Quote:
Originally Posted by turtle
The New World would have all the new map generation features and we don't lose what we have now. Nether passage makes for shorter run between the two "worlds" and minimize map generation in between. Each play can hang in either area. /tp and /tl would still function too.
Give the current world a good pruning and we'd be good to go.  |
A couple of potential issues:
1. First is speculative. We don't yet know that the two terrain generators are
technically compatible within the same world file. A
lot of people (in the larger MC community) are making a
lot of assumptions based on past releases, but there hasn't been a change to the generator this drastic in all of beta and for a very long time in alpha. Some of the options originally discussed by Notch, like the configurable height ceiling, would create neighboring chunk files that would potentially be in wholly different formats (this much I know from having written a chunk reader). I look forward to news from the mothership on this one, but I won't hedge any bets until then.
2. We probably can't ever do the "deep" prune of the world map that I'd suggested previously, either before or after the new generator comes into place. You and I will also never be able to do selective in-game region regeneration after the update (at least not in old areas). Even if we did the deep prune today, a week or more in advance, we'd have to "fill out" the world again to a safe perimeter before the upgrade to be sure stray holes get recreated with the old terrain generator. We should still be able to do the large-grain "meta" chunk deletions, though.
FWIW, I'd personally be fine with tossing what we have today and going cold turkey with 1.8, but I'll propose one other possible alternative for handling the switch. Through various plugins, bukkit today has "multiworld" support that allows you to run several worlds simultaneously and let users jump between them. If it's technically possible, we could continue to run the "old" world as a secondary world. The old world would live on physical disk instead of the RAM disk, and it would have a virtual border set up (using another plugin) to prevent it from significantly growing from where it is today. In my mind, these would both be methods of preparing the world for deprecation, but this would allow us to keep around the old world long enough to transfer inventory stores, copy buildings if possible/necessary, etc.