Mostly when I reply like that it's just me lashing out at the keys so fast because if I don't, the points and crap will have jet shot down to planet 65 and I'll be stuck on the keys.
Trust me, I love to argue. .
Can't look away... It's like an accident, only it's deliberate!
idk what you are looking at but all i see is some maybe half mountains and flat land ....were is the over hangs with waterfalls and the beauty we once had ...gone ...all i see is the same thing over and over ....
Only ONE of those images was created with a post 1.8 version of minecraft. the others were from the minecraft.jar from when I first purchased the game. It was still fun to play that really old version, if only to see how much MC has changed, some of the common elements had totally different textures, etc.
This is a nice little post you have here but nowhere in my OP did I say anything about wanting the pre 1.8 terrain back
Well, then we agree on that, since I never implied otherwise. Or, I certainly didn't mean to imply otherwise. (I imagine your referencing previous versions wasn't meant as an implication either)
as I agree with you to a certain degree that a bit of the pre 1.8 was repetitive, but a lot of it also was not.
A lot of terrain in the new generator is also not repetitive, so this is denying the antecedent; you are saying that If terrain is not repetitive, than it is also interesting. And then asserting that our current generation is repetitive, and therefore that it cannot be interesting.
and there was limited flat ground for building
Only ONE of those screenies I took was from a post 1.8 version of minecraft. There is plenty of flat land to go around regardless of which one is really the latest snapshot (and I've honestly forgotten, good thing I wrote it down...).
and if you had taken the time to read the entire thread you would know that we do not want the pre 1.8 map generation back.
I never said you did. You do feel it is missing something that was in the older versions. I just disagree with that.
You stated in your post that it is difficult to find your bearings because of the distance between landmark A and landmark B was just too great. And said distance was made up of what.. flat land I assume?
Usually, bloody ocean. I ****ing hate oceans. They are flat too, obviously, but only because you can't really have a hilly ocean. They are WAAAY too big. I mean, I want oceans (as opposed to pre-1.8 puddles) but I want an ocean that doesn't take 2 real-time days to cross. Usually I give up after a few thousand blocks, go back to shore, and build a nether portal and try to get across that way. (by building another portal far off in the direction the ocean was in the real world). I certainly won't deny that there is a lot of flat land in the new generator, but there was a lot of it in the older ones as well. What I was thinking of when I made the landmarks comment is related to my quest to find one of those jungle temples. I've found a lot of Jungle biomes, but they all look the same. They aren't flat, which makes them also a pain to traverse. Of course since my goal isn't really to find interesting terrain (though I did find some neat overhangs in a few mountain, Jungle, and even a taiga biome) it was just a pain to traverse, and even though the terrain was interesting (lots of hills) it all looked quite similar. Landmarks existed, but they weren't super obvious- I couldn't say, "OK, My original house is where I am looking if I stand underneath this gigantic overhang and look toward the moon-shaped lava pool" Now I need to usually make the second landmark for guidance, and even if I do that, there usually isn't a good way to easily tell the difference between that cave that I found and made a home of during the night and some unexplored cavern that is somewhere totally different unless I pay very close attention to the surroundings. This is <my> problem with it, of course, and more variation will probably help. (more variation, specifically, within biomes)
And I am almost certain that I am correct.
Well, since flat land is going to be a given regardless of what version's terrain generator we speak of, there will surely be flat land between them. I don't think the ratio between flat and interesting terrain has really changed, the flat stuff has just gotten bigger (plains, Swamp, and Desert biomes being the main contenders, though deserts seem to have gotten more hilly with the latest snapshot, too...).
What we are asking for in this thread is actually a solution to your problem. It would add, in between land mark A and land mark B, a wider variety of height and more unique land features.
To be clear, I don't think that the terrain generation cannot be improved- everything can be improved. Actually, in some ways I think the latest snapshot terrain tweaks may be addressing terrain diversity. Somebody else tried to assert the only change was the jungle temple, but I have noticed hilly terrain all over the place; Jungles, Deserts, even a few forests. I might be imagining things or making a mountain out of a molehill (literally), but I don't remember there being nearly as much variation in height in deserts and other generally "flat" constructs.
Out of all of the screenshots you posted - I believe you and I (along with a lot of others on this thread) have a very very different opinion of what a breath taking land mass would be. As the pictures you presented are nothing more then a couple of little hills in certain biomes
Err... I wasn't expounding them as great screenshots. Only ONE of those images were actually from a post 1.8 version of MC; the others were from a much earlier version, after quite a bit of wandering around to try to find interesting terrain (about 45 minutes). I was hoping to find one of those sweet overhangs, or something like what the yogscast used as a house in their very early Minecraft videos. They certainly exist but I was either unlucky or they aren't nearly as common as I remember. (I think there might be a bit of ad hoc falsification here, since we are more likely to remember awesome stuff than boring stuff, so we remember the cool stuff from earlier versions, but we forgot (or at least I did) how much trekking it took to find them, then we compare our memories to the newer version, and we, having forgotten that there was usually a lot of hunting to find neat stuff then, balk that we have to do it now. As for those pics- There should be enough hints to figure out which one of the four is from the latest snapshot.
I am not saying the current generator lacks hills in all biomes, I'm saying it lacks variety, and the majority of the map is flat and repetitive.
The majority of a given area is more likely to be flat and repetitive in later versions because biomes are bigger and also for some reason biomes like plains and desert show up rather frequently (and Oceans too, grr). That isn't to say I like it this way myself, since it means you have to travel a long way to find toe cool stuff, and in my case I keep hitting oceans, which for me feels like hitting the "end of the world" simply because I either cross it, wasting 15 minutes, or turn around and explore elsewhere. If it's not clear I hate the size of oceans as they are now. They are probably realistic, but nobody has made a game where sailing across an ocean is the main focus. Well except for Wind Waker, but at least there you had a sail.
What we are asking for is not for spamming mountains all over the terrain
...
We want mountains not hills
Aren't those two statements contradictory?
What are the seeds to these (and what version?). Normally I never bothered with seeds but these just scream to be explored (and I see in the first one at least some formations in the distance that I wouldn't mind seeing more of that type of stuff. At the very least those formations should appear outside of the extreme hills where I have seen them (and they were treeless, well, maybe one or two trees on top). I recall similar formations being in deserts in the world I generated after the game updated to Beta 1.2 (I made a new world to get sandstone and lapis, of course :P)
To be clear again, of course there could be improvements to terrain generation (anything can be improved), but I don't think backreferencing previous versions really provides everything needed to understand what you are saying. Like I said, I backdated to an earlier version and didn't see anything like the screenshots posted. I do know those features exist, because I have seen them before, they just aren't any more common from my experience than cool stuff in the terrain is in the current version (though the current version seems to be more likely to make cool stuff only on certain biomes).
One can conceive of biomes "stacking" in a sense; various unique attributes being stacked to create unique combinations. This isn't a very fleshed-out idea but as it is now a lot of the terrain generation relies rather heavily on the biome generation itself to provide the "interesting" parts; but what could be done is (and this is a rough idea) have two "generators" one that determines the formation of the land, and one that is the biome; of course the biome itself could determine the frequency of those land-shape selections; so obviously an extreme hills biome is going to be far more likely to have, well, extreme hills, than a plains biome, but a plains biome can very likely have large hills because it chose the "hilly" attribute to determine terrain shape, and a extreme hills could be less extreme, too.And deserts could have mountains as well.
Though I doubt it implements the concept using my badly communicated idea there, the new snapshot <seems> to provide more shape diversity. I don't recall seeing desert mountains like I am seeing in this snapshot occasionally (and, to be fair, deserts are still mostly flat, but they sometimes have mesa's poking out too) since 1.2 Beta. Main thing I can think of now is making those desert mountains not have exposed stone on the side, since that ruins the... err... "deserty" feel.
My biggest problem with the current terraingen, if it isn't clear, is the Oceans. They are just plain too large to explore properly, and sort of contribute themselves as just wasted disk space for chunks that one most likely only generates trying to find the end of an ocean.
Ah well, i guess i better bump this, i don't want it to fall behind. Nice arguing there shreaders and the guy saying we want seeds removed. I suppose we better end this damn arguement before it turns into a flame war..... i can imagine that, troll faces flying through the air, shooting missiles at incoming ragers shooting flames from their hands........ *Shiver*
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To all of you people who think Notch is still working on the game, he stopped working on Minecraft in late 2011. Get your facts straight and stop spamming his twitter about Minecraft updates.
Only ONE of those images was created with a post 1.8 version of minecraft. the others were from the minecraft.jar from when I first purchased the game. It was still fun to play that really old version, if only to see how much MC has changed, some of the common elements had totally different textures, etc.
Well, then we agree on that, since I never implied otherwise. Or, I certainly didn't mean to imply otherwise. (I imagine your referencing previous versions wasn't meant as an implication either)
A lot of terrain in the new generator is also not repetitive, so this is denying the antecedent; you are saying that If terrain is not repetitive, than it is also interesting. And then asserting that our current generation is repetitive, and therefore that it cannot be interesting.
Only ONE of those screenies I took was from a post 1.8 version of minecraft. There is plenty of flat land to go around regardless of which one is really the latest snapshot (and I've honestly forgotten, good thing I wrote it down...).
I never said you did. You do feel it is missing something that was in the older versions. I just disagree with that.
Usually, bloody ocean. I ****ing hate oceans. They are flat too, obviously, but only because you can't really have a hilly ocean. They are WAAAY too big. I mean, I want oceans (as opposed to pre-1.8 puddles) but I want an ocean that doesn't take 2 real-time days to cross. Usually I give up after a few thousand blocks, go back to shore, and build a nether portal and try to get across that way. (by building another portal far off in the direction the ocean was in the real world). I certainly won't deny that there is a lot of flat land in the new generator, but there was a lot of it in the older ones as well. What I was thinking of when I made the landmarks comment is related to my quest to find one of those jungle temples. I've found a lot of Jungle biomes, but they all look the same. They aren't flat, which makes them also a pain to traverse. Of course since my goal isn't really to find interesting terrain (though I did find some neat overhangs in a few mountain, Jungle, and even a taiga biome) it was just a pain to traverse, and even though the terrain was interesting (lots of hills) it all looked quite similar. Landmarks existed, but they weren't super obvious- I couldn't say, "OK, My original house is where I am looking if I stand underneath this gigantic overhang and look toward the moon-shaped lava pool" Now I need to usually make the second landmark for guidance, and even if I do that, there usually isn't a good way to easily tell the difference between that cave that I found and made a home of during the night and some unexplored cavern that is somewhere totally different unless I pay very close attention to the surroundings. This is <my> problem with it, of course, and more variation will probably help. (more variation, specifically, within biomes)
Well, since flat land is going to be a given regardless of what version's terrain generator we speak of, there will surely be flat land between them. I don't think the ratio between flat and interesting terrain has really changed, the flat stuff has just gotten bigger (plains, Swamp, and Desert biomes being the main contenders, though deserts seem to have gotten more hilly with the latest snapshot, too...).
To be clear, I don't think that the terrain generation cannot be improved- everything can be improved. Actually, in some ways I think the latest snapshot terrain tweaks may be addressing terrain diversity. Somebody else tried to assert the only change was the jungle temple, but I have noticed hilly terrain all over the place; Jungles, Deserts, even a few forests. I might be imagining things or making a mountain out of a molehill (literally), but I don't remember there being nearly as much variation in height in deserts and other generally "flat" constructs.
Err... I wasn't expounding them as great screenshots. Only ONE of those images were actually from a post 1.8 version of MC; the others were from a much earlier version, after quite a bit of wandering around to try to find interesting terrain (about 45 minutes). I was hoping to find one of those sweet overhangs, or something like what the yogscast used as a house in their very early Minecraft videos. They certainly exist but I was either unlucky or they aren't nearly as common as I remember. (I think there might be a bit of ad hoc falsification here, since we are more likely to remember awesome stuff than boring stuff, so we remember the cool stuff from earlier versions, but we forgot (or at least I did) how much trekking it took to find them, then we compare our memories to the newer version, and we, having forgotten that there was usually a lot of hunting to find neat stuff then, balk that we have to do it now. As for those pics- There should be enough hints to figure out which one of the four is from the latest snapshot.
The majority of a given area is more likely to be flat and repetitive in later versions because biomes are bigger and also for some reason biomes like plains and desert show up rather frequently (and Oceans too, grr). That isn't to say I like it this way myself, since it means you have to travel a long way to find toe cool stuff, and in my case I keep hitting oceans, which for me feels like hitting the "end of the world" simply because I either cross it, wasting 15 minutes, or turn around and explore elsewhere. If it's not clear I hate the size of oceans as they are now. They are probably realistic, but nobody has made a game where sailing across an ocean is the main focus. Well except for Wind Waker, but at least there you had a sail.
Aren't those two statements contradictory?
What are the seeds to these (and what version?). Normally I never bothered with seeds but these just scream to be explored (and I see in the first one at least some formations in the distance that I wouldn't mind seeing more of that type of stuff. At the very least those formations should appear outside of the extreme hills where I have seen them (and they were treeless, well, maybe one or two trees on top). I recall similar formations being in deserts in the world I generated after the game updated to Beta 1.2 (I made a new world to get sandstone and lapis, of course :P)
To be clear again, of course there could be improvements to terrain generation (anything can be improved), but I don't think backreferencing previous versions really provides everything needed to understand what you are saying. Like I said, I backdated to an earlier version and didn't see anything like the screenshots posted. I do know those features exist, because I have seen them before, they just aren't any more common from my experience than cool stuff in the terrain is in the current version (though the current version seems to be more likely to make cool stuff only on certain biomes).
One can conceive of biomes "stacking" in a sense; various unique attributes being stacked to create unique combinations. This isn't a very fleshed-out idea but as it is now a lot of the terrain generation relies rather heavily on the biome generation itself to provide the "interesting" parts; but what could be done is (and this is a rough idea) have two "generators" one that determines the formation of the land, and one that is the biome; of course the biome itself could determine the frequency of those land-shape selections; so obviously an extreme hills biome is going to be far more likely to have, well, extreme hills, than a plains biome, but a plains biome can very likely have large hills because it chose the "hilly" attribute to determine terrain shape, and a extreme hills could be less extreme, too.And deserts could have mountains as well.
Though I doubt it implements the concept using my badly communicated idea there, the new snapshot <seems> to provide more shape diversity. I don't recall seeing desert mountains like I am seeing in this snapshot occasionally (and, to be fair, deserts are still mostly flat, but they sometimes have mesa's poking out too) since 1.2 Beta. Main thing I can think of now is making those desert mountains not have exposed stone on the side, since that ruins the... err... "deserty" feel.
My biggest problem with the current terraingen, if it isn't clear, is the Oceans. They are just plain too large to explore properly, and sort of contribute themselves as just wasted disk space for chunks that one most likely only generates trying to find the end of an ocean.
Third picture is gargamel
Edit: First is -6362184493185806144
Second is hideous. (Screenshot is hideous, not seed)
btw how about this:
-2645361505332783691
Alpha generator, x: -250; z: -150.
The first one and third were both taken from the internet so the seeds I do not know of. The middle one isn't the best it's just something interesting I found in my server. (it's actually 1.2.5).
And as for the "we do not want mountains spammed everywhere ... we want mountains not hills" thing. By this I mean we want mountains, we just don't want an over abundance of them. We want them to appear every now and again. Sorry if I was unclear. As for the rest of your post it was a lot to read but the majority of it actually seemed like you didn't really disagree with the thread completely, yet your original post came off as hostile? Maybe I just interpret things the wrong way. Oh hell, I don't know.
Anyway, I agree. The last two recent snapshots do seem like they're taking the right direction toward getting a more wilder and varied terrain generator back and that is amazing news! I am astounded to see this issue is actually being resolved slowly but surely
I have to thank you, Shreaders, for starting this topic. for quite a while I have been wondering why minecraft isn't as interesting to as it used to be, and now I know. I do agree that we don't need the origional 1.7 generator back, shure it was interesting, but it did have the flaws of the chewed up terrain that we don't want. I have been playing since a little before thanksgiving of 2010. I remember when notch reintroduced the seed function to terrain generation and I was able to type in random stuff like "lovemuffin" or something and randomly feel like I just got transported to the Nevada deserts with their giant rock arches (made up the seed off of the top of my head, no Idea what it would actually spawn in any version). I do like RedYosi101's suggestion on how to generate the world. It will take a little longer to create new worlds or generate new terrain, but the quality of the terrain will increase dramaticaly.
And now we get to what I beleive is the elephant in the room of terrain generation. Caves. I play using Direwolf20's lets play mods. once I find a cave, I'll have more copper, iron, tin, and redstone than I can really even use. you can litteraly find a single cave that goes all of the way from the top of a mountain down to lava lake level. It intersects at least 1 abandoned mineshaft, and about... a bajillion ravines. I have honestly found, instead of the origional cave generator that would generate a bunch of small caves that will probably never intersect, you get about 1 uber-cave per every 1-3 biomes.
you can officialy add me on your list of supporters, and if I can make a suggeston to you, take this to Get Satisfaction. that is really the only place mojang looks for suggestions, and so far some of the best or most usefull have been taken. I personaly thing, as one who remembers the interesting genrator of old, that this should deffinetely be one of mojang's priorities. If you want to appease any opposition (how do you oppose this?) you could add this to the terrain generator with superflat and the soon to be introduced giant biome options.
This is the first suggestion that is a big deal to me i totally agree with everything here I've only played minecraft sense 1.0 (but seen a lot of beta) and i really noticed in 1.1 to 1.2 mountains disappeared and everything became flat i sometimes play 1.0 because of that.
its gotten soo bad that multiple mods have ben made to fix this and have gotten pretty popular. i think the problem is more recent than 1.8 because the terain was pretty epic in 1.0 though in 1.1 i saw less and less mountians and as of now 1.2 all i see is flat plains and every once in a while an extreem hils biome that turns out to be tiny. i cant see how mojang could end mountians in a game whare mountians were the main most epic biome the only reason i play minecraft is because of the epic landscape, and that's been degrading ever sense 1.0
caves; no one likes running down a twisted claustrophobic cave just for one tunnel to end after another remember when caves actually led somewhere not just tiny ravines but huge open vast caverns with lakes of lava and dark tunnels that led in through the ceiling far above that's what i want in caves and i bet i'm not alone. make cave exploring exciting!!!
Jeb and mojang shouldn't be focusing on small changes like tripwires and trading though they are awesome i would give all of that away for better world generation. 1.0 was epic and i want a version of it back i agree we don't want 1.7 back it was right for mojang to ditch that but the peak of awesome world generation was definitely 1.9 to 1.0 everything after that went down hill, mountains no longer exist and neither do vast caverns and now we see snowy beaches and snowy deserts. bring what every minecrafter wants back!!!
on a side note hit the little green button if u liked this
Thank you all for your support! All suggestions have been taken into consideration and I am not exactly sure what Get Satisfaction is but I will be sure to take a look at it!
I love your mod Exalm, and there is a point to why I'm starting the post off by saying this. The first is that, going to alpha gen on a woods world, i found something that is really, really, strange. Basically, I found a great map and started a world on it. There were a few lakes surrounded by high lands. I built my house ontop of the highest point, and made a stairway downward to make a mine. Digging down far enough, I found some stone bricks. Here I'm thinking, "WTF?" So I mine through and find I'm in a stronghold. Well, upon exploring not only do I find that there is a double-connected stronghold, (maybe even triple) AND a mineshaft next to a ravine with a GIANT CAVE SYSTEM. After I was done crying over how long it'll take me to explore it all, I start to think. Well, first off is that the alpha gen code is just fire for the flame of 1.2.5 underground structure generation. Secondly, is that I discovered that the caves in alpha are existent, just don't have entrances. Now this was epic, but the annoying had kind of overwritten that. I had a very nice surface gen and a stronghold was right under it. Nice, but still.... Considering that strongholds are 1.2.5 gens, the cave and mineshaft probably generated with it. Want me to tell you how many hours it's taken to explore part of the mineshaft and the stronghold? Over 5 hours. 5 HOURS! I still have the ravine to explore and EVERY SINGLE cave connecting to it everywhere.... Even with an awesome mod, you can't beat the generator. Make caves smaller. Maybe I'll send in a video to Jeb of me exploring 1; a SINGLE; cave system and maybe he'll listen....
Relevance to thread: Make caves smaller. PLEASE!
I love your mod Exalm, and there is a point to why I'm starting the post off by saying this. The first is that, going to alpha gen on a woods world, i found something that is really, really, strange. Basically, I found a great map and started a world on it. There were a few lakes surrounded by high lands. I built my house ontop of the highest point, and made a stairway downward to make a mine. Digging down far enough, I found some stone bricks. Here I'm thinking, "WTF?" So I mine through and find I'm in a stronghold. Well, upon exploring not only do I find that there is a double-connected stronghold, (maybe even triple) AND a mineshaft next to a ravine with a GIANT CAVE SYSTEM. After I was done crying over how long it'll take me to explore it all, I start to think. Well, first off is that the alpha gen code is just fire for the flame of 1.2.5 underground structure generation. Secondly, is that I discovered that the caves in alpha are existent, just don't have entrances. Now this was epic, but the annoying had kind of overwritten that. I had a very nice surface gen and a stronghold was right under it. Nice, but still.... Considering that strongholds are 1.2.5 gens, the cave and mineshaft probably generated with it. Want me to tell you how many hours it's taken to explore part of the mineshaft and the stronghold? Over 5 hours. 5 HOURS! I still have the ravine to explore and EVERY SINGLE cave connecting to it everywhere.... Even with an awesome mod, you can't beat the generator. Make caves smaller. Maybe I'll send in a video to Jeb of me exploring 1; a SINGLE; cave system and maybe he'll listen....
Relevance to thread: Make caves smaller. PLEASE!
Caves use Alpha cave generator. Ravines, strongholds, shafts and villages are from 1.2.5, and they are disabled by default.
You're just lucky.
Alpha has large caves, but they are quite rare. Now there is ONE GIANT CAVE EVERYWHERE. And this makes seeds with nice caves useless.
Hm?
now being updated**
http://minecraft-seeds.net/view/2572/1402600160659762873
http://minecraft-seeds.net/view/2594/-3880911903415449354
It's the selling point of them. It's sad considering that, back then, this was very common.
Can't look away... It's like an accident, only it's deliberate!
Remember:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Wheaton#Wheaton.27s_law
Now there are no interesting and rare things to share seeds with.
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Curse PremiumOnly ONE of those images was created with a post 1.8 version of minecraft. the others were from the minecraft.jar from when I first purchased the game. It was still fun to play that really old version, if only to see how much MC has changed, some of the common elements had totally different textures, etc.
Well, then we agree on that, since I never implied otherwise. Or, I certainly didn't mean to imply otherwise. (I imagine your referencing previous versions wasn't meant as an implication either)
A lot of terrain in the new generator is also not repetitive, so this is denying the antecedent; you are saying that If terrain is not repetitive, than it is also interesting. And then asserting that our current generation is repetitive, and therefore that it cannot be interesting.
Only ONE of those screenies I took was from a post 1.8 version of minecraft. There is plenty of flat land to go around regardless of which one is really the latest snapshot (and I've honestly forgotten, good thing I wrote it down...).
I never said you did. You do feel it is missing something that was in the older versions. I just disagree with that.
Usually, bloody ocean. I ****ing hate oceans. They are flat too, obviously, but only because you can't really have a hilly ocean. They are WAAAY too big. I mean, I want oceans (as opposed to pre-1.8 puddles) but I want an ocean that doesn't take 2 real-time days to cross. Usually I give up after a few thousand blocks, go back to shore, and build a nether portal and try to get across that way. (by building another portal far off in the direction the ocean was in the real world). I certainly won't deny that there is a lot of flat land in the new generator, but there was a lot of it in the older ones as well. What I was thinking of when I made the landmarks comment is related to my quest to find one of those jungle temples. I've found a lot of Jungle biomes, but they all look the same. They aren't flat, which makes them also a pain to traverse. Of course since my goal isn't really to find interesting terrain (though I did find some neat overhangs in a few mountain, Jungle, and even a taiga biome) it was just a pain to traverse, and even though the terrain was interesting (lots of hills) it all looked quite similar. Landmarks existed, but they weren't super obvious- I couldn't say, "OK, My original house is where I am looking if I stand underneath this gigantic overhang and look toward the moon-shaped lava pool" Now I need to usually make the second landmark for guidance, and even if I do that, there usually isn't a good way to easily tell the difference between that cave that I found and made a home of during the night and some unexplored cavern that is somewhere totally different unless I pay very close attention to the surroundings. This is <my> problem with it, of course, and more variation will probably help. (more variation, specifically, within biomes)
Well, since flat land is going to be a given regardless of what version's terrain generator we speak of, there will surely be flat land between them. I don't think the ratio between flat and interesting terrain has really changed, the flat stuff has just gotten bigger (plains, Swamp, and Desert biomes being the main contenders, though deserts seem to have gotten more hilly with the latest snapshot, too...).
To be clear, I don't think that the terrain generation cannot be improved- everything can be improved. Actually, in some ways I think the latest snapshot terrain tweaks may be addressing terrain diversity. Somebody else tried to assert the only change was the jungle temple, but I have noticed hilly terrain all over the place; Jungles, Deserts, even a few forests. I might be imagining things or making a mountain out of a molehill (literally), but I don't remember there being nearly as much variation in height in deserts and other generally "flat" constructs.
Err... I wasn't expounding them as great screenshots. Only ONE of those images were actually from a post 1.8 version of MC; the others were from a much earlier version, after quite a bit of wandering around to try to find interesting terrain (about 45 minutes). I was hoping to find one of those sweet overhangs, or something like what the yogscast used as a house in their very early Minecraft videos. They certainly exist but I was either unlucky or they aren't nearly as common as I remember. (I think there might be a bit of ad hoc falsification here, since we are more likely to remember awesome stuff than boring stuff, so we remember the cool stuff from earlier versions, but we forgot (or at least I did) how much trekking it took to find them, then we compare our memories to the newer version, and we, having forgotten that there was usually a lot of hunting to find neat stuff then, balk that we have to do it now. As for those pics- There should be enough hints to figure out which one of the four is from the latest snapshot.
The majority of a given area is more likely to be flat and repetitive in later versions because biomes are bigger and also for some reason biomes like plains and desert show up rather frequently (and Oceans too, grr). That isn't to say I like it this way myself, since it means you have to travel a long way to find toe cool stuff, and in my case I keep hitting oceans, which for me feels like hitting the "end of the world" simply because I either cross it, wasting 15 minutes, or turn around and explore elsewhere. If it's not clear I hate the size of oceans as they are now. They are probably realistic, but nobody has made a game where sailing across an ocean is the main focus. Well except for Wind Waker, but at least there you had a sail.
Aren't those two statements contradictory?
What are the seeds to these (and what version?). Normally I never bothered with seeds but these just scream to be explored (and I see in the first one at least some formations in the distance that I wouldn't mind seeing more of that type of stuff. At the very least those formations should appear outside of the extreme hills where I have seen them (and they were treeless, well, maybe one or two trees on top). I recall similar formations being in deserts in the world I generated after the game updated to Beta 1.2 (I made a new world to get sandstone and lapis, of course :P)
To be clear again, of course there could be improvements to terrain generation (anything can be improved), but I don't think backreferencing previous versions really provides everything needed to understand what you are saying. Like I said, I backdated to an earlier version and didn't see anything like the screenshots posted. I do know those features exist, because I have seen them before, they just aren't any more common from my experience than cool stuff in the terrain is in the current version (though the current version seems to be more likely to make cool stuff only on certain biomes).
One can conceive of biomes "stacking" in a sense; various unique attributes being stacked to create unique combinations. This isn't a very fleshed-out idea but as it is now a lot of the terrain generation relies rather heavily on the biome generation itself to provide the "interesting" parts; but what could be done is (and this is a rough idea) have two "generators" one that determines the formation of the land, and one that is the biome; of course the biome itself could determine the frequency of those land-shape selections; so obviously an extreme hills biome is going to be far more likely to have, well, extreme hills, than a plains biome, but a plains biome can very likely have large hills because it chose the "hilly" attribute to determine terrain shape, and a extreme hills could be less extreme, too.And deserts could have mountains as well.
Though I doubt it implements the concept using my badly communicated idea there, the new snapshot <seems> to provide more shape diversity. I don't recall seeing desert mountains like I am seeing in this snapshot occasionally (and, to be fair, deserts are still mostly flat, but they sometimes have mesa's poking out too) since 1.2 Beta. Main thing I can think of now is making those desert mountains not have exposed stone on the side, since that ruins the... err... "deserty" feel.
My biggest problem with the current terraingen, if it isn't clear, is the Oceans. They are just plain too large to explore properly, and sort of contribute themselves as just wasted disk space for chunks that one most likely only generates trying to find the end of an ocean.
Edit: First is -6362184493185806144
Second is hideous. (Screenshot is hideous, not seed)
btw how about this:
-2645361505332783691
Alpha generator, x: -250; z: -150.
And as for the "we do not want mountains spammed everywhere ... we want mountains not hills" thing. By this I mean we want mountains, we just don't want an over abundance of them. We want them to appear every now and again. Sorry if I was unclear. As for the rest of your post it was a lot to read but the majority of it actually seemed like you didn't really disagree with the thread completely, yet your original post came off as hostile? Maybe I just interpret things the wrong way. Oh hell, I don't know.
Anyway, I agree. The last two recent snapshots do seem like they're taking the right direction toward getting a more wilder and varied terrain generator back and that is amazing news! I am astounded to see this issue is actually being resolved slowly but surely
- Shreads
And now we get to what I beleive is the elephant in the room of terrain generation. Caves. I play using Direwolf20's lets play mods. once I find a cave, I'll have more copper, iron, tin, and redstone than I can really even use. you can litteraly find a single cave that goes all of the way from the top of a mountain down to lava lake level. It intersects at least 1 abandoned mineshaft, and about... a bajillion ravines. I have honestly found, instead of the origional cave generator that would generate a bunch of small caves that will probably never intersect, you get about 1 uber-cave per every 1-3 biomes.
you can officialy add me on your list of supporters, and if I can make a suggeston to you, take this to Get Satisfaction. that is really the only place mojang looks for suggestions, and so far some of the best or most usefull have been taken. I personaly thing, as one who remembers the interesting genrator of old, that this should deffinetely be one of mojang's priorities. If you want to appease any opposition (how do you oppose this?) you could add this to the terrain generator with superflat and the soon to be introduced giant biome options.
its gotten soo bad that multiple mods have ben made to fix this and have gotten pretty popular. i think the problem is more recent than 1.8 because the terain was pretty epic in 1.0 though in 1.1 i saw less and less mountians and as of now 1.2 all i see is flat plains and every once in a while an extreem hils biome that turns out to be tiny. i cant see how mojang could end mountians in a game whare mountians were the main most epic biome the only reason i play minecraft is because of the epic landscape, and that's been degrading ever sense 1.0
caves; no one likes running down a twisted claustrophobic cave just for one tunnel to end after another remember when caves actually led somewhere not just tiny ravines but huge open vast caverns with lakes of lava and dark tunnels that led in through the ceiling far above that's what i want in caves and i bet i'm not alone. make cave exploring exciting!!!
Jeb and mojang shouldn't be focusing on small changes like tripwires and trading though they are awesome i would give all of that away for better world generation. 1.0 was epic and i want a version of it back i agree we don't want 1.7 back it was right for mojang to ditch that but the peak of awesome world generation was definitely 1.9 to 1.0 everything after that went down hill, mountains no longer exist and neither do vast caverns and now we see snowy beaches and snowy deserts. bring what every minecrafter wants back!!!
on a side note hit the little green button if u liked this
Image says all. Let's fix this mess of terrain and go back to the old classic stuff!
Thank you all!
- Shreads!
Support list updated!
I love your mod Exalm, and there is a point to why I'm starting the post off by saying this. The first is that, going to alpha gen on a woods world, i found something that is really, really, strange. Basically, I found a great map and started a world on it. There were a few lakes surrounded by high lands. I built my house ontop of the highest point, and made a stairway downward to make a mine. Digging down far enough, I found some stone bricks. Here I'm thinking, "WTF?" So I mine through and find I'm in a stronghold. Well, upon exploring not only do I find that there is a double-connected stronghold, (maybe even triple) AND a mineshaft next to a ravine with a GIANT CAVE SYSTEM. After I was done crying over how long it'll take me to explore it all, I start to think. Well, first off is that the alpha gen code is just fire for the flame of 1.2.5 underground structure generation. Secondly, is that I discovered that the caves in alpha are existent, just don't have entrances. Now this was epic, but the annoying had kind of overwritten that. I had a very nice surface gen and a stronghold was right under it. Nice, but still.... Considering that strongholds are 1.2.5 gens, the cave and mineshaft probably generated with it. Want me to tell you how many hours it's taken to explore part of the mineshaft and the stronghold? Over 5 hours. 5 HOURS! I still have the ravine to explore and EVERY SINGLE cave connecting to it everywhere.... Even with an awesome mod, you can't beat the generator. Make caves smaller. Maybe I'll send in a video to Jeb of me exploring 1; a SINGLE; cave system and maybe he'll listen....
Relevance to thread: Make caves smaller. PLEASE!
You're just lucky.
Alpha has large caves, but they are quite rare. Now there is ONE GIANT CAVE EVERYWHERE. And this makes seeds with nice caves useless.
//Shreaders, sorry for offtopic. :/
http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/un666/reddit_i_made_a_mod_that_readds_random_mountains/
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/1270230-terrain-125
Edited to add forum link.
This one is better. Anyway, they all are worse than 1.7.3 terrain.