Minecraft Forums

So here is a gigantic swamp land.

RTG:

http://puu.sh/p55xx/dfafcf02f1.png

Vanilla:

http://puu.sh/p55Hn/048621e178.png

Looking around the edge of the swamp, vanilla shows the typical blobs. Looking around the RTG edge, it seems less noisy and chaotic.

Now, look at the innards. Vanilla is a pretty random mix. RTG has ... well, I want to say has less land sticking up right next to a water biome, but look to the right and slightly north of the player arrow. There's above-water land just next to a significant water blob. Other than that, the swamp tends to go down to "shallow water, no land" just before going to deep water. I know it's past lockdown, but that really sticks out like a sore landscape.

(North of the whole swamp is ocean, btw.)

Now, here is a close-up of the RTG swamp

http://puu.sh/p57be/be7e0a4b85.png

And here is the first-person view

http://puu.sh/p57dw/e9bfc89df4.png

This is incredibly hilly. Most of the RTG terrain seems to be large smooth hills rolling in over dozens of blocks, or up to a 1 to 1 slope up a mountain. This area is massively up-and-down, lots and lots of pockets and hills, some of which go above water. I actually would have expected areas with water like this to be more even ground level. Are real swamps actually so hilly in the bottom? (I don't know; it does not match my expectation).

The deeper water next to the land looks like a river and it was intentional to have rivers continue through swamps (in real life they sometimes do and sometimes don't but I wanted the rivers to remain navigable). I do see a fair amount of open water in that swamp and if it's not due to river/lake/ocean I'd consider bumping it up a little.

Real swamps are - varied. Mostly they're flat, but they can be hilly. In the case of Swampland, I actually deliberately kept them hilly like that (it was that way in the code we inherited from Ted80) because I wanted Swampland to be hard to cross. In the biome mods, I have some swamps which are mostly quite flat (Dead Swamp in BoP and Fens in EB). That's good too, but as with Extreme Hills and mountain types, I've only got *one* vanilla swampland to work with and when I could only have one, I wanted the version where you kind of feel like you're stuck in the mud, having to go in and out of the water.

We're more able to make minor changes to swamp code because you're usually only talking a block or two in height so chunk walls are more tolerable.

Edit: in terms of having higher ground next to a river in a swamp: New Orleans was originally built on high ground right next to the Mississippi river in the middle of a vast swampy delta. It does happen!

Edit edit: Swamps also sometimes have "islands" up to about 8 block high, and they pop up anywhere. Again, this is deliberate: I wanted places to build houses and bases and I like the fact that these can sometimes be in a swampy morass, sometimes next to dry biomes, and sometimes out in a lake-y area. Variety, spice of life, etc.

Rivers:

Rivers are significantly shallower than normal! Vanilla rarely gets to a full depth, but -0.5 base is down at Y=55 ground. Large biome rivers show that (along with them being wide).

Here? River bottoms are incredibly uneven. The "normal" bottom seems to be about Y=59, with hills up and pockets down from there. Mods that assume rivers have a base at Y=55 for placing stuff will place in the wrong place.

I'm pretty sure that Reasonable Realism/Harder Ore's limonite placement, tuned for vanilla swamps and rivers, will not be placing things properly. Other mods I do not know.

Now, rivers that run "through" a swampland get re-tagged as swampland, and show the swamp coloring, but otherwise look identical to the river nature -- there's a sample of that in the giant swamp I showed earlier.

Rivers also turn into "giant lakes" -- still labeled as a river, but looking more like a large, 150-200 block diameter circle.

Map view: http://puu.sh/p58sY/8c4a02252f.png

1st person view: (lake) http://puu.sh/p58BZ/2e0fca0ce3.png

(river) http://puu.sh/p58JV/28989b066f.png

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LolWat? http://puu.sh/p5aii/051f1e3143.png

The ground of this bit of ocean looks like it has a maze inscribed into it. This is a "flat" area with a maze of tunnels carved into it. What happened here?

River depth was also inherited, but the mechanics make every river approximately the same depth, so we probably don't want to make them deeper. I don't play large biomes and so the rivers seemed normally deep to me. We could put in a config for max depth.

The lakes on the river are probably - lakes on the river. There are lakes, and sometimes rivers intersect them. They're "river" biome because there's no "lake" biome in vanilla (you can set them to convert to mod biome lakes if you want). I **LOVE** the lakes on the rivers, ever since the first time I was boating down a river and suddenly emerged into a big lake with the savanna trees on the shore in the distance - man, that was great ...

Seed on the crazy ocean bottom?

Quote from Zeno410»

The deeper water next to the land looks like a river and it was intentional to have rivers continue through swamps (in real life they sometimes do and sometimes don't but I wanted the rivers to remain navigable). I do see a fair amount of open water in that swamp and if it's not due to river/lake/ocean I'd consider bumping it up a little.

Real swamps are - varied. Mostly they're flat, but they can be hilly. In the case of Swampland, I actually deliberately kept them hilly like that (it was that way in the code we inherited from Ted80) because I wanted Swampland to be hard to cross. In the biome mods, I have some swamps which are mostly quite flat (Dead Swamp in BoP and Fens in EB). That's good too, but as with Extreme Hills and mountain types, I've only got *one* vanilla swampland to work with and when I could only have one, I wanted the version where you kind of feel like you're stuck in the mud, having to go in and out of the water.

We're more able to make minor changes to swamp code because you're usually only talking a block or two in height so chunk walls are more tolerable.

Edit: in terms of having higher ground next to a river in a swamp: New Orleans was originally built on high ground right next to the Mississippi river in the middle of a vast swampy delta. It does happen!

Edit edit: Swamps also sometimes have "islands" up to about 8 block high, and they pop up anywhere. Again, this is deliberate: I wanted places to build houses and bases and I like the fact that these can sometimes be in a swampy morass, sometimes next to dry biomes, and sometimes out in a lake-y area. Variety, spice of life, etc.

All of these pictures so far have been the same world/seed. I've got two other seeds to check out -- one that has a large mesa near 0,0, and another from the seed collection thread that has all vanilla biomes within 2K of spawn

Yes, it turns out that the "river going through the swamp" look was exactly that -- a river that was converted to be tagged swamp, but still generated looking like a river, with river biomes at either end to continue it. In fact, the very large swampland that looked like it had large areas of very low terrain seems to have been one of your giant rivers that got retagged as swamp after being made -- the actual terrain bottom matches your rivers.

As for the "high ground in swamps" / "one type of swamp", most of the swamps I've seen in 1.7.10, at least when they are single-biome-blob in size (not multiple swamp blobs next to each other), they are either almost entirely "soaked", or almost entirely "above ground". While doing some research on swamplands to help figure out how to handle limonite for RR, I discovered that the land classification was a bit more than I had thought. I'm rusty now, but I remember the distinctions including both rainfall concerns, and drainage concerns -- land that got soaked and did not drain properly (if I recall correctly) wound up with different bacterial growth and strange water conditions. Ground above "sea level" / no surface standing water could still have unusual plant growth, etc.

As much as there is only "one swamp biome" (ignoring the swampland M's), the question is: Can you give each swamp blob a chance to behave in either of two (or three) different behaviors? Right now I see a "near land" and "away from land" pair of behaviors (although I may just be seeing a patter that does not exist).

If not, then I agree -- the "painfully slow to drudge through" would be the one to choose if you can only choose one.

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Islands in the middle of the ocean. Well, first, the new islands look much nicer, small round ovals, with a gentle slope. Some of the smaller ones seem to have disappeared out of existence.

Here is a map view of what in vanilla is a bunch of tiny splotches of land.

RTG: Two small islands: http://puu.sh/p5aii/051f1e3143.png

Vanilla: A bunch of tiny islands: http://puu.sh/p5f1m/a01930f64d.png

===

Here's a section of ocean that is absolutely flat. Along the edges of this area, there are spots where an underwater hill spills into the flat zone, but the noise function in this area is just flattened down to zero.

http://puu.sh/p5fiS/9b0e9e2fb7.png

With that, I take a dinner break.

To be precise, the "swamp rivers" are actually *not* changed - river biome has to be specially flagged, and I don't do it for areas that are swamp, and if you ever saw a blue river flowing through a brown swamp you'd immediately understand.

Swamps really only have one type of behavior - the near-land and near-water differ only because the smoothing is doing different things (sloping up towards land or down towards ocean/lake). If you get far enough from the outside influence (about 64 blocks for biome; variable for rivers and lakes) the swamps are always the same (with the chance for hills popping up). Lakes and rivers might be responsible for "flooded swamps" as their smoothing can reach substantial distances and it tends to lower land. It would be possible to make swamps change from one style to another over long distances but I think we won't do it for 1.0. At this point I only want to change terrain that are "wrong" and this is more of "well, it *could* be better.." If you've go some specific suggestions we should be able to work them into 2.0.

Islands get shrunk, smoothed, and, if small, erased (well, actually they leave seamounts). That's a function of the smoothing and can't be removed. It's actually reduced recently with the shorter-distance parabolic smoothing we're now using.

I'll see about taking out the flat-bottomed oceans. That does qualify as "wrong" IMO.

Wrong? I like the flat-bottom oceans :-).

What seemed really odd was that the hill-effect winds up being the only effect.

As for swamps/rivers, are we talking about the same thing? Look at http://puu.sh/p55xx/dfafcf02f1.png

To the left or right of the player arrow are sections of swampland that have rivers north and south, and a bottom that looks just like the rest of your rivers. And, they are right next to a land section -- so if there was a 64 block range of influence, they should be sloped up from that.

===

I did not see any surface cave/ravine openings. I know this was mentioned before, that you thought they were ugly, but I also thought that you relented and made them show up. Did I misunderstand?

Equally, I did not see much in the way of cave openings in the sea floor. One place where a lava lake generated just under the sea floor, and the sea water flooded in to make obsidian, and one place where a cave system was just below the sea floor and a section of sand collapsed. I'll test with Realistic Fluids Overhaul, but it looks like finite flowing water likes your world, with very little flowing water in the oceans.

Oh yea -- ChromatiCraft needs areas of ocean floor that are flat next to a hill, so it can place a half-buried structure at the sea floor for you to find and explore. At least, that's my understanding of what it's looking for there -- vanilla has large amounts of flat ocean bottoms.

Have you considered (or do you currently) updating the biome dictionary flags to accurately describe your new terrain?

I'm happy to leave ocean as is, because it would be hard to change without noticeable effects on most coasts.

Rivers override most land, and an area heading towards river will slope down almost regardless of what it would have done if the river weren't there.

Check your configs for caves and ravines. I'm not sure of the defaults. I definitely see caves.

The biome dictionary flags are global so I wouldn't want to try to fiddle with them. Depending on how other mods program their access, it might be too late to change them by the time we got the chance. In the vast majority of cases, our terrains should have the same flags anyway.

Quote from Keybounce»

I just liked the vanilla "most extreme terrain", as the closest to old-school extreme hills back when the definition was wrong in 1.1.

The vanilla world:
http://puu.sh/p4Zs1/3653cd9aa5.png

The RTG world:
http://puu.sh/p4ZER/5cd4fd7f50.png

Location 400, 120, -620, looking south.

Alright, this is right at a bend of a really large RTG river. See this pair:

Vanilla world, map view:
http://puu.sh/p500J/436f27273a.png

RTG world, map view:
http://puu.sh/p50f4/23c052cf35.png

The Savanna M could be more extreme, but probably not going to change now. 2.0, maybe.

The "wet desert" is being created by the rivers. Rivers sometimes re-surface nearby deserts with dirt and place trees.

Quote from Sedridor»

I'd prefer stone surface, the vanilla clay types don't really look good, they look like untextured color blocks from a distance in his picture http://puu.sh/p4Nk1/b0ae4a7fed.png.

Do Forests and ForestHills not have the normal vanilla trees anymore

Yeah, the vanilla textures for Hardened Clay are really flat, too much so IMO.

Forest and ForestHills have the normal vanilla trees still, but they're somewhat uncommon, less common than the single-block trunk pines, which are less common than the spruce and oak giants.

Quote from Keybounce»

I am definitely seeing two different colors of grass in swamplands. Both a brownish, and a greenish.

http://puu.sh/p52PT/ade77038a3.png

What are the biomes where the different colors are?

Those biomes are all swampland -- all one swamp.

That's what seems crazy. If you aren't doing anything to client rendering, isn't the grass color supposed to be constant within a biome?

Quote from Viperion_NZ»

I'm using this mod, along with Biomes O'Plenty and Climate Control, and it's working great and looks awsome except for some reason nearly every new world I'm creating is an (approximately) 100x200 block island with oceans for thousands and thousands of blocks in every direction. Is that caused by this mod? Climate Control? I haven't changed any of the configs for any of the mods.

Help?

RTG doesn't do biome placement, so the amount of ocean is determined by what's doing your biome layouts, which will be CC in your case.

That does happen, but not the majority of the time. You've just been unlucky. If you don't want it, you can set medium islands to 0 and there will be no such islands to start on, or set forceStartContinent to true and you'll always start on some kind of continent, or (if you're OK with a continental world) set separateLandmasses = false and there will be a lot fewer such island and no true oceans, only large lakes (like current vanilla).

The "South Seas Complex" is a longstanding flaw in the BoP sub-biome generator. If you're using CC, you should probably have B:NoBoPSubBiomes=true. You could try their latest release to see if they've fixed it.