Mapgens

[sofar]

Describes mapgen design

• layering if used
• base mapgen if used (v7? valleys?)
• noise params
• decoration placement and other post-mapgen hooks

[gaelysam]

I wrote this on the forum:

• Big mountains (300 nodes high?), big oceans, floating islands
• At some places, terrain would be very chaotic, especially on mountainous places. These big mountains wouldn't be large smooth domes but irregular peaks with rocks everywhere.

This would need to code a new Lua mapgen and it would be slower. But we can use a core mapgen and tweak the parameters. I would say do no use v6 because of its hardcoded biomes and because it is (to my mind) boring.

[sofar]

I think v6 is out of the question indeed.

v7's biome system allows for a lot of customization, at least at the surface. We may have to layer lua mapgens under and above.

Yes, high mountains please.

[twoelk]

as this game looks like it might include scripted adventures as somewhat larger blocks in the usually random world favored for minetest we might need some larger pieces of terrain that are placed by the game and intigrated into the surrounding mapgen. Just as pyramids, temples, and villages are placed allready by other mods. It would be nice if this was possible on a much larger scale. It would be lovely to have for example several of Paramat's Mount Meru scattered at larger distances over the map that had some structure with information of importance near or at the top that would be worth climbing to. Similar places of interest might be an island in an ocean or a lone oasis in a vast desert together with an old temple or whatever.

I think code that could merge parts of terrain generated by different mapgens, mods or other sources or at different times in a convincing way might be usefull for Minetest anyways, not only for a single game.

btw I would love it if the map would be surrounded by an ocean at the 32k border and thus turn out to be a group of large islands.

[sofar]

A lot of problems are solved by going entirely with a lua mapgen as this would allow us to create mapgen zones and possibly even blend them.

This could provide for mountain mapgens blending with regular landscape mapgens, and we could exclude spawn zones from them as well - e.g. -5000,5000 in x,z would be void of tier 2/3 mapgen zones.