FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

I played around with 3d noise to generate caves. What do you think about these caves (YouTube Video)?

I really like them and they are generated with only one 3d noise. They don't break the surface, but grow into mountains.

In the next step I will connect them with tunnels and I also will add mines and dungeons


Server smobtest.ddns.net 30001: Offline

This is just a survival test server. It's purpose is to get experience in server settings and to test my mods. Feel free to try. You will spawn in front of a cave entrance with a few basic items. You will respawn at this position if you die.

Mapgen: Valleys, nocaves, dungeons
Mods: Valleys_c, torches (with wield light 0.5 second update), mobs redo, mobs monsters, my own cave mod for testing

Please try the caves and let me know what you think. Don't start big buildings because they will be deleted if I update the server

I will update the server status manually, so if might be online even if the server has crashed.

I don't know. The caves remind me of the default mapgens somehow. I don't know why.
To be honest, it doesn't seem too exciting or special. But maybe that's because I did not play them.

Wuzzy wrote:I don't know. The caves remind me of the default mapgens somehow. I don't know why.
To be honest, it doesn't seem too exciting or special. But maybe that's because I did not play them.

They are nothing special yet, but they don't remind me of the default mapgen at all. The v7 caves look more like flatten "blobs". They all have the same height and have a uniform shape. My caves vary in size and shape. Some are huge, some are tiny and partially to low to walk, some have plain ground, some are hard to walk

Between this blobs are some rifts. Lots of them are to steep to walk. I never liked them.

I want to make more tunnle like structures to connect the caves, but I don't know yet which algorithm I should use. There are different choices

I was able to modify the intersect mod to add an nice tunnel system

I installed a test server (see first post). Feel free to try

Yeah, playing it on the test server gave me a much better impression of the caves. Yes, the caves really are different. Looks like there are many many connection points between caves which makes it easy to go down very quickly. Could come in handy for some particular subgames.

Sorry, I don't really now what else to say.

The problem with making great caves is that it produces an immense amount of mapgen lag. Of course if minetest was set up to run everything in threads, it would help, but there's a more basic problem. If you prioritize player over mapgen, eventually the players are annoyed when they hit the edge of the generated world. Do the opposite and you get lag.

I'm trying to think of some way to do caves that's much simpler -- maybe something that doesn't even require perlin noise. I wonder how many people would even notice if you just had a few sets of geomorphic functions that produce more or less the same shapes that fit together at the same spots on each face of the chunk. That way, you're guaranteed a network of tunnels. No fetching huge blocks of perlin noise from the game, no waiting for garbage collection afterward.

Edit: No, strike that idea. Didn't help at all over the stock caves. Anyway, I'm off topic.

Well, this "go down very quickly" wasn't my intention. You are down at -100 in minutes without digging. I'm still not happy with the result.

I want something like a labyrinth of tunnels and interconnections, but it shouldn't be so easy to go down so deep

And as I mentioned in another thread the Perlin noise needs a lot of time. Each noise ~30ms

duane wrote:I'm trying to think of some way to do caves that's much simpler -- maybe something that doesn't even require perlin noise.

I have different ideas. One is to use perlin worms like Minecraft. Another is to use something like the wanderer behavior to carve tunnels. I also think about something like the space colonization algorithm or creating "layers" of tunnels using two 2d perlin noises, one for the route and one for height adjustment, and place the layers that they can overlap. But this would require lots of 2d noises with different seeds or I can add y to x and z to shift the plain.

The advantage of the Minecraft underworld is, that it just goes down 64 nodes. They don't have to calculate that much and they don't need to think about how to fill the space

burli wrote:I also think about something like the space colonization algorithm or creating "layers" of tunnels using two 2d perlin noises, one for the route and one for height adjustment, and place the layers that they can overlap.

That's clever. My system might be able to handle a couple of 2D noises. At the moment I've got all cave generation turned off, just to keep from getting lagged to death in dungeons. Unfortunately, lighting and liquid handling would probably still be too much.

The advantage of the Minecraft underworld is, that it just goes down 64 nodes. They don't have to calculate that much and they don't need to think about how to fill the space

And who really uses 30km of caves anyway? I've never managed to dig down 1km yet, and I'm already getting bored of them.

duane wrote:Unfortunately, lighting and liquid handling would probably still be too much.

True. That's why I don't want to add too much lava and water to my caves.

And who really uses 30km of caves anyway? I've never managed to dig down 1km yet, and I'm already getting bored of them.

Some ppl like to dig that deep, for whatever reason.

I opened an issue about chunk generation. I think that Minetest generates too much unnecessary chunks

I will dump the idea to use 3d noises to create tunnels. It is impossible to get the results I expect because of the nature of 3d noises.

Maybe I try space colonization next