Steve Swaringen
- taiwroal
- taiwroal
- America/Chicago
- Yes
- No
![[Mod] Torabi](../../../data/assets/gravatar/torabi.png){kind=small}
Adam, you put way too much thought into understanding a system that was designed to require no thought at all. Maps now align themselves on a grid, such that they either represent the exact same area at the same zoom level, or don't overlap at all. This makes it trivial to make a wall of maps in item frames that line up correctly with no overlap. Unfortunately, with this comes the loss of the ability to choose the center point of the map, and a greater risk of accidentally creating two separate maps that cover the exact same area of the world.
Torabi, assuming this change in map behavior is intentional (as you describe), it represents a philosophical change in the concept of maps in Minecraft. One of the beauties of Minecraft is that every individual can play the game in a different way, suited to their own interests. For those who like to explore large areas and stitch maps together, the new behavior will be regarded as a good thing. It will substantially reduce the effort required to get separate maps to line up with each other. For the rest of us for whom maps are primarily about mapping the area around where we live, it forces us to choose a location for our domicile that has a particular orientation to the invisible coordinate system. (Keep in mind that the grid coordinates are only visible if you either have a mod installed or use the "diagnostic" HUD.)
I personally don't like the new philosophy, though I think I understand it and recognize that there are those who will like it. Maps no longer work in an intuitive fashion aligned with the "primitive" character of stone picks and shovels. Instead they act more like satellite images managed by NSA computers.
Has this new philosophy of maps been vetted against the Minecraft vision?
This very succinctly describes the entire situation. However, I'd argue that there's been a gradual shift, at least in respect to maps, from realism to convenience, over the course of Minecraft's development. When they were originally added, they were centered on the exact block the player was standing on, but this was changed in 1.4.2 to center on the chunk. This was certainly less flexible, more magical, and required an understanding of the internal concept of a chunk to be able to predict where the map would be centered. But it made efficiently mapping out an area much easier without counting blocks or using the debug screen.
The ability to clone maps, and for multiple players to appear on the same map, was originally a bug: maps could only be cloned by shift-clicking when originally creating the map, and the player arrows would all be pointing in the direction of the person holding the map, even if the players were facing/moving different directions. This was later fixed up and promoted to a feature: copies of an existing map could be made by crafting it with another Empty Map, and player arrows reflected the actual orientation of each player. Maps also show up as green dots when a copy was placed in an item frame. This information is communicated "magically" between all copies of the map in the world. When item frames were originally introduced, the map showed up in the middle, like any other item, but as of 1.7.2, maps cover the entire block when placed in a frame, to allow for seamless tiling, and thus the creation of large, composite maps. This latest change is just an extension of that trend.
Minecraft is deliberately simplistic, and sacrifices realism for abstraction in many cases. Consider, for example, the use of the same furnace to both cook food and smelt ore. Or the crafting table, which is used to create a wide variety of items, and which features a number of metal (or perhaps stone) tools on the sides, and yet only requires four wooden planks to create. So I don't really think this change violates the philosophy of Minecraft, and I doubt there would have been many complaints, were it not for the absolute loss of the ability to choose the center point of the map.
I don't think reverting to any of the previous behavior is the best solution. That just sacrifices one usage pattern for another. Seamlessly tiling maps is now well supported. Ideally, there should also be a way for players to create maps that aren't locked to the grid, with a way to specify the center point down to the exact block, like when maps were first introduced.
I agree that this effect was likely the interaction of multiple rules in the Villager AI, and also that the behavior is much improved in the latest snapshot.
I have a pre-existing artificial village where I've evaluated this. It is a very large village, built under a 101 meter diameter glass dome to protect from mobs. Inside the dome are two concentric 5-story rings of apartments. Total is approximately 700 doors. (I can't begin to count the villagers, or even the iron golems with them moving in and out among the structures.)
With 1.7.4 the vast majority of villagers conglomerated, day or night, on the first floor on the northwest edge of the outer ring. With 14w07a they definitely spread out a lot more, some even venturing outside the dome. Large crowds will gather in the central park/forest, and others will gather at the north end of the dome where a natural river passes inside the dome. Some of these villagers will play in the water. (All we need now is a rubber duck. Where did I leave that chicken??
They do still seem to be biased to the northwest (even after many day/night cycles in 14w07a), but not nearly so strongly as before.
Part of me would like to see this AI taken a step farther where villagers would socialize during the day but would tend to associate themselves with particular doors (apartments) at night, generally trying to return to the same door (making it easier at night to find a particular villager offering a particular trade), and trying harder to spread themselves uniformly among doors within the community at night. Children at night would tend to go home with their parents. But, what I see in 14w07a is a huge improvement in the AI, and makes creating large villages more interesting than they were with the old AI.
@Torabi, assuming this change in map behavior is intentional (as you describe), it represents a philosophical change in the concept of maps in Minecraft. One of the beauties of Minecraft is that every individual can play the game in a different way, suited to their own interests. For those who like to explore large areas and stitch maps together, the new behavior will be regarded as a good thing. It will substantially reduce the effort required to get separate maps to line up with each other. For the rest of us for whom maps are primarily about mapping the area around where we live, it forces us to choose a location for our domicile that has a particular orientation to the invisible coordinate system. (Keep in mind that the grid coordinates are only visible if you either have a mod installed or use the "diagnostic" HUD.)
I personally don't like the new philosophy, though I think I understand it and recognize that there are those who will like it. Maps no longer work in an intuitive fashion aligned with the "primitive" character of stone picks and shovels. Instead they act more like satellite images managed by NSA computers.
Has this new philosophy of maps been vetted against the Minecraft vision?