FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Is there a way (changing of source code OK) to extend the viewing range?
However I put the settings, it seems the game doesn't render nodes further than approximately half a kilometer. I've been standing in the same place for half an hour, hoping for the landscape further away to show.
I am aware that this may slow the game down to Unplayable, I just want to see what it looks like.

Somewhen there's a limit when Minetest stops generating and/or sending far mapblocks.
For this, change in your minetest.conf the following lines:


minetest.conf.example GitHub link

Thanks, will try when nobody at work is looking ;)

Have you tried to enable far view by pressing R? First fly around the map a bit so everything gets loaded, then hit R.

Thanks!

But that light blue artifact in the water is really annoying. I get them all the time.

OmniStudent wrote:But that light blue artifact in the water is really annoying. I get them all the time.

Is that just sky showing through un-generated ground?

Press + until it is at the range you want. - makes it shorter range.

kaadmy wrote:

OmniStudent wrote:But that light blue artifact in the water is really annoying. I get them all the time.

Is that just sky showing through un-generated ground?

Never thought of that, but ground is obviously generated very far in the xy-plane.

OmniStudent wrote:But that light blue artifact in the water is really annoying. I get them all the time.

That's an optimization that makes views like this look nasty. The server assumes that things that are pitch black and far away from the player wouldn't be visible or useful and doesn't send them, but as it turns out, the bottom of oceans is exactly like that.

You can try how it looks without that if you can modify the code and re-compile:



However, I'm not sure if we should just remove that piece of code. Some kind of an actual fix to it so that it would send ocean floors, but still not things that are very far in actual undeground, would be much better.

Another option of course would be to make the bottom of the skybox to be black. Then the blue sky wouldn't shine through like that. It might make more sense than making the server send pitch black blocks. Certainly it would have better performance at least.

Thankyou, will try this in the weekend.

Worked as you said!

Before:

After (couldn't figure out where to change the view distance for this one, but nevermind) :

The second screenshot looks good. I sometimes fly around just to get the ocean floor covered. Can this be added at least as an option to the game?

Sokomine wrote:The second screenshot looks good. I sometimes fly around just to get the ocean floor covered. Can this be added at least as an option to the game?

probably not, or at least not before 7 years down the road. Devs are busy doing, then re-doing, then discussing various innoticeable changes and then scrapping them. important stuff, like hyphens in code, adding dead code, "better" solutions for the golden future (never used...) so PLS STOP MAKING SENSE. kthxbai

jin_xi wrote:

Sokomine wrote:The second screenshot looks good. I sometimes fly around just to get the ocean floor covered. Can this be added at least as an option to the game?

probably not, or at least not before 7 years down the road. Devs are busy doing, then re-doing, then discussing various innoticeable changes and then scrapping them. important stuff, like hyphens in code, adding dead code, "better" solutions for the golden future (never used...) so PLS STOP MAKING SENSE. kthxbai

That's a bit harsh isn't it? Although I don't agree with some of the things that the dev team does I still appreciate all the work they do. Constructive criticism is good but what you said is nothing more than an insult. It is not productive and can cause harm.

jin_xi wrote:

Sokomine wrote:The second screenshot looks good. I sometimes fly around just to get the ocean floor covered. Can this be added at least as an option to the game?

probably not, or at least not before 7 years down the road. Devs are busy doing, then re-doing, then discussing various innoticeable changes and then scrapping them. important stuff, like hyphens in code, adding dead code, "better" solutions for the golden future (never used...) so PLS STOP MAKING SENSE. kthxbai

Just sayin', that's rude. :(

@jin_xi in the meantime you are busy not being helpful. The devs move at a prudent pace. They want to avoid implementing experimental things that will break stuff or affect performance. I don't think that kind of feedback will make devs listen to you, as it just gives the image of a naysayer.

Example of an attempt to give constructive feedback on this:

Since there's already code to check for farther away nodes, would it be possible to alter the way the water nodes in the frontier are rendered? I mean, somehow render the last water nodes of the far away frontier so that their faces are visible. If this is done only with liquids that are in the limits of the rendering it would look fine.

This way you wouldn't need to render the whole ocean floor nor would you have to find a way to make the sky change without making it look bad when you are flying above a singlenode mapgen world.

EDIT: ok, I just realized that the check is per-block not per-node (which makes sense). I guess it would be too much to affect the opacity of all the nodes in the block.

Is there a way to render the faces of the liquids when they are next to an "ignore" node? There's this related PR that adds faces for waving liquids, but not sure if it's helpful.

jin_xi wrote:

Sokomine wrote:The second screenshot looks good. I sometimes fly around just to get the ocean floor covered. Can this be added at least as an option to the game?

probably not, or at least not before 7 years down the road. Devs are busy doing, then re-doing, then discussing various innoticeable changes and then scrapping them. important stuff, like hyphens in code, adding dead code, "better" solutions for the golden future (never used...) so PLS STOP MAKING SENSE. kthxbai

It may be harsh, but it is true enough that the core developers are aware of the problem.

AnxiousInfusion wrote:

jin_xi wrote:

Sokomine wrote:The second screenshot looks good. I sometimes fly around just to get the ocean floor covered. Can this be added at least as an option to the game?

probably not, or at least not before 7 years down the road. Devs are busy doing, then re-doing, then discussing various innoticeable changes and then scrapping them. important stuff, like hyphens in code, adding dead code, "better" solutions for the golden future (never used...) so PLS STOP MAKING SENSE. kthxbai

It may be harsh, but it is true enough that the core developers are aware of the problem.

I was reading the irc log and saw a quick mention of it and then they go on to discuss things that matter. Your comment before stated "Devs are busy doing, then re-doing, then discussing various innoticeable changes and then scrapping them". If you read through the whole page you can see that they are discussing more important things.
If the dev team was as ridiculous as you claim then we would not have any changes. Just look at the difference between 0.4.10 and the latest dev version and you will seen a huge difference.
Also, even if you was 100% correct, your comment does nothing to help. If you really think that the dev team is that bad then what should be done about it? Should we see if the dev team will have a conversation with you were you present your evidence that they are not doing what they should do? Maybe you could start a new tread that addresses this. You could lay out your argument and present your evidence and then ask the dev team if they would read it.
I know the dev team is not perfect. No one is. I do see the great things that they are doing though. For a free open source game I do believe that it is advancing nicely. Might not be advancing in the direction I would prefer but since I am not able to fork minetest and develop it in a different way I choose to be happy with what the dev team does. If I am not happy then I voice my opinion in a constructive way and hope that I am heard.

@celeron55 there is an algorithm we could implement:
https://tomcc.github.io/2014/08/31/visibility-1.html

Don wrote:I was reading the irc log and saw a quick mention of it and then they go on to discuss things that matter. Your comment before stated "Devs are busy doing, then re-doing, then discussing various innoticeable changes and then scrapping them". If you read through the whole page you can see that they are discussing more important things.
If the dev team was as ridiculous as you claim then we would not have any changes. Just look at the difference between 0.4.10 and the latest dev version and you will seen a huge difference.
Also, even if you was 100% correct, your comment does nothing to help. If you really think that the dev team is that bad then what should be done about it? Should we see if the dev team will have a conversation with you were you present your evidence that they are not doing what they should do? Maybe you could start a new tread that addresses this. You could lay out your argument and present your evidence and then ask the dev team if they would read it.
I know the dev team is not perfect. No one is. I do see the great things that they are doing though. For a free open source game I do believe that it is advancing nicely. Might not be advancing in the direction I would prefer but since I am not able to fork minetest and develop it in a different way I choose to be happy with what the dev team does. If I am not happy then I voice my opinion in a constructive way and hope that I am heard.

I am not the same person who made the original comment. I do read through those pages each day and I was particularly happy to find talk of updating the encryption with TLS. Sokomine's criticism just made me think of that one part of yesterday's chat.

Sorry. I should have read it better.

AnxiousInfusion wrote:Sokomine's criticism

It wasn't intended to be criticism. I just saw something that might be an improvement and became hopeful :-) There's usually quite a lot of work behind some things.