FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

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Hi All

Seeing regular mentions of Perlin noise in the context of map-gen throws me back to greyscale bump mapping exercises with early versions of Photoshop and 3D-modellers that have long-since gone to meet their programmer in the sky.

I know nothing of the details of Minetest map-gen design and implementation but in the spirit of open-source cross-pollination, a couple of questions sprang to mind :

1) - does the current architecture permit coordinate-based variation of the map-gen, such that, for (simple cliched) example, further North/South from Spawn might be more likely generated more flat and cold biomes..?

2) - anyone who's spent time with synthesizers knows how much can be achieved by simply fiddling with knobs and sliders --- which you have some idea ''sort-of affect'' this or that aspect of the sound --- and then monitoring the results to see if you like it ... so, with that in mind, would it be impossible to introduce easy-access GUI map-gen sliders --- with dev-hint labels about what gets affected --- which could be tweaked while exploring singleplayer..?

Just wondering.

HTH

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CuriousNoob wrote:.

Hi All

Seeing regular mentions of Perlin noise in the context of map-gen throws me back to greyscale bump mapping exercises with early versions of Photoshop and 3D-modellers that have long-since gone to meet their programmer in the sky.

I know nothing of the details of Minetest map-gen design and implementation but in the spirit of open-source cross-pollination, a couple of questions sprang to mind :

1) - does the current architecture permit coordinate-based variation of the map-gen, such that, for (simple cliched) example, further North/South from Spawn might be more likely generated more flat and cold biomes..?

2) - anyone who's spent time with synthesizers knows how much can be achieved by simply fiddling with knobs and sliders --- which you have some idea ''sort-of affect'' this or that aspect of the sound --- and then monitoring the results to see if you like it ... so, with that in mind, would it be impossible to introduce easy-access GUI map-gen sliders --- with dev-hint labels about what gets affected --- which could be tweaked while exploring singleplayer..?

Just wondering.

HTH

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I like this idea... I had recently checked out visual terrain maker with this idea in mind but... it really didn't turn out working so well under Wine for me.
A visual mapgen GUI feature would be very nice. It's not so incredibly difficult to work with the current methods but, would definitely be... easier and prob quite helpful in others learning which settings affect which features in the terrain.

CuriousNoob wrote:1) - does the current architecture permit coordinate-based variation of the map-gen, such that, for (simple cliched) example, further North/South from Spawn might be more likely generated more flat and cold biomes..?

No, but it's easy to do with a patch to the minetest code. I came up with this ages ago, but it wasn't nearly as much fun as I'd expected.

1 requires changes to engine code.
2 would be possible in a separate terrain previewer, but not realtime changing of terrain in-game.
Also see https://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=15272 for more mapgen discussion.