Some semi-random thoughts on terrain generation

[xoft]

Well then, make a patch out of it and let me see; if it's okay, you can then commit it to svn.

[NiLSPACE]

Well the only thing is that there is no sandstone under the sand in deserts/beaches.

[xoft]

Okay, your patch had a nasty bug that it could try to set blocks at Y < 0; you'd have probably found out about it if you ran the code in Debug.
I massaged the patch a bit, added sandstone below sand, here's the patch back, update to latest svn revision and then apply the patch, so that you can commit it

[NiLSPACE]

If you want then you can commit it becouse i keep getting the message that the file is outdated even though i updated it.

[xoft]

It probably conflicted, because I committed another few changes in that same file in the meantime. Alright, I'll commit it it, with attribution
To fix your sources, delete the file altogether and then do a svn update, it will restore the file.

[NiLSPACE]

its realy funny to see what you get if you use a heightmap with a different compositiongen. For example if you use Noise3D heightmap with the DistortedHeightmap compositiongen you get sudden holes in the ground

[xoft]

I'd also expect that you'll get a lot of cut-up trees. But then, what do I know, never actually tried

[NiLSPACE]

I'd also expect that you'll get a lot of cut-up trees. But then, what do I know, never actually tried

I didn't see any, i did see allot of lakes generated on the surface though

[xoft]

Lakes do use only the height generator to determine where to generate. For the same reason, it's possible for lakes to generate mid-air under an overhang. I knew there was something that would go wrong

[xoft]

I found a new hobby in Vanilla - I place glass on the patches of sand on the ocean floor and then dig out the sand (to produce more glass). Makes a great underwater dome, or rather, a maze.

Related to this, I found out that MCServer's ocean floor is not flat enough for my hobby. There are just too many hills. This brought my attention to the base height generator. It uses the same amplitude everywhere, resulting in somewhat dull heightmap. What we need is variance - places with higher amplitude, so it generates some hills, and places with low amplitude, generating almost a plain.

The easiest way to do it would be to multiply the Perlin noise we're currently using as the heightmap generator with another very-low-frequency noise. The very-low-frequency noise will attenuate the amplitude of the entire noise.
An alternate version would be to the Perlin nose - take out the middle octave, generate it separately, multiply it with a low-frequency noise and then add it up to the Perlin noise. This might preserve at least some of the characteristics of the biome.

Not sure which is better, I guess I'll have to try both out to see.