I'm not working on Tall Worlds Mod anymore! But Barteks2x is!
Read all about his progress here:
I'll keep the original OP below for historical reference though.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Next up in my series of exciting mods is the Tall Worlds Mod!
The goal is simple: Raise the height cap on the world from 256 blocks to 16,777,216 blocks, but do it without adding too much lag. Turns out that's pretty technically challenging to do, but I love a good technical challenge.
Download the mod:
Tall Worlds Mod has released a somewhat-working protoype! The core idea of cubic chunks works fairly well, but there are still lots of minor bugs that prevent seamless gameplay. You can try out the mod today if you like, but don't expect it to work with any of your other mods.
Download Tall Worlds Mod prototype
How does it work?
The first step to raising the height cap on worlds is to break up the world into pieces vertically and only load the vertical pieces when players are actually near them. Of course, Minecraft's chunk system does exactly this to break up the world horizontally, but the vertical size of the world has always been fixed at 256 blocks.
Tall Worlds Mod breaks up Minecraft's world in the vertical dimension as well. Here's an early video of the cubic chunk loading system in action, the main component of Tall Worlds Mod.
Of course, players can't travel very quickly in the horizontal directions, so chunk loading doesn't have to be very fast there. But what about players in free fall? How fast can a cubic chunk system load chunks when players are moving very quickly? This video answers that question:
The details:
Minecraft Version: 1.8.3
Modding System: Magic Mojo Mod Loader (M3L for short)
Wait... what the heck is Magic Mojo Mod Loader?
Well, building the Tall Worlds Mod required gutting and entirely replacing large portions of the Minecraft engine. Namely, the entire chunk loading system and a fair bit of the lighting system. Since these changes are rather large, there isn't much benefit to using a modding system like Forge which has essentially no APIs to help with something like this.
I'm using Tall Worlds Mod to start building the modding API for my own modding system, Magic Mojo Mod Loader, or M3L for short. You can read the justification for why we need yet another modding system here, but it means that when I eventually release M3L, you'll actually have modding API support if you wanted to do something completely insane like entirely replace the chunk loading system in Minecraft.
If you REALLY have a lot of free time, there is another thread discussing cubic-chunk type mods. It's 275 pages long at the time of this post and it's chocked full of discussion about cubic chunk ideas, particularly suggestions for how to solve "the lighting problem." I'll be honest though, I haven't read the whole thread.
Need more room to talk? Try the offiicial Tall Worlds Mod Forums:
http://www.cuchazinteractive.com/forums/
I think we're starting to outgrow a single thread for discussing Tall Worlds. In a huge thread, sometimes good suggestions get lost. If you feel like you want more room to talk, or a place to put your suggestions so people can actually find them later, header over to the dedicated forums.
Development Status: Backburner'd!
I'm taking a break from working on Tall Worlds for a while.
All of the fun technical challenges have been solved and all that's left to do is a massive amount of tedious cleanup work. This is a hobby project. I'm going to enjoy doing the fun bits, but there's no reason I need to slog through all the tedious bits. The tedious work left to do includes things like finding all the places in vanilla Minecraft that broke because of the new engine changes and trying to add compatibility with every modded thing ever imagined.
The only reason to do boring work is if someone is paying a decent wage, and that's definitely not the case here. I ran a poll for about a month asking if players would donate to a Patreon. The answer was very clear: the donations wouldn't come anywhere close to paying a decent wage, or even make a dent in my rent payments.
I general, I think making massive changes to Minecraft's core game engine and seeing them through into a finished product is far larger in scope than any one person can really do for hobby without getting seriously burned out. I put up a prototype mod to show the idea actually works, but I don't really have any interest in turning it into a finished product. Perhaps it's up to Mojang now to decide if they want cubic chunks or not, but it's just too much work for a single unpaid modder.
The entire project is open source of course. Contributions are always welcome from other modders. None of this technology is disappearing any time soon, it's just going to start gathering dust.
In the meantime, I'm going to focus all of my energy into my Ships Mod and make that mod the best mod it can be.
Since I'm no longer splitting my time among too many projects, I should be able to make some real progress, so look forward to some exciting new features there!
2
OMG, I...I love you so much right now
This was my favourite mod for so long, and now it has returned... I think I'm going to cry joyous tears...
1
[Probably stupid] Question: Once the world is generated, if you copy it over to another place - such as a server - do you have to keep the world type setting, or could you use the default one (with the acceptance it wouldn't control new chunks that get loaded)?
1
I shall wait with bated breath; I simply adore this mod. Its concept is wonderful, especially compared to other mods for recipe adding/changing/removing. You've done an amazing job, I look forward to see its continued progression
1
It's the stupidest and most destructive because of how much it's changed. Easy way to tell? FORGE is buggy all over the place. If Forge isn't necessarily stable, how much harder will it be for everything else to be updated and stable?
In an unrelated note; I'm having a small issue I was hoping someone could help me with - using shift (sneak) to dismount isn't working for me, and I'm uncertain why or what to do.
1
You are such a tease - I love you ^^