{"id":751,"date":"2010-11-07T11:55:49","date_gmt":"2010-11-07T19:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/?p=751"},"modified":"2010-11-07T12:26:39","modified_gmt":"2010-11-07T20:26:39","slug":"minecraft-monster-spawning-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/archives\/751","title":{"rendered":"Minecraft monster spawning ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"

With the recent 2010 Halloween update to Minecraft, players are complaining about some of the changes to monster-spawning code which causes them to appear in otherwise-safe areas. After kicking some ideas around, I figured they might be worth a blog-post or two.<\/p>\n

I’d like to present three ideas that should make the lighting-based monsters spawning system more viable. While it may seem to make players safer in their bases, it actually means that the game can place a greater emphasis on spawning lots of monsters because it reduces the chance of “weird” or “unfair” monster appearances.<\/p>\n

Suggestion 1: Bright ceilings also deter monster spawns.<\/h2>\n
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The order in which cells are checked before spawning a creeper<\/p><\/div>\n

Currently, monsters will spawn based on the brightness of the bottommost “floor” tiles. While this makes some sense from a technical standpoint, it neglects to consider how players prefer to light their buildings, and leads to cases where an area that seems<\/em> properly lit can still be vulnerable.<\/p>\n

To fix this: When deciding whether to spawn a monster, check any empty-space around the spot and make sure the surroundings (especially upwards) are either “solid” or else are also dark enough.<\/p>\n

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Blocks checked for light when obstructions are present<\/p><\/div>\n

On the left you can see that for a 2×1 creeper (side-view) the spawning system checks each of the blocks in the order shown. If a block on the path is “solid”, the checking on that line stops. If any “open” block visited has a light-level that is too high, the creeper cannot spawn.<\/p>\n

In conclusion, monsters can–as before–spawn in very small dark places. However, if the area is larger, some of the extra space is checked to make sure it is also dark-enough.<\/p>\n

Suggestion 2: Player “scent” trails.<\/h2>\n

Some people may be familiar with this as “breadcrumbs” from AI terminology. Basically, the player leaves behind a “smell” in the world as they move around. This smell goes a small distance from them, and then hangs around areas they’ve been for a while before fading. A given area will have a smell that depends on how close the player was, and how long ago they were nearby.<\/p>\n

Technical details: Each block (or perhaps each “floor” surface) has a special counter. Counters which are above zero will decrease with time (and are zeroed when the chunk is unloaded.) If the player is near a block, that block’s counter cannot be lower than an a certain amount based on how close the player is. This means that the “smell” of a block depends both on how long ago the player was nearby, and how close the player was to to that block before they moved away.<\/p>\n

This basic idea provides two very useful possibilities in terms of both making players less-frustrated and also making monsters a slightly bigger challenge:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. \n

    Most immediately-useful: Monsters can be prevented from spawning anywhere the player has very recently been<\/span>, even if that place is poorly lit. This prevents annoying (and impossible) cases where you walk around a large room, and then a monster appears on the far side of it behind you as you are leaving through the only door.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n

  2. \n

    It provides a way to make monsters smarter<\/span>! OK, not very much, but smart enough to actually follow<\/em> you around small corners. If they can’t directly reach you, they can try to follow the path you<\/em> took by looking at gradients in the smells.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Suggestion 3: Additive lighting<\/h2>\n

    Currently, Minecraft’s lighting model is not additive. \u00c2\u00a0This means that (compared to the real world) adding more torches doesn’t always make certain areas any brighter than they were before. I’ve made a quick animation to illustrate what I mean by “non-additive”. In the real world, you would expect the area between both torches to become brighter, but it does not.<\/p>\n

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    Click to see an animation showing how light is non-additive in Minecraft<\/p><\/div>\n

    This lighting model is partly responsible for the frustration people are having in deep areas of the world: They place torches in a way which seems correct based on real-world lighting, but it doesn’t really work. Every time you see someone make a 1×1 pillar with torches on all four sides, it’s an example of this mistaken belief. The way the minecraft world currently works, \u00c2\u00a0the ideal way to light things is to avoid<\/strong> grouping any torches together, yet players do this all the time because it’s what we “know” works.<\/p>\n

    Changing to an additive model (with an upper cap on brightness) would add visual realism and reduce the amount of frustration players will feel when trying to make areas safe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    With the recent 2010 Halloween update to Minecraft, players are complaining about some of the changes to monster-spawning code which causes them to appear in otherwise-safe areas. After kicking some ideas around, I figured they might be worth a blog-post or two. I’d like to present three ideas that should make the lighting-based monsters spawning […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[10,4],"tags":[21],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=751"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":806,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/751\/revisions\/806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/technofovea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}