FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Edit: This project has outlived its usefulness to me, so I am no longer actively developing or supporting it. I invite everyone to fork it or borrow what you like (respecting the licenses of those I borrowed from). Many of the parts I developed myself are now in Fun Caves.

This is the project I put together to support my work on the "valleys" C++ mapgen. It's based on Gael de Sailly's original Valleys Mapgen, though most of the code has diverged.

Valleys Helper adds a few, more natural-looking trees, some new (purely decorative) soil types, water plants, coral, little wooden houses, glowing plants, rocks, cave biomes, and whatever I feel like at the time. It uses standard, V7 biomes and is very compatible with other mods. The cave work is based largely on HeroOfTheWinds' Underground Realms.

This mod is, and will always be, a work in progress. I don't advise anyone to put it on a serious server.

Code License: GPL3/WTFPL (and other licenses I'll note where I use other's work)

Textures License: same as above

Dependencies: default, flowers?, stairs?, integral trees?
* You must use the "valleys" mapgen from a recent build of Minetest.

Source code: https://github.com/duane-r/valleys_c

Downoad: https://github.com/duane-r/valleys_c/archive/master.zip

The overworld:


The underworld (falsely lit):


Note that in order to avoid flooding the huge caves, this mod will disable random lava and water in your valleys mapgen settings. It places lava and water in the appropriate cave biomes, but not in huge caves.

I just completed a fresh build and updated this mod... Amazing!

Thank you for adding in that bit of manual garbage collection. It should help, though I have started to test my mods running both a server and a client to spread the memory load out over 2GBx2GB instead of testing in single player.

blert2112 wrote:I just completed a fresh build and updated this mod... Amazing!

Thanks. I'm working on fungal growth and reproduction now. The fungal trees reproduce by EXPLODING. Heh, heh, heh.

I just updated to the latest git of this mod. If I recall correctly... before (last weekend), walking on hot cobble was painful and caused damage. Today it does not. Am I confused or did you remove the damage?

blert2112 wrote:I just updated to the latest git of this mod. If I recall correctly... before (last weekend), walking on hot cobble was painful and caused damage. Today it does not. Am I confused or did you remove the damage?

I haven't managed to get the damage to work. I tried increasing it to four, the same as fire, but nothing happened. I think I'm missing something from the original caverealms, but I haven't had a chance to go back and check it.

Great work !
Caves are frightening... Better not see mobs there :s

duane wrote:I haven't managed to get the damage to work. I tried increasing it to four, the same as fire, but nothing happened. I think I'm missing something from the original caverealms, but I haven't had a chance to go back and check it.

There are only two ways I know of to make a node you are standing on to cause damage... First, an ABM: Check to see if a player is standing on the node and apply the damage. The other way is a global step: Continually check what the player is walking on and if it is your node then apply damage.
Increasing the damage specifier of the node definition will only work if the player is actually inside the node (lava, toxic fluid gunk, etc).

I've added the biomes we were talking about in the Valleys Mapgen forum. They may still need some tweaking, but they're a definite improvement, especially with the dry rivers patch.

I've added a fake gennotify function, which tries to determine whether any given cave block is part of a massive cave. It manages about a 75% success rate, which is better than any of the several more complicated methods I've tried. There may not be a good way to check this.

If you're doing more than just examining this mod, I recommend using my branch of the minetest engine, or compiling in a gennotify based on it. Make sure to turn on the gennotify setting in the valleys_c mod settings. The fake gennotify is slow, though better than nothing.

Fortunately, the only things it affects so far are placement of fungal trees (only in massive caves) and random lava and water spawns (only outside of massive caves). So, if you aren't concerned with those, you can just turn the gennotify setting on in the valleys_c mod settings and use the regular minetest engine. This disables the fake, causing fungal trees to disappear and lava/water to spawn everywhere.

I made some long-neglected changes to improve memory efficiency. (That is, I'm allocating memory permanently, rather than triggering garbage collection every time a chunk is generated.) Let me know if this causes any problems.

This is the best map-gen I have ever seen for MT!

I will deferentially be using this alone with my builds

How can I installiert this mapgen?

burli wrote:How can I installiert this mapgen?

You have to have a recent version of minetest that's got the "valleys" mapgen in the drop-down list. Then just download the zip file and unzip it into your mods directory.

Thx, I'm already playing with this mod. Is it possible that there are much less ores in the caves if I use this mod?

burli wrote:Thx, I'm already playing with this mod. Is it possible that there are much less ores in the caves if I use this mod?

I can't think of any reason why there would be. It uses the same ore generation as mapgen v7.

I don't know why, but if I add valleys_c mod I get different type of caves. Try to play with valleys_c, but I was killed two or three times befor found enough iron for a sword and a chestplate.

I generated two worlds with the valley mg and the same seed, one with and the other without valleys_c mod. Then I "flew" through the caves. Without the valleys_c mod I found much more ores, with valleys_c mod I found lots of empty sandstone caves

Is it possible to tweak the cave decoration? I want to reduce it.


Edit: this mod can reduce the number of minerals on cave walls dramatically. Is it possible that only stone will be replaced by moss, lichen etc? Or maybe add sandstone with coal/iron/copper and stone with lichen/moss and coal/iron/copper?

burli wrote:Is it possible to tweak the cave decoration? I want to reduce it.

Delete the register_ore lines in deco.lua. In your screenshots, the ores are being replaced by other ores -- in this case, stone.

I really love this mod. But why can I dig stone with lichen or moss without a tool and get cobblestone?

This mod is messing up caverealms :-(



Can this be solved?

because you are running thoses two mods at the same time??!! Last time i did that it broke me two world files ;)

azekill_DIABLO wrote:because you are running thoses two mods at the same time??!!

Well, I know that both mods do the same thing. Maybe it it possible for valleys_c mod to "detect" if caverealms is generating a cave and skips the own decoration. But it get wores if I also run fun_caves v6 and intersect_light. Don't know how this could be solved

azekill_DIABLO wrote:Last time i did that it broke me two world files ;)

Woops. Big fail

Running 2 mapgen mods at the same time is usually a bad idea.

Solution is simple. Normal caves and decoration above eg -1000, caverealms below -1000.

I think in my game the player never diggs deeper than -1000 vor maybe -2000

Solved the problem. I just add this to the generator



Maybe duane can add this or something more elegant solution to valleys_c, fun_caves v6 and intersect_light to make it availible for everyone

I'm officially abandoning Valleys Helper. See the first post.

duane wrote:I'm officially abandoning Valleys Helper. See the first post.

That makes me sad. I like this mod

burli wrote:

duane wrote:I'm officially abandoning Valleys Helper. See the first post.

That makes me sad. I like this mod

Don't be sad -- fork it!

duane wrote:Don't be sad -- fork it!

I won't fork it, but I will use some code

Maybe talk to sofar and see if this mod should be moved to minetest-mods.