Notch (creator of Minecraft) has started explaining his Procedural map generation

[guyanonymous]

Well, to be fair, the tallest a building in the game can be is 128 blocks, including the bottom bedrock layer.

And for people to move far enough for these issues to effect them involves modding/cheating, and, realistically, isn't something that 99.99999% of users would encounter during normal game-play.

Here's some user video of what happens etc.. http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewto...p?f=35&t=53577

And here's some info: "At 12,550,820 units, the normal world stops and these edgelands start. They continue until 32,000,000 units, where they suddenly stop and nothing is beyond them."

Each unit is ~1m in real-world terms, so the issues don't start until people have gone 12 550.820 km in any direction from the center of the world (the spawn point), and they can continue (albeit with distortions, slowdowns, etc) until they've gone 32,000 km from spawn.

I think he's doing OK.

That said - I'm all about endless worlds etc, and planning ahead. Imagine how much resolution we'd have if each block was 1dm instead of 1m (we'd need a bit more height in the world)...or 1cm. Let's get some 64bit goodness rolling in games and other applications people!