Development Roadmap
Addressing significant stability and third party mod compatibility concerns (ongoing)
Reimplement standalone lakes. Treat as river variant that dont generate river sections between their isolated pools. (conceptual stage)
Increase vegetation density placement (local branch proof of concept)
When rivers change vertical height they generate uniform banding and step distances which is unnatural. The bands spread onto the surrounding valley floors due to the height uplift implementation. We can fix this. (local branch has microterraces implemented, working on valley floor model update)
Got sent some code that reportedly makes mountain snow look better. Review and productionize if reasonable (needs review / productionizing)
Villages will build over rivers and it's annoying. (PR in review https://github.com/ETcodehome/ReTerraForged/pull/149)
Rivers have flow strength and direction. Drags boats and spawns visible particles. (PR needs more work and QA https://github.com/ETcodehome/ReTerraForged/pull/106)
RTF spawns volcano pipes already (rarely). Make them a usable source of lava and integrate cleanly to surrounding landscape in a cool way. (Raw early draft PR https://github.com/ETcodehome/ReTerraForged/pull/141)
Actually document all the settings so you can just point people at supporting documentation which will be important if bulk popularity (Started at https://github.com/ETcodehome/ReTerraForged/wiki/World-Settings)
The non noise carver cave settings aren't wired up to anything. I wired them up to something, but don't like the results at all. Probably should remove them all as they're extraordinarily slow and generate weird, defunct results. (Tested results of wiring them up, need to do a removal and cleanup PR)
Do stuff once validated (waiting on third party)
Update world creation to make it clearer when an RTF world is being created Update Preset menu to just be less bad and more intuitive (concept stage)
Somewhat prerequisite to ore generation improvements. Need correct/expectant biome behavior to properly QA biome-dependent ore conditions.
Its also worth a deep analysis after PRs 151, 152, 154, and 163 that all touched biomes in some way, whether it be biome spawning, third-party mod integration, or effects from biomes. (WIP https://github.com/ETcodehome/FreeTerraForged/pull/170)
Addressing the fact that Deep and tall worlds don't spawn ores in the same quantities we would prefer for reasonable gameplay. Approach sounds like an opt in toggle for extended ore generation? tbc. (planning)
Improve Archipelago Generation (#18)
Three separate things contributing to the vertical island coastal walls:
- One of the noises used to roughen island coastlines can fold back over itself and create sudden drops.
- The island-to-ocean transition stays pretty much the same width no matter how much deeper the ocean gets, so it becomes much steeper at large oceanDepth values.
- Islands near continents are faded point by point, which can clip or sharply distort part of an island.
I think the island generator needs to:
- Treat each island as a distinct shape
- Work from actual distances in blocks to both its own shoreline and nearby continents.
That would let it scale the ocean transition properly, and place/exclude islands correctly rather than clipping them. (conceptual stage)
Addressing the fact that trail ruins are painfully obvious due to shitty placement locations natively. (conceptual stage)
Migrating to align settings with 0.0.7 codebase for interoperability and easier settings addition for developers (proven, at implementation stage)
Migrate Erode feature from a feature to a surface decorator so its more correctly earlier in the worldgen pipeline and has to cleanup fewer artifacts like grass block removal. (conceptual stage)
Generating a more complete set of valid and sensible presets for incorporation (wip)
Preparation of video materials showing the capabilities of the mod in the best light for promotional purposes (actively progressing)