What map height is really needed?

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by TumeniNodes » Post

so the clouds and skybox will behave the same on multiple levels.... nice.

I was not aware the clouds were connected to player position.

and I had thought that further layers above would be generated in front of the box... but these two points are good to know.
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Re: What map height is really needed?

by paramat » Post

By default they are not, they are fixed at y = 128.
But the Clouds API allows a mod to relocate them per-player if needed.

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by TumeniNodes » Post

excellent, thank you
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Re: What map height is really needed?

by BirgitLachner » Post

My ideas concerning the big (umused) space is to use it for mods. Like the deep for the hell and in the air something like a heaven or space like we have it in real (dark, cold) to build some spaceships.

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Nyarg » Post

BirgitLachner wrote:concerning the big (umused) space is to use it for mods..
Page overlay feature or permanent preserved space for existed mod )
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Re: What map height is really needed?

by texmex » Post

I wonder why there are so many specialized sky land and underground cave type mods if you can use the regular biome system instead… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by paramat » Post

Because the Biome API can only add nodes to a stone terrain generated by a core mapgen. So what is needed is a new core mapgen that can generate the levels of stone terrain.

I have worked out how to do this, but, the difficult part is making each level have a different terrain character. Is it interesting to have 8 levels where the terrain has the same character on every level? I'm not sure, all this does is expand surface area. The Biome API would have to create difference per level.

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Andrey01 » Post

I want size map - 50000 x 50000! What do you think about it?

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by texmex » Post

Thanks for elaborating, paramat. I see the problem.

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Wuzzy » Post

The Minetest world is NOT going to be made smaller just because you don't want to build high or dig deep. My answer to the question is that our current height limit is just fine and does not need to be reduced. Just keep it.

The fact that Minetest Game starts to gets boring outside -1024 and ca. 300 is just Minetest Game being boring in general. It is NOT Minetest's fault.
This thread is completely missing the point IMO. The problem is not that Minest offers the possibility of digging so deep or building so high. The problem is that our subgames are not creative enough to make it interesting.

So, fix this by proposing or building a better subgame. :D

Remember, the Minetest Game underground is very basic. There is only “stone”, with the exception of deserts. The only underground dangers are lava and giant caves. Ores follow the very simplistic rule of “the deeper you go, the more you find”. Exploring the X and Z axes in the underground has no reward other than finding the same ores than everywhere else at this height. There is no such thing as underground biomes. As soon you reached mese block height and built an efficient mineshaft up- and downwards, you have “defeated” the underground, as there is nothing new to explore.

Random ideas to solve the problem of repetitive underground:
1) Make the underground more interesting as a whole
2) To avoid repetitions, the simplest (but also most boring) solution is adding an indestructible bedrock layer above -30000, but remember, this limits player freedom! The number to choose here (if any) strongly depends on the subgame you want to build
3) Add something special at the bottom of the world
4) Alternative idea which avoids bedrock: Make digging more painful (more lava, longer digging, more monsters, etc.) the deeper you go, to the point where becomes suicidal to proceed

Random ideas for a more interesting underground:
- More stones than just stone, varying in hardness, so you sometimes have to dig around very hard block. And NO, I don't mean cheap ore blobs which disguise themselves as stones, I mean giant areas of various stone types, forming some kind of “3D biomes”
- Avoid repetitions
- More ores with real uses
- Dungeons with treasure chests (see tsm_dungeon_chests) and monsters
- Make digging progressively more painful and dangerous as you go deeper
- “ore biomes”. Ore distribution should be way more sophisticated than just “the deeper the more”
- Cave crystals
- More natural dangers, such as:
--- Radiating block
--- Caves filled with toxic gas
--- Stalactites or loose rocks at the ceiling which fall down on your head at the worst possible moment!
--- Amoeba block, tries to enclose living things (like the amoeba in Boulder Dash)
--- Hot lava which flows faster and destroys softer stone types
--- Volcanic lava which rapidly spreads upwards through stone for a random distance
--- Blocks which explode in contact with … heat, air, water, etc.
--- Stone with cracks, falls when stepped on
--- Traps
- Interesting underground caves (see caverealms mod)
- Stalactites and stalacmites
- More different random underground structures
- Monsters
- More and more lava as you go deeper
- Giant lava lake at the very bottom
- I strongly recommend adding a bedrock layer at leat at the very technical bottom (ca. -30000) of the world (if the player can legally reach this height), because the bottom just looks horribly broken and buggy otherwise

Ideas for a more interesting sky:
- Birds, flying animals
- Nyan cats, but as mobs :-)
- More and more evil creatures as you rise higher; provide unique drops
- Floating islands (note the floatlands feature in v7)
- Unique floating islands (new biomes)
- Other effects at extreme heights, just as „drowning“ (lose bubbles like in water), reduced gravity, etc.


I know, some of these ideas are already implemented in one mod or another. I just wanted to make a point here that you can do MUCH more with the underground than just putting stone with random ore spawns.
Especially multiple underground non-orelike (!) stone types is a very unexplored terrain.

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Nyarg » Post

infinite map height of course in any direction )))
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Re: What map height is really needed?

by TechNolaByte » Post

30km up is GREAT not for players who will ever reach them but because minetest doesn't support a 4th cord(like it should) so for modders who want to add new dimensions they add a new dimension a few thousand blocks above or below the surface at some level as no player should ever realistically get to them other than using what ever means the mod adds of getting there(like a portal) these dimensions will also have some barrier to prevent players from just building up or down until the reach one
the only reason the sky shouldn't go up for 30km would be if minetest got a 4th cord added to determine what dimension its in
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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Vapalus » Post

The missing support for dimensions is a huge fuzz.
If Minetest would only support 4096, but be split in dimensions, it would be a better gameplay. Much better would be keeping it like today AND adding dimensions.
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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Gael de Sailly » Post

Spoiler
Wuzzy wrote:The Minetest world is NOT going to be made smaller just because you don't want to build high or dig deep. My answer to the question is that our current height limit is just fine and does not need to be reduced. Just keep it.

The fact that Minetest Game starts to gets boring outside -1024 and ca. 300 is just Minetest Game being boring in general. It is NOT Minetest's fault.
This thread is completely missing the point IMO. The problem is not that Minest offers the possibility of digging so deep or building so high. The problem is that our subgames are not creative enough to make it interesting.

So, fix this by proposing or building a better subgame. :D

Remember, the Minetest Game underground is very basic. There is only “stone”, with the exception of deserts. The only underground dangers are lava and giant caves. Ores follow the very simplistic rule of “the deeper you go, the more you find”. Exploring the X and Z axes in the underground has no reward other than finding the same ores than everywhere else at this height. There is no such thing as underground biomes. As soon you reached mese block height and built an efficient mineshaft up- and downwards, you have “defeated” the underground, as there is nothing new to explore.

Random ideas to solve the problem of repetitive underground:
1) Make the underground more interesting as a whole
2) To avoid repetitions, the simplest (but also most boring) solution is adding an indestructible bedrock layer above -30000, but remember, this limits player freedom! The number to choose here (if any) strongly depends on the subgame you want to build
3) Add something special at the bottom of the world
4) Alternative idea which avoids bedrock: Make digging more painful (more lava, longer digging, more monsters, etc.) the deeper you go, to the point where becomes suicidal to proceed

Random ideas for a more interesting underground:
- More stones than just stone, varying in hardness, so you sometimes have to dig around very hard block. And NO, I don't mean cheap ore blobs which disguise themselves as stones, I mean giant areas of various stone types, forming some kind of “3D biomes”
- Avoid repetitions
- More ores with real uses
- Dungeons with treasure chests (see tsm_dungeon_chests) and monsters
- Make digging progressively more painful and dangerous as you go deeper
- “ore biomes”. Ore distribution should be way more sophisticated than just “the deeper the more”
- Cave crystals
- More natural dangers, such as:
--- Radiating block
--- Caves filled with toxic gas
--- Stalactites or loose rocks at the ceiling which fall down on your head at the worst possible moment!
--- Amoeba block, tries to enclose living things (like the amoeba in Boulder Dash)
--- Hot lava which flows faster and destroys softer stone types
--- Volcanic lava which rapidly spreads upwards through stone for a random distance
--- Blocks which explode in contact with … heat, air, water, etc.
--- Stone with cracks, falls when stepped on
--- Traps
- Interesting underground caves (see caverealms mod)
- Stalactites and stalacmites
- More different random underground structures
- Monsters
- More and more lava as you go deeper
- Giant lava lake at the very bottom
- I strongly recommend adding a bedrock layer at leat at the very technical bottom (ca. -30000) of the world (if the player can legally reach this height), because the bottom just looks horribly broken and buggy otherwise

Ideas for a more interesting sky:
- Birds, flying animals
- Nyan cats, but as mobs :-)
- More and more evil creatures as you rise higher; provide unique drops
- Floating islands (note the floatlands feature in v7)
- Unique floating islands (new biomes)
- Other effects at extreme heights, just as „drowning“ (lose bubbles like in water), reduced gravity, etc.


I know, some of these ideas are already implemented in one mod or another. I just wanted to make a point here that you can do MUCH more with the underground than just putting stone with random ore spawns.
Especially multiple underground non-orelike (!) stone types is a very unexplored terrain.
I fully agree with you, Wuzzy. That's exactely what I would like to see in the game. Thank you for this excellent post.
Vapalus wrote:The missing support for dimensions is a huge fuzz.
If Minetest would only support 4096, but be split in dimensions, it would be a better gameplay. Much better would be keeping it like today AND adding dimensions.
Adding support for multiple "dimensions" can indeed only be a good thing for the game, but not by far since IMO the world is already deep enough to simulate efficiently these dimensions. I'm not sure it's worth adding this, because of the work needed that, I think, would be huge.
Just realize how bored we would be if the world was perfect.

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Byakuren » Post

Gael de Sailly wrote:
Spoiler
Wuzzy wrote:The Minetest world is NOT going to be made smaller just because you don't want to build high or dig deep. My answer to the question is that our current height limit is just fine and does not need to be reduced. Just keep it.

The fact that Minetest Game starts to gets boring outside -1024 and ca. 300 is just Minetest Game being boring in general. It is NOT Minetest's fault.
This thread is completely missing the point IMO. The problem is not that Minest offers the possibility of digging so deep or building so high. The problem is that our subgames are not creative enough to make it interesting.

So, fix this by proposing or building a better subgame. :D

Remember, the Minetest Game underground is very basic. There is only “stone”, with the exception of deserts. The only underground dangers are lava and giant caves. Ores follow the very simplistic rule of “the deeper you go, the more you find”. Exploring the X and Z axes in the underground has no reward other than finding the same ores than everywhere else at this height. There is no such thing as underground biomes. As soon you reached mese block height and built an efficient mineshaft up- and downwards, you have “defeated” the underground, as there is nothing new to explore.

Random ideas to solve the problem of repetitive underground:
1) Make the underground more interesting as a whole
2) To avoid repetitions, the simplest (but also most boring) solution is adding an indestructible bedrock layer above -30000, but remember, this limits player freedom! The number to choose here (if any) strongly depends on the subgame you want to build
3) Add something special at the bottom of the world
4) Alternative idea which avoids bedrock: Make digging more painful (more lava, longer digging, more monsters, etc.) the deeper you go, to the point where becomes suicidal to proceed

Random ideas for a more interesting underground:
- More stones than just stone, varying in hardness, so you sometimes have to dig around very hard block. And NO, I don't mean cheap ore blobs which disguise themselves as stones, I mean giant areas of various stone types, forming some kind of “3D biomes”
- Avoid repetitions
- More ores with real uses
- Dungeons with treasure chests (see tsm_dungeon_chests) and monsters
- Make digging progressively more painful and dangerous as you go deeper
- “ore biomes”. Ore distribution should be way more sophisticated than just “the deeper the more”
- Cave crystals
- More natural dangers, such as:
--- Radiating block
--- Caves filled with toxic gas
--- Stalactites or loose rocks at the ceiling which fall down on your head at the worst possible moment!
--- Amoeba block, tries to enclose living things (like the amoeba in Boulder Dash)
--- Hot lava which flows faster and destroys softer stone types
--- Volcanic lava which rapidly spreads upwards through stone for a random distance
--- Blocks which explode in contact with … heat, air, water, etc.
--- Stone with cracks, falls when stepped on
--- Traps
- Interesting underground caves (see caverealms mod)
- Stalactites and stalacmites
- More different random underground structures
- Monsters
- More and more lava as you go deeper
- Giant lava lake at the very bottom
- I strongly recommend adding a bedrock layer at leat at the very technical bottom (ca. -30000) of the world (if the player can legally reach this height), because the bottom just looks horribly broken and buggy otherwise

Ideas for a more interesting sky:
- Birds, flying animals
- Nyan cats, but as mobs :-)
- More and more evil creatures as you rise higher; provide unique drops
- Floating islands (note the floatlands feature in v7)
- Unique floating islands (new biomes)
- Other effects at extreme heights, just as „drowning“ (lose bubbles like in water), reduced gravity, etc.


I know, some of these ideas are already implemented in one mod or another. I just wanted to make a point here that you can do MUCH more with the underground than just putting stone with random ore spawns.
Especially multiple underground non-orelike (!) stone types is a very unexplored terrain.
I fully agree with you, Wuzzy. That's exactely what I would like to see in the game. Thank you for this excellent post.
Vapalus wrote:The missing support for dimensions is a huge fuzz.
If Minetest would only support 4096, but be split in dimensions, it would be a better gameplay. Much better would be keeping it like today AND adding dimensions.
Adding support for multiple "dimensions" can indeed only be a good thing for the game, but not by far since IMO the world is already deep enough to simulate efficiently these dimensions. I'm not sure it's worth adding this, because of the work needed that, I think, would be huge.
4096-high worlds would only allow for 16 dimensions, which would give problems if mods allow the creation of an arbitrary number of dimensions, or even if you just install a few mods that create a few dimensions each. This limit is the main disadvantage over explicitly representing dimensions.

Another option would be to change the y coordinate to be 32-bits (~4 billion nodes). This would allow for around a million dimensions at 4096 nodes high, which should be plenty. The main problem with this approach is that the "node index" would no longer be representable in Lua, because the index will be a 64-bit integer that cannot be represented exactly by a double (Lua's number type). Lua 5.3 and LuaJIT have support for integers, but in the case of 5.3 the width of the integer is machine-dependent. In LuaJIT you can specify having a 64-bit integer, but you cannot use it to index into a table.
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Re: What map height is really needed?

by voxelproof » Post

pandaro wrote:everest is 8848 if i remember...
i will see mountains of 10000 mt in minetest
I'd like to see mountains of that size too. There was recently a discussion about the size of the MT worlds and this question emerged as a digression. I must admit that I changed my mind about the size of Minetest worlds. I'd be happy to see it expanded horizontally to the size of Minecraft worlds (i.e. 6*10^7 x 6*10^7 blocks).

My most recent discovery is an extraordinarily large river canyon of scenic beauty. Such upgrade in size would enable to accommodate even more impressive terrain features of the size of Himalaya mts or Grand Canyon of Colorado.
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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Vapalus » Post

...if the drawing distance allows it.
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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Andrey01 » Post

It is wonderful Minecraft has so a little height. Really probably to mine anything there in so one? Let Minetest has 35km and developers shouldn`t change it.

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Linuxdirk » Post

Andrey01 wrote:It is wonderful Minecraft has so a little height. Really probably to mine anything there in so one? Let Minetest has 35km and developers shouldn`t change it.
It’s 62 km (circa -31000 to +31000). Unfortunately only 2 km around 0 are interesting. Above 800-1000 (emty space) and below 1024 (repeating down to -31000) there simply isn’t anything that could attract players. You need to modify world generator settings and use mods to make it somewhat interesting. So having some kind of “dimensions” in the world generation would be awesome.

But I wouldn’t separate them. Just have the normal world as now, and then above, lets say, 20000 the “Sky World” begins, with floating islands and walkable clouds, etc. ()and when reaching 30000 space begins. And from -2000 to -10000 caves appear having plantlife in them and below that deeper underground stars where greater danger are waiting (poisonous gasses, hazardous water, more lava, etc.) and everything below 20000 could be reserved for mods adding their own places (since skybox, etc. are changeable for players it doesn’t matter that it’s deep underground.).

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Andrey01 » Post

Linuxdirk wrote:
Andrey01 wrote:It is wonderful Minecraft has so a little height. Really probably to mine anything there in so one? Let Minetest has 35km and developers shouldn`t change it.
It’s 62 km (circa -31000 to +31000). Unfortunately only 2 km around 0 are interesting. Above 800-1000 (emty space) and below 1024 (repeating down to -31000) there simply isn’t anything that could attract players. You need to modify world generator settings and use mods to make it somewhat interesting. So having some kind of “dimensions” in the world generation would be awesome.

But I wouldn’t separate them. Just have the normal world as now, and then above, lets say, 20000 the “Sky World” begins, with floating islands and walkable clouds, etc. ()and when reaching 30000 space begins. And from -2000 to -10000 caves appear having plantlife in them and below that deeper underground stars where greater danger are waiting (poisonous gasses, hazardous water, more lava, etc.) and everything below 20000 could be reserved for mods adding their own places (since skybox, etc. are changeable for players it doesn’t matter that it’s deep underground.).
Floating islands on 2000 height??? What are they? And where are poisonous gases and "hazardous water" from -2000 to -10000 depth from????

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by voxelproof » Post

Vapalus wrote:...if the drawing distance allows it.
Yes, this might be some issue which would require more efficient hardware to fix it. But as it is now, the distance of 260 gives quite agreeable results on a pretty low-end laptop I use. It definitely would do quite well with ten times higher mountains - you don't necessarily have to see everything, sometimes it's enough to know the altitude of the mountain range to feel the ambience. I was in mountains many times and only rarely could see the peaks I was heading for :)

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Linuxdirk » Post

Andrey01 wrote:Floating islands on 2000 height???
20000.
Andrey01 wrote:What are they?
Floating.
Andrey01 wrote:And where are poisonous gases and "hazardous water" from -2000 to -10000 depth from????
From the world generator.

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Andrey01 » Post

Do floating islands, poisonous gases and hazardour water exist on default? Because i have never seen and heard similar stuff and structures.

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Linuxdirk » Post

It’s a concept/idea. That’s what the thread is about :)

With current map generator you need mods to achieve that.

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Re: What map height is really needed?

by Vapalus » Post

Linuxdirk wrote:It’s a concept/idea. That’s what the thread is about :)

With current map generator you need mods to achieve that.
...and I think that's fine.
We shouldn't make Minetest an actual game, but keep it "as is", as a game engine with many possibilities.
Adding it would just destroy current gamemodes - like mine...
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