

Notch (the Minecraft Developer) Answers Your Questions - ugh
http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/djlsz/notchs_answers_to_your_questions/

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siculars
Most technical question/answer:

 _"11. Ahawks This may be "confidential" information, but I have to ask: As a
developer, I am amazed at the amazing world that's created dynamically.
Towering mountains, twisting caves opening up to caverns, islands, precious
ores sprinkled throughout, etc. Notch, could you explain at a high level how
the world generation algorithm does this?

I'm not sure how to explain it without getting technical.. The complicated
high level technical version is: First I generate a linearly interpolated 3d
perlin noise offset along the y axis. I fill that in so that everything except
the top x blocks is stone, then I do a second pass to add features like grass,
trees, gravel, sand, caves and flowers. The world is generated in chunks of
16x16x128 blocks, based of pseudorandom seeds that are a mix of the level base
seed and the chunk location in the world. This ensures that you always get the
same terrain in an area regardless of what direction you traveled there
from."_

~~~
elblanco
_First I generate a linearly interpolated 3d perlin noise offset along the y
axis_

What an interesting application of perlin noise. Anybody aware of any other
similar applications?

~~~
z303
Ken Musgrave's work on Terrain rendering is worth a look. He did similar
things. The book 'Texturing and Modeling: A Procedural Approach' gives a nice
explanation of a lot of the techniques and they used to give a course at
SIGGRAPH on which the book was based but I can't find a link right now

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mey
Notch (Markus Persson) interview on the Indie Games podcasts
[http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/09/indiegamescom_podcast...](http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2010/09/indiegamescom_podcast_2_minecr.html)

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andreyf
Strange that nobody seems to have asked the obvious question: what does he
think makes the game so much fun? More specifically, how much thought/effort
did he think into getting the creeper/sound/cave mechanics just the right
amount of scary/destructive? I imagine it's intentional that dying can easily
make you lose all of your inventory (that is, 5 minute decay). How vital are
these decisions to how fun the game is?

~~~
monos
Some of his reasoning can be found in posts in that thread

<http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=6273.0>

I like to think that 'interesting decisions' are what make any game fun but
that alone doesn't explain it... ludology?

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ugh
Follow up to <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1723677>

