Mountain Ranges & Larger Terrain Generation

[SegFault22]

In games like minetest, there are no proper "mountain ranges". Instead, there are small, jagged "mountains" that look like an eyesore and aren't "proper":


These "mountains" as they are sometimes called, don't look realistic, and the terrain looks terrible. Even if they were decently shaped, they would be too small to actually be called "mountains". For example, here's some Real mountains:


We all know the terrain very well aswell, and all know how tiny it is. Oceans aren't nearly as big as a lake, and the hills are just small mounds of dirt. That is pathetic, and it is no wonder that people (including me) get bored with games like this.

So I was thinking, what it would be like, to have realistic-looking mountains like the ones pictured above, and to have a larger terrain-generation system. And I think it would be awesome!
Sadly, Minecraft has a height limit, which prevents awesome mountains from being created. But Minetest does not have a [relatively small] height limit, and it is very possible here to make huge mountains. But said huge mountains would be out of place, if the rest of the terrain is tiny like it is now.

My suggestion, is to do both of these things:
-Change terrain generation to produce tall, lush mountains with an average slope of 40 degrees, while still having ledges and flat areas mixed into the generation. Some regions would be covered in trees, while others wouldn't have many trees - said regions would be large, so that the mountains aren't spotty-looking. If a mountain is tall enough, it may generate snow on its cap, or bare stone with no dirt/grass.

-Make terrain larger. Seriously, the hills are like small dirt mounts, and the oceans aren't nearly as big as a common river tributary or lake. Making the terrain generate larger, would be much more realistic, yet very amazing and epic. Building a house in a valley would no longer require cutting up the hills on either side, and the houses would fit in with the scale of the terrain.

This isn't possible in Minecraft, for two reasons. First, the world isn't tall enough for epic/realistic mountains. Second, the development team is too busy adding trivial stuff like Item Frames and Horses, and does not have any time for actually making Minecraft better.

Since Minetest doesn't focus on development of the default game (items and other modstuffs) as much as Minecraft, there is more room for making the entire game better. And since the world height is [practically] infinite, there is plenty of room for the mountain ranges. If these changes are done, Minetest would literally become more awesome than Minecraft. Building would be fun, and terrain smoothing (different suggestion) wouldn't even be needed to make the environment look epic. More people would come to Minetest for its amazing terrain, and Minecraft would be all but left behind.

So, what do you think? Please submit your opinions/ideas for discussion, but don't be unnecessarily negative.

[Krock]

I already asked for something to generate mountains and higher hills.
And I think, if there get higher mountains generated, then there also should be a new way to generate ores.
Also deep oceans do I miss sometimes...

EDIT: The new way to generate ores is because people, which are living on hills need to dig deep down until they get ores.

[Sokomine]

Real mountains...yes, they would be nice. And they would utterly fail to work on servers because you'd never see them. Except if you stand on one.

The size of "oceans" is also a problem. Sometimes players start building aircraft carriers or tankers (see Redcrabs server). Once you managed to load the entire ship, you have to strain your imagination to find an explanation how the huge ship ever got there - because there's land all around and not enough water anywhere for a ship that size.

More flat areas for player-built cities and fields would also be nice. Perhaps making the area around spawn pretty flat to begin with (and let the real intresting terrain start further out) might help. At least for servers.

For singleplayer survival worlds, it's diffrent. The current approach is very fine there - you don't have to go too far for diffrent terrains, and intresting spots for a small house are easy to find.

Perhaps manual server creation could help a bit here - at least for servers: Start around spawn with flat mapgen, sourround that with some of nores smooth hilly region magen, add a big ocean at the other side, add a few of paramats big mountains to the other side. It would require hardly any actual programming and could be done by manually changing mapgen/installed mods before exploring the desired region. Or by selecting diffrent mapgens depending on (roughly rounded) x/z coordinates.

I have no idea how the transition between diffrent terrains (flat, deep ocean with occasional islands, smooth hills, mountains, canyons, ..) could be handled in such a case.

[PilzAdam]

(Disclaimer: I havent read the whole first post (its too long), so forgive me if it doesnt make sense what I post now)

I personally prefere these "small mountains" that we have currently, because it would be simply boring if the in-game terrain had the scale of the real world.

[Pitriss]

PilzAdam: +1

[Sokomine]

personally prefere these "small mountains" that we have currently, because it would be simply boring if the in-game terrain had the scale of the real world.

The scale of the real world would probably be too large. 30 km^2 - that space might be taken up by a few mountains or a large town. And on the ocean, it would be nothing. Yet there are situations (especially if people build large things) where the terrain is sometimes too small-scale, while in other situations it suits perfectly (i.e. singleplayer survival and/or small houses).

[BrandonReese]

I bet paramat could modify his mount meru mod to make mountain ranges instead of a single mountain. It would be more abrupt than the real life photo to used as an example but it would be pretty cool to have a mountain range across the map.

[proller]

simplest way to get high mountains map:
mg_name = indev
mgindev_np_terrain_base = 400, 1000, (2500, 2500, 2500), 82341, 8, 0.6, 1, 1
mgindev_np_terrain_higher = 200, 400, (5000, 5000, 5000), 85039, 8, 0.6, 1, 1

you can tune numbers and get various landscapes

[twoelk]

I would love mountain ranges of the "Mt Meru" scale. Not as high as the Himalaya but high enough to be truly a mountain (300m+) Ranges should be long enough to be a real obstical. Lakes (or ponds) at the moment often do not justify a harbour, as the (imagined)ships can hardly move considering the size nor do they normally justify large bridges as most could have a road go around them that isn't much longer.

It is true that large scale biomes may be impressive but also easily boring. Yet a good mixture could give the landscape a more destinctive structure. As of now the pattern of the noise(s) used to generate the landscape seems to lead to a pretty even destribuated pattern of biomes (that is if you generate enough landscape).

I think it may lead to interesting results if water was allowed to build far larger biomes, as in "sea/ocean". Although I think several hundreds of water nodes across may be enough in contrast to many thousands of meters as in real life. (I don't want to swim for months to reach the other side ;-) ) Also water and mountains should be allowed to build biomes that are stringlike - like mountain ranges ( I know rivers and canyons are present in mods doing this for water allready)

Of course for island worlds it might be simply better to change the ratio of water to land. As of now we usually have a "land" landscape dotted with lakes - so - how about a water landscape dotted with islands, some kilometers across, others arranged along "strings". Again I know there are mods for this but I would love some values I could add to some builtin function in the GUI of the basic engine - because the engine is the place to provide a nice map generation without mapgenerating mods fighting the engine and each other, overwriting what the engine had just built and populated.

Something like sliders: more--less mountains, more--less water, higher--flatter mountains, and so on would be cool......
......
......
but I guess this is getting more and more the description of a map editor....
....
....oh well, dreams

[paramat]

Now 0.4.8 and the lua voxel manipulator are here i can easily create mountain ranges of any size, the chunks will generate in under a second too, i am certainly intending to rewrite my landup mod to use LVM it's just a case of getting around to it
MT mapgen dev kwolekr / hmmmm will be adding optional mountains to mapgen v7, not sure how big but i expect around 200m? MT terrain is not realisticallty sized and mountains need to be suitably scaled to not over-power the default terrain or take up too much space, however my mod will have parameters for those who want to make 5km high mountains.
I am also contemplating how to create a mapgen with variation on a larger scale, in fact like a fractal: variation on every scale, i want to create large archipelago regions mixed in to standard mapgen, keep an eye on paragen mod for my experiments in this. kwolekr / hmmmm is actually also pondering how to add of larger scale variation in mapgen.

[SegFault22]

(Disclaimer: I havent read the whole first post (its too long), so forgive me if it doesnt make sense what I post now)

I personally prefere these "small mountains" that we have currently, because it would be simply boring if the in-game terrain had the scale of the real world.

It wouldn't be boring at all. The current mountains look more like mesas than mountains, which are pathetic. If someone wants to build a log cabin on the "mountain", it looks out-of-place, and the player might even have to add more to the mountain, for their house to have support under it.
Making the mountains bigger, would allow much more to be possible. Houses would look right on the mountain. Coal mines would make sense.
Also, there should be a reward for finding large mountains - the generation of coal ore at the higher levels would be much more, than at lower levels. Maybe even to the point, that coal is more common than stone in the "heart" of the mountains. Coal blocks could also generate, but only if a blocks is surrounded on all 6 sides by Coal ore.

Now 0.4.8 and the lua voxel manipulator are here i can easily create mountain ranges of any size, the chunks will generate in under a second too, i am certainly intending to rewrite my landup mod to use LVM it's just a case of getting around to it
MT mapgen dev kwolekr / hmmmm will be adding optional mountains to mapgen v7, not sure how big but i expect around 200m? MT terrain is not realisticallty sized and mountains need to be suitably scaled to not over-power the default terrain or take up too much space, however my mod will have parameters for those who want to make 5km high mountains.
In the meantime i will rewrite landup for larger mountain ranges in mapgen v6.

Awesome. Well, uh... Keep up the good work, and I'll be happy to see what kinds of mountains your mods would create. If it doesn't get implemented in minetest default/engine, I'll still use the mod in my server that I plan to create someday.

[Novacain]

I like this idea. I think it could also be a great idea to have a template people could use for servers. just something like a sheltered bay surrounded by mountains.

An example of what it could look similar too is Emerald Bay in Lake Tahoe. Only with larger mountains

[Tomas Brod]

Well, I was playing with the v7 mapgen and this is what I got.

1. Get latest minetest
2. Create a new world with v7 mapgen and minetest_game.
3. Start and stop it. (idk if necessary)
4. Overwrite the map_meta.txt file with one in attachment.
5. delete map.sqlite

The MGv7 has a potential.

apparently forum software does not allow txt attachments:
http://brod.refin.sk/fu/map_meta.txt

[ABJ]

..
EDIT: The new way to generate ores is because people, which are living on hills need to dig deep down until they get ores.

I know this post was long ago, but it reminds me of something. This effect is actually very realistic..
In real life, when people make tunnels through mountains, they DO uncover ores.

Back to topic, YES it would look BEAUTIFUL in Minetest. Mountains thousands of nodes high fading into the sky is something I miss. And gigantic rivers and large, rolling river valleys and super-deep canyons and gigantic oceans are a chance we could never miss. I really hate it when I'm crossing a huge body of water thinking it's an ocean and all of a sudden BUMP! It makes me so mad and so frustrated.
And of course bays and gulfs.

[Gael de Sailly]

4. Overwrite the map_meta.txt file with one in attachment.
5. delete map.sqlite

Proper way to do it : find the minetest.conf file and add the following lines :

Code: Select all

mgv7_np_cave1 = 0, 12, (100,100,100), 52534, 4, 0.5, 2
mgv7_np_cave2 = 0, 12, (100,100,100), 10325, 4, 0.5, 2
mgv7_np_filler_depth = 0, 1.2, (150,150,150), 261, 4, 0.7, 2
mgv7_np_height_select = -0.5, 1, (250,250,250), 4213, 5, 0.69, 2
mgv7_np_mount_height = 630, 250, (2000,2000,2000), 72449, 6, 0.6, 2
mgv7_np_mountain = -0.6, 1, (750, 1400, 750), 5333, 5, 0.68, 2
mgv7_np_ridge = 0, 1, (100, 100, 100), 6467, 4, 0.75, 2
mgv7_np_ridge_uwater = 0, 1, (500,500,500), 85039, 4, 0.6, 2
mgv7_np_terrain_alt = 4, 50, (1200,1200,1200), 5934, 5, 0.6, 2
mgv7_np_terrain_base = 4, 70, (300,300,300), 82341, 6, 0.7, 2
mgv7_np_terrain_persist = 0.6, 0.1, (500,500,500), 539, 3, 0.6, 2
mgv7_spflags = mountains, ridges

Save the file and start Minetest.
Create a new world with mapgen v7, it will be automatically set in map_meta.txt.

[Gael de Sailly]

I'm working on a Lua mapgen, Valleys Mapgen, which aims to create real mountains and various landscapes.

[ABJ]

I'm working on a Lua mapgen, Valleys Mapgen, which aims to create real mountains and various landscapes.

That's nice. As long as you don't forget the trees that is :)
And do put volcanos and big oceans too. And islands and stuff :) Will check your mapgen out :)

[Gael de Sailly]

Download the lastest version. There are trees.
There will be more types of trees in the future.

About volcanos… it's more difficult, but it's a good idea. This is not the priority.

[paramat]

ABJ, almost everything you wish for can be done in mgv7 with custom noise parameters added to .conf as shown above.

[BobbyBonsaimind]

Regarding realistic* mountain ranges in Minetest, I have given it a lot of thought in the last time, and it seems to be hard, if not impossible to accomplish for several reasons.

At the moment the map of Minetest is limited to 62.000 nodes in each direction, if we assume that one node is 1 cubic-meter, that's 62x62km. That is not a lot of terrain. Here is a roughly 62x62km map-part of Austria:



It goes from the right/east with an elevation of ~250-300m above sea level to the left with a maximum at ~1000m. And that at the left is not remotely "mountainous" terrain, it's quite "hilly", yeah, but not really what you would call mountains. So if you want to create somehow "realistic" terrain you can only generate a very small portion of it, so you'll never have flat lands and mountain peaks in one map.

Also there is the view range limitation in Minetest. The image posted in the first post shows a view of at least 100 kilometer of terrain. It is at the moment simply not possible to have such a view in Minetest.

However, for quite some time I had the idea in my head to generate "realism based" terrain with exactly that limitation. How I would do it:

• Generate a basic height map of 775x775 "tiles". That is 62.000/80, meaning it is the complete map that is available to us.
• Do terrain manipulation on it (erosion, deformations etc.).
• Keep this map in memory.
• Whenever a map block (80x80x80 nodes) is generated, take the basic tile we pre-generated and run a "detailing" operation on it.

Imagine it like a fractal (mandelbrot) in which you can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in and zoom in and zoom in and all you get is more details...same approach.

But if that terrain is playable in a nice way, I don't know.

You most likely imagine walking on the side of a mountain, with high peaks to your right and a vast valley to your left. Now imagine that you can only see ~300 meters top in all directions, what do you see? Not much. Welcome to Minetest. Your terrain might be vast and awesome, but that doesn't help if the players can not see that. The only see small portions of it, so it is more important to have interesting features in that small range.

There is also the approach that I took with my Australopithecus project, terrain can range from roughly -120 to +120 in height, with some local "features" that might span up to +400 or higher. The terrain generated is quite usable and interesting to play with, as it allows to have very descent mountains. If you add a lot of features, like extrusions (Uluru), peaks (everything above a certain height is mulitplied with a fixed value, creating fast rising peaks) and canyons/basins, the resulting terrain is extremely interesting to traverse, but not in the slightest realistic. But there can be mulitple interesting features within viewing range of each other, and that's what is important.

*: I don't like the usage of "realistic" in the context of Minetest, especially not in the ambiguous way a lot of people have been using it in the community. "Realistic" means it would pass as realistic, something outdoors, you'll never get a "realistic" terrain with a resolution of 1 square meter with the limitation that a node is either full or empty. Additionally there is the limitation that only few people want to actually play "realistic" terrain, because it includes a fuckton of walking, and according to Scott Rogers and his Guide "LevelUp! The Guide to Great Video Game Design", walking is never, ever (absolutely never) game play.

[Casimir]

This is mapgen v6 with default Voxelgarden settings. There is also v5 which is awesome and all the mods by paramat. So what are we complaining about? It's that those things are not default, or not usable. In gameplay I also have my viewrange at 300 (maximum), I never get to see the terrain in a whole.

[Sokomine]

You most likely imagine walking on the side of a mountain, with high peaks to your right and a vast valley to your left. Now imagine that you can only see ~300 meters top in all directions, what do you see? Not much. Welcome to Minetest. Your terrain might be vast and awesome, but that doesn't help if the players can not see that. The only see small portions of it, so it is more important to have interesting features in that small range.

That's right. Most of the time, if we walk around in RL, we don't see much of the sourrounding area. The view of the horizon is blocked by other objects. Even at sea view range is limited.

Mapgens do generate diffrent and intresting maps. The only drawback is that it *looks* so small. Maybe we can use that trick other video games have been using for a long time? Just use a fixed background, like that skybox with the planets in MoonTest. That background might also be useful to provide players with some orientation as to which direction they're currently facing. Regarding space, such a scenario is very convincing as movement compared to far away objects in the background is insignificant. Mountain ranges would be difficult. 30 km (starting from the middle) might be enough to reach such a mountain. People would expect it to be there eventually. And the view would need to change, depending on where you're currently standing in that 60x60 km area. And if people start building something, they'd expect it to show up on the horizon when climbing a tower. Maybe we ought to invent sandstorms and lots of pollution so that you can't see too far. And then there's the problem of not-yet-generated areas. Still, creating a nice skybox (perhaps diffrent ones for day and night?) could provide an intresting experiment.

[BobbyBonsaimind]

@Sokomine Well, in theory all you need is some low resolution representation of the terrain as a skybox.

I think an interesting solution would be to "bake" the terrain of far map blocks, making them a static mesh for that player. If I know correctly, such static meshes are peanuts for GPUs these days and can be very big. To do that one could simply transform the loaded map block into a static mesh, removing all duplicate points, merging adjacent areas and then pushing that grid to the GPU. That would also have the upside to remove memory and CPU strain, as it is only a cloud of points/triangles and not of nodes anymore, but players can still see far away terrain (not live, but better than nothing I guess).

When the map generation isn't a "block all the things" operation anymore, not generated terrain becomes less of a concern, as you can happily generate blocks in the background without interrupting the user.

[prestidigitator]

I think an interesting solution would be to "bake" the terrain of far map blocks, making them a static mesh for that player.

Heck, just take each map block and represent it as a cube, with a texture composed of the average colors viewable through that square of the block (including transparency). If it's far enough away, it'll be good enough. Or represent map blocks as various sized blobs based on where there are enough nodes clumped together. There are lots of graphically feasible options that could work for this.

[Magz_builder]

As a newbie player I would welcome most suggestions in this thread. Viewing distance is limited (understandably), but if there is a software trick to show objects that are further away with limited detail, then I'd be all for it. It would definitely make the game look more awesome (and it would make tall towers more rewarding!).

Also, larger geographical objects (mountains and oceans) would be cool. Of course, at smaller scale, we'd still want to have the current level of details, otherwise the map would be boring... but if larger features could be included too ( occasionally) that would make for interesting maps.