[Suggestion] Add mountains/rivers/scenery at the edges of town

Heya Raaynn, question: can you forward this thread to SS?

We've got a nice discussion going and I think it would be good to have the SS' view on the feasibility of this proposal

Okay, but the edge of smp8 town has to have an unaccessible town of happy marriage fish, carelessly floundering around the grass and the clouds.

Well if we’re just picking and choosing now. I’d like there just to be the void on my corner on smp2.

So ideally, it'd be a BT project or a SS project?

I'm pretty sure our awesome community would also be done to get at it!

What say you, chicken sir?

Free promotion straight to SS for me to do it?

I would love this!

In fact, I suggested it also, back... yeesh, almost a decade ago: https://empireminecraft.com/threads/scenery-beyond-town-borders.23117/

Using world edit to copy-paste a bunch of chunks doesn't seem too difficult, so yeah, it does seem like the main work is just identifing a good (relatively flat) area of naturally occuring land and tweaking the edges so that it flows naturally into Town's flatness when pasted.

That's a bit of work, sure, but also work that anyone could do, even regular players. You could even make it a contest: go out exploring in the wild, find an area of X*X dimensions, dig a (let's say) 2 block wide perfectly flat square around its perimeter, and then make the surrounding terrain flow nicely into that flat edge. Let residents of each server vote for their favorite and there you go.

The whole thing is not a matter of what we put there, it's a matter of how we put it there. Covering that much space in WE [WorldEdit] while does drastically speed up the process, only SS/Admins may do so, and they are already busy enough as it is. Setting up permissions/residences or whatever alternative also takes SS/Admins to set up so the same problem persists.

Indeed. Mind: EMC towns are big, and we've got 10 of them!

Once you have it working in creative, it's just four "//paste"s per town to port it over. Worldedit does dynamic loading of structres if you want to paste outside of render distance.

To get the terrain, doing it in WE would be foolish, WorldPainter, probably with assistance from Gaea or WorldMachine, would make this a lot easier. I said it before: if you get someone who knows what they're doing with terrain making, this can be done in an afternoon or two.
The problem there is that we would either need BT members with actual skill in using build tools, or someone would need to get paid. I would have the connections to get a good builder on this, or I could even do it myself, but, as I work professionally now, I don't think anyone I know is going to do it for free.

I myself do know how to use WorldPainter and the like as well, but getting access to the worlds is strictly on the very high ups so I wouldn't have a shot of doing anything like that. However, in order to do such a thing with the program to every SMP and Utopian town, we would have to effectively shutdown EMC on the town side for a day or two. Which for just a cosmetic change I feel would annoy more people who really couldn't care what the very edge of town looks like.

No, you wouldn't?

You would just download the word and create a fork. Then, change all the sides on your fork with world painter, and merge only the outside chunks of the fork with main... There is no need for a turn-off other than the nightly reboot + maybe a minute to execute a few commands... Merging a fork doesn't take any extra time...

I haven't heard of such a thing with Minecraft worlds outside of region files, and I wouldn't dare touch such a thing. So I am clearly not knowledgeable in that area of the game. So anyone else with that kind of knowledge do speak up

I still think the better idea would be lava walls https://empireminecraft.com/threads/suggestion-lava-walls-around-town.23307/

Easy +1

Disclaimer: I am speaking as a regular member, and not in any official capacity so my opinions here are worth all of 2 cents. It's just my 2 cents.

Even if we did a simple stupid change to the edges of town (//set water assuming WE even is a working solution for town edges - I have no clue on that), a SS would have to run around setting the coordinates, and then the command. Also, as Cyber pointed out, this would have to be done in pieces because otherwise the smp would crash.

This assumes there would be zero mistakes, mis-clicks, and that people in chat wouldn't drive them batty while they try to use the up arrow for the command (set to vanish and hide all chats so they have the coordinates to verify on screen easily, yada), and having to ignore any reports that come in while they do this work (and no trolls show up or another staff is online to handle all that). Etc.

Somehow, at least once, I betcha some residences accidentally get set to water (remember the smp8 cake incident anyone LOL?). I'd also bet Ulti's money that we'd guess how many blocks we could do at once without crashing the smp based off experience with Stage, and we'd be wrong. And we'd crash an smp. So now we need the big guns on standby too.

It's more time and people than you might think at first blush. Like most things, heh. The build aspect of this is the very least of it IMO. That would probably be the easiest part of it all. How to deploy, how to test the deploy, how to do a risk assessment on it (what safeguards are needed), what backup/recovery steps would need to be ready, etc...

All that said, I do like the idea. I just don't know how to get it done in a feasible easy manner, and again as Cyber pointed out, who has any time to even look into it. Gods above know I don't. But threads like these start the discussion, so that's a good thing at least. It's likely a "low" on the priority-totem-pole, but hey, at least it's a nice idea that can get floated about, and I could be totally wrong. Maybe a SS will see all this and go "hey, I have an easy solution" but if Chicken don't know one off the top of his genius head, don't hold breath

Disclaimer: I am speaking as a regular member, and not in any official capacity so my opinions here are worth all of 2 cents. It's just my 2 cents.

I have done it before, I don't think you understood what I meant with it. Basically, yes, those tools exist. There are a few tools developed specifically for it, but you could probably do something as simple as this with MCEdit's scripting functionality, assuming it still has that.

I think that, by using terms like "fork" I implied that I was talking about the world files, but I was not. I just used the terminology of software development to describe what I meant, I didn't mean you would use Git to get it to work.
As for the chunk borders: I agree that it wouldn't be a good idea to play with and merge in any chunks that also have player builds on them. But, the way I see the landscape done, there would be some flatland around the outer road anyway, to provide a little bit of visual space, so no chunks of player data should be touched. Region files are (As far as I know, I could very well be wrong in that part) not an issue

An even safer-feeling (though a lot more sketchy) way to do it would be to just... Use FAWE... Just copy paste a few times, like using World Edit, but with uploaded schematics. I don't like it, as it is effectively working on a life database, but, if you are careful, you *should* not run into any issues. FAWE has the functionality that it dynamically loads anything you want to paste, even if it would otherwise not be loaded, exactly for stuff like this. FAWE also has (should still have) a safe paste functionality, where it doesn't try to execute the command as fast as possible, but rather only does a few edits at a time, meaning there wouldn't be any update overflow nonsense. (If you don't know: some running redstone contraptions can break when a large WorldEdit operation is done, because of block update scheduling, this would circumvent that.) And, of course, FAWE has the functionality that you can load schematics from your computer to any server that runs it. This is the way I did stuff when I was on on Build Team, because, as you know, the entire Halloween map I made for BT was done in WorldPainter, using a combination of WorldDownloader and FAWE.
FAWE is the way smaller servers did stuff like this, when I was still working freelance for small servers, but most bigger servers nowadays use either custom plug-ins or some custom version of MCEdit. at least, that was still the case a year ago when I worked for bigger servers.

False, FAWE has a safe paste feature that schedules it all for you. You can even already start with the next edit while the other one is still running. Also, measuring for Crashes is way to low, as running redstone breaks way earlier.

False, FAWE has an automatic backup feature. You can set a command, run it, and, if it did something you didn't want it to do, shut down the server and load the local backup, all without touching the actual server files. Yes, it uses a bit of RAM, and it does quite a few writes to an SSD, meaning you burn through it a bit faster, but I don't think the EMC servers are that close that using a GB or two of RAM more is an issue, and it's not like it would always be turned on, so the SSD burning should be minimal.

FAWE =/= World Edit. There is a reason why I built on a locally hosted server instead of a single player world, and there is a reason that server runs Arch.

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Just to be entirely clear here: I have four years of experience as a professional build team member. While doing that, I have also focussed a lot on the more technical side of things, starting with data packs, and ending up doing some server dev stuff. I'm still not a good Java developer, I wouldn't even call myself a decent C++ developer, even though I'm far better at that language, but I currently work for Mojang on Education Edition, and I quit my part-time job as a teacher at University to do that. (Still alongside my Masters) I know what I am talking about, and I have done stuff like this before. I wouldn't be comfortable coordinating it myself, but I would know people who would. The question is not whether or not it is possible, the question is whether or not you want to get the kinds of people who have the skills to do it. Ada, an old [Big server you know about] dev, who currently works on Hytale, is the girl I'd recommend for it, charges fifty quid an hour for one-off projects like this. That sounds like a lot, but *some* get paid more as a builder. She's done stuff like this for servers way bigger than this one. You can probably find someone who is cheaper than her, or even try to learn the skills required yourself, but don't act like it's rocket science, it's just a skill you don't have, requiring tools you've never learned to use (properly.)

I'm trying to help here, because I think there are people who would actually want this. I like the edges fine as they are, and just don't think it's worth the money. But, please, don't act like stuff like this has never been done before, or like it's absurdly difficult. It's pretty easy, but the stakes are so high that you should really get someone with a lot of experience to do it. If this would have been a sever that resets once a year anyway, I would probably be arrogant enough to do this myself, but, as it stands, all I can do is tell you how I saw other people do it when I worked for server build teams, and point you to those people in case you need them.