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Guest Elagn

River Improvments

22 posts in this topic

Let me start out with the fact that I do like that there are rivers in TFC, it adds to the landscape and more, but I think there are some fairly major improvements that could be made to them to make them better.

1 )  Floodplains. Historicaly, the first centers of agriculture and farming were right on the banks of major rivers, such as the Tigris, Eurphrates, Yellow, Nile, and others. About at the same level as the water is a flattened area perfect for farming, naturaly irrigated that periodically floods and makes the soil rich. Making them actually flood would be hard to program, but a flattened area arround rivers would make farming much easier, and more realistic.

 

2 ) Water Elevation. All water except hot springs is generated at a certain level or below. Rivers aren't at the same level as the sea. They should, to a degree, be about the same level as the ground around them. a little lower at some places or even cliffs in mountains would be fine, but all usable water in the world shouldn't be at the same level. Ideally, there would be springs in mountains that cascade down, joining into rivers that eventually go to the ocean, but that might be a bit much.

 

3 ) Size. Rivers in minecraft are tiny. Rivers in real life can be huge, such as the Mississippi, Amazon, Nile, and others. Most of what we acutally consider rivers in real life are much larger than those in minecraft. Some rivers should remain the current size, but they are more of streams. Large, navigable rivers should also exist, and rivers should be able to come together to form larger rivers. Decent sized rivers would then make water vehicles more reasonable.

 

In total summary, water should flow from higher elevations to lower elevations, it should be much easier to farm on them, and they should varry in size, from the tiny, to the massive. Rivers were the focal points of civilization, yet in the game, all they do are slow you down while you search for a nice swamp to settle in for good farming. Rivers should become, for once, an acutally useful feature

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Most of this, I'm quite sure is impractical if not impossible, but on one specific point I emphatically agree: mega-rivers. Amazons, Niles, Mississippis.

Flood plains aren't really flood plains without the floods, which are .. problematic to implement, to say the least, but deltas where these larger rivers empty into the ocean would be nice, too.

A note on why much of the rest ranges from practical to impossible: terrain is generated piece-meal. Rivers that change altitudes without a plan would look ridiculous; you'd get things like rivers that run up one side of a hill and down the other, in very obvious ways. No trivial way to avoid it without somehow having a higher-level plan imposed on terrain gen. I'm not sure this is, strictly, impossible, but it would certainly be difficult, and would likely greatly increase the complexity (and speed) of chunk generation.

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The question of rivers is related to infinite versus finite water.

Is not impossible to create a map with finite water and have rivers behaving the way they should. What makes it hard is how minecraft worlds are infinite so chunks are generated on demand.

The way I see I would rather have a more believable world where water behaves like in the real world than having a infinite world.

We already have a limit on the North and south coordinates. Yes I know that in theory you can keep walking north forever but is impossible to survive there unless in creative.

I see no problem in creating a limit on the east west coordinates, lets say 20,000 blocks in each direction.

Now the coders may be able to tell us if the map would need to be pre-generated for this to work and how long it would take for your computer to do it.

I believe that if this was a possibility we could also be able download maps. People would design maps and upload then to the community.

Understand that all this is just conjecture and totally out of the TFC scope. This would be a mod in itself. 

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The idea for river elevation isnt for it to be perfect, more so just to not have every single block of usable water at or below a certain elevation. With hills, rivers generaly go around hills, though this would be a pain to program. It would be awesome if it searched how to go to low ground, and could generate lakes to fill in big dips it finds. This would require a whole new system to first generate elevation, then run rivers, form lakes, and much more, similar to Dwarf Fortress world generation.

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The way that vanilla minecraft handles river generation is that it pretty much just throws them along the border of two different biomes. Bioxx has already been doing some work on rivers for 79 so that they instead cut through biomes, and they don't cut through high elevation biomes so you don't have to worry about a grand canyon going through a massive mountain.

 

Here's one picture that Bioxx has thrown up on his twitter showing worldgen progress. The white lines are rivers:

 

Posted Image

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The way that vanilla minecraft handles river generation is that it pretty much just throws them along the border of two different biomes. Bioxx has already been doing some work on rivers for 79 so that they instead cut through biomes, and they don't cut through high elevation biomes so you don't have to worry about a grand canyon going through a massive mountain.

 

Here's one picture that Bioxx has thrown up on his twitter showing worldgen progress. The white lines are rivers:

 

Posted Image

 

Can't wait!

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yah, that river generation looks like an excellent improvement, so kudos to Bioxx.

As for the idea of finite, pre-generated worlds... to me, the ideal, which would probably be tricky (to say the least) to retrofit into the existing minecraft code base, would be a finite world that wraps on x, so you could walk all the way around the world along the equator and come back to where you started. This would be far preferable to running into a wall or farlands type scenario, but the more I think about it, the more sure I am it would be virtually impossible to retrofit into minecraft and tfc. Everything that checks relative positions, distances, or ranges would have to be tweaked, and I'm quite sure that, even if standard functions exist to do these checks, they are not consistently used through the code where the actual checks are performed. So another pipe dream that's doomed out of the gate... but it would be cool!

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I have that feature in my server so if you walk over the border on east or west you end up on the other side. It mimics how the earth is round

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really? O_o what kind of server setup? I've not been paying that much attention lately, but last time I checked there was nothing like that available.

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Just read my server post. Is in test mode at the moment. Post there if you want to be whitelisted.

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oh, you're just using that bukkit plugin that teleports you? Unless there's been a pretty major update, that's a pretty brutal approach to world wrapping, and not really what I (or, well, anyone) has in mind when you talk about wrapping the world. How cruel would it be to have all that phantom terrain off behind the teleport boundary, taunting you with trees, crops, and minerals, only to teleport you away when you try to approach them? XD

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Yeah is not perfect but is a start. It will not be better until the concept of finite world is introduced to some mods. Since for the world to really wrap around implies that the same biome and terrain would be on both sides.Not impossible to make but it requires some heavy codding.

Our best home is for a plugin for bukkit. I don't think the TFC DEV's will spend time on that.

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About the only thing I really lack is the fact that there are no really flowing rivers. Everything's still, maybe some stream here and there but no real, flowing rivers changing elevation, leading to small waterfalls etc.

Though I understand that such stuff could be somewhat demanding, a thing requiring caution as TFC is already taxing on many computers.

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Those rivers look nice. Maybe if the continents were bigger, and the rivers too!!!!

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It raises the question as to why there was never any full flowing water blocks in vanilla.

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It raises the question as to why there was never any full flowing water blocks in vanilla.

Where would they flow to? World isn't generated enough for them to decide to flow towards any particular direction most of the time. Pregenerating this much terrain at once would kill servers left and right.

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Where would they flow to? World isn't generated enough for them to decide to flow towards any particular direction most of the time. Pregenerating this much terrain at once would kill servers left and right.

What about pre-generated worlds? Is it possible? Would that make possible for the game to use finite water and have flowing water?

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yeah, with pre-generated worlds it could work; you'd generate the terrain itself first, without rivers or lakes, then in a second pass, generate streams, rivers, and lakes in a more realistic way.

I was going to say these worlds would have to be finite, but actually you could generate them one continent at a time on an infinite world, though it wouldn't be a trivial thing to do so, and it doesn't help much since generating a continents' worth of terrain at a time is still too large a chunk for a server to be doing on the fly as players explore.

but yes. You could pre-generate terrain far more realistic than can be generated on-the-fly in-game; not just rivers, but all the little anomalies that tend to crop up on chunk boundaries could be eliminated.

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yeah, with pre-generated worlds it could work; you'd generate the terrain itself first, without rivers or lakes, then in a second pass, generate streams, rivers, and lakes in a more realistic way.I was going to say these worlds would have to be finite, but actually you could generate them one continent at a time on an infinite world, though it wouldn't be a trivial thing to do so, and it doesn't help much since generating a continents' worth of terrain at a time is still too large a chunk for a server to be doing on the fly as players explore.but yes. You could pre-generate terrain far more realistic than can be generated on-the-fly in-game; not just rivers, but all the little anomalies that tend to crop up on chunk boundaries could be eliminated.

A lot of work was put into trying this in the past but it is still a huge pain in the ass to transfer into a blocky minecraft world sadly. 

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oh, you're just using that bukkit plugin that teleports you? Unless there's been a pretty major update, that's a pretty brutal approach to world wrapping, and not really what I (or, well, anyone) has in mind when you talk about wrapping the world. How cruel would it be to have all that phantom terrain off behind the teleport boundary, taunting you with trees, crops, and minerals, only to teleport you away when you try to approach them? XD

 

Could you not just copy the terrain from one side to the other?  Maybe have it update on server reset.

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Done artfully that could help, but you still have a teleport, which isn't instantaneous, and you still have a line in the world across which entities - from players to mobs to dropped items - are invisible. You really need proper world wrapping to be implemented deeply in the engine, and currently, code just accesses and coordinates directly, not using any king of global accessors that could be modified to properly implement world wrapping in a non-breaking way. It would be virtually impossible to retrofit this feature properly, making everything from redstone to block updates to mob AI work as seamlessly across this boundary. As long as the boundary is going to be there affecting things, it might as well be prominent and visible to the player.

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I like the idea for floodplains. :D but you wouldn't want them to just flood with water blocks, and not to mention making halved and different sized water blocks would be a pain... 

 

Why not have Floodplains act like the boundry beetween for example a cold biome and a warm one. It could be raining on one side but a block over snows falling. And the blocks more specifically the Dirt and Grass in floodplains would decay over time into a different block, a block of flooded dirt/grass that would slow you and you'd sink into it about halfway making it look like you were waist deep in flood water. As well building on the floodplain itself would be a bit hazerdous and perhaps it could be made so that when a heavier block like cobblestone or plain dirt is placed on top of it the block simply falls into the flooded block to simulate the effects of buildings sinking into the oversaturated soil.  Then over time it would drain and turn into dirt/grass but the dirt/grass closer to the river would stay in this stay almost constantly, (save for the winter when it could possibly turn into frozen flooded dirt/grass?) 

 

:D maybe even make plants such as Rice only able to be planted on this 'flooded block' and allow Cattails and Jute to spawn growing on it in the wild.

 

 

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