It's becoming alarming to me that it doesn't seem Mojang is concerned about maintaining continuity in biome generation from one version to the next. I'm talking about misaligned chunks. Chunks generated by one version of the biome code do not seamlessly line up with other chunks with a different version of the biome code consistently.
Once 1.8 was released I finally decided to restart my server and import various structure with MCEDIT reasoning that the new biome code wouldn't cause this sort of problem from then on, since Notch advertised it as being smoother and coded for future additions. And for a while my server was clean and devoid of such misalignment but now I've started seeing it pop up again as I explore new areas with the recent pre-releases.
I'm ok with this since it's still Beta. But I have to wonder, what happens after release? Is mojang going to start accounting for this or not? I can only take so many mountains cut perfectly in half with a giant perfectly vertical cliff directly next to an ocean biome before I start feeling like I'm wasting my time building a world.
I tend to build bases separated by distances of at least a kilometer or two connected by bridges or tunnels of mine cart track so one can get a view of the terrain. Likewise I've started to create fast travel rail lines in the nether to get from one end of my empire to the other. The buildings I can cut and import fairly easily, without spending too much time touching up the seams with the natural terrain. The bridges I can not and more to the point your average casual user probably isn't going to use any kind of editor.
At any rate I'm curious if anyone knows what Mojang's attitude toward this after release is going to be.
I totally agree. I wrote something like this in the forums some time back but not much response. It totally trashed my old world which had previously 'survived' multiple updates. I'm VERY hesitant spending any time on a new world for it to get wrecked again by new biome generation etc. Bit depressing really
MCedit just didn't feel right.
I don't much enjoy using MCEDIT either. It kind of defeats the purpose of mine craft. The idea of a big open world in which you can interact with everything and use that feature to building anything is what got me into minecraft, and if that big open world risks being compromised with every update my interest in it is going to wane.
I went nuts on my first world making houses and mines everywhere, but now I stay very centralized due to the need for a new world almost every update. MCedit doesn't look good all the time. I usually build things the way they are for that specific location. I agree it's annoying, and should definitely not happen in the official release.
It is disheartening. While I love the prospect of biome changes, I don't think Notch realizes quite how disruptive they are for those of us who don't wish to create new worlds.
I, too, created a new 1.8 world, and when biomes changed again in 1.9, rendering my world seed invalid, it was definitely annoying.
I definitely think this is a fixable problem. Notch would need to develop a feature that would allow player to remove unused chunks from their game world and seamlessly begin a new biome from the edges of the existing world. Im sure its no small task but, hey, its Notch. He can do it!
It's becoming alarming to me that it doesn't seem Mojang is concerned about maintaining continuity in biome generation from one version to the next.
Unfortunately it's not really possible for one version of the world builder to line up with another version, because the map is procedurally generated. Any significant change, like adding a biome, is going to make it impossible for differing versions to produce the same map from a seed.
I'm ok with this since it's still Beta. But I have to wonder, what happens after release? Is mojang going to start accounting for this or not? I can only take so many mountains cut perfectly in half with a giant perfectly vertical cliff directly next to an ocean biome before I start feeling like I'm wasting my time building a world.
At any rate I'm curious if anyone knows what Mojang's attitude toward this after release is going to be.
Many people do not want to cobble together parts of different worlds, or have a long list of save files for each project, and SMP servers benefit greatly from having a long lived consistent world. All these things push us in the direction of getting the world building code into a genuinely finalized state.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
More Ocean Life: Kelp, Coral, Crabs and Jellyfish; Coconut Palm trees for beaches and islands. Terrain Generation Changes: Which biomes and world-building features are most in need of change?
Unfortunately it's not really possible for one version of the world builder to line up with another version, because the map is procedurally generated. Any significant change, like adding a biome, is going to make it impossible for differing versions to produce the same map from a seed.
Eh I'm going to have to say no on this one. I'm guessing that what happens with terrain generation is that it generates the topology on the fly to create mountains, plains or hills and then "colors it" to be a particular type of biome or each biome is generated on the fly and connects seamlessly. If the latter of the two, then they should be able to code for it given that they already have, and if the former then it demonstrates that they are meddling presumably to fix a problem or for tweaking the fiddly bits. Either way post release they'll have a real problem adding biomes without making people angry if they don't take the time to address the problem properly.
What he means is that the biomes will generate nicer and smoother, but will still not be compatable with older generation. That's physically impossible, because he'd have to cater to each seed and how many chunks have been generated in it, taking a good look at the terrain at the edge too, comparing the old to the new generation. That's a major pain in the ass, even to make a SINGLE seed work. If he does random generation to make it smooth, it won't be. Just deal with it or reset the map.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Why do assholes exist? Life would be boring without someone to yell at.
Eh I'm going to have to say no on this one. I'm guessing that what happens with terrain generation is that it generates the topology on the fly to create mountains, plains or hills and then "colors it" to be a particular type of biome or each biome is generated on the fly and connects seamlessly. If the latter of the two, then they should be able to code for it given that they already have, and if the former then it demonstrates that they are meddling presumably to fix a problem or for tweaking the fiddly bits. Either way post release they'll have a real problem adding biomes without making people angry if they don't take the time to address the problem properly.
You're wrong on that one.
It doesn't generate topography to "paint". It generates the biome information first and then the topography is based on that. That's why you can have flat grasslands and mountains separated as biomes.
It will be impossible to add new biomes without causing misaligned chunks.
The OP has hit the problem directly, my old worlds with ALL of my projects have scars from each update. It's making them look terrible! While I can understand Notch has made the terrain generate better than the last update and that they are uncompatable, it still makes me cringe when ever I look at my main world.
Atleast it will not get changed much (if at all) after the final release.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
I was the second person to use the avatar I have. The rest took it from me. The first I asked, he said yes.
I know what I'm doing. I plan ahead, or get tired and screw up everything.
I've been concerned about this issue myself. I hope they'll be able to come up with something with the first patch or expansion that have new biomes. I wouldn't mind a tiny desert biome or a snow patch in the swamp as long as it isn't a 16x16 box, but blends in with the biomes around.
Frankly folks, you just are lucky to even be able to continue a world at all. It's asking a bit much to have them make seamless previous world integration. It's not something they can easily do anything about. The possible permutations of previous world gens, and making them seam together.. that is practically impossible.
Most games would make you give up a world when a new world generator is coded. It's a luxury that Notch gives you the ability to continue an old world at all, and this is just one of the unhappy side effects.
This is why he has always said to not be too attached to worlds.. and frankly, anyone who got attached to any world in the beta testing process has only themselves to blame. Until the game is finalized, there was never any guarantee of worlds continuing to work flawless.
You are testing an evolving product. That's just the way it is. Don't seriously expect this to happen. Even after release, if they ever change the world gen again (which they probably will in the course of the games life), worlds will get messed up again.
It's asking too much to make it make perfect seams. That's not going to happen.
Please read the original post guys. This is not about keeping any pre release world, but about future changes when they add new biomes after the releas now in November.
Let's say you create a new World after downloading the full release at MineCon. Then 1.5 month later there is a patch with a new biome. The question is how will that be delt with in order to avoid chunk errors. The moment a game is finished we expect that there are some compatability with previous versions.
Thought: when a world is being upgraded from terrain generation A to terrain generation B, determine biome borders under A and generate remaining chunks for those biomes. For border chunks containing more than one biome, prioritize A and generate blocks under B where the old biome ends. After a world has been converted, preserving A will no longer be necessary, and B can be used without sharp borders. Maybe.
I'd be happy with some kind of inverse erosion function between chunks generated by different code.
Instead of trying to implicitly line up the edges predicatively we'd just build up edges of new terrain until they meet within a certain threshold. Then you don't need the actual terrain generation code for every version. After the terrain is generated is shouldn't matter, since it only generates the terrain once then stores the structure in memory. Unless I'm wildly off on that last bit it shouldn't be considerably easier than the alternative and only needs to run once per chunk generation alignment where the generations versions are different.
But yes, thanks to the full readers who pointed out that I'm concerned about post release.
I don't see why people would have made a new world in 1.8. They clearly started that tundra biomes and such -no longer generated in it- and would be back in 1.9. So no duh that the biome generation would have changed, they also added the new muchroom biome, so why would anyone think that the world would stay the same?
Our server know this, and for 1.8 put up a temp world for us to build and enjoy the game while we waited for 1.9. Any nice guilds made in the temp world would be saved and imported to the new once made.
People QQing about the biome changes are really becoming annoying. You were TOLD these changes would happen between 1.8 and 1.9. But you insist on whining when the change did take place and ibfact the biome code is STILL changing and you still think they should stay the same? It's likly to change yet again for all we know.
Yes it's annoying, but this is BETA, they are CHANGING/FIXING THINGS like they keep saying they are!
I don't see why people would have made a new world in 1.8. They clearly started that tundra biomes and such -no longer generated in it- and would be back in 1.9. So no duh that the biome generation would have changed, they also added the new muchroom biome, so why would anyone think that the world would stay the same?
Our server know this, and for 1.8 put up a temp world for us to build and enjoy the game while we waited for 1.9. Any nice guilds made in the temp world would be saved and imported to the new once made.
People QQing about the biome changes are really becoming annoying. You were TOLD these changes would happen between 1.8 and 1.9. But you insist on whining when the change did take place and ibfact the biome code is STILL changing and you still think they should stay the same? It's likly to change yet again for all we know.
Yes it's annoying, but this is BETA, they are CHANGING/FIXING THINGS like they keep saying they are!
Well I guess you didn't read my OP. I'm not concerned about the pre-release changes, I'm concerned about how they plan to add content after release. And I am definitely not whining.
Are they going to create a solution to this problem once and for all so that any future biome additions do not wreck our existing worlds or not? I can't think of many if any full release games that force you to start over from scratch with a patch.
But suppose for a moment I was concerned about the pre-release alignment problems. It stands to reason that if they plan to solve this problem it should be done BEFORE release. Otherwise that implies they'll fix it after release which will likely involve another restart post-release.
In other words, making the point that the game is currently BETA is irrelevant since the problem is going to exist before and after release. In both the full and beta versions.
Now if they just flat out aren't planning to fix it then we've effectively been given the following admonishment. "Don't get attached to anything you've done in minecraft ever." Or more simply, "Don't get attached to minecraft."
I would really imagine that once we get the full release we won't see a lot of major changes to terrain generation. Actually, I doubt we'll a lot of very big changes at all.
I really do hate seeing the clean cut-offs at chunk boarders. It's a fairly small thing but it does do a lot to break the immersion in the MC world. In the past I tried to keep a persistent world through the versions but lately I've been restarting with every 1.9-pre release. I'm really trying to not too attached to a world and play a bit more casually until final release. Hopefully after that we won't have a lot of world-breaking changes.
Once 1.8 was released I finally decided to restart my server and import various structure with MCEDIT reasoning that the new biome code wouldn't cause this sort of problem from then on, since Notch advertised it as being smoother and coded for future additions. And for a while my server was clean and devoid of such misalignment but now I've started seeing it pop up again as I explore new areas with the recent pre-releases.
I'm ok with this since it's still Beta. But I have to wonder, what happens after release? Is mojang going to start accounting for this or not? I can only take so many mountains cut perfectly in half with a giant perfectly vertical cliff directly next to an ocean biome before I start feeling like I'm wasting my time building a world.
I tend to build bases separated by distances of at least a kilometer or two connected by bridges or tunnels of mine cart track so one can get a view of the terrain. Likewise I've started to create fast travel rail lines in the nether to get from one end of my empire to the other. The buildings I can cut and import fairly easily, without spending too much time touching up the seams with the natural terrain. The bridges I can not and more to the point your average casual user probably isn't going to use any kind of editor.
At any rate I'm curious if anyone knows what Mojang's attitude toward this after release is going to be.
I don't much enjoy using MCEDIT either. It kind of defeats the purpose of mine craft. The idea of a big open world in which you can interact with everything and use that feature to building anything is what got me into minecraft, and if that big open world risks being compromised with every update my interest in it is going to wane.
I, too, created a new 1.8 world, and when biomes changed again in 1.9, rendering my world seed invalid, it was definitely annoying.
I definitely think this is a fixable problem. Notch would need to develop a feature that would allow player to remove unused chunks from their game world and seamlessly begin a new biome from the edges of the existing world. Im sure its no small task but, hey, its Notch. He can do it!
Unfortunately it's not really possible for one version of the world builder to line up with another version, because the map is procedurally generated. Any significant change, like adding a biome, is going to make it impossible for differing versions to produce the same map from a seed.
This is generally my major concern regarding the world building code as well. People are not going to be so accepting of major changes to the map generation after launch as in the beta phase. That's why I've been a strong proponent of getting this aspect of the game polished sooner rather than later.
Many people do not want to cobble together parts of different worlds, or have a long list of save files for each project, and SMP servers benefit greatly from having a long lived consistent world. All these things push us in the direction of getting the world building code into a genuinely finalized state.
Terrain Generation Changes: Which biomes and world-building features are most in need of change?
Eh I'm going to have to say no on this one. I'm guessing that what happens with terrain generation is that it generates the topology on the fly to create mountains, plains or hills and then "colors it" to be a particular type of biome or each biome is generated on the fly and connects seamlessly. If the latter of the two, then they should be able to code for it given that they already have, and if the former then it demonstrates that they are meddling presumably to fix a problem or for tweaking the fiddly bits. Either way post release they'll have a real problem adding biomes without making people angry if they don't take the time to address the problem properly.
You're wrong on that one.
It doesn't generate topography to "paint". It generates the biome information first and then the topography is based on that. That's why you can have flat grasslands and mountains separated as biomes.
It will be impossible to add new biomes without causing misaligned chunks.
Atleast it will not get changed much (if at all) after the final release.
I was the second person to use the avatar I have. The rest took it from me. The first I asked, he said yes.
I know what I'm doing. I plan ahead, or get tired and screw up everything.
i hope though the final won't look like a swiss cheese so extremely anymore. digging became useless.
Most games would make you give up a world when a new world generator is coded. It's a luxury that Notch gives you the ability to continue an old world at all, and this is just one of the unhappy side effects.
This is why he has always said to not be too attached to worlds.. and frankly, anyone who got attached to any world in the beta testing process has only themselves to blame. Until the game is finalized, there was never any guarantee of worlds continuing to work flawless.
You are testing an evolving product. That's just the way it is. Don't seriously expect this to happen. Even after release, if they ever change the world gen again (which they probably will in the course of the games life), worlds will get messed up again.
It's asking too much to make it make perfect seams. That's not going to happen.
Let's say you create a new World after downloading the full release at MineCon. Then 1.5 month later there is a patch with a new biome. The question is how will that be delt with in order to avoid chunk errors. The moment a game is finished we expect that there are some compatability with previous versions.
Instead of trying to implicitly line up the edges predicatively we'd just build up edges of new terrain until they meet within a certain threshold. Then you don't need the actual terrain generation code for every version. After the terrain is generated is shouldn't matter, since it only generates the terrain once then stores the structure in memory. Unless I'm wildly off on that last bit it shouldn't be considerably easier than the alternative and only needs to run once per chunk generation alignment where the generations versions are different.
But yes, thanks to the full readers who pointed out that I'm concerned about post release.
Our server know this, and for 1.8 put up a temp world for us to build and enjoy the game while we waited for 1.9. Any nice guilds made in the temp world would be saved and imported to the new once made.
People QQing about the biome changes are really becoming annoying. You were TOLD these changes would happen between 1.8 and 1.9. But you insist on whining when the change did take place and ibfact the biome code is STILL changing and you still think they should stay the same? It's likly to change yet again for all we know.
Yes it's annoying, but this is BETA, they are CHANGING/FIXING THINGS like they keep saying they are!
Well I guess you didn't read my OP. I'm not concerned about the pre-release changes, I'm concerned about how they plan to add content after release. And I am definitely not whining.
Are they going to create a solution to this problem once and for all so that any future biome additions do not wreck our existing worlds or not? I can't think of many if any full release games that force you to start over from scratch with a patch.
But suppose for a moment I was concerned about the pre-release alignment problems. It stands to reason that if they plan to solve this problem it should be done BEFORE release. Otherwise that implies they'll fix it after release which will likely involve another restart post-release.
In other words, making the point that the game is currently BETA is irrelevant since the problem is going to exist before and after release. In both the full and beta versions.
Now if they just flat out aren't planning to fix it then we've effectively been given the following admonishment. "Don't get attached to anything you've done in minecraft ever." Or more simply, "Don't get attached to minecraft."
I really do hate seeing the clean cut-offs at chunk boarders. It's a fairly small thing but it does do a lot to break the immersion in the MC world. In the past I tried to keep a persistent world through the versions but lately I've been restarting with every 1.9-pre release. I'm really trying to not too attached to a world and play a bit more casually until final release. Hopefully after that we won't have a lot of world-breaking changes.