Post your screenshots!

[Calinou]

Just a cave in Carbone…



Down in the water, there was a dirt monster and sand monster.

[ArguablySane]

I've been playing around with cave generation algorithms to get a feel for modding Minetest.
The following screenshots show caves which smoothly vary in size and density in all 3 dimensions.

A typical unassuming cave entrance on the surface. This particular one goes a lot deeper than it looks.

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The number of caves near the surface varies according to "biome":

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Going deeper, the caves get larger and more spread out:

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After 500 metres depth the algorithm no longer cares about surface cave density.

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Almost 2 km below the surface, and we can see the largest tunnels (the size increase actually caps out at 1 km depth). These twist and turn through all three dimensions, so navigating them on foot would be extremely difficult and rather dangerous. Once I get ore generation working though, there should be some valuable resources down there which make the caves worth exploring.

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Please excuse the inconsistent lighting. I tried to set everything to be fully illuminated, but that's apparently easier said than done.

[ExeterDad]

WOW! Very interesting work!
Welcome to the forums by the way :D

[Krock]

\o/ I like all those mapgen screenshots.

http://i.imgur.com/CSmL6vv.jpg

If you use perlin noise there, you can minimalize that to two 3d-noise.

[Calinou]

This one reminds me of Minecraft a lot:

[ArguablySane]

I'm glad people like the screenshots.

If you use perlin noise there, you can minimalize that to two 3d-noise.

All my caves are actually generated by the intersection of two thresholded 3D noise functions. I took a bit of inspiration from paramat's code for that, so if he's reading this, thanks. I have just tested adding a third set of 3D noise to generate more interconnected caves, and that seems to work well.

The main modification is a blending function which takes multiple octaves of 3D perlin noise and combines them in varying proportions to produce a smooth noise function with varying spatial frequency. I also use a spherical "cutting head" when carving out the caves so that narrow caves are usually navigable without digging and larger caves have slightly rounded corners.

If people are interested, I could write up a larger post explaining how this technique works in more detail. I'd be happy to share my code, but it still has one annoying bug in it which I'm trying to find. Coincidentally you can actually see the bug in the screenshot above - a vertical line of not-quite-continuity down the middle of the image.

EDIT: Fixed the bug. It turns out the 2D perlin noise function takes slightly different parameters than the 3D one. There were huge discontinuities in the cavernosity map, leading to slight discontinuities in the cave systems at y>-500.

EDIT2: Pastebin of the init.lua source: http://pastebin.com/DhHFESb4

[paramat]

I love that wide tunnel screenshot. Good to see someone working on this stuff. In 'riverdev' mod i'm expanding one of or both noisebands to blend tunnels, fissures and caves. Your spherical excavation 'brush' is a great idea, imagine using an irregular brush for rougher wall textures.

Flexrealm in tube mode, looking towards eastern endcap, intended to be an O'Neill type space colony:

[ExeterDad]

Paramat... I'm thinking that last image is only missing a dude on a skateboard catching extreme air!

[ArguablySane]

I love that wide tunnel screenshot. Good to see someone working on this stuff. In 'riverdev' mod i'm expanding one of or both noisebands to blend tunnels, fissures and caves. Your spherical excavation 'brush' is a great idea, imagine using an irregular brush for rougher wall textures.

Flexrealm in tube mode, looking towards eastern endcap, intended to be an O'Neill type space colony:

That looks really awesome. It's a shame the engine doesn't support dynamic changes in local gravity (yet). Also I imagine lighting would be difficult if you made it a closed cylinder.

As for using an irregular brush, I think it would actually be better to use a spherical brush with a random radius or write-probability instead. Because there's normally a lot of overlap between consecutive brush writes, any constant irregularity would tend to get smoothed out in at least one dimension.
If, for example, there was a 1/125 chance to cut out a sphere at each point inside the intersection volume, then you'd end up with very irregular walls with spherical chunks cut out approximately every 5 nodes in each direction. I'll have to test that later, because it would make the large caves a bit more interesting and speed things up significantly.

[MirceaKitsune]

I love that wide tunnel screenshot. Good to see someone working on this stuff. In 'riverdev' mod i'm expanding one of or both noisebands to blend tunnels, fissures and caves. Your spherical excavation 'brush' is a great idea, imagine using an irregular brush for rougher wall textures.

Flexrealm in tube mode, looking towards eastern endcap, intended to be an O'Neill type space colony:

Nice! I can tell that required engine changes, since the actual geometry of the world appears to be wrapped... though it's not zoomed in enough for me to tell with precision. In either case, cool idea :)

[Wuzzy]

An old screenshot of mine:


Minetest 0.4.7, minetest_game, no mods. This was result of an experiment with MGv6 parameters.

[SAMIAMNOT]

Whoa...did you release your edits? That's awesome!!!

[philipbenr]

Yes, magpen parameters are handy things. try looking at voxelgarfen defaults.

[paramat]

[srifqi]

amgmt 0.4-dev-alpha
Album

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Early development of plateau:



Side of plateau when it meets river:

[Krock]

Whoa. Looks great!

[DarkgarX]

This is one of the configurations I am working on for our next stream series. I love the lush foliage, thanks to Vanessa ;)

screenshot_35376792.jpg (657.27 KiB) Viewed 1342 times

[Amaz]

The earth from the moon! (Using Paramat's flexrealm mod, on a server that I run.)


And the moon from the earth! (If you want, I can go into details on how I made it...)

[Esteban]

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The earth from the moon! (Using Paramat's flexrealm mod, on a server that I run.)

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And the moon from the earth! (If you want, I can go into details on how I made it...)

I would like to know the details! :3

[Hybrid Dog]

"net_noise"


some tests




"basalt_noise"




"hnoise"
"cubic"

"cyclic"

both

[RHR]

Nice stuff Hybrid Dog! "basalt_noise" and "cyclic" create very interesting surfaces. :)

[Hybrid Dog]

Nice stuff Hybrid Dog! "basalt_noise" and "cyclic" create very interesting surfaces. :)

thanks
the "hnoise" was a bit difficult because I got error in error handling (https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/1423) the whole time but I had luck and found my typo without being informed about it by minetest

[Sol]

I like basalt_noise too.

[lag01]

Today i noticed that my server got griefed. The way it was done really amazes me - people placed a lot of water sources right above the spawn, at height 320 blocks, in 50x50 node shape!


Now i need to clean that mess somehow :D

[Dragonop]

@Lag01
Something similar happend some time ago in isotope.uk... but with lava, and water.

what's your server adress and port? I want more servers to play in :D