FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Lets do the obvious thing and lets compare Minetest and the commercial Microsoft-owned game with the same idea.

Scaled by :6000 due to file size in RAM, click and view full size image and zoom to the top left. Light grey: Minetest, dark grey: Minecraft



Minetest: 61840×61840 nodes
Minecraft: 59999968×59999968 blocks (= nodes in size)

I know, the height of the world in Minetest ist absolutely unrivaled, but is the majority of players really into digging thousands and thousands of nodes deep to see, well, pretty much the same structure (in vanilla) from -1024 downwards?

And 61840 nodes sounds good until you realize that it’s actually only around 30920 nodes in each direction because you start more or less in the center of the world.

So … What are the reasons that the MT world size is so tiny? And are there any plans in extending the size?

I really would love to see larger maps

You'd be surprised at how many players are into digging thousands and thousands of nodes deep. I'm not sure as a server owner if I'd want to do daily backups of a map.sqlite file that is outrageously large. Perhaps the world limits could be increased, but it should be an option.

Have you checked these topics already?

• Infinite world size
• World size
• The size of Minetest's world compared to the size of Earth

The first one in particular is quite long with lots of info.

There may be other similar topics, but I'm not going to GTFY.

kaeza wrote:Have you checked these topics already?

I did. They’re either from 2014 or do not cover the particular question I have.

What are the reasons that the MT world size is so tiny?

Well... performance? Disc space? The ability to run on older hardware? Or just the fact that it takes over two hours on a flat map without any obstacles to get from the center to the edge?

But I agree that a larger map would be nice. Survival players who like to explore might hit the edge quickly or multiplayer server might need more space

Crumbs this subject again. I thought the other threads did explain.

It's because a S16 (signed 16-bit integer) was chosen for co-ordinates, which is limited to +/- 32768 (= 2^16 / 2).
The next larger choice would be a S32 (32-bit integer) which is very much larger but is slower to process.
Because +/- 32768 is a reasonable size and just big enough that was chosen by celeron55 for the performance advantage, and i agree with his decision.
Changing co-ordinates now would be a huge task as they are everywhere in the code. Our former mapgen expert hmmmm, and myself, strongly oppose doing this.

For me the most significant dimension is not the largest but the smallest, although MC is insanely vast horizontally it is very limited vertically, so i see it as much less spacious than MT.
We do intend to stack realms to make use of the world height, and many mods do this already, this is much more interesting and varied than a single horizontally vast world. This way we can have a 'Nether' and 'Aether' that are actually physically below and above the normal world, and can be reached by vertical travel.

rubenwardy wrote:

DatJohnDoe wrote:What about depth?

Minetest: 32km
Minecraft: 62m

I didn't play MC before. I start with MT, because I don't pay attention to any proprietary software if it is very cool as they say.

BUT! 62 METERS? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? MC HAS ENORMOUS SURFACE AREA (more than Earth's). BUT 62 METERS? I CAN'T BELIEVE IT. MC IS FLAT AS SHEET (sounds good :-). understand as you want).

No, I like MT more in this aspect.

paramat wrote:[I] strongly oppose doing this.

And so the last bit of hope for horizontally larger worlds in MT is gone forever :(

paramat wrote:This way we can have a 'Nether' and 'Aether'

But you’re against those, too, and thus those won’t be in the default game either because they would break backwards compatibility, right?

There is one good point in the first thread. It is impossible to do such projects like Denmark in Minetest

http://www.minecraftforum.net/news/8225 ... -all-of-it

By writing 'Nether' and 'Aether' i meant to show how these realms in MC cannot be physically below and above, even when the 'Aether' was intended to be above the clouds. I didn't mean to suggest we copy these MC realms in MT, we wouldn't want to and couldn't for copyright reasons, they would need different names and different nodes.

paramat wrote:they would need different names and different nodes.

eh... just call them Heaven n Hell (or Hades)
and then you can set a song from one of my favorite bands to them. And not to worry about permission, I'll tell the guys it's o.k., we're tight :D

Heaven n Hell

TumeniNodes wrote:

paramat wrote:they would need different names and different nodes.

eh... just call them Heaven n Hell (or Hades)
and then you can set a song from one of my favorite bands to them. And not to worry about permission, I'll tell the guys it's o.k., we're tight :D

Heaven n Hell

we could also name it Utgard, Midgard and Asgard =(^.^)=