So, according to a post at http://notch.tumblr.com/ 8 hours ago, Notch is abandoning finite water. Is anyone else disappointed by this? I feel that the task wouldn't be terribly difficult, and it was one of the main things that impressed me about indev (bought the game 2 days ago, haven't played anything else since).
The current model of water is quite realistic, in my point of view. I like it. My caves are constructed with the finite water model in mind, with sewers, torches that wont go out, and even the occasional air hole (though I've never needed them). Finite water is quite fun to deal with. The last epic water maneuver I made was converting a room I realized was under the ocean into an underwater greenhouse with a glass ceiling and water piped down to crop-level(the experiment was a failure, during dusk the crops were subjected to intense darkness and died, repeated this 3 consecutive days and concluded that it was impossible. Crops placed after dusk completed, which I consider to be the time after which all of the messed up lighting fixes itself). The experiment was a very fun one that involved sealing off an entire segment of the ocean and draining it into a cave system which I had prepared. This would have required a different, and much less realistic, process under the new system. I like the finite water system and I think that with some tweaking it would easily become one of the game's ground-breaking features.
With regards to the newly announced system, I feel that it would be wildly unrealistic, for the reasons that notch mentions in his post, and because it would trivialize the way you handle water. Whoops, that's water. let me just plug that up without any sort of problem. Oh look, good thing I lined my tunnel with bounty! It's super absorbent!
But seriously though, The new system, while clearly less effort to implement(and therefore less work for notch!), would be far, far, less awesome. While I think it would be great to have flowing water and static water, I don't think that this development is incompatible with the finite water system (though I know nothing about the particulars of how the game OR the finite water system are programmed, as a self-proclaimed competent programmer, I can speculate). I would be willing to wait a full extra year for the game if it meant having finite water in the finished product. *Shields face from inevitable flamestorm from people who want an inferior game now rather than a better game later, and from people who are going to jump to the conclusion that I cannot possibly be a competent programmer because I am on the internet and therefore am a 7 year old with no talents whatsoever*
It annoys me a bit that you seem to assume that every response will be disrespectful of your opinion, not every response will even outline a different opinion then yours I'm sure.
Anyway, on the subject of realism I don't think the current system is very realistic either. I remember not long ago I was mining and I accidentally dug up into the ocean, so the whole cave flooded. I just closed the hole that the water came through and it dried up pretty quickly. Besides, I don't think realism should really matter in a game where water is restrained to cubic meter blocks that can stack up on each other before they flow into the next room.
On the subject of which one is more fun, I really can't judge until I've used both. The only water system I've really played with are the infinite one in creative and the current one in indev.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
real minecrafters are attracted to rana and bookcases
In my opinion, half of the fun of survival mode (And of any mode similar to it) is that you are surviving within a given set of constraints, the most encompassing one being realism. I'm talking for the purposes of the slightly directed gameplay. In creative mode he can do what he wants, and I won't care at all. I don't think it's worth sacrificing realism just to facilitate people who want complete domination over whether or not they can make an infinite waterfall (which, by the way, would presumably serve no purpose). I think the solution is to fix finite water and not to jump to a less spectacular solution. If you want moving water, add it to finite water. If you want waterfalls, make it work with finite water. Reality works, believe me, it's real. The only issue is getting it to work out computationally.
EDIT: also, I'm sorry if I prepare my first post on any forum for excessive flaming, I haven't spent any time lurking here, so I haven't the slightest idea what the community is like.
Computationally it's much easier to expand the water, because all that needs to be done is to look for places where water meets air, and see if the conditions are right to create a new water block. What I think would be cool though, would be to check the area of a cave or hole. For instance, find the height at which the cave would be "filled" and then check the amount of area in that cave. Then, you could assign that entire cave a region identifier. Whenever water went in, the region identifier's water level value would increase. Obviously, if you dug any walls on the contour of that region, the area would increase by one block size, and if you dug into another region, the region with the lowest block would "absorb" the higher region. If there was a tie, the region you were digging into would become the primary region. In this way, the water level wouldn't be dependent on a blocky representation. You could have rain that would fill up caves, because as the water fell into the cave, the value of "water" filling the cave would increase steadily. Of course, this would require a rewrite of the level generation system, to instead generate the map, and potential lakes/oceans and mark them, and then determine the water level necessary to fill them (the max area of the region) and apply that much "water" to the region. This would be a computationally intense way to do it during level generation, but would take less computation during operation, at the expense of more RAM.
Example: a hole in the ground with 7 blocks of area. You could say each box holds 100 water. That would be 700 water value required to fill it. To get the water level, all you would need to do is divide 700 by the amount of water, and position the water plane at that position in that area. 700/700, it would be up to the brim, and 350/700, it would be halfway down, regardless of any boxes. It could be perfectly smooth and finite.
The main issue that it would come down to is surface water. Obviously all water above holes and caves would be part of a giant water field. This would require a special region, of water above ground. If a region was connected to this upper region, water would leave the upper region, hence decreasing surface water, and increasing under-surface water. Obviously to determine how much water would be required to "fill" the surface/sky would be very intense, so it would need to be calculated during generation, instead of using a recursive function or otherwise way to save time. Of course, this is all speculation since I haven't seen the source, and I'm sure notch is doing the right thing regardless.
See? It's easy to make someone look dumb or agree with you or really say anything when you take quotes out of context. Sure, this example is laughably unrealistic, but the fact remains.
Your first quote Is fine, as is your response, but I feel that infinite amounts of water spawning from a relatively small pool are a tad more unrealistic than the world slowing to a crawl whenever a tidal wave is present.
As for your second quote, it blatantly ignores the fact that in my very post I mentioned that my concerns have nothing to do with creative mode. Here's the quote:
Quote from SkoobyDoo »
In creative mode he can do what he wants, and I won't care at all.
If you are at the point in survival mode that you are doing things for the sake of expression and not to prevent the next spider that comes your way from gnawing on your nadges, i'd say its about time to crank up the difficulty level, or just declare yourself the winner and move on to a different map. Not that I feel Creative mode should become an unmaintained, deprecated game mode, I just think that the needs of creative are very different than the needs of survival, and it's possible that these two game modes should treat water differently.
Allow me to expand your second quote, for the sake of context:
Quote from SkoobyDoo »
Reality works, believe me, it's real. The only issue is getting it to work out computationally.
As you can see, everything you just said regarding the difficulties of fluid mechanics is encompassed in the very next sentence, which you either decided was unimportant, or just overlooked in the excitement and outrage of me saying reality works.
Tongue-in-cheek replies aside, I stand by my statements. I'm not supporting the addition of convection currents, the affects of wind on surface waves, or any of the dozen "X Effects" that are at work in fluids. I'm just asking that when water comes from point A and moves to point B, that point A be exactly X liters short of water, where X is the amount of water that moved from A to B. This was one of the biggest things that impressed me upon originally playing the game. In its current state, the system is buggy and bad, however I think that this code can, and should, be optimized. Perhaps he's been tackling the problem the wrong way and needs to look over the problem again and come up with a different way to code similar behavior in a way that requires less computing. I know nothing of how the current system works, however, but I am slightly mystified as to why the highest block is an important bit of data. At any rate, I still feel the current system adds much more flavor to the (survival) game than any amount of infinite waterfalls (Though I wouldn't mind if the running water mechanic were implemented in the current system.)
Before I move on, I would like to stress that I do not intend for this post to be hurtful in any way. If my somewhat sarcastic responses at the beginning of my post were too harsh, I'll edit them out and replace them with a more traditional response.
Moving on to Epitaph64's response, I'm not quite certain I have the slightest idea what you described. At a glance, your post appears to rely on concepts I think would be unwise to implement in a block-based system. Anything that happens in the game should really only rely on a given block, and perhaps the blocks directly adjacent to it. At least this is how I feel. For instance, when checking if water should spread, you should just look adjacent to and beneath water blocks, and in each of those two circumstances do something to mimic the spread or movement of water accordingly (Incidentally, this is why I am unsure why the highest block is important).
Perhaps I'll pursue a conversation with Notch and see if he's willing to share some insight into how the current system (doesn't) works, so I can better understand why it's being phased out.
*Shields face from inevitable flamestorm from people who want an inferior game now rather than a better game later, and from people who are going to jump to the conclusion that I cannot possibly be a competent programmer because I am on the internet and therefore am a 7 year old with no talents whatsoever*
Because anybody who disagrees with you is certainly wrong.
Actually, your only argument so far has been:
the newly announced system, I feel that it would be wildly unrealistic
The new system, [...] would be far, far, less awesome
because it would trivialize the way you handle water
1) Infinite water is unrealistic. Because block worlds with massive floating islands and exploding cucumbers. Good point.
Because block worlds with massive floating islands and exploding cucumbers.
I don't understand sentence fragments. That said, while we're abandoning realism, I think I should be able to eat tools to recover life. I don't know how many times I've been out and about and run out of food. If I could have eaten my shovel i would not have died! Therefore, since cucumbers explode, I can eat my shovel.[/sarcasm]
2. You are very mature. Please teach me to be more mature like you.
3. Epic waterfalls and "cave flooding" (whatever you meant by that) can be made possible by other means. If by cave flooding you meant 'ease of water management in a mining environment', water IS easy to manage, provided you have the head to deal with it.
Please spend more than 12 seconds criticizing my point of view, and maybe we can get some real discussion done here.
*gets ready for the personal attack fireb0rn will almost certainly respond with*
At any rate, regarding how water works, if your memory is correct, then I feel that Notch has done this incorrectly. Much processing power is spent finding that magic block to move down, when all you need to do is move a block locally. Eventually through a cascade effect, the same thing will get done. This is how it works in real life, and it would work in the game if done properly as well. Also it wouldn't lag like crazy...
I must admit I am confused why Notch is abandoning finite water. But I also do not understand how he programmed the infinite maps, in a way that it preserves areas that you have walked passed (and later return to). From a programmer's perspective, I understand infinite maps are probably no simple task, and finite water certainly isn't either. It's fairly complex to say the least, so I could perhaps see why there would be a conflict.
I have been in similar situation multiple times, where you hit a point where you can have one, the other, but not both. Though I can say, I really hope he finds a way for finite water to stay.
1. I don't understand sentence fragments. That said, while we're abandoning realism, I think I should be able to eat tools to recover life. I don't know how many times I've been out and about and run out of food. If I could have eaten my shovel i would not have died! Therefore, since cucumbers explode, I can eat my shovel.[/sarcasm]
Interesting how you claim to not be able to understand my sentence yet are able to respond to it without any problems. Also interesting is your inability to recognize that it was fragmented on purpose, to exaggerate the ridiculousness of your implied claim that the game should be realistic.
I'll begin my retort with this: your argument is terrible. First of all, do not resort to reductio ad absurdum in an argument. It makes you look stupid, not me. Second of all, since you made the claim that the game should be realistic the onus is on you now to prove it, that is without resorting to childish or absurd argumentation. Third, since you seem to be having some difficulties, I'll properly explicate my argument for you:
Minecraft has never tried to be a "realistic game". It has tried to be a "fun game". Fun can be a consequence of realism but it is not in this case. Minecraft is fun for a variety of reasons but realism isn't one of them.
Quote from SkoobyDoo »
2. You are very mature. Please teach me to be more mature like you.
Next time don't call the people posting in your topic stupid before you even hear from them. Then I won't feel inclined to mock you.
Quote from SkoobyDoo »
3. Epic waterfalls and "cave flooding" (whatever you meant by that) can be made possible by other means. If by cave flooding you meant 'ease of water management in a mining environment', water IS easy to manage, provided you have the head to deal with it.
No, I meant cave flooding, because that is precisely what it is. Finite or infinite water doesn't usually make cave flooding easier or not, it is more often determinant of whether it is possible or not. Besides that, I don't really see how "cave flooding" is difficult for you to understand.
Also, explain these "other means" to Notch, not me.
Quote from SkoobyDoo »
Please spend more than 12 seconds criticizing my point of view, and maybe we can get some real discussion done here.
Try writing an argument that's worth more than 12 seconds of my time, and I'll take more than 12 seconds to respond.
Wow, really, a flame war this soon into the discussion? =/
Uh, not sure if you read this part of his post, where he essentially invited a flame war:
Quote from SkoobyDoo »
*Shields face from inevitable flamestorm from people who want an inferior game now rather than a better game later, and from people who are going to jump to the conclusion that I cannot possibly be a competent programmer because I am on the internet and therefore am a 7 year old with no talents whatsoever*
To translate: I'm posting this in a forum for open discussion, but if you disagree with me you're both a dumbass and completely wrong. Now discuss!
Quote from unison »
Yep. It is best to ignore them, and have a civil discussion with the rest of the reasonable people here :smile.gif:
I'm both uncivil AND unreasonable .... wow. Now whereas I only used some sarcasm in my post, you've insulted me directly twice. And I'm uncivil. Whatever.
I did not directly state any such thing, though I did imply you should be ignored. I also said this thread contains reasonable people of whom are capable of a civil discussion, which I would like to continue :smile.gif:
I did not directly state any such thing, though I did imply you should be ignored. I also said this thread contains reasonable people of whom are capable of a civil discussion, which I would like to continue :smile.gif:
Actually, when you ascribed other posters in this thread the quality "reasonableness", it was clearly meant to be in a direct contrast to us, who you were directly implying are unreasonable.
Let me explain it to you in a logical, (one might even say...) reasonable way:
Your beginning statement: we should listen to reasonable people.
Therefore, implying: we should not listen to unreasonable people.
1) Other people are reasonable. Implied from your words: "the rest". Since your phrase "the rest" means to exclude us, the implication is that we are unreasonable.
2) You make the statement that we should be ignored. Your criteria for who should be ignored, as stated in your post, are those who are unreasonable.
So, stop acting coy, please. Just admit you flamed me for "starting" a flame war, where all I did was stump a guy who was the only person who wanted a flame war in the first place. Anyways, I've got nothing more to say in this thread because this is getting a bit childish. So no need to lock it, I won't be posting here anymore.
What you seem to forget is the starter of this discussion, although perhaps going about it in the wrong way (which I agree with you, to an extent), started a useful discussion about Notch's decision regarding finite water and other matters thereof. Which, might I add, feedback is something all software developers need, and most appreciate.
I did call you unreasonable, although indirectly. Call it a flame if it suits you. This is not meant to be a put down toward you. It was my attempt to persuade others to add something useful to the discussion, rather than argue semantics (over the manner in which the discussion was started).
Well, let's hope he was sincere in promising us to not return.
*retort omitted*
Really wanted to leave that in too. Sometimes it sucks being the bigger man.
Finally returning to the topic at hand, in response to unison's post about not understanding finite water, my guess is this: the current maps have a definite edge, so the edge blocks can be occupied by infinite sources of water, in order to keep sea level constant. In a map that is constantly expanding outwards in all directions, this cannot be, because once the player expands past one of said infinite water tiles, it would be in the middle of an ocean (and potentially 'harvest-able' or otherwise utilized. This was the first thing that came to mind anyways, until I made my underwater dome and realized how slow it was to finally cover it with water. Framerate dropped below 1 for a time. It's possible that keeping track of finite water in an infinite world would become quite cumbersome on the machine. That said, he never elaborated on why finite water on infinite map is not do-able, so we cant know his reasons.
Getting back to the topic:
Trying to update a transfinite map space with finite computer power will result in a transfinite execution time.
In order to achieve tolerable execution speeds this requires that the game only pay attention to blocks which have changed since the last tick and update the game world accordingly.
My preferred solution would be to use a fully deterministic map generator and store only the initial seed value, the active chunks, and the changes made to the map. Then any chunks too far away from a player can be dropped from memory and reliably reconstructed as needed, and the game only needs to work to keep a small area updated.
The current model of water is quite realistic, in my point of view. I like it. My caves are constructed with the finite water model in mind, with sewers, torches that wont go out, and even the occasional air hole (though I've never needed them). Finite water is quite fun to deal with. The last epic water maneuver I made was converting a room I realized was under the ocean into an underwater greenhouse with a glass ceiling and water piped down to crop-level(the experiment was a failure, during dusk the crops were subjected to intense darkness and died, repeated this 3 consecutive days and concluded that it was impossible. Crops placed after dusk completed, which I consider to be the time after which all of the messed up lighting fixes itself). The experiment was a very fun one that involved sealing off an entire segment of the ocean and draining it into a cave system which I had prepared. This would have required a different, and much less realistic, process under the new system. I like the finite water system and I think that with some tweaking it would easily become one of the game's ground-breaking features.
With regards to the newly announced system, I feel that it would be wildly unrealistic, for the reasons that notch mentions in his post, and because it would trivialize the way you handle water. Whoops, that's water. let me just plug that up without any sort of problem. Oh look, good thing I lined my tunnel with bounty! It's super absorbent!
But seriously though, The new system, while clearly less effort to implement(and therefore less work for notch!), would be far, far, less awesome. While I think it would be great to have flowing water and static water, I don't think that this development is incompatible with the finite water system (though I know nothing about the particulars of how the game OR the finite water system are programmed, as a self-proclaimed competent programmer, I can speculate). I would be willing to wait a full extra year for the game if it meant having finite water in the finished product. *Shields face from inevitable flamestorm from people who want an inferior game now rather than a better game later, and from people who are going to jump to the conclusion that I cannot possibly be a competent programmer because I am on the internet and therefore am a 7 year old with no talents whatsoever*
Anyway, on the subject of realism I don't think the current system is very realistic either. I remember not long ago I was mining and I accidentally dug up into the ocean, so the whole cave flooded. I just closed the hole that the water came through and it dried up pretty quickly. Besides, I don't think realism should really matter in a game where water is restrained to cubic meter blocks that can stack up on each other before they flow into the next room.
On the subject of which one is more fun, I really can't judge until I've used both. The only water system I've really played with are the infinite one in creative and the current one in indev.
No, but really, despite some kinks in the current system, it is just fine. I would like to see flowing water however.
I hoped for that to come :smile.gif:
EDIT: also, I'm sorry if I prepare my first post on any forum for excessive flaming, I haven't spent any time lurking here, so I haven't the slightest idea what the community is like.
Example: a hole in the ground with 7 blocks of area. You could say each box holds 100 water. That would be 700 water value required to fill it. To get the water level, all you would need to do is divide 700 by the amount of water, and position the water plane at that position in that area. 700/700, it would be up to the brim, and 350/700, it would be halfway down, regardless of any boxes. It could be perfectly smooth and finite.
The main issue that it would come down to is surface water. Obviously all water above holes and caves would be part of a giant water field. This would require a special region, of water above ground. If a region was connected to this upper region, water would leave the upper region, hence decreasing surface water, and increasing under-surface water. Obviously to determine how much water would be required to "fill" the surface/sky would be very intense, so it would need to be calculated during generation, instead of using a recursive function or otherwise way to save time. Of course, this is all speculation since I haven't seen the source, and I'm sure notch is doing the right thing regardless.
See? It's easy to make someone look dumb or agree with you or really say anything when you take quotes out of context. Sure, this example is laughably unrealistic, but the fact remains.
Your first quote Is fine, as is your response, but I feel that infinite amounts of water spawning from a relatively small pool are a tad more unrealistic than the world slowing to a crawl whenever a tidal wave is present.
As for your second quote, it blatantly ignores the fact that in my very post I mentioned that my concerns have nothing to do with creative mode. Here's the quote:
If you are at the point in survival mode that you are doing things for the sake of expression and not to prevent the next spider that comes your way from gnawing on your nadges, i'd say its about time to crank up the difficulty level, or just declare yourself the winner and move on to a different map. Not that I feel Creative mode should become an unmaintained, deprecated game mode, I just think that the needs of creative are very different than the needs of survival, and it's possible that these two game modes should treat water differently.
Allow me to expand your second quote, for the sake of context:
As you can see, everything you just said regarding the difficulties of fluid mechanics is encompassed in the very next sentence, which you either decided was unimportant, or just overlooked in the excitement and outrage of me saying reality works.
Tongue-in-cheek replies aside, I stand by my statements. I'm not supporting the addition of convection currents, the affects of wind on surface waves, or any of the dozen "X Effects" that are at work in fluids. I'm just asking that when water comes from point A and moves to point B, that point A be exactly X liters short of water, where X is the amount of water that moved from A to B. This was one of the biggest things that impressed me upon originally playing the game. In its current state, the system is buggy and bad, however I think that this code can, and should, be optimized. Perhaps he's been tackling the problem the wrong way and needs to look over the problem again and come up with a different way to code similar behavior in a way that requires less computing. I know nothing of how the current system works, however, but I am slightly mystified as to why the highest block is an important bit of data. At any rate, I still feel the current system adds much more flavor to the (survival) game than any amount of infinite waterfalls (Though I wouldn't mind if the running water mechanic were implemented in the current system.)
Before I move on, I would like to stress that I do not intend for this post to be hurtful in any way. If my somewhat sarcastic responses at the beginning of my post were too harsh, I'll edit them out and replace them with a more traditional response.
Moving on to Epitaph64's response, I'm not quite certain I have the slightest idea what you described. At a glance, your post appears to rely on concepts I think would be unwise to implement in a block-based system. Anything that happens in the game should really only rely on a given block, and perhaps the blocks directly adjacent to it. At least this is how I feel. For instance, when checking if water should spread, you should just look adjacent to and beneath water blocks, and in each of those two circumstances do something to mimic the spread or movement of water accordingly (Incidentally, this is why I am unsure why the highest block is important).
Perhaps I'll pursue a conversation with Notch and see if he's willing to share some insight into how the current system (doesn't) works, so I can better understand why it's being phased out.
Because anybody who disagrees with you is certainly wrong.
Actually, your only argument so far has been:
1) Infinite water is unrealistic. Because block worlds with massive floating islands and exploding cucumbers. Good point.
2) Finite water is "SUPER AWESOME". Wow!
3) Epic waterfalls and cave-flooding = trivial.
1.
I don't understand sentence fragments. That said, while we're abandoning realism, I think I should be able to eat tools to recover life. I don't know how many times I've been out and about and run out of food. If I could have eaten my shovel i would not have died! Therefore, since cucumbers explode, I can eat my shovel.[/sarcasm]
2. You are very mature. Please teach me to be more mature like you.
3. Epic waterfalls and "cave flooding" (whatever you meant by that) can be made possible by other means. If by cave flooding you meant 'ease of water management in a mining environment', water IS easy to manage, provided you have the head to deal with it.
Please spend more than 12 seconds criticizing my point of view, and maybe we can get some real discussion done here.
*gets ready for the personal attack fireb0rn will almost certainly respond with*
At any rate, regarding how water works, if your memory is correct, then I feel that Notch has done this incorrectly. Much processing power is spent finding that magic block to move down, when all you need to do is move a block locally. Eventually through a cascade effect, the same thing will get done. This is how it works in real life, and it would work in the game if done properly as well. Also it wouldn't lag like crazy...
I have been in similar situation multiple times, where you hit a point where you can have one, the other, but not both. Though I can say, I really hope he finds a way for finite water to stay.
Interesting how you claim to not be able to understand my sentence yet are able to respond to it without any problems. Also interesting is your inability to recognize that it was fragmented on purpose, to exaggerate the ridiculousness of your implied claim that the game should be realistic.
I'll begin my retort with this: your argument is terrible. First of all, do not resort to reductio ad absurdum in an argument. It makes you look stupid, not me. Second of all, since you made the claim that the game should be realistic the onus is on you now to prove it, that is without resorting to childish or absurd argumentation. Third, since you seem to be having some difficulties, I'll properly explicate my argument for you:
Minecraft has never tried to be a "realistic game". It has tried to be a "fun game". Fun can be a consequence of realism but it is not in this case. Minecraft is fun for a variety of reasons but realism isn't one of them.
Next time don't call the people posting in your topic stupid before you even hear from them. Then I won't feel inclined to mock you.
No, I meant cave flooding, because that is precisely what it is. Finite or infinite water doesn't usually make cave flooding easier or not, it is more often determinant of whether it is possible or not. Besides that, I don't really see how "cave flooding" is difficult for you to understand.
Also, explain these "other means" to Notch, not me.
Try writing an argument that's worth more than 12 seconds of my time, and I'll take more than 12 seconds to respond.
Uh, not sure if you read this part of his post, where he essentially invited a flame war:
To translate: I'm posting this in a forum for open discussion, but if you disagree with me you're both a dumbass and completely wrong. Now discuss!
I'm both uncivil AND unreasonable .... wow. Now whereas I only used some sarcasm in my post, you've insulted me directly twice. And I'm uncivil. Whatever.
Actually, when you ascribed other posters in this thread the quality "reasonableness", it was clearly meant to be in a direct contrast to us, who you were directly implying are unreasonable.
Let me explain it to you in a logical, (one might even say...) reasonable way:
Your beginning statement: we should listen to reasonable people.
Therefore, implying: we should not listen to unreasonable people.
1) Other people are reasonable. Implied from your words: "the rest". Since your phrase "the rest" means to exclude us, the implication is that we are unreasonable.
2) You make the statement that we should be ignored. Your criteria for who should be ignored, as stated in your post, are those who are unreasonable.
So, stop acting coy, please. Just admit you flamed me for "starting" a flame war, where all I did was stump a guy who was the only person who wanted a flame war in the first place. Anyways, I've got nothing more to say in this thread because this is getting a bit childish. So no need to lock it, I won't be posting here anymore.
I did call you unreasonable, although indirectly. Call it a flame if it suits you. This is not meant to be a put down toward you. It was my attempt to persuade others to add something useful to the discussion, rather than argue semantics (over the manner in which the discussion was started).
*retort omitted*
Really wanted to leave that in too. Sometimes it sucks being the bigger man.
Finally returning to the topic at hand, in response to unison's post about not understanding finite water, my guess is this: the current maps have a definite edge, so the edge blocks can be occupied by infinite sources of water, in order to keep sea level constant. In a map that is constantly expanding outwards in all directions, this cannot be, because once the player expands past one of said infinite water tiles, it would be in the middle of an ocean (and potentially 'harvest-able' or otherwise utilized. This was the first thing that came to mind anyways, until I made my underwater dome and realized how slow it was to finally cover it with water. Framerate dropped below 1 for a time. It's possible that keeping track of finite water in an infinite world would become quite cumbersome on the machine. That said, he never elaborated on why finite water on infinite map is not do-able, so we cant know his reasons.
Trying to update a transfinite map space with finite computer power will result in a transfinite execution time.
In order to achieve tolerable execution speeds this requires that the game only pay attention to blocks which have changed since the last tick and update the game world accordingly.
My preferred solution would be to use a fully deterministic map generator and store only the initial seed value, the active chunks, and the changes made to the map. Then any chunks too far away from a player can be dropped from memory and reliably reconstructed as needed, and the game only needs to work to keep a small area updated.