"Enhanced" world-gen

[PureTryOut]

Since xoft is back (and I heard he is the world-gen expert ), I thought I should make a seperate thread about my world-gen post.

Minecraft's default world generation is boring. You see people bringing it up on Reddit and other sites every now and then, but Mojang isn't changing it.
All biomes (except for the hill biomes) are relatively flat, and there aren't really actual beautiful biomes.

I was thinking that Cuberite could do something about this, it could even attract new users.


My idea was to have 2 world generation modes: a vanilla one, and an "enhanced" one:
The vanilla one would be the generation algorithm we have now, and the enhanced algorithm would create the same biomes, but with tweaks to make them more interesting to explore.

@NiLSPACE said that it should maybe done with plugins, although @LogicParrot thought that Lua wouldn't be "powerful" enough for it. I believe Bukkit/Spigot does give plugin developers the option of changing the world-gen, as I seen plugins that create entire randomly generated sky island maps.
This thread is of course open to suggestions.

So things I was thinking of to enhance the default biomes:

• proper mountains with stone on top and snow covered
  
• actually high mountains, reaching to just below the sky limit. maybe emeralds on top to make it worth climbing
  
• mountain lakes, high up (100+ and above?)
  
• mountain... fields? Like this. Valleys, but high up (100+ and above?)
  
• deep oceans, to just above the bedrock, it would make for awesome underwater bases. Maybe more chance for diamonds in the bottom of those deep oceans, to make it worth risking drowning. These deep oceans could also hold the ocean monuments, so they don't get too easy to conquer like it is now
  
• sandy ocean floors (so less gravel like it is now)
  
• atols in oceans, like this
  
• fjords like this, possibly when an extreme hill biome borders an ocean?
  
• cliffs, possibly when an extreme hill biome borders an ocean? Maybe in combination with fjords. Example
  
• icy coasts like you have in Antarctica, with icebergs and such, possibly when an ice biome borders an ocean? Example
  
• tropical coasts like this. Maybe  when an jungle hill biome borders an ocean?
  
• deserts with proper rock formations like this, maybe combined with clay generation
  
• jungles with a variation thicker threes, 3x3 and more, so they actually look old
  
• jungles with floating islands possibly? Less realistic, more like the landscape from the movie Avatar. Example
  
• northern, cold, giant, forests with mountains distributed in them like here
  
• proper volcanos, with lava chasms beneath it like this
  
  

[xoft]

Some of what you want may be already doable, just playing with the generator settings. Some could be done with a plugin. Unfortunately, most of it is very difficult, if not impossible, to do. You'll notice that these kinds of pictures are just that - pictures of something that someone spent an awful lot of time designing and editing just for a screenshot. The terrain is custom-made for the original situation, or built from scratch, but always with the bigger picture in mind. However, terrain generator cannot work like that, it cannot take too much of a "big picture", because it is very costly, in terms of performance, to do so. The tree generator requires 3x3 chunks worth of terrain composition and 5x5 chunks of biomes around the currently generated chunk, and that's already pushing the generator to its limits. Now imagine you wanted to do a terrain feature that spans several chunks and needs to smoothly transition into possibly tens of chunks in each direction. That is simply infeasible.

As for the plugins, don't go there yet. The OnChunkGenerating and OnChunkGenerated hooks are good for general notification, but not much for tweaking the generator. If you tweak too much, things start breaking, such as villages mid-air or trees in the Sahara.
I have a plan for a better system of generator API, more tightly coupled with the ComposableGenerator pipeline, that would allow plugins to really tweak anything and everything. As usual, reality can hardly keep up with the plans

[PureTryOut]

As usual, reality can hardly keep up with the plans

Definitely

I'm not saying everything should be made just as in those screenshots. They're more for inspiration.
It's just that the default world generation is boring, and I think Cuberite could really spicen it up a bit.

[tigerw]

xoft suggests that "most of it is very difficult, if not impossible, to do."

This of course, should be read and interpreted as, "of course I can do it, but a developer of my calibre only has so many hours in a day."