Natural slabs for smooth hills / valleys
Posted: Mon Mar 11, 2013 15:32This is something that always bothered me in MineCraft, and although it's a major change I believe MineTest can do it. I initially wanted to code it as a mod, but since I'm not good with the mapgen and would like to see it defaulted in MT, I thought to suggest it to someone who knows the world generator and ask who else supports the idea.
Both MC and MT lack smooth / walkable leveled terrain. The terrain is made out of full blocks, and to climb a hill you must jump on each block. I always wanted to see slabs added to the play... by occasionally spawning slab versions of each natural node. Dirt, sand, stone, gravel, etc. would exist as both blocks and slabs (half tall blocks). Slabs would only be spawned on the ground and its surface, and mixed with normal blocks to make hills and valleys smoother (as well as the floor of natural caves). The improvements would be visually smoother terrain, as well as allowing small hills to be walked on like stairs.
Here are two constructs I made to exemplify. The left stone build shows how a natural hill currently looks like, and the right one shows how its variant would look like using my suggestion. Once again, the interior of the right construction is full of stone blocks (no hollow spaces), slabs only existing where they are visible.
Only problem I can think of is that you can't place things on slabs, so trees and flowers / grass cannot be spawned on top of slab dirt (at least currently). For trees that's ok since they can override natural slabs and erase them where the trunk comes. Kinda sucks for grass and flowers, but since neither grass or slabs would be frequent it shouldn't be noticeable. This feature would also require the mapgen to create hills twice wider horizontally, to make room for slab transitions... but of course not all parts of a hill would be smoothed with slabs since that would be boring.
I'm pretty sure this can be done with the current LUA API and possibly minor changes to the C++ mapgen. But would it work out otherwise, and do other players want this? Personally I'd love it, and I think it would be a huge improvement to the world.
Both MC and MT lack smooth / walkable leveled terrain. The terrain is made out of full blocks, and to climb a hill you must jump on each block. I always wanted to see slabs added to the play... by occasionally spawning slab versions of each natural node. Dirt, sand, stone, gravel, etc. would exist as both blocks and slabs (half tall blocks). Slabs would only be spawned on the ground and its surface, and mixed with normal blocks to make hills and valleys smoother (as well as the floor of natural caves). The improvements would be visually smoother terrain, as well as allowing small hills to be walked on like stairs.
Here are two constructs I made to exemplify. The left stone build shows how a natural hill currently looks like, and the right one shows how its variant would look like using my suggestion. Once again, the interior of the right construction is full of stone blocks (no hollow spaces), slabs only existing where they are visible.
Only problem I can think of is that you can't place things on slabs, so trees and flowers / grass cannot be spawned on top of slab dirt (at least currently). For trees that's ok since they can override natural slabs and erase them where the trunk comes. Kinda sucks for grass and flowers, but since neither grass or slabs would be frequent it shouldn't be noticeable. This feature would also require the mapgen to create hills twice wider horizontally, to make room for slab transitions... but of course not all parts of a hill would be smoothed with slabs since that would be boring.
I'm pretty sure this can be done with the current LUA API and possibly minor changes to the C++ mapgen. But would it work out otherwise, and do other players want this? Personally I'd love it, and I think it would be a huge improvement to the world.
