of the pre 1.8 and it was vastly different. the former being smooth and with more land mass, better transitioning and the former being very static and jumbled in comparison, especially like you point out the clay/dirt/sand mess underwater was significantly noticeable.
The astute fellow who made the topic pointed out the both the problem with the beaches and the lack of the bright tropical rainforest grass. While I do not feel the need to reiterate this, I think people should see what I mean by the jumble of circular patterns of dirt/clay/sand in shallow water. No one has yet seemed to have pointed it out or noticed it besides qwertylesh.
1.8.1 Map, notice the arrangement of the elements beneath shallow water:
1.7.3 Map, compare the shallow waters found in the above pic to this one:
As you can probably see, there is huge difference in the composition of blocks found beneath shallow waters. Now if you ask me, circular patterns in lakes, rivers, etc. are something one would not see in real-life. I would not expect to go up to a pond and see Jesus's face in it. But seriously, fix that.
I apologize for stealing this pic from the linked thread but I felt like this should be seen on this page. All credit goes to reconrey.
yes that is the one. and the pre 1.8 map is a real eye opener. I dont have a problem with more clay deposits then there used to be but its taken to the extreme now, before you were lucky to find some clay on a shoreline or in specific areas, sometimes even underground but now its littered everywhere.
yes that is the one. and the pre 1.8 map is a real eye opener. I dont have a problem with more clay deposits then there used to be but its taken to the extreme now, before you were lucky to find some clay on a shoreline or in specific areas, sometimes even underground but now its littered everywhere.
That is true, and now in formations that make for quite an eyesore. ;P
the catch 22 here is that I think if we say nothing and let it remain as-is, seeing how it was not just in a pre-release it may never be corrected, but if we complain we get a dozen or so forum members going 'STOP COMPLAINING ITS A PRE RELEASE FSFSFFSZLFLZFLZFL'
>_>
Im complaining though as I really do miss a lot of how the old generation used to work, it made traveling less interesting to an extent but the way everything is set to an extreme and cluttered now is just ridiculous.
notice the arrangement of the elements beneath shallow water
Oh man, that's horrible. I haven't noticed this phenomenon until now; it's like an STD
Map, compare the shallow waters found in the above pic to this one
Now that is some lovely topography. We have beaches on the coast. There are lakes and ponds. Every area of land has a subtly unique flavor to it. And just LOOK at that tree distribution; it doesn't dominate the area of forest, and it isn't absent from the plains and islands. Sure, there's a thicket, but there's clearings on east by the desert, a plain to the north, inland lakes and waterfront...
You can't release the game with the terrain generation the way it is right now.
the catch 22 here is that I think if we say nothing and let it remain as-is, seeing how it was not just in a pre-release it may never be corrected, but if we complain we get a dozen or so forum members going 'STOP COMPLAINING ITS A PRE RELEASE FSFSFFSZLFLZFLZFL'
You can't release the game with the terrain generation the way it is right now.
You are absolutely right, the game cannot release with the terrain generation the way it is now. Of course, in this case, the forum members flaming people complaining like us may be somewhat right. We may have to just wait and see if Notch puts such features back into the game in a later pre-release. However, seeing as he is working on The End and Ender Dragons and the such, refinement of the biome code is probably at the bottom of his list of priorities and so that will probably not happen. ):
we'll just have to wait and see, but I think its definitely worth pointing out on get satisfaction if it has not been addressed already, since theres multiple problems with the terrain generation.
Beaches, as other people have noted we need those back.
Many people are saying that the biomes in the new terrain generator are boring and repetitive as most forest biomes will look very similar to each other, with the same tree density and whatnot. I think one of the main differences between the new and old biome generators was that the old one had more biomes than the current and many of these biomes were used primarily as transitions between several of the main types of biomes. (e.g. rainforest to seasonal forest to forest or plains to scrubland to forest) Hopefully the future will see the return of some of the older biomes and the transition biomes (seasonal forest, scrubland, savannah, taiga, etc.) that we are currently missing which help smooth biome transitions and have more varying tree density and elevation.
Also, the way the frozen plain biome is currently implemented in 1.9 is not too good.
It seems to be exceedingly large, but also very rare. I personally, think it should be seen nearly as often as the other biomes.
Check out this map of the biome types on my current seed. Notice how large the snow biome is (top left and top right)
Also, take note of the scale we are looking at. The map generated with the stronghold finder is 6000 blocks across and that red square I added is the size of my in game map (paper + compass kind)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
When no one was looking, the Endermen took forty blocks.
They took 40 blocks. That’s as many as four tens. And that’s horrible.
[*]The Mountain biome should be the extreme, stony barren heights under high erosion. However, other biomes, particularly the forests and desert, should be capable of being extremely hilly as well as flat - they are currently only flat - they used to exhibit extreme heights and should do so again.
[/list]
[*]Vertical Limit: the Y limit of Minecraft is miniscule compared to its horizontal axes.
[list]
[*]There is so much potential for Minecraft with a more realistic vertical limit, both in providing a proper canvas/sandbox for sculptors and builders, as well as in rendering lifelike landscapes.
[*] I'll provide some numbers to put this in perspective:
[u]Compare the Vertical limit of Minecraft (comparing the 64 blocks above sea level):[/u]
Sears Tower, 442m tall, tallest skyscraper in North America, (6.9*Minecraft).
Burj Khalifa, 828m tall, tallest manmade structure on Earth, (12.9*Minecraft).
Mont Blanc, 4,810m tall, highest mt. in the Alps, (75.2*Minecraft).
Mount Elbert, 4,401m tall, highest mt. in the Rockies, (68.8*Minecraft).
Mount Everest, 8,848m tall, highest mountain on Earth, (138.3*Minecraft).
Olympus Mons, 22km tall, highest known mountain in our solar system, (344*Minecraft).
[u]To the Horizontal Limit of Minecraft:[/u]
Minecraft X*Z covers an area of 576 million square kilometers of world.
Earth has a surface area of 510 million square kilometers.
[*]While I think the payoff for increasing the vertical limit of Minecraft would be immense, I sadly do not expect this great improvement to actually happen, even though it should be a much greater priority than the folks at Mojang give it.
[/list]
I agree with you, I would love to see limits of 1024 or greater instead of just 128, however I see Notch's problem with this.
Chunks are 16x16x128 atm, which gives you 32,768 total blocks per chunk, if we increased this size to say 16x16x1024 we would get 262,144 blocks per chunk, which is a much greater number but still well within the realm of implementation, until you start exploring, that's where the issues start to arise.
Say your world is 1000x1000 blocks, thats 1000x1000x128 = 128,000,000 blocks total which isn't terrible, and minecraft easily handles that. However if we have a ceiling of 1024, thats 1000x1000x1024 = 1,024,000,000 blocks total, thats a much larger area to generate, therefore slowing down the generation system, which could be compensated for by making the game start world generation from a farther distance away, but also increase the memory used to store worlds by many times and because your system has to generate such a large area, it also increases the amount of CPU power required to generate a chunk.
Also you have to think of servers, now your server has to send out level information for a level that has a ceiling with our example 8 times higher than the standard ceiling, which increases the bandwidth needed to host a server because the server has to transmit all that extra data.
Like I said, I love the idea, and I am all for added height to the Minecraft world, unfortunately its a very difficult problem to fix, I'm sure the guys are trying to solve it, but it's tough with all the extra issues that may arise from doing so.
List tags are malformed.
Related to this I think the order that the 'structures' generated in could be adjusted. Currently from what I have seen mineshafts generate after both ravines and strongholds. If mineshafts were changed to generate before ravines and strongholds it would solve 2 problems.
1) Mineshaft materials would no longer be floating ridiculously in ravines.
2) As evidenced in Jebs livecast where he searches and finds a stronghold, mineshafts overwrite stonghold sections. As strongholds are rarer and are the only place where the portal the new ender realm will be found strongholds should be generated after mineshafts. Just imagine walking into an ender portal room and discovering that a mine shaft has cut half of the unplaceable portal blocks out of the room.
As a follow up to the points I made above about the order of structures in the terrain generation, somebody has posted this picture on the minecraft wiki. That has got to suck.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
When no one was looking, the Endermen took forty blocks.
They took 40 blocks. That’s as many as four tens. And that’s horrible.
I miss the mountainous areas.And the colorful grass.Nowadays when I play Minecraft I am bored by the flat terrain and dull colors.To me it seems swamps are to common.I remember in 1.5 I had a base in a snow biome which somehow epically molded at its edges to a pine forest biome.It was more like a splotch painting than a country's borders.I saw a post about a cyrstal biome,which would be epic.And Volcanoes would be a adventures delight to have.But my main problem is I'm tired of flat biomes that look like they died 4 years ago and the only truly epic variation in height is the freakin ravine in the ground.But one thing i loved pre 1.8 was the mountain areas surrounding little inlets or bays.And bring back the Green Grass and Trees!But i love the ideas for expanding the ocean biome with beaches and life.
This a great forum though, hope Notch and Jeb get to this
I know that Notch or Jeb commented recently on the order of precedence for the secondary terrain features (ravines, mineshafts, stronghold, villages) and admitted that strongholds need to take a higher priority in the rendering to prevent things just such as that.
I didn't get the impression that the means of achieving the outcome was quite what it ought to be though. It was intended to be along the lines of dissalowing mineshaft components from floating in ravines or replacing existing stronghold blocks.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
More Ocean Life: Kelp, Coral, Crabs and Jellyfish; Coconut Palm trees for beaches and islands. Terrain Generation Changes: Which biomes and world-building features are most in need of change?
More Ocean Life: Kelp, Coral, Crabs and Jellyfish; Coconut Palm trees for beaches and islands. Terrain Generation Changes: Which biomes and world-building features are most in need of change?
I think that the Oceans and Desert biomes need to be fleshed out more. Deserts need some attention, but oceans need more things in them to make them interesting. They got the ocean floor perfect. However there is no life in them at all. They feel like the Nether in a way. They have nice terrain generations, but it feels lifeless and boring. Swamp biome generation is also poor.
The clay/dirt deposits are really unrealistic looking. Clay formations look the same and are shaped the same way. They even form evenly spaced in parallel lines. It was much nicer when the deposits randomly formed on the edges of waterways. Deposits form a lot more predictably since 1.8 and I don't like it.
I think ravines should be less common. In their place should be more random cave generations. I swear there are more ravines than caves in areas. It's a problem that should be addressed.
Mountains are a mess. You rarely find mountain ranges that look pretty. Most mountains i see are these impossible and random shapes, with free floating bits and sheer faces. Don't get me wrong, there should be plateaus and other interesting mountain features, but the 1.8 change made mountains just too random looking.
Adding a couple satelite images of sub tropical coastal waters:
The old river/sea bed patterning was considerably more realistic as well as aesthetically appealing. I also think that the depth of sand on beaches, in deserts, and under river transitions is less than it should be.
100% agreed. Some days ago, I made a similar thing ...
Btw, does anyone else here think that leaves are too dark now?
[]http://i54.tinypic.com/11vmruu.png[]
I like having the darker foliage in some biomes. The loss of tropical forest removed the vibrant green trees, so all we have are the darker ones. In general, before we had tree variety at all, I considered the trees a bit too "radio active" green. The grass had the same problem. It was so unrealistically vibrant it was kind of obnoxious. If we got the tropical forest back we'd see some of that vibrant color return.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
More Ocean Life: Kelp, Coral, Crabs and Jellyfish; Coconut Palm trees for beaches and islands. Terrain Generation Changes: Which biomes and world-building features are most in need of change?
Mostly prefer the new generator - but lots needs to be done with terrain logic. My list includes:
As others have mentioned... deserts spawning next to tundra is weird.
Biomes should change gradually, along with things like weather effects. It's weird that I can step over the border of a biome in and out of the rain.
I'm not for a huge number of new mobs, but we need a few biome specific things. It's weird to mostly just find farm animals EVERYWHERE. Animals should prefer to stay near their preferred biomes.
I'd like to see the swiss-cheese effect of having little caves and tunnels right next to the surface everywhere softened a bit. It's nice to find these random tunnels and entrances, but there are too many right now.
I'm talking about the lightning system, actually ... and btw, I liked how the grass looked like in pre-1.8 versions; I'd call it dark green though. Radioactive green was how it looked like before the addition of biomes.
I was referring to older versions with the radioactive reference as well, when there was only one kind of tree. I think the foliage color is a big part of what you're seeing though. It's a matter of contrast. With such bright foliage previously, the shadows were not so appearant.
Let me add all those ponds in desert biomes. I mean, it doesn't make any sense at all that there are little ponds everywhere in deserts. If they supposed to be oases, they should have some vegetation around them at least ...
Patches of clay in place of most of those ponds could be a good alternative. It would show where water collects in times of plenty, without having the water. If Cactus and Dead Bushes were localized to them the desert would look more logical and less random.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
More Ocean Life: Kelp, Coral, Crabs and Jellyfish; Coconut Palm trees for beaches and islands. Terrain Generation Changes: Which biomes and world-building features are most in need of change?
Agree with everything you point out.
I did see a post on the forums in one thread (somewhere) that showed a cartogen of the current terrain generation and of the pre 1.8 and it was vastly different. the former being smooth and with more land mass, better transitioning and the latter being very static and jumbled in comparison, especially like you point out the clay/dirt/sand mess underwater was significantly noticeable.
If i find it again i'll quote it in this thread.
I know these are pre-releases but even 1.8 was bad like this and I do hope that its significantly worked one and some of the smoothness and consistency of the older generation returns.
Was this the topic you were referring to?
WHAT HAPPENED TO BEACHES AND GREEN GRASSES?
The astute fellow who made the topic pointed out the both the problem with the beaches and the lack of the bright tropical rainforest grass. While I do not feel the need to reiterate this, I think people should see what I mean by the jumble of circular patterns of dirt/clay/sand in shallow water. No one has yet seemed to have pointed it out or noticed it besides qwertylesh.
1.8.1 Map, notice the arrangement of the elements beneath shallow water:
1.7.3 Map, compare the shallow waters found in the above pic to this one:
As you can probably see, there is huge difference in the composition of blocks found beneath shallow waters. Now if you ask me, circular patterns in lakes, rivers, etc. are something one would not see in real-life. I would not expect to go up to a pond and see Jesus's face in it. But seriously, fix that.
I apologize for stealing this pic from the linked thread but I felt like this should be seen on this page. All credit goes to reconrey.
That is true, and now in formations that make for quite an eyesore. ;P
>_>
Im complaining though as I really do miss a lot of how the old generation used to work, it made traveling less interesting to an extent but the way everything is set to an extreme and cluttered now is just ridiculous.
Oh man, that's horrible. I haven't noticed this phenomenon until now; it's like an STD
Now that is some lovely topography. We have beaches on the coast. There are lakes and ponds. Every area of land has a subtly unique flavor to it. And just LOOK at that tree distribution; it doesn't dominate the area of forest, and it isn't absent from the plains and islands. Sure, there's a thicket, but there's clearings on east by the desert, a plain to the north, inland lakes and waterfront...
You can't release the game with the terrain generation the way it is right now.
You are absolutely right, the game cannot release with the terrain generation the way it is now. Of course, in this case, the forum members flaming people complaining like us may be somewhat right. We may have to just wait and see if Notch puts such features back into the game in a later pre-release. However, seeing as he is working on The End and Ender Dragons and the such, refinement of the biome code is probably at the bottom of his list of priorities and so that will probably not happen. ):
Many people are saying that the biomes in the new terrain generator are boring and repetitive as most forest biomes will look very similar to each other, with the same tree density and whatnot. I think one of the main differences between the new and old biome generators was that the old one had more biomes than the current and many of these biomes were used primarily as transitions between several of the main types of biomes. (e.g. rainforest to seasonal forest to forest or plains to scrubland to forest) Hopefully the future will see the return of some of the older biomes and the transition biomes (seasonal forest, scrubland, savannah, taiga, etc.) that we are currently missing which help smooth biome transitions and have more varying tree density and elevation.
Also, the way the frozen plain biome is currently implemented in 1.9 is not too good.
It seems to be exceedingly large, but also very rare. I personally, think it should be seen nearly as often as the other biomes.
Check out this map of the biome types on my current seed. Notice how large the snow biome is (top left and top right)
Also, take note of the scale we are looking at. The map generated with the stronghold finder is 6000 blocks across and that red square I added is the size of my in game map (paper + compass kind)
They took 40 blocks. That’s as many as four tens. And that’s horrible.
I agree with you, I would love to see limits of 1024 or greater instead of just 128, however I see Notch's problem with this.
Chunks are 16x16x128 atm, which gives you 32,768 total blocks per chunk, if we increased this size to say 16x16x1024 we would get 262,144 blocks per chunk, which is a much greater number but still well within the realm of implementation, until you start exploring, that's where the issues start to arise.
Say your world is 1000x1000 blocks, thats 1000x1000x128 = 128,000,000 blocks total which isn't terrible, and minecraft easily handles that. However if we have a ceiling of 1024, thats 1000x1000x1024 = 1,024,000,000 blocks total, thats a much larger area to generate, therefore slowing down the generation system, which could be compensated for by making the game start world generation from a farther distance away, but also increase the memory used to store worlds by many times and because your system has to generate such a large area, it also increases the amount of CPU power required to generate a chunk.
Also you have to think of servers, now your server has to send out level information for a level that has a ceiling with our example 8 times higher than the standard ceiling, which increases the bandwidth needed to host a server because the server has to transmit all that extra data.
Like I said, I love the idea, and I am all for added height to the Minecraft world, unfortunately its a very difficult problem to fix, I'm sure the guys are trying to solve it, but it's tough with all the extra issues that may arise from doing so.
List tags are malformed.
As a follow up to the points I made above about the order of structures in the terrain generation, somebody has posted this picture on the minecraft wiki. That has got to suck.
They took 40 blocks. That’s as many as four tens. And that’s horrible.
This a great forum though, hope Notch and Jeb get to this
I know that Notch or Jeb commented recently on the order of precedence for the secondary terrain features (ravines, mineshafts, stronghold, villages) and admitted that strongholds need to take a higher priority in the rendering to prevent things just such as that.
I didn't get the impression that the means of achieving the outcome was quite what it ought to be though. It was intended to be along the lines of dissalowing mineshaft components from floating in ravines or replacing existing stronghold blocks.
Terrain Generation Changes: Which biomes and world-building features are most in need of change?
Nice illustration of the ideas. :biggrin.gif:
Terrain Generation Changes: Which biomes and world-building features are most in need of change?
The clay/dirt deposits are really unrealistic looking. Clay formations look the same and are shaped the same way. They even form evenly spaced in parallel lines. It was much nicer when the deposits randomly formed on the edges of waterways. Deposits form a lot more predictably since 1.8 and I don't like it.
I think ravines should be less common. In their place should be more random cave generations. I swear there are more ravines than caves in areas. It's a problem that should be addressed.
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=155932
Crates
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=239467
Item Scrolling
http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=174539
Mountains are a mess. You rarely find mountain ranges that look pretty. Most mountains i see are these impossible and random shapes, with free floating bits and sheer faces. Don't get me wrong, there should be plateaus and other interesting mountain features, but the 1.8 change made mountains just too random looking.
The old river/sea bed patterning was considerably more realistic as well as aesthetically appealing. I also think that the depth of sand on beaches, in deserts, and under river transitions is less than it should be.
I like having the darker foliage in some biomes. The loss of tropical forest removed the vibrant green trees, so all we have are the darker ones. In general, before we had tree variety at all, I considered the trees a bit too "radio active" green. The grass had the same problem. It was so unrealistically vibrant it was kind of obnoxious. If we got the tropical forest back we'd see some of that vibrant color return.
Terrain Generation Changes: Which biomes and world-building features are most in need of change?
I was referring to older versions with the radioactive reference as well, when there was only one kind of tree. I think the foliage color is a big part of what you're seeing though. It's a matter of contrast. With such bright foliage previously, the shadows were not so appearant.
Patches of clay in place of most of those ponds could be a good alternative. It would show where water collects in times of plenty, without having the water. If Cactus and Dead Bushes were localized to them the desert would look more logical and less random.
Terrain Generation Changes: Which biomes and world-building features are most in need of change?