ChunkGenerators & BlockPopulators FAQ

Recently I added a whole new section of API to Bukkit; Custom ChunkGenerators and BlockPopulators. I've had a world (sorry) of questions so I'll try to answer as many as I can here.

What the hell is a ChunkGenerator?
It's a thing. It lets you design new landscapes for a world. Plugins can create one and assign it to a world, and all new chunks created by the world will have been designed and created by that ChunkGenerator.

Okay, and what's a BlockPopulator?
BlockPopulators are the things that go over a new chunk and fill it in with the details. In vanilla minecraft, they're used to make all sorts of things likes dungeons, lakes, trees and grass.

Do you have an example of these?
Check out my example plugin BukkitFullOfMoon (jar). Type "/moon" when you're ingame and see!

Can I override the default worlds?
Yes! But it's not as easy as making your own. Specifically, you need to:

• Add load: startup to your plugin.yml. You need this to make sure your plugin loads before the worlds do.
• Add a new method to your plugin called getDefaultWorldGenerator(String worldName, String id). It should return the ChunkGenerator associated with the given id (if any id is specified). See here for an example.
• Tell your users to add the following lines to their bukkit.yml:
  
  Code:

  worlds:
       NAME_OF_THEIR_WORLD:
         generator: NAME_OF_YOUR_PLUGIN:ID_OF_GEN

• ID is optional, it can be left out (so just use "NAME_OF_YOURPLUGIN" and no colon). It's up to you if you want to use an ID, but they're pretty much required if you have multiple possible generators and people need a certain one.

Can I make a world with another plugin's generator?
Yes! You will need the name of the plugin, the name of the world and an ID (or null). If you're getting this from a user, I'd highly recommend keeping it with the same format as bukkit.yml ("SomePlugin" or "SomePlugin:SuperGenerator").

Simply get the plugin with the given name, make sure it actually exists, and then call its getDefaultWorldGenerator(worldName, id) method.

Can I add a BlockPopulator to someone elses ChunkGenerator?
Yep! It's a simple world.getPopulators().addPopulator(populator).

Can I add vanilla BlockPopulators to my own ChunkGenerator?
Not yet. We're working on it.



Please feel free to ask any questions you may have and I will try to answer them the best I can

 

Epic, now just push out the RB

 

This is pretty exciting stuff. Can't wait to see what the Bukkit community does with it.

 

This looks really cool. but the latest successful build returns no such command for '/moon' (#925)

 

Are you using the plugin? Please give me a copy of "/version" and "/plugins"

 

oops. sorry. I didnt realise it was a plugin.

 

Neat. Will it be possible to build a world generator that acts like a scaled up (in continent and ocean sizes) version of the vanilla generator? Us Cordiloners were rather disappointed with the small sizes of continents and oceans in Beta's generators.

 

ehm, ant fails with several javac errors. wait I'll paste the output somewhere.

 

You can do whatever you can dream.
http://forums.bukkit.org/threads/misc-bananaimagetomap-v2-turn-any-image-into-a-world-860.22623/

 

I couldnt fit it so I started a new terminal and did an cmd+A so NO I did not get to choose my username. http://pastie.org/2113512

java version "1.6.0_26"
Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.6.0_26-b03-378-11A486)
Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 20.1-b02-378, mixed mode)

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

It looks like it's missing the Bukkit import. I compile with maven (as recommended), so I'm of little help

 

oh ok, I didnt know what to do so I asked someone else and they said ant.

 

Added link to precompiled jar of BukkitFullOfMoon http://dinnerbone.com/screenshots/bukkit-moon-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar for the lazy.

 

We were thinking something procedural. Or, if that thing could create more vanilla-like worlds with caves, resources, lava, etc...

 

You can create those. It just needs some work getting them tuned right

 

Check out V2 - it has caves, resources, and epic dungeons!
Lava and underground lakes are on the way in v3, but seriously, you ought to check out those caves

 

Can you post a picture of what the moon thing looks like? I can't test it atm.

 

neither can I, all it does for me is take 30 mins to prepare the spawn arean to 32% than crashes.

 

Please define "crashes" so that we can fix it.

 

ehm, I kill it because its eating up cpu and ram and is dropping player connections, freezing and not being a minecraft server.

 

Here is one that I've been working on a bit here and there for a few days: https://github.com/Pandarr/PandaGen

It creates landscapish stuff. Still need to work on smoothing it out. Heck I'm pretty sure some of the code is even wrong. Quite aware it needs work still...

Once you are in game type /pandagen to get teleported. I have entity spawning turned off in the world and it always uses seed "1" as I'm trying to see what my changes do. You can remove the 1 for random worlds though.

 

Hi, I'm a minecraft modder who wants to port my world generation mod into a bukkit plugin. So I need to do something very simple, which is add a populator to the default list so the default world is populated with my creations.

EDIT - better way to do this

Code:

public void onEnable(){
        PluginManager pm = this.getServer().getPluginManager();
        pm.registerEvent(Event.Type.WORLD_INIT, new WorldListener(){
            public void onWorldInit(WorldInitEvent event) {
                event.getWorld().getPopulators().add(new MyPopulator());
            }
        }, Event.Priority.Normal, this);
    }

Not sure there is an addPopulators() method as stated in OP. getPopulators() just returns a list.

 

Hook the WORLD_INIT event and add your populator if the world meets your requirements (environment type etc)

 

Oh I see. Thanks!

 

Here's a screenshot of the moon world:


This is probably a kinda stupid question, but when compiling with maven, I get a bunch of errors about the ChunkGenerator and BlockPopulator classes not existing. Do I need to have my bukkit.jar somewhere so it uses it in the classpath?

EDIT by Moderator: merged posts, please use the edit button instead of double posting.

 

Redownload the maven dependencies

 

*yay* Now to start working on my generator

Edit: heh, this one's sure to confuse you:
"But I'm sure I built my house here..."


Edit 2: Another one, this time with voronoi noise:

 

How to return back to initial chunk generator (eg. what class used to generate chunks initially)

 

world.getGenerator()

 

I'm a huge fan of #2.

Let me know when you have cavegens working, I'd love to see them!