Gameplay
Cubic Chunks: Reduced lag, infinite height, and more [The #1 Suggestion Thread of all time!][Updated! 6/14]
Poll: Which parts of this system do you like?
Ended May 15, 2014
Poll: Which parts of this system do you NOT like?
Ended May 15, 2014
Poll: Do you support this system's implementation overall? (If yes, if
Ended May 15, 2014
However, I have always liked the idea of putting the Nether under the overworld's bedrock layer. While it would ruin the 8:1 coordinate displacement, it could create a number of interesting scenarios. It would be excellent as a mod for a cubic chunks world, to be certain.
also you should check out Tall Worlds
What if we moved the sunlight heightmaps to separate files? This way, if somebody were to build a giant house X chunks above their chum's house, the guy below would receive the changes to the height map and it would be reflected on the ground below.
I'm working on a voxel engine right now with a cubic chunk system, and that's the solution I've been considering. Essentially have two folders for the world, one filled with the chunk data while the other is filled with the skylight data. Considering it would be a 2D grid of 16x16 integer array, the load time would be instant, and the chunks would be able to update the light levels to reflect the changes without the in-between chunks being loaded.
Residential veteran
Seems like it would work... it would increase file size however...
As far as a bit of research shows, the largest is 3.6gigs uncompressed(the entirety of great britain, 23 billion blocks).
Kurt's Far Lands or Bust world is probably around 15 GB if this out-of-date page is any indication (about 7 GB when they were around 700,000 blocks out; the last coordinate given was around , plus a couple more months of travel).
In any case though the majority of people probably don't go more than a few thousand blocks from spawn; at least the furthest I've ever gone is about 3,000; in a continuous path, not teleporting or using the Nether (as file size is only based on chunks that were actually generated).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?
dear lord...
However, I’ve seen suggestions here for mountains to reach 4000 blocks high or more. Such extremes might look really good in thoery on as a screen-grab, but I think that it would badly affect gameplay.
Performance Issues
Let’s think about sight ranges (SR) here, in chunks if you can. Sure, Cubic Chunk (CC) at SR-8 will boost perfomance over Vanilla Anvil (VA) at SR-8. But all other things being equal, CC-16 will still require 8 times more processing than CC-8, just like VA-16 also requires 8 times the processing of VA-8. Doubling the size of a cube always makes the volume go up by a factor of 8, no matter which redenring engine you are using.
But let’s be generous and say CC allows rendering to be done 64 times better than VA. This means you'd get only 4x the SR. Targeting for « average » computer instead of a « power » rig, this means the default of 8 chunks from vanilla could be improved from VA-SR-8 to CC-SR-32.
In short : let’s not be too greddy with what can be done here, let’s stay realistic and conservative with what should be done with CC. First, let’s determine how much performance it can really deliver without actually changing the terrain. Then once it is in vanilla, then will be time to improve the world's thickness.
But still, what kind of thickness should we aim for ? It should be not only "the max" or "as big as real-life terrain", but a compromise established for a game that is running on an average rig, played by players that often have not enough patience.
Gameplay Ergonomics Issue #1 : Real Living Space Really Needed
Most servers make 30000x30000 maps or less because mostly anything bigger ain’t realy needed. Except for ugly « exploration tendrils », most players don’t like walking for hours to go from point A to point B.
Most players are in fact quite content to explore in full only an area about 2048x2048, the size of a single max-zoomed Minecraft map item. Few players will really explore in detail a 3x3 « wall map » of such max-zoomed map items. Thus, a 6000x6000 map « living surface » should be enough. I also think climate zones should be smaller to take that into account, currently I think walking from one to the other feels too much like grinding.
Imagine the uproar if suddenly all transportation mode got their speed halved. Well, doubling distances, be them vertical or horizontal, can easily achieve the same bad effect. Players tolerate needing ot travel an extra mile when it’s worth it, but after some max threshold it just becomes useless grinding. So distances, whether horizontal or vertical, need to appeal to 80%+ of the player base.
We humans are also « hardwired » to prefer moving around horizontally instead of verticall by a solid factor, and also prefer simple continous actions (sprinting) to constant interruptions (lots of jumps to climb a mountain). So while most players are quite satisfied with a 6000x6000 horizontal living area, similarly a 512 tall vertical area would also be quite sufficient for most.
Gameplay Ergonomics Issue #2 : Reasonable « Time to Go There »
There is a point where doubling distances = grind.
Let’s say we have 512 high mountains in an "Alps" biome, with 1 rare Edelweiss flower on top of say 1/8 of those mountains. That is a lot of grind already, just to get a rare flower. Doubling the max height to 1024 would become « too much » for way too many players vs the few that would love it instead! I’m not talking about what the game could do, or the need for customizable world gen settings (sure why not), but about what the Default setting should be.
Also, a player will usually prefer crossing 2048 blocks through plains, than 512 blocks through hills. Or 4096 blocks though a not-too-hilly forest rather than 256 blocks through a maze of huge vertical cliffs constantly blocking his way. Now imagine if the vertical elevation itself was over 512 blocks. Too big can be as bad as too small. If players suddely start simply preferring to dig STRAIGHT THROUGH most mountains, it just means that the mounbtains are too high and vertical for their own good.
In games, in the long run too big distances always cause more problems than the benefit they actually add. 50000 blocks wide Oceans eventually got fixed. 20000 blocks wide Climate zones got a small fix too. Sure Realism is cool, but gameplay trumps it any day. So let’s keep vertical distances to a reasonable value
Gameplay Ergonomics Issue #2 : Truncated Terrain is Ugly
If the max vertical world gen distance is higher than what the player can see, you get all sorts of real ugliness. Truncated mountain tops, etc. Players do not like ugly scenery !
Several tricks could be used. Simplifying a 2x2x2 cubic Chunk into a single « textureless" pseudo-block (that is 2x2x2 blocks in size), just the color and a simple shape that represents the « average » of the 8 blocks "inside", that could help. This threshold could be a seamless transiution betwene 100% fuly-textured and 100%-smooth-color. The shape could also be a parallelogram extrpaolated from 4 corners in the CC + 4 corners from nearby CC, so that faraway objects don’t suddely become super-blocky. for further and furthe away distances, it can be done recursively so that a 4x4x4 blocks area (or bigger) is the "rendered average" of the 8 Cubic Chunks contained inside teir parent "bigger" Cubic Chunk.
But even with ALL of those tricks, it can only go so far. These kinds of tricks often tend to add more precise shapes and colors, but at the cost of overall image blurriness, after all.
In any case, standing at the bottom of a mountain, I think you need to be able to see the mountains closest to you without such « visual artifacts » from such rendering tricks. There is not much point in adding something to improve the scenery, but having visual artifacts spoiling it. There is a "best compromise" between addng sight range and overall scenery "breathtaking quality". These « optimization tricks » only really work well for really faraway stuff. So a max world gen height should be at or around 384 blocks I think, 256 conservative and 512 generous.
Sure, players could build higher, and the occasionnal really high mountain could spawn say a giant tree on top of it, allowing some stuff to spawning above the "normal" limit, but ergonomically speaking, a « world generation ceiling » around 256 to 512 blocks, would give a good tradeoff between bigger and better scenery, and not too much ugliness creeping in, nor too much performance hit, nor too much gameplay ergonomy hit too.
Preliminary Verdict
I think a sight range anywhere from 256 to 512 , with « much less details for really faraway stuff" being rendered to say 1024 blocks max, or maybe 2048 blocks on the best gaming rigs, should be the short-term CC’s goal, and no more. With full texture detail up to 256 blocks away.
Thus : 256 blocks high mountains would be rendered fully (textures + block details), up to an horizontal distance of about 572 blocks.
Mining Depth
Same ergonomic and gameplayability analysis and principles apply here too. While a few hardcore fanatic player might enjoy kilometers deep mining, I think most players would have a hard time tolerating having to go deeper than 256 blocks.
So basically, we get mountains 4 times higher than currently, and mining depth also 4 times bigger. I think that would be an excellent starting point as the default world setting that would apeal to the most players.
Spicing Up the Underground
With the extra depth, the underground could be greatly improved say with different layers (vertical) and « underground biomes » (horizontal). Such undergound biomes should have their own biome boundaries, NOT match up with surface biomes.
For example, under the normal caves & tunnels layer, you could have a « giant caves » layer, with giant mushroom forests, wide halls full of thick and tall stone pillars, super-long giant "dune worms" tunnels, underground rivers, whatever.
Then under that you could have a « crystal caves » layer with glowing mushrooms and all kinds of unique stuff. And then the actual lava layer.
These could be for example 64 blocks thick for the normal caves and the crystal caves, 32 blocks thick for the lava lakes layer, and 96 blocks thick for the giant caves area.
Maybe some new harder mobs could start spawning only at some depths.
Overall, that would definitely break the monotony of digging down alot..
I find that even totally useless gems which can say only be crafted 3x3 to form a decorative "gem" block, would still be way cool. Maybe the Crystal layer could be the only place to get gems like that. Maybe the underground biomes could also play a role in determining which gems spawn.
Maybe Abandoned Mineshafts could come in several « varieties ». Those at the layers near the surface, would be the normal ones we know of, and maybe many could have actual entrance shafts. Deeper Abandoned Mineshafts could have their « reinforcement frames » made of sturdier stuff, maybe gray bricks.
Maybe deep underground villages too. Who knows ?
Without such « spicing up features », mining depth doesn’t really need that badly to be increased all that much: just doubling it to 128 deep would be enough I think.
People would never reach that high... ever... besides, just make it a bit more reasonable(I doubt people would make it to 10,000, let alone 30,000,000)
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!
-The Gods Of The Copybook Headings, by Rudyard Kipling.
That said, falling 30,000,000 blocks at terminal velocity (which is, in Minecraft, 78.4 blocks per second) would take ~265.7 days straight, if my calculations are correct.
also you should check out Tall Worlds
The terrain needs to be bigger. The problem is that "too much bigger" would quickly become "infuriating" for a lot of players. In my opinion, taller mountains only count for the tiniest fraction of the potential of a cubic chunk system.
One thing that I would really like to see would be greater variance in actual ground height. It doesn't even need to be geographically realistic. The MC world is just unrealistically flat, even ignoring the underwhelming size of vanilla hills and mountains.
I believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn, bless her Invisible Pinkness.
so, simple elegant, and very little lag.