A few weeks ago, I was about to start an outpost in the SMP8 frontier, close to some of the uncharted area there (what shows up as black in the live map). I thought the uncharted area would simply be revealed when I got close to it and would look like normal terrain, but instead, the island was cut off abruptly where the uncharted area began, and what did exist in that area was just ocean. However if you look at the live maps for the different frontiers, the undiscovered/uncharted areas look like they have swaths which have been cut through by exploration, revealing ordinary looking terrain. In other words, it looks like normal terrain had always been there, but that it wouldn't show up on the live maps until the first time that at least one player would get within its chunk radius or something. So...if you look at a live map and see a large, black area, how is this handled? Is it always empty ocean? Does terrain sometimes randomly materialize when you get close enough to the area? Does it have a delay of a few days or so before an admin updates the database manually? Or is it something else? Thank you.
Any chunks not already created will be generated with the current world generation model. This is why you have long cliffs that look silly, different versions of minecraft will use the same seed differently. 1.7 might have a desert for those chunks, 1.8 could have ocean or ice or any other biome. They have never looked at world generation from a long-term multiplayer point of view and taken into account the existing map.
we currently do have dynmap triggering renders on simply loading the chunk, but its not guaranteed to stay that way as it caused issues in past. for ensuring, place a block.
In my experience those black sections are islands that someone had to sail around. They're dark I'd assume because the person exploring didn't get off their boat. They have a weird shape because the land generation algorithm changed between some older minecraft versions, which had the efffect of random biome changes on chunk boundaries. So the island could be a mountain that was abruptly cut-off by ocean biome chunks. Some of this could be inaccurate. I'm going off what I've heard from other threads.
Nope, not always. I love exploring the "Black Areas" and there's a lot of water. I recommend bringing a boat and the various water related enchantments on your armor. I think the black areas are mostly areas where people just went straight and didn't explore/place blocks while they went. There is a lag on the server, like most web servers/clients, in showing up. Sometimes it is quicker to show up if you force your browser to reload new data, force a refresh or zoom in on the area.
