Its as simple as it gets. I would suggest a biome selector so those adventurers can have the perfect seed rather than a seed that is "tolerated". Here is an example
Tundra: Checked Swamp: Checked
Taiga: Unchecked Jungle: Checked
Plains: Unchecked Extreme Hills: Unchecked
And so on and so fourth. Just simple and easy to understand. I know It may be hard to code but maybe there can be like 200 worlds for each possible category or something like that. When I first got minecraft I thought to myself if it was ever possible to get "the perfect seed." I have always wanted something that I liked and would think it is original. When the next update comes out (tu12) I would like for tu13 which will probably be a bug fix to have this as a added feature. I would make a world with jungles, plains, taiga all checked and everything else unchecked so only the three I picked generated. This can be extremely helpful to map makers who might want to make a adventure map in a complete jungle world. Please if you read these reply below on what you think on the idea because I personally would love to see this implemented. If anyone has connections to 4j studios please have them read this it make me so happy if they could consider this.
I'd also like to see settings for cave frequency (everywhere - normal - few) and size (mammoth - mixed - small).
Perhaps switches for different types of mobs, too. For instance, you might want a map with all swamps and jungles and lots of undead (zombies and skeletons) but no creepers, because they really don't fit that theme. Or maybe an all-desert map with tons of skeletons but not zombies (they'd dry out!). There are all sorts of combinations that would make for fun games.
Right now, we try to find seeds that meet our particular needs for what we want to build, or match the way we want to play at the moment. Sometimes you want to play in a crazy mountainous map full of huge caves, and some days the idea of plains and low hills, with plenty of space for mining without hitting a cave everywhere, seems like a good idea. Instead of wasting time and forum space trying to find seeds that do that, it should be a setting.
4J wants to find ways to differentiate the XBox version from the PC version -- that would be a great one!
I like the idea, but I really need to rain on this parade.
It would require a fundamental change to (or elimination of) the current seed generator. Right now, it builds worlds based off of an alpha-numeric algorithm. Whats being proposed would have the game generate (supposedly random) worlds based on predetermined parameters.
Its possible. There are mods for the PC that do it. But if incorporated into the Xbox addition, say goodbye to any seed sharing.
It would require a fundamental change to (or elimination of) the current seed generator. Right now, it builds worlds based off of an alpha-numeric algorithm. Whats being proposed would have the game generate (supposedly random) worlds based on predetermined parameters.
I don't think it would.
Based on how I'd design it (and, admittedly, this may not be anywhere close to accurate) I'd have a series of fixed values for the world-generation algorithm that I could tweak as needed during development. For example, biomes might have a 10% chance to be desert, a 20% chance to be forest, etc. The seed only affects the starting point of the pseudo-random number generator, not those values. So, changing those values would change how the number generated by the RNG is applied, but not what it actually is.
Let's say that we have a very simple system, with four kinds of biomes: taiga, ocean, forest, and plains. There's a 10% chance for a biome to be taiga, 20% for ocean, 30% for forest, and 40% for plains; effectively, there's a chart that says 1-10, taiga; 11-30, ocean; 31-60, forest; 61-100, plains.. A number from 1-100 comes out of the RNG. This number will be the same every time with the same seed, of course. We'll say that number is 42. Comparing that to the chart, we see that we get forest. But if someone has changed the biome percentages ... maybe they slid the hypothetical little sliders to make it a survival island world, with 90% water ... that same 42 might land firmly in the "ocean" range instead. So that biome would generate as ocean, not forest.
The algorithm has to have all sorts of numbers like that. Take extreme hills ... somewhere in the algorithm, there have to be values for the minimum and maximum height variant in terrain, or extreme hills would be no different from plains. There has to be a percentage value for "do we generate a cave here?" and, most likely, for whether to generate another section for that cave, too; these would control the density and size of caves. The world generation algorithm is undoubtedly full of numbers like that -- it has to be, in order to translate the values the RNG gives it into effects on the MC map.
So, the idea is to allow the players to affect what those numbers are -- changing the chart by turning off "ocean" for instance, or changing the threshold for "cave here?". That's not actually adding anything -- it's just exposing factors that already exist. They have to.
As for the sharing of seeds, that would be somewhat more complicated -- instead of saying "the seed is 123" it would have to be "the seed is 123, all values default" or "the seed is 123, with cave size all the way up and ice plains turned off." So, yes, for non-default seeds, people would have to list which values they changed. But since the seed is the starting value for the pseudo-random number sequence, with the same set of values ("cave size all the way up and ice plains turned off") everyone who uses the same seed and sets those values as specified would still get the same map.
I like the idea, but I really need to rain on this parade.
It would require a fundamental change to (or elimination of) the current seed generator. Right now, it builds worlds based off of an alpha-numeric algorithm. Whats being proposed would have the game generate (supposedly random) worlds based on predetermined parameters.
Its possible. There are mods for the PC that do it. But if incorporated into the Xbox addition, say goodbye to any seed sharing.
I think it could be done and the resulting seeds could still be shared. The game just, in effect, untilmately assigns a fixed number to the map it calculates using the entered parameters. If no parameters are given by the player, the game then resorts/defaults to a random number generation to grab a fixed number to assign to a map (as it does now). Once that number is assigned, if the player types in that number the map that generates could still be the same. No doubt, adding in this layer of calculation would slow down map creation significantly; but that might be considered a good trade off by players (i.e. since it beats starting map after map after map trying to randomly get something that fits the player's planned project).
If you think about it, this isn't all that dissimilar to currently - when the player types in words into the seed string slot. The player IS specifying parameters to the system because the system will generate the same numerical seed translated from the words every single time (within an update version). The only difference is that with slidebars representing this input by the player, the player will know what it is they are specifying rather than just guessing that "snow" might generate a snowy world or an all island world or etc. etc.
Personally, I prefer the idea of slidebars (that must always add to 100%) rather than just toggling different biomes on and off; but I think either one would be a vast improvement over what we have to go through now. I do see more issues with having players specifying cave sizes, since I'm sure the game uses cave sizes to keep the number of empty spaces in various areas of the map within a certain range (to help optimize memory usage).
I also don't support the idea of being able to turn individual mobs on and off... This is still Minecraft afterall, not a "Design Your Own Video Game" app (although it may eventually get down-graded to becoming that sort of app if Mojang keep catering more and more to the modding crowd and if Microsoft caves in its resistance to freelance modding on the Xbox systems).
I also don't support the idea of being able to turn individual mobs on and off... This is still Minecraft afterall, not a "Design Your Own Video Game" app (although it may eventually get down-graded to becoming that sort of app if Mojang keep catering more and more to the modding crowd and if Microsoft caves in its resistance to freelance modding on the Xbox systems).
If they could do it easily, though, how would it harm anyone else?
If I decide I don't want to have zombies in my desert, and more skeletons instead, how is that hurting someone who wants the default mix?
If they could do it easily, though, how would it harm anyone else?
If I decide I don't want to have zombies in my desert, and more skeletons instead, how is that hurting someone who wants the default mix?
It doesn't - other than the game eventually just becoming that "design your own" app. As I said, it may be coming to that anyway... but I view that as sort of a travesty. It's not what modders could do to the game that attracted me to Minecraft in the first place. In many respects, I became enamored with it because I liked what the game's original creator came up with out of his own imagination... with a little help from a coding bug (re specifically creepers).
Also, each mob provides a certain drop in accordance with the game designer's idea of what the player needs to survive and thrive in the world. For example, eliminating skeletons means you eliminate bonemeal from the game. Increasing them means you create a great abundance of both bonemeal and arrows. Eliminating zombies means you eliminate not only rotten flesh, but also (soon) zombie villagers and, potentially, a need for golden apples, etc., etc. It also changes the generation of dungeons in the world, potentially disturbing the integrity of seeds with their assigned numerical seed string... leading to the necessity to end seed sharing as described by Deskepticon (since all seeds, as far as I can tell, do generate at least 1 dungeon for each type of mob).
It's not what modders could do to the game that attracted me to Minecraft in the first place.
But if you play without mods, what the modders can do isn't affecting you. If there's a mod that turns creepers purple, they're still green to you forever, unless you choose to install that mod. So if you choose not to change the default settings for biomes, mobs, etc., then you're still playing exactly the same thing. What someone else is playing doesn't affect what you're playing, any more than what color creepers are in their game affects your creepers.
Also, each mob provides a certain drop in accordance with the game designer's idea of what the player needs to survive and thrive in the world. For example, eliminating skeletons means you eliminate bonemeal from the game.
Which, by the way, is one of the problems with what people are saying about how players who formerly enjoyed easy mode, but now can't survive (or enable villagers to survive) the zombie hordes should play on peaceful mode: if they can only play peaceful now, they can't obtain bonemeal, leaving them without many colors of dye, fertilizer, etc.
That's the player's choice, really. If they want to play a version of the game where they can't get bones, that's their problem. If they don't like that, they could play with skeletons turned on. Maybe some people would find that a challenge: for instance, playing where you couldn't get arrows as drops, only manufacture your own. Again, just because that's not how I want to play doesn't mean that someone else wouldn't find that a lot of fun, and since it's not affecting me in any way, why should I care?
It also changes the generation of dungeons in the world...
Why? At most, dungeons that would have the disabled form of mob spawner either wouldn't generate, or would "reroll", as it were, to get a different spawner. So if you have no skeletons, your spawners would do more zombies, spiders, etc.
...potentially disturbing the integrity of seeds with their assigned numerical seed string... leading to the necessity to end seed sharing as described by Deskepticon (since all seeds, as far as I can tell, do generate at least 1 dungeon for each type of mob).
It wouldn't affect seeds at all. The same seed would still generate the same sequence of pseudo-random numbers, and produce exactly the same map if the settings are set the same.
Consider the matter of superflat worlds: If you use a particular seed for a regular world and a superflat world, you'll get two different worlds, naturally. But if someone else uses that same seed and the same setting -- regular or superflat -- that you did, they'll get the exact same map as you got for that seed and setting. This idea is just extending the regular/superflat distinction by adding more things that can be set instead of just that one dichotomy. So instead of the seed being 123/regular or 123/superflat, someone could have it as 123/regular/no-zombies/huge-caves, and everyone who used 123/regular/no-zombies/huge-caves would, just as they would with the regular/superflat dichotomy, get the exact same map, but in this case with no zombies and huge caves.
Why? At most, dungeons that would have the disabled form of mob spawner either wouldn't generate, or would "reroll", as it were, to get a different spawner. So if you have no skeletons, your spawners would do more zombies, spiders, etc.
You'll have to ask MG about an explanation for this... He did awhile ago give a reason why mob spawners still generate when you turn "Generate Structures" off that is tied somehow to the overall initial terrain generation of the world... and, I believe, this would likely affect the ability to turn individual types of mob spawners off as well.
As for the rest - we can agree to disagree. It's really a matter of personal opinion about the "political" effects of modding on the ongoing creative processes at Mojang.
True, I used to be in favor of an easier mode that would take creepers out of the game. I no longer support that position.
On a tangential note, UpUp, even when we disagree, you're an excellent person to discuss things with. You make good, well-supported points, and we seem to only differ in the weight and interpretation we put on those facts. That's a refreshing change from so many people online.
I for one am with up on this one. I understand the facts or trial n error findings that others have found within the generation. I don't mind the idea as a whole, as long the spawners are not touched. Since that could very well change things to some degree.
I also understand how it can be possible to modify the spawners, as those will always be in the same location every time. That much will not change. It would be a sub-routine tied to spawners when generating that branches off when the spawner meets what was specified. Say you want no zombies, well that means;
1. When the generation starts and places every spawner, it will check to see if any spawner would be a specific type. Being zombie selected to not have, all those zombie spawners will turn up true, and then the sub-routine will start. What that sub-routine will do is to determine a logical next in order of what the spawner would be since zombies are not allowed. All this will still be based on the seed # still to keep the integrity of the generation. So what ever the next mob in line for that specific spawner, it will be such.
Not quite as easy, but more like a lot of extra coding that needs to be forked. I would say bout as easy to impliment the % idea as it is the mob selection in this manner.
The problem I foresee is cave spiders... That really shouldn't be on the list, since those spawners are meant to be that specific kind and would not be anything else, unlike the other spawners which have a small selection. This spawners actually get generated with Structures, since they belong solely with mineshafts.
Over all like I mentioned I am fond of generation selection, where biomes/sub-biomes are concerned, but not so with mob selection. I may be able to see how it is possible or ways it could be done, but the why I see it I think it shouldn't. (Think Jurassic Park) "Just because you can doesn't mean you should." ian
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My First World, always getting back to is a pleasure I enjoy with each new update that brings in more things to add in.
I agree about the cave spiders -- they're an element of mineshafts. (of course, someone who doesn't like mineshafts could turn them off entirely, and then no cave spider spawners would appear anyway).
I think biome selection is not only essential but a no-brainer. It's a form of world customization that would make the game more fun for players -- less time searching for, say, survival island seeds, or all-snow seeds, or whatever a player might want at that moment, and simply setting the parameters for the particular world type you want to play (or build) on.
I've been thinking, as I poke around MC/PC worlds looking for one I really want to settle down and build in, that I'd love one that's nearly all jungle, so I could build myself a great Maya-style jungle kingdom -- possibly even more fun on creative, so I could build an absolutely huge one. With the current system I'd have to keep trying seeds until I hit something close, or hope someone else found one, and, realistically, the chances are low to nonexistent that it would happen. With biome selection, I could turn ocean way down, desert, plains, taiga, etc., off completely, maybe leave swamp on, etc., and get the massive jungle of my jungle-empire-constructing dreams (well, when we get jungles on the 360). That would give me more fun things to do, and therefore a reason to stay interested in the game longer.
Mob selection is a bit less of a no-brainer, but if, as I suspect, actually implementing it wouldn't take much work (if y'all haven't guessed, I'm a former code grinder myself) there's no good reason not to. It's not like we're competing with each other somehow, and a person whose world had no creepers would have an unfair advantage over the rest of us. If someone wants to turn off creepers (and their built-in supply of gunpowder) why not let them? Or if someone thinks it would be more of a challenge if they couldn't just grind skeletons for arrows (in my 360 world, I have a sunlight-powered skell incinerator I visit whenever I need a few more stacks of arrows) why not let them have a no-skeletons world? Again, I'm not playing in that world, or affected by their choice of rules, so why not set it up so they could play the way they want?
And think of the fun custom worlds we could set up: an all-desert world, for instance, with no zombies (because they'd dry out) but lots of skeletons ... or a world with all swamps and jungles, with lots of spiders ... a world with few natural caves, so if you want ore, you'd have to dig for it ... we could have all sorts of fun with this. I think it would be a neat way to differentiate the XBox version from the PC version, and give us something really fun to do.
hence the reason for my explanation. I may not be a coder, but I do know roughly the basics of coding... Not that I could actually make a program, that would take a bit more research and practice for me. However I do know some things of coding and how it works. I mainly know roughly how to plan the route or path one needs to do in order to get somewhere, but the actual code itself, as I only know a little on that part.
The logic is what I basically know however. Also why I said what I did. After all with coding, anything is possible, you just have to find the way to go about it.
I may not agree with the mob part of it as that holds no interest to me, but the biome part I have always held interest, since I like the mobs as they are and would rather customize the assortment that is within my world rather than the inhabitants. I can see both sides of the coin and the edge is usually where I stand due to the fact there is always more than two sides to things. Of course it is all in my perspective in what I know is possible, but is it feasible or rather truly needed. I can see it as a mod on the pc edition, the mob part, but for me vanilla minecraft really aught to have all the mobs.
That of course is me, I know I don't stand alone, but that is not the point, as there are others on the opposite end of the rope. Vanilla is in its' prime, hence my quote from ian...lol
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My First World, always getting back to is a pleasure I enjoy with each new update that brings in more things to add in.
I'm pretty sure natural spawns and dungeon spawners work independant of one another. I may be wrong, but dugeon spawned mobs don't count toward the total mob limit. (I should really test that one day).
But this is off topic.
In response to the posts made by Akynth and UpupAway:
I understand what you're saying about it being possible to preserve a "repeatable" seed while still selecting specific biome generation. I agree with this premise.
I was unclear in what I meant by saying goodbye to seed sharing. That was my fault. I meant the xbox would not be able to duplicate seeds that generate on the PC using the same alpha-numeric seed string. The two seed generators would work completely differently. Even if some of the string translates the same information some of the time, the seeds would never be exactly the same.
Now don't me wrong, I like this idea a lot. I would have no qualms about it at all, since personally I never hunt down PC seeds; I much rather like searching out my own. But you are talking about months worth of coding and trouble-shooting to address what is a relatively minor setback to the 360 edition. There are plenty of posts in the Seeds sub-forum describing any kind of world you may be looking for.
Just my two cents.
I meant the xbox would not be able to duplicate seeds that generate on the PC using the same alpha-numeric seed string.
I didn't realize it could!
But there's really no reason why it couldn't. It would be using the same pseudo-random number sequence in any event, just changing the parameters for what the random numbers represent (e.g., the "results table" might be changed so instead of ocean, a partciular result would mean forest instead); if it was using a PC seed, it simply wouldn't set any of the parameters to any special values, just use their default.
Going with my original example, let's say we have the following table for which biomes should be generated:
1-10 taiga
11-30 ocean
31-60 forest
61-100 plains
And, for the seed 123, the RNG would generate these values (this is a very small world and has only 5 biomes):
19 73 15 45 3
So, we're generating 5 biomes for our little world (just to make sure everyone knows, this is a very simplified example!). Based on that seed, we get the following:
ocean
plains
ocean
forest
taiga
Someone decides they want to generate a survival island seed, with nothing but ocean and some forest. So they turn off taiga and plains, and set the sliders for 30% forest, 70% ocean. Now our chart looks like this:
1-70 ocean
71-100 forest
The same sequence from the RNG -- 19 73 15 45 3 -- would give us these biomes:
ocean
forest
ocean
ocean
ocean
(that is, a lot of water with one forested island in it)
Nothing changed in the RNG results -- only in how they were interpreted. This is necessarily extremely simplifed for the purpose of a forum post, of course (not to mention that I don't know what's really under the hood in MC!) but I think the basic idea is sound. As long as the default values were used, the same seed (from the PC version, if relevant) would produce exactly the same results that it does today. Changing the biome and/or mob values would produce different results, but the numbers wouldn't change, only how they were interpreted. "Put an ocean here" instead of "put taiga here" for instance.
So, in short, it wouldn't interfere with using seeds from the PC because they would just have the default settings, the same as they do today.
Also, I doubt if it would entail months worth of coding. The numbers already exist -- they have to, by the very nature of how the program works. This would be essentially exposing them to a suitable user interface so the user could change them in their world generation. Relative to the magnitude of effect it would have on the game, this is actually very little work.
Also, each mob provides a certain drop in accordance with the game designer's idea of what the player needs to survive and thrive in the world. For example, eliminating skeletons means you eliminate bonemeal from the game. Increasing them means you create a great abundance of both bonemeal and arrows. Eliminating zombies means you eliminate not only rotten flesh, but also (soon) zombie villagers and, potentially, a need for golden apples, etc., etc. It also changes the generation of dungeons in the world, potentially disturbing the integrity of seeds with their assigned numerical seed string... leading to the necessity to end seed sharing as described by Deskepticon (since all seeds, as far as I can tell, do generate at least 1 dungeon for each type of mob).
if we "NEED" those items so badly then why can't we get them in peaceful??? I get that we don't NEED to tame wolfs to fight with us in peaceful but maybe we want a pet wolf anyways or some bonemeal to farm faster. or maybe we want to gunpowder to make tnt to blow spots up for projects or slimeballs for sticky pistons which are very useful.
Very good point about the slimeballs. You can't really build many redstone gadgets without them, so people who play on peaceful are pretty much cut out of a lot of redstone building. I hadn't even thought of that since I don't play peaceful.
That's another good reason for selectable mobs: what if someone wants to play mostly-peaceful but still be able to get slimeballs?
if we "NEED" those items so badly then why can't we get them in peaceful??? I get that we don't NEED to tame wolfs to fight with us in peaceful but maybe we want a pet wolf anyways or some bonemeal to farm faster. or maybe we want to gunpowder to make tnt to blow spots up for projects or slimeballs for sticky pistons which are very useful.
I agree that playing in peaceful really limits the players on some items. String became easier to obtain in peaceful when mineshafts were introduced to the game. Gunpowder is quite rare, but it can occasionally be found in dungeon chests (which still generate in peaceful but are not active. Skeleton and zombie drops can be obtained without fighting mobs by blockading yourself in a safe place overnight and allowing them to burn in the morning, then saving and exiting, and then re-entering the game on peaceful in order to run around a pick up the drops. Slimes used to stay spawned if the game was flipped from easy, normal, or hard difficulty to peaceful; but now they do despawn. I believe it was the way it was because Mojang originally wanted slime to be available to players in peaceful mode; but the community continually reported it as a bug... so I guess they just decided to fix that bug. It does make it more difficult for peaceful players to get slimes; however, a slime farm can still be constructed in such a way that no mobs other than slimes are likelyt to spawn. So, if the player ensures that the slime farm area is enclosed and well lit, they will wind up just collecting slimes without encountering other mobs anyway.
Biome selection is being done by players anyways... Most of us start many seeds before we settle on a world with terrain that suits us... so, I think 4J should save us some time and give us a method to give us a better chance of getting a world we like on the first try rather than the 100th. We still would not be able to truly customize the terrain generation since the game would still decide how to mix the biomes we select together on the map.
Conversely, custom mob selection fundamentally changes the gameplay in ways that the creator of the game has not envisioned. From reading old interviews, it is obvious that the game was originally designed by Notch and Mojang to encourage players to leave peaceful mode... at least on occasion in order to get drops that they could not get otherwise. They want people to play the full game. I'm a person who believes that the creator should maintain some semblance of creative control over their creation. If the program was intended to be merely a terrain similator for rendering building designs or if it was a training program for novice game writers, OK... but it's not, it's a complete game idea conceived by Notch and brought to life by Mojang... not us. The creeper is the mascot of the entire game. Eliminate the creeper and it's just NOT Minecraft.
Tundra: Checked Swamp: Checked
Taiga: Unchecked Jungle: Checked
Plains: Unchecked Extreme Hills: Unchecked
And so on and so fourth. Just simple and easy to understand. I know It may be hard to code but maybe there can be like 200 worlds for each possible category or something like that. When I first got minecraft I thought to myself if it was ever possible to get "the perfect seed." I have always wanted something that I liked and would think it is original. When the next update comes out (tu12) I would like for tu13 which will probably be a bug fix to have this as a added feature. I would make a world with jungles, plains, taiga all checked and everything else unchecked so only the three I picked generated. This can be extremely helpful to map makers who might want to make a adventure map in a complete jungle world. Please if you read these reply below on what you think on the idea because I personally would love to see this implemented. If anyone has connections to 4j studios please have them read this it make me so happy if they could consider this.
I'd also like to see settings for cave frequency (everywhere - normal - few) and size (mammoth - mixed - small).
Perhaps switches for different types of mobs, too. For instance, you might want a map with all swamps and jungles and lots of undead (zombies and skeletons) but no creepers, because they really don't fit that theme. Or maybe an all-desert map with tons of skeletons but not zombies (they'd dry out!). There are all sorts of combinations that would make for fun games.
Right now, we try to find seeds that meet our particular needs for what we want to build, or match the way we want to play at the moment. Sometimes you want to play in a crazy mountainous map full of huge caves, and some days the idea of plains and low hills, with plenty of space for mining without hitting a cave everywhere, seems like a good idea. Instead of wasting time and forum space trying to find seeds that do that, it should be a setting.
4J wants to find ways to differentiate the XBox version from the PC version -- that would be a great one!
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
It would require a fundamental change to (or elimination of) the current seed generator. Right now, it builds worlds based off of an alpha-numeric algorithm. Whats being proposed would have the game generate (supposedly random) worlds based on predetermined parameters.
Its possible. There are mods for the PC that do it. But if incorporated into the Xbox addition, say goodbye to any seed sharing.
I don't think it would.
Based on how I'd design it (and, admittedly, this may not be anywhere close to accurate) I'd have a series of fixed values for the world-generation algorithm that I could tweak as needed during development. For example, biomes might have a 10% chance to be desert, a 20% chance to be forest, etc. The seed only affects the starting point of the pseudo-random number generator, not those values. So, changing those values would change how the number generated by the RNG is applied, but not what it actually is.
Let's say that we have a very simple system, with four kinds of biomes: taiga, ocean, forest, and plains. There's a 10% chance for a biome to be taiga, 20% for ocean, 30% for forest, and 40% for plains; effectively, there's a chart that says 1-10, taiga; 11-30, ocean; 31-60, forest; 61-100, plains.. A number from 1-100 comes out of the RNG. This number will be the same every time with the same seed, of course. We'll say that number is 42. Comparing that to the chart, we see that we get forest. But if someone has changed the biome percentages ... maybe they slid the hypothetical little sliders to make it a survival island world, with 90% water ... that same 42 might land firmly in the "ocean" range instead. So that biome would generate as ocean, not forest.
The algorithm has to have all sorts of numbers like that. Take extreme hills ... somewhere in the algorithm, there have to be values for the minimum and maximum height variant in terrain, or extreme hills would be no different from plains. There has to be a percentage value for "do we generate a cave here?" and, most likely, for whether to generate another section for that cave, too; these would control the density and size of caves. The world generation algorithm is undoubtedly full of numbers like that -- it has to be, in order to translate the values the RNG gives it into effects on the MC map.
So, the idea is to allow the players to affect what those numbers are -- changing the chart by turning off "ocean" for instance, or changing the threshold for "cave here?". That's not actually adding anything -- it's just exposing factors that already exist. They have to.
As for the sharing of seeds, that would be somewhat more complicated -- instead of saying "the seed is 123" it would have to be "the seed is 123, all values default" or "the seed is 123, with cave size all the way up and ice plains turned off." So, yes, for non-default seeds, people would have to list which values they changed. But since the seed is the starting value for the pseudo-random number sequence, with the same set of values ("cave size all the way up and ice plains turned off") everyone who uses the same seed and sets those values as specified would still get the same map.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
I think it could be done and the resulting seeds could still be shared. The game just, in effect, untilmately assigns a fixed number to the map it calculates using the entered parameters. If no parameters are given by the player, the game then resorts/defaults to a random number generation to grab a fixed number to assign to a map (as it does now). Once that number is assigned, if the player types in that number the map that generates could still be the same. No doubt, adding in this layer of calculation would slow down map creation significantly; but that might be considered a good trade off by players (i.e. since it beats starting map after map after map trying to randomly get something that fits the player's planned project).
If you think about it, this isn't all that dissimilar to currently - when the player types in words into the seed string slot. The player IS specifying parameters to the system because the system will generate the same numerical seed translated from the words every single time (within an update version). The only difference is that with slidebars representing this input by the player, the player will know what it is they are specifying rather than just guessing that "snow" might generate a snowy world or an all island world or etc. etc.
Personally, I prefer the idea of slidebars (that must always add to 100%) rather than just toggling different biomes on and off; but I think either one would be a vast improvement over what we have to go through now. I do see more issues with having players specifying cave sizes, since I'm sure the game uses cave sizes to keep the number of empty spaces in various areas of the map within a certain range (to help optimize memory usage).
I also don't support the idea of being able to turn individual mobs on and off... This is still Minecraft afterall, not a "Design Your Own Video Game" app (although it may eventually get down-graded to becoming that sort of app if Mojang keep catering more and more to the modding crowd and if Microsoft caves in its resistance to freelance modding on the Xbox systems).
If they could do it easily, though, how would it harm anyone else?
If I decide I don't want to have zombies in my desert, and more skeletons instead, how is that hurting someone who wants the default mix?
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It doesn't - other than the game eventually just becoming that "design your own" app. As I said, it may be coming to that anyway... but I view that as sort of a travesty. It's not what modders could do to the game that attracted me to Minecraft in the first place. In many respects, I became enamored with it because I liked what the game's original creator came up with out of his own imagination... with a little help from a coding bug (re specifically creepers).
Also, each mob provides a certain drop in accordance with the game designer's idea of what the player needs to survive and thrive in the world. For example, eliminating skeletons means you eliminate bonemeal from the game. Increasing them means you create a great abundance of both bonemeal and arrows. Eliminating zombies means you eliminate not only rotten flesh, but also (soon) zombie villagers and, potentially, a need for golden apples, etc., etc. It also changes the generation of dungeons in the world, potentially disturbing the integrity of seeds with their assigned numerical seed string... leading to the necessity to end seed sharing as described by Deskepticon (since all seeds, as far as I can tell, do generate at least 1 dungeon for each type of mob).
But if you play without mods, what the modders can do isn't affecting you. If there's a mod that turns creepers purple, they're still green to you forever, unless you choose to install that mod. So if you choose not to change the default settings for biomes, mobs, etc., then you're still playing exactly the same thing. What someone else is playing doesn't affect what you're playing, any more than what color creepers are in their game affects your creepers.
Which, by the way, is one of the problems with what people are saying about how players who formerly enjoyed easy mode, but now can't survive (or enable villagers to survive) the zombie hordes should play on peaceful mode: if they can only play peaceful now, they can't obtain bonemeal, leaving them without many colors of dye, fertilizer, etc.
That's the player's choice, really. If they want to play a version of the game where they can't get bones, that's their problem. If they don't like that, they could play with skeletons turned on. Maybe some people would find that a challenge: for instance, playing where you couldn't get arrows as drops, only manufacture your own. Again, just because that's not how I want to play doesn't mean that someone else wouldn't find that a lot of fun, and since it's not affecting me in any way, why should I care?
Why? At most, dungeons that would have the disabled form of mob spawner either wouldn't generate, or would "reroll", as it were, to get a different spawner. So if you have no skeletons, your spawners would do more zombies, spiders, etc.
It wouldn't affect seeds at all. The same seed would still generate the same sequence of pseudo-random numbers, and produce exactly the same map if the settings are set the same.
Consider the matter of superflat worlds: If you use a particular seed for a regular world and a superflat world, you'll get two different worlds, naturally. But if someone else uses that same seed and the same setting -- regular or superflat -- that you did, they'll get the exact same map as you got for that seed and setting. This idea is just extending the regular/superflat distinction by adding more things that can be set instead of just that one dichotomy. So instead of the seed being 123/regular or 123/superflat, someone could have it as 123/regular/no-zombies/huge-caves, and everyone who used 123/regular/no-zombies/huge-caves would, just as they would with the regular/superflat dichotomy, get the exact same map, but in this case with no zombies and huge caves.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
You'll have to ask MG about an explanation for this... He did awhile ago give a reason why mob spawners still generate when you turn "Generate Structures" off that is tied somehow to the overall initial terrain generation of the world... and, I believe, this would likely affect the ability to turn individual types of mob spawners off as well.
As for the rest - we can agree to disagree. It's really a matter of personal opinion about the "political" effects of modding on the ongoing creative processes at Mojang.
True, I used to be in favor of an easier mode that would take creepers out of the game. I no longer support that position.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
I also understand how it can be possible to modify the spawners, as those will always be in the same location every time. That much will not change. It would be a sub-routine tied to spawners when generating that branches off when the spawner meets what was specified. Say you want no zombies, well that means;
1. When the generation starts and places every spawner, it will check to see if any spawner would be a specific type. Being zombie selected to not have, all those zombie spawners will turn up true, and then the sub-routine will start. What that sub-routine will do is to determine a logical next in order of what the spawner would be since zombies are not allowed. All this will still be based on the seed # still to keep the integrity of the generation. So what ever the next mob in line for that specific spawner, it will be such.
Not quite as easy, but more like a lot of extra coding that needs to be forked. I would say bout as easy to impliment the % idea as it is the mob selection in this manner.
The problem I foresee is cave spiders... That really shouldn't be on the list, since those spawners are meant to be that specific kind and would not be anything else, unlike the other spawners which have a small selection. This spawners actually get generated with Structures, since they belong solely with mineshafts.
Over all like I mentioned I am fond of generation selection, where biomes/sub-biomes are concerned, but not so with mob selection. I may be able to see how it is possible or ways it could be done, but the why I see it I think it shouldn't. (Think Jurassic Park) "Just because you can doesn't mean you should." ian
I think biome selection is not only essential but a no-brainer. It's a form of world customization that would make the game more fun for players -- less time searching for, say, survival island seeds, or all-snow seeds, or whatever a player might want at that moment, and simply setting the parameters for the particular world type you want to play (or build) on.
I've been thinking, as I poke around MC/PC worlds looking for one I really want to settle down and build in, that I'd love one that's nearly all jungle, so I could build myself a great Maya-style jungle kingdom -- possibly even more fun on creative, so I could build an absolutely huge one. With the current system I'd have to keep trying seeds until I hit something close, or hope someone else found one, and, realistically, the chances are low to nonexistent that it would happen. With biome selection, I could turn ocean way down, desert, plains, taiga, etc., off completely, maybe leave swamp on, etc., and get the massive jungle of my jungle-empire-constructing dreams (well, when we get jungles on the 360). That would give me more fun things to do, and therefore a reason to stay interested in the game longer.
Mob selection is a bit less of a no-brainer, but if, as I suspect, actually implementing it wouldn't take much work (if y'all haven't guessed, I'm a former code grinder myself) there's no good reason not to. It's not like we're competing with each other somehow, and a person whose world had no creepers would have an unfair advantage over the rest of us. If someone wants to turn off creepers (and their built-in supply of gunpowder) why not let them? Or if someone thinks it would be more of a challenge if they couldn't just grind skeletons for arrows (in my 360 world, I have a sunlight-powered skell incinerator I visit whenever I need a few more stacks of arrows) why not let them have a no-skeletons world? Again, I'm not playing in that world, or affected by their choice of rules, so why not set it up so they could play the way they want?
And think of the fun custom worlds we could set up: an all-desert world, for instance, with no zombies (because they'd dry out) but lots of skeletons ... or a world with all swamps and jungles, with lots of spiders ... a world with few natural caves, so if you want ore, you'd have to dig for it ... we could have all sorts of fun with this. I think it would be a neat way to differentiate the XBox version from the PC version, and give us something really fun to do.
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The logic is what I basically know however. Also why I said what I did. After all with coding, anything is possible, you just have to find the way to go about it.
I may not agree with the mob part of it as that holds no interest to me, but the biome part I have always held interest, since I like the mobs as they are and would rather customize the assortment that is within my world rather than the inhabitants. I can see both sides of the coin and the edge is usually where I stand due to the fact there is always more than two sides to things. Of course it is all in my perspective in what I know is possible, but is it feasible or rather truly needed. I can see it as a mod on the pc edition, the mob part, but for me vanilla minecraft really aught to have all the mobs.
That of course is me, I know I don't stand alone, but that is not the point, as there are others on the opposite end of the rope. Vanilla is in its' prime, hence my quote from ian...lol
But this is off topic.
In response to the posts made by Akynth and UpupAway:
I understand what you're saying about it being possible to preserve a "repeatable" seed while still selecting specific biome generation. I agree with this premise.
I was unclear in what I meant by saying goodbye to seed sharing. That was my fault. I meant the xbox would not be able to duplicate seeds that generate on the PC using the same alpha-numeric seed string. The two seed generators would work completely differently. Even if some of the string translates the same information some of the time, the seeds would never be exactly the same.
Now don't me wrong, I like this idea a lot. I would have no qualms about it at all, since personally I never hunt down PC seeds; I much rather like searching out my own. But you are talking about months worth of coding and trouble-shooting to address what is a relatively minor setback to the 360 edition. There are plenty of posts in the Seeds sub-forum describing any kind of world you may be looking for.
Just my two cents.
I didn't realize it could!
But there's really no reason why it couldn't. It would be using the same pseudo-random number sequence in any event, just changing the parameters for what the random numbers represent (e.g., the "results table" might be changed so instead of ocean, a partciular result would mean forest instead); if it was using a PC seed, it simply wouldn't set any of the parameters to any special values, just use their default.
Going with my original example, let's say we have the following table for which biomes should be generated:
1-10 taiga
11-30 ocean
31-60 forest
61-100 plains
And, for the seed 123, the RNG would generate these values (this is a very small world and has only 5 biomes):
19 73 15 45 3
So, we're generating 5 biomes for our little world (just to make sure everyone knows, this is a very simplified example!). Based on that seed, we get the following:
ocean
plains
ocean
forest
taiga
Someone decides they want to generate a survival island seed, with nothing but ocean and some forest. So they turn off taiga and plains, and set the sliders for 30% forest, 70% ocean. Now our chart looks like this:
1-70 ocean
71-100 forest
The same sequence from the RNG -- 19 73 15 45 3 -- would give us these biomes:
ocean
forest
ocean
ocean
ocean
(that is, a lot of water with one forested island in it)
Nothing changed in the RNG results -- only in how they were interpreted. This is necessarily extremely simplifed for the purpose of a forum post, of course (not to mention that I don't know what's really under the hood in MC!) but I think the basic idea is sound. As long as the default values were used, the same seed (from the PC version, if relevant) would produce exactly the same results that it does today. Changing the biome and/or mob values would produce different results, but the numbers wouldn't change, only how they were interpreted. "Put an ocean here" instead of "put taiga here" for instance.
So, in short, it wouldn't interfere with using seeds from the PC because they would just have the default settings, the same as they do today.
Also, I doubt if it would entail months worth of coding. The numbers already exist -- they have to, by the very nature of how the program works. This would be essentially exposing them to a suitable user interface so the user could change them in their world generation. Relative to the magnitude of effect it would have on the game, this is actually very little work.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
if we "NEED" those items so badly then why can't we get them in peaceful??? I get that we don't NEED to tame wolfs to fight with us in peaceful but maybe we want a pet wolf anyways or some bonemeal to farm faster. or maybe we want to gunpowder to make tnt to blow spots up for projects or slimeballs for sticky pistons which are very useful.
That's another good reason for selectable mobs: what if someone wants to play mostly-peaceful but still be able to get slimeballs?
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
I agree that playing in peaceful really limits the players on some items. String became easier to obtain in peaceful when mineshafts were introduced to the game. Gunpowder is quite rare, but it can occasionally be found in dungeon chests (which still generate in peaceful but are not active. Skeleton and zombie drops can be obtained without fighting mobs by blockading yourself in a safe place overnight and allowing them to burn in the morning, then saving and exiting, and then re-entering the game on peaceful in order to run around a pick up the drops. Slimes used to stay spawned if the game was flipped from easy, normal, or hard difficulty to peaceful; but now they do despawn. I believe it was the way it was because Mojang originally wanted slime to be available to players in peaceful mode; but the community continually reported it as a bug... so I guess they just decided to fix that bug. It does make it more difficult for peaceful players to get slimes; however, a slime farm can still be constructed in such a way that no mobs other than slimes are likelyt to spawn. So, if the player ensures that the slime farm area is enclosed and well lit, they will wind up just collecting slimes without encountering other mobs anyway.
Biome selection is being done by players anyways... Most of us start many seeds before we settle on a world with terrain that suits us... so, I think 4J should save us some time and give us a method to give us a better chance of getting a world we like on the first try rather than the 100th. We still would not be able to truly customize the terrain generation since the game would still decide how to mix the biomes we select together on the map.
Conversely, custom mob selection fundamentally changes the gameplay in ways that the creator of the game has not envisioned. From reading old interviews, it is obvious that the game was originally designed by Notch and Mojang to encourage players to leave peaceful mode... at least on occasion in order to get drops that they could not get otherwise. They want people to play the full game. I'm a person who believes that the creator should maintain some semblance of creative control over their creation. If the program was intended to be merely a terrain similator for rendering building designs or if it was a training program for novice game writers, OK... but it's not, it's a complete game idea conceived by Notch and brought to life by Mojang... not us. The creeper is the mascot of the entire game. Eliminate the creeper and it's just NOT Minecraft.