Clouds

[greenlion]

Should clouds be generated? Should they be added by the decorator function?

[deathcap]

Hmm. If clouds are purely visual (like voxel-sky) then they may be better as a separate plugin. Good idea of how they could work from http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/e7xol/this_is_how_clouds_should_work_gif_simulation/c161ygy:

On the other hand, cloud blocks as part of terrain generation (as a decorator yes) could be neat, too. Maybe they could be harvested for special purposes - like from the Natura mod from MC http://ftbwiki.org/Cloud :

Clouds are a type of block added by Natura. These clouds spawn naturally in the Overworld, generally near the build height limit. This makes gathering them difficult, but rewarding, as clouds will slow the player's movement and falling speed and prevent the player from falling through the bottom block.

[greenlion]

I was thinking more along the lines of blocks that you could harvest. At the very least you could combine a bunch of cloud drops in a bucket and get some water or something :)

There is:
https://github.com/shama/voxel-clouds which looks visually similar to first example.

The first version of voxel-perlin-terrain generated blocks that looked like clouds and you could mine and walk on them. I kind of liked it, but it is of course "unrealistic".

I'm not sure what level of realism you are shooting for in your game. For the highest level of realism there would be a height map and a rainfall map. The rainfall map is likely based on prevailing winds, which could be done via seed selection. Rain tends to fall on the windward side of a mountain and deserts tend to be found on the opposite side. Rainfall also determines the total amount of water, which leads to rivers and lakes. Latitude and longitude affect the range of temperature values and rainfall amounts as well. Further, tree density is affected by elevation, with tree height and density diminishing as you approach the treeline.

Cloud cover would be affected by humidity (arid regions are not cloudy) and weather as well.

This all feeds back into biome generation as well.

[deathcap]

@greenlion All cool ideas ;) Just to comment on:

I'm not sure what level of realism you are shooting for in your game.

Basically, I'm heavily inspired by modded MC – especially packs like Feed The Beast where there are hundreds of modifications all running together, written by many different developers, and player or admins can enable/disable and customize anything to their liking, or write their own enhancements. Its quite impressive, the way the game can be shaped in nearly any way imaginable.

As for voxel-land, ideally it would be generic enough to allow all of these possibilities, and more, by having separate plugins hook into it to add most functionality. Chunk generators, populators, decorators, biomes, etc. Maybe the biome generator (GH-8) could generate noise for altitude, humidity, etc., then plugins could add rivers, lakes, trees, snow, clouds, etc.