FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

The landscape in Minetest is scaled. But by what factor? What would be the height of the Mount Everest?

I think past discussions scaled a node at 1 metre.
So Mount Everest would be around 8,848 nodes high.

I know that one node is one meter, but the terrain is scaled.

The average height worldwide is 700m, but clouds in Minetest are afaik at 120m

I guess the landscape is scaled down by a factor of 10 and the Mount Everest would be ~880 nodes high, but I'm not sure

burli wrote:I know that one node is one meter, but the terrain is scaled.

The average height worldwide is 700m, but clouds in Minetest are afaik at 120m

I guess the landscape is scaled down by a factor of 10 and the Mount Everest would be ~880 nodes high, but I'm not sure

Cloud height is configurable.

KCoombes wrote:

burli wrote:I know that one node is one meter, but the terrain is scaled.

The average height worldwide is 700m, but clouds in Minetest are afaik at 120m

I guess the landscape is scaled down by a factor of 10 and the Mount Everest would be ~880 nodes high, but I'm not sure

Cloud height is configurable.

I'm sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. The average height in the REAL world is 700m. As far as I know the lower clouds in the real world (Stratus and Stratocumulus) have an average height of 1000-1500m.

So I assumed that the world in Minetest is scaled down by the factor of 10, that's why clouds are at 120

I want to know if that factor 10 is correct. Or is the height of the clouds just determining a good visual setting and the landscape has another scale? I am talking just about the landscape, not biomes

The landscape in MT is not deliberately scaled down. At least not according to my knowledge. It is just extremly small-scale so that it works with limited sight. Houses are usually scaled up a lot (1 m thick walls? rare though not unheared of in reality), and "furniture" is also scaled up. The bench in my cottages mod has a realistic size for a real bench - about 40 cm high, wide and 1 m long. yet it looks like a footstool inside the game. Kitchen furniture, tables and the like are usally one block wide and high. In reality, tables would be about 70 cm in height.

Mount Everest would fit into the mapsize limits. I was at first afraid that its base would be too huge, but it seems it's not wider than a couple of kilometers (5-6 km?) at its base. Of course it's part of a whole mountain range and does not start at sea level.

The main drawback is that it would be impossible to actually see that large mountain.

MT's highest "mountain" might be the mount meru. It is created by a mod (or copied into the world?) and quite high. From afar, it looks more like a tree cake than any real mountain. Something like that might only exist in very low gravity I'm afraid. And better have no earthquakes ever.

I found myself thinking exactly this, and decided on a scale of roughly 1:10, based on cloud height, assuming Minetest clouds represent fairly low real clouds. The result is Mt. Everest is roughly 1000 nodes high, which is my preferred max height for mountains in Minetest.

You're all wrong.
The real answer is: It depends on the subgame and what you want to achieve. Conventions should be dictated by the subgame, and only by the subgame alone.
IMO Minetest itself should not dictate these conventions as it is only an engine.

The reason for this is that even the “1 node length = 1 meter” convention is just that: a convention. For Minetest Game I certainly agree. But this convention can't be universally true. I could come up with a subgame where you play in some kind of micro world and you play as a microbe or ant or anything small. Then a node length would definitely NOT be a meter.

In any case, it would make sense for subgames to write down somewhere these conventions of scale.

Well, scales in Minetest are strange anyway. Landscape is scaled ~1:10, maybe more, trees are scaled ~1:3 I guess, furniture has to be scaled up. Biomes are scaled by whatever, but I never walked from snow to (hot) desert in 2 minutes.

I know that these are conventions to get an acceptable visual feeling and an acceptable gameplay, which can be changed. But I am talking about the default settings

The largest mountain I've ever seen in valleys mapgen was well over 140m. However, I changed a few settings once and generated one over 5km high. It was an exercise in futility trying to see it all at once.