I don't vote for vertical limit to be expanded because it would be a very harmful thing to do. I've discussed this with a programmer ... and Mojang's algorithms for this type of engine seem to be among the best I've witnessed (performance wise). So, I can't really insist on having this at this point in time. Maybe in a few years most computers can handle that, but for now it would break minecraft.
As for the rest I did vote, and I agree that the game could have more diversity and more consistency in my ways. Weather was where I focused most of my votes, as it is very black on white, very uninteresting, quite annoying, too biome-specific, and, mostly, purely cosmetic yet.
It depends entirely on how you make the height limit greater. If you take the current system and merely increase the range of the Y variable, then yes, it will become horribly laggy. That's why it needs to be rewritten with a larger range in mind from the beginning (similar to the millions of meters the X and Z are allowed). The Y axis needs to be treated like the X and Z, don't load the entire Y range for a given [X,Z], just the components within sight range. The approach of cubic chunks (rather than the columns we have now (which has been exhibited with the CubicChunks mod)) is an excellent way to do this.
I want the ugly npcs to stay, and to bring in some more and even uglier npc models as well. Having the NPC model be the same as the PC model (which is what many complainers want) seems like an incredibly boring idea to me.
Perhaps in the future the player will even be able to choose a character model as well as a skin to make their avatar more customizable. Those models need to come from somewhere, the pool used for NPCs seems like an obvious location.
I haven't really read the other 11 pages (I did read OP obviously), but ever since 1.8 hit our clients, I've noticed the majority of the terrain is repetitive, bland, and not full of life. We need changes that separates EPIC seeds from other ones. We need beaches back. We need more trees in biomes. We need better transitions and we need something that makes one part of your world significant from other parts.
That makes me think back to when the worlds were complete pandemonium with biomes as small as a single chunk, and when you came across an area of 20 or so chunks that were the same biome it really stood out. The biomes are all very very uniform now, putting most of that uniformity aside and focussing on size, I think it would be great to be able to come across a vast mountain range, forest, desert etc. I'm a fan of the oceans occasionally being huge, and I think it could be a good thing, and help bring back some of the distinctiveness to a seed/world to have something like a 5% chance for a vast patch of a single biome type.
I would love to see more focus on the world itself, the terrain gen is nice and all but if you compare our real world to the minecraft world you will see the bio diversity is lacking completely as if evolution itself had stopped at three trees and a couple climate changes.
Each of the biomes is currently quite unvaried. I hope now that the arbitrary deadlines around Minecon and coming out of beta are over, some real improvements can be made to the world generating code. There are a lot of things that used to be better than they are currently, or are obviously in need of fixes.
I have the impression that Notch stopped paying much attention to these forums when Curse Gaming took over. I don't think he's logged in or posted for about 6 months. I'll post about the results on reddit in the near future.
@JulianDraak I've thought of similar approaches that divided the generation of a heightmap and then applied biome data to it for surface geology and flora/fauna. One major issue with that kind of approach is water. Particularly with swamps.
The most important change that the terrain generator needs is to STOP changing it, so that maps don't keep getting messed up.
At the very least, the old generation code should stay along side the new, and the world saves should be versioned, so the correct generator can be used (unless you force it to use something else).
I'm not sure how large a portion of the game is the world generating code, but I would suspect its substantial. Having the last several versions included would likely make the game files much more cumbersome. I do agree that the world generating portion of the code needs to be finalized in a much better state than it currently is. We can only hope that it will receive a major overhaul for 1.1 so that worlds don't have to be so regularly replaced in the future.
Having a set of oceanic biomes, rather than just one Ocean biome, would be very nice. Oceans being entirely barren and in need of some kind of content probably distracted me from the idea that was brought up earlier about desert and wetland diversity being applied to oceans as well. The oceans we have now are temperate, ocean diversity would be nice (in the same way that we have arboreal diversity with several kinds of forest).
There could be the temperate oceans we have, plus an 'arctic' variety with icebergs polar bears and walruses, and the one that I think a lot of people look forward to, tropical ocean, with corals and abundant small sealife like crabs, jellyfish, and all manner of little colorful fishes.
If Notch had done this earlier it would have been much easier. Now, unfortunately, it is much harder since there is so much depending on the current system that a lot of stuff would need recoding. Still, if a modder can do it then Notch or Jeb should be able to do it (eventually...)
Quote from Kleevage »
The vertical limit really bothers me for both building and natural terrain possibilities. I believe every biome has a lot more potential. I really hope they focus more on these things than adding more features to the game sometime soon. A patch dedicated to nothing but terrain generation (including a vertical height limit option) would be fantastic.
I would love to see an update dedicated to updating the world building code as well. At this point, it would take a major update to accomplish all the tweeks and rebalancing that will be necessary.
I know I've used mountains as an example of a biome that needs a greater Y limit many times, but Kleevage is right, it does impact them all. Especially those that contain trees. We've lost our tropical forest biome for now, but any good jungle is going to have trees 50-80m tall, and that's not a giant bramble of branches. When we get our topographical variation back, I'd like to be able to look at some forested hills without seeing them all shorn flat at the top.
Relatively new poster but I've been playing since Alpha days and I can't help but agree. While I love some of the new spelunking features I'm left wondering (in Pre 5 especially) if I'll ever be able to build a reasonable drift mine again. The abandoned mine shafts were a really neat idea, the new ravines as well, but the sheer density of both in any given world generation seems to be almost like spam code.
I realize there are some changes up coming and I'm looking forward to them but instead of spending time in creating a new world to actually play a survival map, I feel like I'm just building for vanity and the ability to test out a few new features.
The density of ravines does seem rather high. I've seen many maps with several of them within the space of an in-game map around the spawn. I can only hope the density we have now was done to test them, and they won't be so abundant in release.
Quote from Bumber »
The mod actually manages to increase it to over 65k (probably way more than anybody actually needs.)
I was just using 1k as an example of a much preferable target than the mere 128 we have now, and the principles of cubic chunks rather than the mod Cubic Chunks. The fellas as Mojang are quite talented, I'm sure they could make a better map parceling system than the legacy column chunks it has now if they took the time and made the effort. The point being that they should try, because it's an unfortunate and unpleasant limit on the game's potential.
The video that chezzymann posted a link for reminds me of the type of helicopter panorama shots often seen in movies, which frequently pass over mountains. It's a shame that an unmodified version of Minecraft can't produce such a stunning landscape.
oh well, at least we know now that they recognize the problem. Still they should have fixed it before 1.0. Changes to the landscape generation are always gonna cause trouble, so you should clear that as soon as possible.
There haven't been any statements recognizing the big issues here. Just an implication that Jens wants to fiddle around with biomes. I would love to some remarks about filling out the Ocean biome, restoring topographical variation to all the biomes, and converting to cubic chunks from collumns to make a 1k Y limit. These map generating problems are the things that cause major conversion issues when new updates come out. They really ought to take a higher precedence early in development.
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I knew
were a good idea. :tongue.gif:
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It depends entirely on how you make the height limit greater. If you take the current system and merely increase the range of the Y variable, then yes, it will become horribly laggy. That's why it needs to be rewritten with a larger range in mind from the beginning (similar to the millions of meters the X and Z are allowed). The Y axis needs to be treated like the X and Z, don't load the entire Y range for a given [X,Z], just the components within sight range. The approach of cubic chunks (rather than the columns we have now (which has been exhibited with the CubicChunks mod)) is an excellent way to do this.
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Perhaps in the future the player will even be able to choose a character model as well as a skin to make their avatar more customizable. Those models need to come from somewhere, the pool used for NPCs seems like an obvious location.
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That makes me think back to when the worlds were complete pandemonium with biomes as small as a single chunk, and when you came across an area of 20 or so chunks that were the same biome it really stood out. The biomes are all very very uniform now, putting most of that uniformity aside and focussing on size, I think it would be great to be able to come across a vast mountain range, forest, desert etc. I'm a fan of the oceans occasionally being huge, and I think it could be a good thing, and help bring back some of the distinctiveness to a seed/world to have something like a 5% chance for a vast patch of a single biome type.
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/signed
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Each of the biomes is currently quite unvaried. I hope now that the arbitrary deadlines around Minecon and coming out of beta are over, some real improvements can be made to the world generating code. There are a lot of things that used to be better than they are currently, or are obviously in need of fixes.
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... that there is a plan to do some significant overhaul after the release. This ugly non-transition is like the tip of an iceberg.
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"Some clues" like the 50 times they have explicitly said there would continue to be more updates? Yeah ... there are ...
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I have the impression that Notch stopped paying much attention to these forums when Curse Gaming took over. I don't think he's logged in or posted for about 6 months. I'll post about the results on reddit in the near future.
@JulianDraak I've thought of similar approaches that divided the generation of a heightmap and then applied biome data to it for surface geology and flora/fauna. One major issue with that kind of approach is water. Particularly with swamps.
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I'm not sure how large a portion of the game is the world generating code, but I would suspect its substantial. Having the last several versions included would likely make the game files much more cumbersome. I do agree that the world generating portion of the code needs to be finalized in a much better state than it currently is. We can only hope that it will receive a major overhaul for 1.1 so that worlds don't have to be so regularly replaced in the future.
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Having a set of oceanic biomes, rather than just one Ocean biome, would be very nice. Oceans being entirely barren and in need of some kind of content probably distracted me from the idea that was brought up earlier about desert and wetland diversity being applied to oceans as well. The oceans we have now are temperate, ocean diversity would be nice (in the same way that we have arboreal diversity with several kinds of forest).
There could be the temperate oceans we have, plus an 'arctic' variety with icebergs polar bears and walruses, and the one that I think a lot of people look forward to, tropical ocean, with corals and abundant small sealife like crabs, jellyfish, and all manner of little colorful fishes.
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I would love to see an update dedicated to updating the world building code as well. At this point, it would take a major update to accomplish all the tweeks and rebalancing that will be necessary.
I know I've used mountains as an example of a biome that needs a greater Y limit many times, but Kleevage is right, it does impact them all. Especially those that contain trees. We've lost our tropical forest biome for now, but any good jungle is going to have trees 50-80m tall, and that's not a giant bramble of branches. When we get our topographical variation back, I'd like to be able to look at some forested hills without seeing them all shorn flat at the top.
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The density of ravines does seem rather high. I've seen many maps with several of them within the space of an in-game map around the spawn. I can only hope the density we have now was done to test them, and they won't be so abundant in release.
I was just using 1k as an example of a much preferable target than the mere 128 we have now, and the principles of cubic chunks rather than the mod Cubic Chunks. The fellas as Mojang are quite talented, I'm sure they could make a better map parceling system than the legacy column chunks it has now if they took the time and made the effort. The point being that they should try, because it's an unfortunate and unpleasant limit on the game's potential.
The video that chezzymann posted a link for reminds me of the type of helicopter panorama shots often seen in movies, which frequently pass over mountains. It's a shame that an unmodified version of Minecraft can't produce such a stunning landscape.
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There haven't been any statements recognizing the big issues here. Just an implication that Jens wants to fiddle around with biomes. I would love to some remarks about filling out the Ocean biome, restoring topographical variation to all the biomes, and converting to cubic chunks from collumns to make a 1k Y limit. These map generating problems are the things that cause major conversion issues when new updates come out. They really ought to take a higher precedence early in development.