Tweaking Core perlin world improvements

[Josharias]

Now that the faceted world generation and vertical chunk systems are out in the wild, lets start finding ways to improve them!

Oddness I have found:

• Deserts occur in mountain ranges in high elevations
• There are too many cactus in deserts
• There are no lakes, only oceans

What else could be added or tweaked with the core perlin world generator?

 

[Cervator]

• Overhangs and sheer cliffs are missing, old one had them but in a more hard coded fashion I figure.
  
• Rivers tend to become oddly narrow to the point where they don't even have water, almost more like a dry canyon at that point (which would also be a thing, but ... maybe some sort of erosion smoothing thing at some point?)
• Options for plateaus at different levels would be nice. I think one or two generate but that's it. Fatter mountain chains with a few plateaus at different spots would be nice
• Options for larger mountains to stay warm/green to higher altitudes? Or at least break up the boundary, which is very obvious right now. Mountains can be hugely tall now, but will be all snow very quickly
• Add in the new style caves and actual mineral veins
• Come up with actual underground features beyond random open spaces and caves. Underground ravines, for instance, lava pools, etc
  
• Allow rivers to change elevation (actually run down the side of a mountain - heck, even into a cave!)

Possibly some of these will never fit into Perlin, but be more for the pre-generated world map types (Perlin remains too random to develop huge unique areas)

 

[Josharias]

• tall grass happens on snow
• trees are kind of flat on the top

 

[synopia]

When playing around with my skeletal mesh improvements, I started many many worlds, just to place models, fix issues and restart. So maybe its only a problem for my special case, but I always spawned at sea level and I had to climb up an often really huge mountain until I found some empty space to place the models.

Maybe bigger coastlines with more flat land would help?

 

[Cervator]

Also posting about the "spawn in depression" tendency, just came up with three of us on IRC, heh

Maybe could help / be related: https://github.com/MovingBlocks/Terasology/issues/1379

 

[Skaldarnar]

Just found this nice fly-over video on youtube:

I think there are some very nice landscape shapes and transitions, all done by using and combining different noise functions. Would love to see some of this in our main world gen again

 

[Cervator]

Very nice, reminds me a lot of our height map world, just with those cliffs we are indeed lacking nowadays

It does seem like it just needs another layer of noise to shake up the terrain in piece. @Marcin Sciesinski didn't you use a sort of secondary height modifier in TTA?

 

[Josharias]

I took a look at the old core perlin in more detail the other day. It appears that the original implementation was a 3d noise function (yes, it has taken me this long to fully understand what was going on in there). Likely BoundlessWorlds by @Esereja will hold some key elements to the cliff improvement.

 

[Esereja]

If I would clean up and optimize Boundless world we could use it for those purposes. I mean it can do stuff like that easily but, I am probably only one who understand what it does ATM. My code at BW isn't fully optimized either. If we would use it only for cliffs it would just bring lot of unneeded functionality. I hope to document it properly someday.(there is examples and java doc tough). ATM I am working on advanced Biome generator for 3D worlds.

 

[chessandgo]

Something like this for settings: http://dev.bukkit.org/bukkit-plugins/terrain-control (or maybe just a new terrain generator if thats not possible)

(and world settings like this http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Theme )
Things wanted: basic things like height/amplitude, etc, maybe some fun things too, like upscaling terrain (IE, no each block is represented as larger blocks made of 2*2*2 blocks, so you feel small, etc)

Stuff like, lava oceans, amplified, biome size configuration.



Also: beaches, http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/suggestions/53985-bring-back-beaches,

and just calm rolling terrain in addition to our exciting bumpy stuff.

In general just a more range of biomes, perhaps some sea/water biomes, (deep sea? Fresh water biome (seperate block?), salt water, river, etc)

Volvanos, and lava tubes, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_tube

mesas,


overhands:

huge expanisve caves that are intresting, not veins or air.

and perhaps a touch of optional insanity with farlands.


and perhaps a skyworld