Extra Biomes ... Not compelling content.

[ScottKillen]

...which is a fine sentiment but does make sharing experiences more difficult - I would need your exact config file in order to reproduce your seed. For that reason it might be better to kep the potential for all biomes, but pick a seed that gives the biomes that you want nearby. Which also means that if you decide later on, "I want to visit a redwood forest", or "I forgot to include Small Jungles and now I want some Quicksand", you haven't cut off your options. You just need to travel.

If you remove some biomes in your config, can you still make a Mystcraft Age with that biome? Oh, the mechanics have changed now haven't they? So that makes two questions: In the old mechanics, could you still randomly find a non-config biome, and in the new mechanics can you still find a symbol for non-config biomes?

In actuality, to achieve the exact same experience from a given seed, you must preserve all hits on the random number generator, and their order...meaning that you must preserve the load order of mods, the version of mods and the configuration of mods. So...already, you must share more than a single seed. If you are not using modded terrain generation, these little differences are not really noticeable, but a mod like Extrabiomes amplifies the effect of small changes in a very visual way. The reality is that a seed no longer is enough to fully describe a gaming experience.

For the next major version of Extrabiomes we will be introducing some features that allow "terrain artists" to heavily influence the way terrain is generated. It is difficult to explain in this setting, but a good overview is here. These features will make config sharing an even bigger part of sharing worlds.

Regarding Mystcraft, as long as a biome has an id in the config file, whether it is disabled or not, Mystcraft will create a symbol for it.[DOUBLEPOST=1361462516][/DOUBLEPOST]

But ultimately my thoughts are - "Customization is King". Let the Config file for ExtraBiomes let you determine how frequent, how much, how many, which biomes, etc, and your ills are cured. Every player using it can custom fit it to what they want.

I agree completely. For me customization of the experience is the holy grail.

 

[Bigglesworth]

I, too, have had to put forth an effort to get items I wanted. It is a travesty and an outrage!

 

[enki]

To anyone having trouble tracking down rubber trees or birch, Twilight forest is a great place to hunt for those.

I don't care for the snow or redwood biomes, thus they have all been disabled in my world and I dialed back the jungles just a bit. I would kill for biome code that didn't have biomes from opposite ends of the spectrum bordering each other. Snow areas would bother me a lot less if I didn't discover them bordering desert or wasteland areas.

Those new biomes are REALLY pretty

The autumn woods, swamps, (except the FPS-killing marsh), wasteland, and meadows are my favorite hangouts. Death to the big ugly square trees on my minimap.


EBXL4 and terrain control: I have incredibly mixed feelings here. Terrain Control can do some neat things but the last time I played with it (Circa 1.2.5) I spent more time creating and deleting worlds trying to prevent it from misbehaving and doing horrible horrible things to the terrain. The way it handles height and sizes feels backwards and ultimately way too arcane for the average user. I put a good two weeks into building some custom biomes and things still weren't looking great. Transitions and custom object placement were a bit of a pain. Hopefully it has been polished, I look forward to seeing what gets released.

 

[ScottKillen]

To anyone having trouble tracking down rubber trees or birch, Twilight forest is a great place to hunt for those.

I don't care for the snow or redwood biomes, thus they have all been disabled in my world and I dialed back the jungles just a bit. I would kill for biome code that didn't have biomes from opposite ends of the spectrum bordering each other. Snow areas would bother me a lot less if I didn't discover them bordering desert or wasteland areas.



The autumn woods, swamps, (except the FPS-killing marsh), wasteland, and meadows are my favorite hangouts. Death to the big ugly square trees on my minimap.


EBXL4 and terrain control: I have incredibly mixed feelings here. Terrain Control can do some neat things but the last time I played with it (Circa 1.2.5) I spent more time creating and deleting worlds trying to prevent it from misbehaving and doing horrible horrible things to the terrain. The way it handles height and sizes feels backwards and ultimately way too arcane for the average user. I put a good two weeks into building some custom biomes and things still weren't looking great. Transitions and custom object placement were a bit of a pain. Hopefully it has been polished, I look forward to seeing what gets released.

TerrainControl also has the code you would kill for.

 

[runlvlzero]

I have been experimenting for the last 48 hrs tweaking biome mods with FTB. It is possible to have extrabiomesxl, highlands biomes, biomes o plenty, and emasher's biomes all working together with many other mods. Though it takes about an hr to reconfigure biome and item id's to blend it and a little bit of patience and skill with notepad. This is after you figure out what your doing.

The perfect ideal solution would be to disabled biomes that are similar between each mod, disable ones you don't like, and blend them all together. All the biome mods have their pro's and cons. Which are subjective to everyone.

I'm kind of on the bench about adding yet more terrain generating mods to the pack 1.4.7 because there are indeed really awesome crazy great additions coming with extrabiomesxl 4.0 and I'm sure that other mods are getting big juicy updates ready for 1.5. Just want to high five the extra biomes folks for going for the gusto and having the most technically compatible and clean mod.

Once I started playing modded minecraft, I have always been waiting around the corner for those updates ;p as big things can change every major version. So its not a biomes issue.

Terrain control will be a godsend because then I will finally be able to get rid of vanilla mountainous generation forever, I hope =)

 

[ScottKillen]

The downside is that the introduction of a new terrain generator necessarily means no compatibility with prior worlds.

But yes, you can get rid of vanilla mountains if you wish. I have personally created test worlds with mountains generated to 255 height--a bit laggy during fresh terrain gen--but worth it. Terrain control allows configuration of any terrain generation variable you can think of. (Imagine setting sea level at, say y= 30 and max world height at 255 so that you have everest like mountain peaks...or setting sea level to y=200 for remarkable valleys and oceans...

And...settings can be configurable by world...something not possible now...I get excited just thinking of it.

Some of you may be interested in what we expect will be a new minecraft art style: design of world styles (the world gen equivalent of texture packs) More details about this here.

 

[runlvlzero]

The downside is that the introduction of a new terrain generator necessarily means no compatibility with prior worlds.

But yes, you can get rid of vanilla mountains if you wish. I have personally created test worlds with mountains generated to 255 height--a bit laggy during fresh terrain gen--but worth it. Terrain control allows configuration of any terrain generation variable you can think of. (Imagine setting sea level at, say y= 30 and max world height at 255 so that you have everest like mountain peaks...or setting sea level to y=200 for remarkable valleys and oceans...

And...settings can be configurable by world...something not possible now...I get excited just thinking of it.

Some of you may be interested in what we expect will be a new minecraft art style: design of world styles (the world gen equivalent of texture packs) More details about this here.

Hahaha omg, more crazy awesome news. I'm one of those crazy people who spend more time configuring games that provide options like this then playing them lol. I spent at least 6 months doing that to dwarf fortresses world generation settings lol.

Anyway I'm really excited now ! ... the possibilities are endless! No pressure lol.

 

[Omicron]

Using Terrain Control both worries and excites me, to be honest.

I worry, because that mod always seemed a bit oversized to me... like hunting ducks with a rocket launcher. When I last looked at it a couple months ago, it also had a long list of minor incompatibilities (such as not generating Buildcraft oil bubbles and the like). I worry that I might have to learn one of the most complex configuration files in the modding community just to create a world with vanilla behavior.

I am excited because of the options it could offer. I too wouldn't mind a more sensible logic behind which biomes can neighbour others based on temperature and humidity. Or even on terrain height - if a plains biome generates next to extreme hills, then it could be much higher up than usual. And possibly sloping downwards over the entire width of the biome. Or alternatively, the plains biome could be at ocean level as usual, while the extreme hills biome starts off low as well and gets successively higher the deeper you get into it. It's easy to keep brainstorming about this for hours and hours.

Nevertheless - if I may make a request here, Scott, it would be to focus on standardization and usability first, and features second. It needs to be something that is as unobtrusive as possible, defaults to something that people expect as much as possible, is configurable as intuitively as possible, and keeps the user from making mistakes as much as possible. Once you have that baseline, it's easy to add features. If you start with a huge featureset without usability, though, the hardcore 10% might applaud you, but the broad userbase will be confused and unhappy, and it will then be difficult to convince them otherwise.

 

[runlvlzero]

From all the links I read and what I have seen talked about on the github wiki it looks like there's going to be a very sane set of default worldgen types. I can't say how much community involvement they have for setting up world types though. With lots we should have a bunch of world types right off of the bat that are usable without configs. I am pretty sure that if you just install extrabiomesxl the terrain control core should be made compatible with all the other world gen like oil bubbles. They bug fix that stuff already in their current release when it breaks! The 3.8.0-3.9.0 update.

 

[Azzanine]

I think it's relevant content, not going as far to say it's compelling but there would be no real point in removing it.

It does get a little silly in conjunction with larger biomes though... With a run of bad luck you sometimes have to trec 1000's of blocks to find a specific biome. I once spawned in a tundra biome that was girt by more snow like biomes and none of them had a rubber sapling spawn in it... Made for a slow game.

 

[ScottKillen]

Using Terrain Control both worries and excites me, to be honest.

I worry, because that mod always seemed a bit oversized to me... like hunting ducks with a rocket launcher. When I last looked at it a couple months ago, it also had a long list of minor incompatibilities (such as not generating Buildcraft oil bubbles and the like). I worry that I might have to learn one of the most complex configuration files in the modding community just to create a world with vanilla behavior.

I am excited because of the options it could offer. I too wouldn't mind a more sensible logic behind which biomes can neighbour others based on temperature and humidity. Or even on terrain height - if a plains biome generates next to extreme hills, then it could be much higher up than usual. And possibly sloping downwards over the entire width of the biome. Or alternatively, the plains biome could be at ocean level as usual, while the extreme hills biome starts off low as well and gets successively higher the deeper you get into it. It's easy to keep brainstorming about this for hours and hours.

Nevertheless - if I may make a request here, Scott, it would be to focus on standardization and usability first, and features second. It needs to be something that is as unobtrusive as possible, defaults to something that people expect as much as possible, is configurable as intuitively as possible, and keeps the user from making mistakes as much as possible. Once you have that baseline, it's easy to add features. If you start with a huge featureset without usability, though, the hardcore 10% might applaud you, but the broad userbase will be confused and unhappy, and it will then be difficult to convince them otherwise.

I appreciate the feedback and understand what you mean. Here is how I plan to address it:

1. I have been active in the TerrainControl project and recently added support for Forge terrain gen events to the mod. Buildcraft oil *should* be generating now.
2. I agree that it is unacceptable to force anyone into those config files. On the other hand, the most requested feature category: configuration. TerrainControl is attractive precisely because of its configuration options--however, there is a bit of a learning curve. To address this, I have come up with the idea of "World packs" which will be produced by those who want to delve into the guts (and we will provide a few different packs) When you create a world, you select the world pack you want and a world is generated in that style...no config files need to be edited.
3. By default, TerrainControl generates a default vanilla world...we will follow suit.

Let me just say that this thread, with its unflattering title , is one of the most valuable sources of honest feedback I have found. Thank all of you for contributing.

 

[Omicron]

That sounds great. I'll be looking forward to trying it out then!

 

[Golrith]

I hope there will be an option to control the height and density of trees. I just have to disable the redwood/fir biomes due to lag, which is a shame. If I could configure them to be less densely placed, and half height, I can then enjoy greater variation in my worlds.

 

[PhilHibbs]

Yes I usually have to log back out and in again when I go near a fir biome, and it usually takes me about 5 minutes just to log out. This is on a 4-core machine with 4 gigs of RAM. I know 4 gig isn't a lot nowadays but it was the most I could get in a laptop at the time and fir biomes in Minecraft are the only times that any game has a problem running on it. Oh, other than the time I accidentally broke the redwire that was turning off my mob spawner and didn't realise for five minutes!

 

[SeniLiX]

Yes I usually have to log back out and in again when I go near a fir biome, and it usually takes me about 5 minutes just to log out. This is on a 4-core machine with 4 gigs of RAM. I know 4 gig isn't a lot nowadays but it was the most I could get in a laptop at the time and fir biomes in Minecraft are the only times that any game has a problem running on it. Oh, other than the time I accidentally broke the redwire that was turning off my mob spawner and didn't realise for five minutes!

Minecraft does not support multi threading and laptops are generally not geared for any serious gaming.
Taking these two factors in account, your results should be expected.

 

[ScottKillen]

Most certainly![DOUBLEPOST=1362199181][/DOUBLEPOST]

Yes I usually have to log back out and in again when I go near a fir biome, and it usually takes me about 5 minutes just to log out. This is on a 4-core machine with 4 gigs of RAM. I know 4 gig isn't a lot nowadays but it was the most I could get in a laptop at the time and fir biomes in Minecraft are the only times that any game has a problem running on it. Oh, other than the time I accidentally broke the redwire that was turning off my mob spawner and didn't realise for five minutes!

Lag is caused by a lot of factors. I have a fairly bad computer by comparison--and yet--no lag. But yes, the number one type of config people request has to do with trees.

 

[I_Am_Pariah]

DrZharkpersonally i love extra biomes. Sometimes the transfer from one biome to another can be a little jarring, so perhaps a few more of the technical biomes? perhaps emulating real world biomes Eg: Deltas, Plateaus, Lowland (like the Netherlands) THe only real problem i have EBXL is aside from the trees there is nothing really unique in each biome. A crazy idea i had was, what if Scott (EBXL) and DrZhark (Mo'Creatures) joined forces. i have played With Mo'creatures and the only complain i had there was i was tripping over criters every were i went. Extra Biomes Solves that problem. also troll and ogre caves would be a thing.[DOUBLEPOST=1362201481][/DOUBLEPOST]

DrZharkpersonally i love extra biomes. Sometimes the transfer from one biome to another can be a little jarring, so perhaps a few more of the technical biomes? perhaps emulating real world biomes Eg: Deltas, Plateaus, Lowland (like the Netherlands) THe only real problem i have EBXL is aside from the trees there is nothing really unique in each biome. A crazy idea i had was, what if Scott (EBXL) and DrZhark (Mo'Creatures) joined forces. i have played With Mo'creatures and the only complain i had there was i was tripping over criters every were i went. Extra Biomes Solves that problem. also troll and ogre caves would be a thing.

Sorry a little scatter brained, Just woke up.

 

[superninjakiwi]

i personally like the trees, even though my computer cant handle them and i avoid them like the plague. one of the only things more that i want are a few more biomes similar to the old RPG addon. specifically speaking, i personally think that the wheat field was among the best out of all the biomes. when i do get into modding, the first thing i will do will be to make an addon to add more biomes. of course, with the new grove layer, things will require some thought as to how i wish them to turn out, but that is just going to be a small setback.

 

[ScottKillen]

personally i love extra biomes. Sometimes the transfer from one biome to another can be a little jarring, so perhaps a few more of the technical biomes? perhaps emulating real world biomes Eg: Deltas, Plateaus, Lowland (like the Netherlands) THe only real problem i have EBXL is aside from the trees there is nothing really unique in each biome. A crazy idea i had was, what if Scott (EBXL) and DrZhark (Mo'Creatures) joined forces. i have played With Mo'creatures and the only complain i had there was i was tripping over criters every were i went. Extra Biomes Solves that problem. also troll and ogre caves would be a thing.[DOUBLEPOST=1362201481][/DOUBLEPOST]

Sorry a little scatter brained, Just woke up.

Thank you! The v4 release should address biome transitions. They cannot be address with the vanilla terrain generator, which is one of of the reasons that leads us to replace it.

..and Dr. Zhark and I have worked together! [DOUBLEPOST=1362247928][/DOUBLEPOST]

i personally like the trees, even though my computer cant handle them and i avoid them like the plague. one of the only things more that i want are a few more biomes similar to the old RPG addon. specifically speaking, i personally think that the wheat field was among the best out of all the biomes. when i do get into modding, the first thing i will do will be to make an addon to add more biomes. of course, with the new grove layer, things will require some thought as to how i wish them to turn out, but that is just going to be a small setback.

Agreed.

And v4 will make it so you don't have to be a modder to add more biomes...I think you will really like the new features described at the end of this post: http://extrabiomes.net/blog/2012/12/31/community-participation/

 

[hotblack desiato]

just a weird idea: would it be possible to adjust sealevel? once it was set to 64 because the world height was 128. but now the world is 256 high, and sealevel is still at 64. I love to dig around, the deeper the better...

if the sealevel is at 100 or 128, it still leaves a lot of space for extreme hill biomes.

of course, a setting for that needs to be done at the first time, a game is started, else it would leave the old chunks at sealevel 64, and the new ones are suddenly not compatible to the old ones.