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
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.
Back to Chunk^3, guys!
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You do realize that we're joking, right?
Everyone else is completely serious. Your devotion is simply half-baked.
The number one rule of religions like IPU and Pastafarianism is that the believer must never falter in the immutable and overwhelming strength of their devotion, regardless of what they must say and do sustain their arguments.
Why do Christians consume the flesh and blood of Jesus for communion?
I believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn, bless her Invisible Pinkness.
Of course.
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Curse PremiumI'm sorry, you are so wrong here that it is just not funny. It's serious.
Your claim is that if you have a valid reason for dislike, then you have an easy time explaining it. That would imply that if you cannot explain your opposition, then you are not valid, and can be ignored.
The problem is: Easy to explain means a well analyzed and understood reason. Not a valid reason. Many valid reasons can be hard to explain. Things start with intuition, patterns off of experience, that are often very hard to explain because they are not understood, not because they are not valid or reasonable. Heck, consider how long it was before relativity was easy to explain.
Equally, you see no downside (fine), yet assert that there is no possible downside at all; I'd challenge you to defend that claim. (I'd assert that it's impossible to prove that there is no possible downside.)
Let me give you a downside. I, for one, hate the whole "Just dig down to Y=11, and then branch mine horizontally to get ores" aspect of vanilla. There are two different mods -- Custom Ore Generation, and Better Ore Distribution -- that allow generation of ores in veins, or other formations; COG defaults to a layered approach where as you go deeper down, you see different ores.
As soon as you switch from "Ground depth is 64" to "ground depth is potentially several thousand", you have to ask: How do you place ores in the ground?
You handwave this away without even considering it. You assume that vanilla ore generation will remain unchanged, without even considering that people use different ore systems. You don't even consider worlds such as twilight forest where sea level is Y=32 and ore layout is tweaked slightly.
Why should ore generation remain unchanged from 60-70 meters below the ground (sea level at Y=64 does not mean ground level at Y=64 -- look at the height of your plains/deserts or around the base of hills sometimes) to several thousand meters below ground? At what height do you change it? COG wants to factor in the total depth of the world; BOD has it's own system for working with layers and depth (I haven't played with it yet).
Once you say that there is a finite depth, you can put "valuable, hard to reach stuff" down there. Heck, once you know the depth, you know where to put the lava lake in the deeps.
But if you can go an unlimited distance down? How far to the diamonds? How far to the lava? How deep is gold?
If you want to model realistic depths? Players will never manage to reach it without being bored and quit. Smaller depths -- smaller scales in general -- make it a game. Minecraft has about a 60 to 100 factor scale, and the 72 times scale of time is just the most obvious aspect of that. (If you consider the current "ocean floor" to be the continental shelf, then the vertical factor down is only about 8x; if you consider it to be actual "ocean floor", you are slightly over 100 meters per block. That doesn't take into account rivers that are about actual depth, implying different scale at different depth, which actually fits the vanilla ore generation gap above 32-ish).
Do I see benefits to unrestricted depths/heights? Do I see benefits to increased render distance? You better believe it. I'm actually working on trying to set up a server to model a real world city -- horizontal scale 1 block = one meter. I can pretty much make it "fit" with a vertical scale of 1 block = 12 meters. I've found a program that reads in real world topographical data, and generates a minecraft world.
But what makes this city special are the mountains; and the default render distance is something like 1/12th of a mile, about one city block, and almost the worst period of fog this city has seen, around 2-3 days a year, as the norm. So all the glory of this place is just not even possible to see.
Being able to break the map up into cubic chunks, and only send portions of the Y scale off to clients? So that instead of sending hundreds and thousands of vertical minichunks that are not going to be displayed, you send thousands of ground level chunks letting us see mountains? That's a good thing. Assuming that you can go from improved rendering distance to "arbitrarily deep, infinitely down builds and digs"? That's a huge leap, and it potentially breaks the game if you change ores. And if you don't change ores, then ... why?
If you assume sea level is Y=0, and put gold/etc at Y=-32, and diamond/etc at Y=-52 (yes, those are only approximate), then why dig down to Y=-178? You'll have no air-filled caves (only lava filled ones) unless you re-write the generation/decoration, and then why not re-write other things? How do you design all this?
===
Now, lets consider something else you have not considered. "Cave worlds". There are mods that use nether-style generation for worlds that you can visit and explore. It's one thing to say "A given horizontal chunk will generally have 1 to 2 minichunks that need to be sent for display"; it's something else to say "Typical horizontal chunks have 4-6 minichunks of visible ground boundaries". As soon as you are looking at these, functional render distance drops -- both because of the increased memory (there are no longer significant amounts of "air" minichunks to discard, and all Y=128+ vertical minichunks are sent/calculated) and the increased display complexity.
(See "Mystcraft". Rethink what's possible in world generation.)
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The TL;DR summary:
1. The argument that "If you cannot easily explain your opposition, then I can ignore you" is flawed.
2. The idea of "Only send minichunk data that corresponds to ground level changes" is good -- it lets you send longer views, lets you see mountains, and reduces the network traffic and client memory demand.
3. The ability to build arbitrarily high into the air is good.
4. The assumption from 2 and 3 that you can equally extend arbitrarily down potentially breaks the assumptions that make this a game instead of a reality simulator, and has several issues to consider --
4a: Ore generation is not always done the way vanilla thinks it is done in the overworld,
4b: Depth limit lets you define a hazardous "lava zone" to put valuable stuff down at
4c: Increasing depth runs into the whole "no more air caves, only lava caves", requiring a rewrite of something or else it's pointless
4d: The abstracted scale of minecraft is what makes it a game, and this potentially breaks that.
5. The issue with worlds that do not look like the overworld -- for example, worlds that look like the nether, or a void world with "tendrils" (caves made of a material such as stone or wood, instead of air) to provide terrain, will give you render complexity / vision factors that you do not take into account. While there may be no downside to a vanilla overworld being rendered/sent/built this way, other worlds may.
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"Don't worry Mr. Po, you son will be back before you can say Noodles".
* Promoting this week: Captive Minecraft 4, Winter Realm. Aka: Vertical Vanilla Viewing. Clicky!
* My channel with Mystcraft, and general Minecraft Let's Plays: http://www.youtube.com/user/Keybounce.
* See all my video series: http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-editions/minecraft-editions-show-your/2865421-keybounces-list-of-creation-threads
(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
(Also, far is about 0.16 mile - almost 1/6 mi.)
Do you not understand the concept of setting a location for the void to generate? That would be the absolute depth limit for worlds, where bedrock generates and CC stops making chunks.
Ore generators could use the void generation setting, or they could basically start generating ores at X (Possibly 50 or so below the surface, depending on the ore) with Y amount of common-ness and have the ores get more common at deeper levels (Z percent common at bedrock, game transitions common-ness between start ore generation and the respective percentages).
Reworking the lava generation may be needed to use this system fully, but think of this: At X percent (defined by user?) from bedrock level to surface, lava generates everywhere, while at Y percent from bedrock to surface, lava generates in Z percent of caves.
Again, normal worlds would work fine with the current generators if the bedrock level was set to what it is currently. And again, this system only gives the option for mod-makers and world-generator-makers to use dynamic height.
Minecraft is a voxel game. It can be a reality simulator if the user wants it to, but does not have to. This system would simply give those users the option to utilize infinite height in their reality sims, and it lets everyone else use infinite height for whatever they what Minecraft to be (Think of the modders! They change the game because it isn't what they want it to be! I say it is a good idea to allow them to go up and down endlessly if they want to!)
All that depends on how the makers of world generators decide to develop their mod. They could use infinite height or not. But I'm sure anyone would like the option to do so.
Note: At this time I have no estimate as to when one will be available - it will be a while, but there will be much more info available as it's provided to me.
Fantastic.
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Curse PremiumAnd, as I'm trying to say, sometimes you get an intuitive feel for something that you cannot explain well.
The attitude of "If you don't have a rational, explained reason for your views, then you are ignorable" -- the attitude of "If you have a ration reason, you can easily explain it" -- that is what I took from your earlier post. That's what I'm disagreeing with.
No, I did miss that -- I thought you wanted that in flat world, and infinite depths in normal worlds.
So there's two different things happening here.
On one hand, you want vertical chunk transmission to be less than everything, like the horizontal transmission is less than everything. Which implies that the total vertical height is now enough that this is significantly different.
So right away, either you are using some sort of routines to determine "Do we send these minichunks over the network", with no change in depth -- which is increased complexity, a win for overworld-style dimensions, probably a tie for nether style worlds, and very likely a loss for some complicated worlds -- or, you have a world that is so tall that the transmission clipping is significant.
If your idea is to reduce network transmission, and reduce the client world model / memory load / chunk rendering, that's one thing. You are making both client and server more complicated; more code to debug. But that's not automatically a bad thing.
The constant testing for "Do we send this block?" works well for small servers, but can quickly scale badly on larger servers. Maybe you see sufficient optimization possible here.
If your idea is to permit crazily deep worlds, then you are really putting limits on what style of ore generation can be done while still making the whole depth of the world worth using. This is kinda why the main world only has about two stone picks worth of digging to get down to the bottom.
Mwa -- mwa --- mwahahahah. You say this like cave A is not connected to cave B. I can imagine generating lava in one cave, not in another cave, only to find that they run into each other. Then ask the question which cave generated first, and is the intersection zone air or lava?
* Promoting this week: Captive Minecraft 4, Winter Realm. Aka: Vertical Vanilla Viewing. Clicky!
* My channel with Mystcraft, and general Minecraft Let's Plays: http://www.youtube.com/user/Keybounce.
* See all my video series: http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-editions/minecraft-editions-show-your/2865421-keybounces-list-of-creation-threads
(In regard to a mod that gives realistic animal genetics):
Would you really rather have bees that make diamonds and oil with magical genetic blocks?
... did I really ask that?
Well, we are one step closer to having a valid example of Cubic Chunks working to show Mojang. Who is the author?
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.
Your signature says the super blocks mod is "A bit dead right now," and I think that's because the picture doesn't link with the mod page. Just letting you know...
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.
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.
It would, but I don't know if it bumps the topic or not.
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.