Random Chitchat 2012-2016

[xoft]

Added a new heightmap painter to the AnvilStats utility. Finally we can see large portions of MC terrain, height-wise. As soon as I get home, I'll try processing the huge world I have there. Hopefully this will enlighten us as to the terrain height the vanilla generator uses.

[xoft]

Since I had too much time on my transfer in China and nothing really to do (no net connection), I did a brand new biome generator. I think it came out pretty nice, go give it a try - it's called MultiStepMap (its parameters will get default values once it's enabled and then you can tweak them; I'll document those in the wiki later, wife wants to sleep and says she'll kill me if I keep waking her up).

It finally has proper mushroom biome that is generated inside oceans and is quite rare. It also has true rivers! And the biomes should transition quite smoothly - where it's icy, the cold biomes should stick together (tundra + taiga + icy hills); dry biomes stick together (plains + desert); wet biomes stick together (jungle, swamp).

[NiLSPACE]

its a little bit slower but its still awsome and the ocean and river biome have a hilly surface beneath the water. maybe its nice to make it more flat. especially for the river biome.

[xoft]

The ocean is meant to be a bit hilly underwater, maybe I'll make the hills smaller a bit. With river, I'll get rid of the hills altogether, or maybe only very slight ones. That's the kind of tweaking I had in mind

Of course it'll be a bit slower, it does quite a bit more calculations. Is it that much slower to you? I couldn't really compare, my computer is too fast, so the chunks/sec feature didn't fire up when I was comparing only the biome generation (i. e. using DebugBiomes composition and Flat height, I had over 500 ch/s and the reporting is not precise with such a huge number)

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Maybe it's only perceived slowness, as this biome generator makes more forest and jungle biomes, thus having more trees, which are slower to generate.

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I've adjusted the river height generator to have less hills. Now I noticed that even though we have a river biome, there is actually very little water generated in it, because it's too small. So it's time for you to go and try to find the best parameters to generate a nice terrain. I think enlarging MultiStepMapRiverWidth would help with the rivers. Maybe the biomes are too small, too, so enlarge MultiStepMapLandBiomeSize? It's up to you now

[xoft]

We had a bit too many active branches and it was becoming confusing, so I merged in the useful bits from other branches into trunk and moved all inactive branches out into a separate folder (branch cemetery ).

So current state is, we have an active trunk and two experimental branches that will probably die very soon, too.

[NiLSPACE]

this:

MultiStepMapOceanCellSize=384
MultiStepMapMushroomIslandSize=32
MultiStepMapRiverCellSize=384
MultiStepMapRiverWidth=0.150000
MultiStepMapLandBiomeSize=192

seems to work for me

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things worth mentioning:

• there are no beaches,
  
• there is no Extreme hills edge
  
• Jungle and Taiga are generated too much.
  
• Desert and extreme hills are not generated quite often.

[xoft]

Finally got to the bandwidth required to upload the video So here's the New Zealand hills, which I'll be trying to replicate in the terrain generator:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0LoO2uYUg2A

[NiLSPACE]

wow those mountains are realy different than the mountains in czech republic

[xoft]

Yup. And they're wonderful. It'd be so great to have something like that in a MCS generator.

[xoft]

I had a nice idea and, quite surprisingly, it seems to work:
I added a piece of code into the Debuggers plugin to list all available API functions. It is toggled by a switch at the top of the file, off by default, but it works! Wow! I'm beginning to like Lua