[Mod][Merged] Valleys Mapgen [valleys_mapgen]

[Gael de Sailly]

duane : I've merged your changes in a branch, and added you as a collaborator.

[demon_boy]

I've been working on adding volcanoes.

I've added randomness to create variable height and radius of the the volcano. Testing tonight and spawned a very large "super" volcano. Think Mt. Vesuvius.



Standing on the top of the volcano, looking across the cone.


Looking down. Volcanoes are currently dormant. I haven't figured out how to add lava into the void yet.


At the base of the volcano cone.


TODO:

1. Add lava
2. Currently only spawns once per map. I need to add multiple volcanoes to mapgen, potentially clustered in a chain of islands or in a mountain range.
3. In mapgenv7, a volcano that spawns on water will create obsidian down to the seabed to form an island. In Valleys mapgen it floats on the water. I need to figure this out.
4. Add variable radius to cone.

Don't expect fast progress on this. I'm very much still learning to code. Offers of help are welcome :)

[duane]

I've been working on adding volcanoes.

Cool. Ideally you want this to be based on Noise 11 and 12, which determine the occurrence of underground lava. I'm not comfortable with the details of noise functions, but I'm guessing that increasing the scale of 12 (or just decreasing the lava_depth and increasing lava_max_height settings) would bring it closer to the surface. Then you use something like the current lava placement code to locate each volcano.

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if v11 + v12 > 2 ^ (y / lava_depth) and y <= lava_max_height then

Normally, mapgen.lua doesn't even check for lava except in caves, so it won't break out anywhere else, regardless of the noise function. (And if a cave's under a volcano, you want lava there.) Leaving lava_max_height in will let people tune out vulcanism if they don't want any, though we might consider making any change to noise 12's scale based on a setting too (and/or any possibility of volcanoes, but that might be redundant).

I guess after that, we need to decide how closely to monitor the volcanoes. Do we want them to potentially devastate an area (which a player might spawn in) or not?

[Gael de Sailly]

I propose to add another noise with very large spread parameter (2048 ? 4096 ?). Volcanoes should spawn where :

• This new noise 19 is close to zero (volcanoes will spawn in lines)
• noise 2 is not close to zero (avoid volcanoes near the rivers)
• noises 11 and 12 are high

That's just an idea, I haven't tested it.

[duane]

I propose to add another noise with very large spread parameter (2048 ? 4096 ?).

That sounds ideal.

This, on the other hand, is just the opposite. I was playing around last night and put together a few changes that make random lava flows pop up occasionally, causing havoc and destruction. They can kind of form a vague cone shape eventually, if you squint your eyes and hold your head just right.

Here are a couple of screenshots.

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If anyone wants to see more, you can check it on https://github.com/Gael-de-Sailly/valle ... e/fireland. It's not a serious addition, but I'm having fun with it. Nothing like a raging forest fire to light up your evening.

[FreeLikeGNU]

Duane: ermehgerd! Thats fantastic!

[duane]

Duane: ermehgerd! Thats fantastic!

The fire! It kills my fps!

[paramat]

Kills mine too, i think the firelike drawtype is too complex having 6-10 textures per node, it used to be plantlike with just 2 textures, maybe an option is needed https://github.com/minetest/minetest_game/issues/655

[duane]

Spoiler

[srifqi]

^ (screenshot)
Woah, that's looks nice!

What I still confused about: "How can you make so that the water inside river doesn't flood lower area?".

[duane]

What I still confused about: "How can you make so that the water inside river doesn't flood lower area?".

Partly, that's because the river water is redefined to have a smaller spread radius than normal water. It's also ingeniously placed.

Code: Select all

minetest.override_item("default:river_water_source", {liquid_range = waterflow})
minetest.override_item("default:river_water_flowing", {liquid_range = waterflow})

[duane]

ObaniGemini raised a concern about the high-res textures in the last commit.

I don't understand why did you add those textures. It's up to the user if he wants to change the textures. Also, high quality texture packs are made for computer with great capacities, and realistic packs aren't enjoyable for every one. So at least just make a proposal in the README.txt.

I really don't understand : Did you do that only because you like those textures or because you wanted to use them for other blocks ? The description you provided seems to tell it's only for those who use HDX's texture packs (not so many users, if we compare to those who would be interested by this mod).

So what you did here was just to make a publicity for another project which is a texture pack in a repository about a mapgen. I think you should remove it, as it uses room and as it is out of the way this repository is used.

EDIT : (I have nothing about VanessaE, but include a texture pack in a mapgen mod is not good to me if you don't create blocks with the textures, and even more if it's just to support a texture pack without removing the original one)

My response was:

I put these textures in because I use high-res textures routinely and the standard ones included with vmg stand out by comparison. I could try to have them included in another texture pack, but I'm not sure any of texture artists want to bother with a wip mod. (As much as I like vmg, it isn't ready for prime time.)

If Gael-de-Sailly decides to, we might move the high-res textures to another branch. However, they only take up 1.7M total, even with the cave additions, so I think it's a fairly minor inconvenience for those who don't want them. I use a ten-year old laptop exclusively, and I have no trouble with them. They are not enabled by default, they just sit there in another directory for those who do want them.

As for publicizing another mod, I wish more people would do that. It's harder for newcomers to minetest to locate the popular mods than it ought to be, so an occasional shout-out might be a good thing.

If there are other folks who don't like the inclusion of larger textures, please chime in. I'd like to hear everyone's opinions.

Please excuse the over-quoting.

Let me also say that I've made a pull request for additions to caves that some folks will almost certainly not approve of. It's disabled by default, but if anyone has problems with it, now would be the time to shout.

Edit: Canceled the pull request until this is resolved.

[demon_boy]

I would suggest removing the HDX textures because this is a mapgen MOD, and textures are seperate. Create a new Github repo for textures and link to it in the README for those interested.

Also, if new plants, trees and other nodes are added the mapgen repo will get very large if new 512bit textures are added.

[Gael de Sailly]

The high-resolution textures has been removed from the repo. I've put it on the first post, in an attachment. These textures may be on HDX textures (the answer of VanessaE).

[duane]

Gael de Sailly, have you considered adding an equivalent of minetest.register decoration (or overloading it)? It would require a second pass over all blocks in the mapgen function, but I can't see any other way of planting decorations that depend on the proximity of other nodes, like the lady ferns in mossman's fern pack that spawn near metals or the rhubarb in the farming redo mod.

I don't think it should be optional. Either everyone should take the cpu hit or we should leave it out. And if we add it, we should probably remove the code in mapgen for flowers, using the decoration function instead.

[duane]

I got tired of dealing with the quirks of a lua mapgen, so I ported the rudiments of vmg to C++ as a real mapgen. You can take a look here.

This is not a mod. If you want to run it, you've got to actually compile the game from code, so I don't expect a lot of people to be very interested. It's a bit faster than the lua code, but nothing to write home about, so why bother?

As a real mapgen, it doesn't conflict with other mods that use biomes or voxelmanip, like caverealms (one of my faves) or ethereal. Yes, it has all the standard biomes. That was easy since I built it on the mapgen v7 code.

What it doesn't have is everything in vmg beyond the basic landforms and rivers. The rest is all stock v7, but I intend to port as much as I can eventually. My C++ kung-fu is feeble, at best. I spent most of a day trying to figure out why my landscapes looked so weird, and finally tracked it down to using the integer version of the absolute value function. /facepalm

Anyway, here's a few screenshots of what I have so far.

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Only the genius that is valleys mapgen could have inspired me to use C again. Blecchh!

[duane]

vlapsley added several flowers to the mod.

Spoiler

[Ivà]

This mapgen should be merged into the main engine as the fifth option, really. It provides a realistic terrain that is a lot more interesting than v6 and less fantasious than v5 or v7, for those who prefer that style of land.

Keep up the good work!

[duane]

This mapgen should be merged into the main engine as the fifth option, really.

Gael de Sailly would have to relicense it. The minetest license isn't compatible with gpl3, as I understand it.

[Ivà]

For those who want to give it a try, pretty default minetest_game with duane C++ vmg on:

mtdig.zapto.org:30000

fly and fast are enabled by default.

[paramat]

Good to see this ported to C++, keep going, there is a good chance it could be added to core minetest, we want a variety of mapgens. Lua mapgen is too slow for a multiplayer server due to lag caused by other players exploring, so porting to C++ is essential to make it practical.

[Ivà]

Good to see this ported to C++, keep going, there is a good chance it could be added to core minetest, we want a variety of mapgens. Lua mapgen is too slow for a multiplayer server due to lag caused by other players exploring, so porting to C++ is essential to make it practical.

+1 paramat :)

[Minetestforfun]

+1, need to port this mapgen to C++, this is definitly the mapgen i will use by default instead of mapgenv5/6/7, i think the actual writing in LUA pull of many admins...

[duane]

Good to see this ported to C++, keep going, there is a good chance it could be added to core minetest, we want a variety of mapgens. Lua mapgen is too slow for a multiplayer server due to lag caused by other players exploring, so porting to C++ is essential to make it practical.

I hope it will be faster, but every piece I add sucks up more cpu time. There's just a lot of math involved. I'm simplifying where I don't think anyone will notice, but Gael de Sailly optimized the heck out of his lua, so there may not be much room for improvement.

Just posted some fixes, especially to the spawn problem (which was getting on my nerves). Heat and humidity are working. Very ingenious code. And since I love screenshots...

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At the Mountains of Madness

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Note that no mods were running other than the default for any of these.

[Nathan.S]

This is just so beautiful. Keep up the good work. Really enjoy using this mapgen.