Was about to post this on the board for Manic Digger but then it suddenly went down. Instead of waiting for it to return I'll just put a copy here for now. And just generally talk here about idea that might work in vaguely Minefraft-like games.
I was looking at Wikipedia articles when I came across one about the
Harris martix, which is a tool used in archaeology in describing how a site was structured. From what I've read and observed of terrain in Minecraft, it struck me as a useful concept for games with such generation systems. One of the more difficult parts of terrain generation seems to be making complex structures, such as towns and dungeons, appear coherant. Villages hang off cliffs and mineshafts intersect poorly with dungeons tunnels.
Harris matrixes appear perfectly suited for mitigating this problem. Before actually generating the terrain, one could produce a Harris matrix for the area. The chart could be constructed from bottom to top, by proucing a layer at a time. After each layer, various featrues like cuts and walls could be added in relation to each other, possibly dividing layers. How this would help is that features could have rules as to what other features they can be placed directly on top of, to help prevent things from connecting nonsensically.
This matrix could then be refferenced when placing structures such as minesfafts and ravines to better determine where structures should be places relative to each other, and how overlapping objects take precident over each other. So a house might be made with a foundation, which goes on a construction cut, which itself would not be placed directly on a ravine cut, so a house would not generate over a ravine. Thus one would be generating archaeological charts and shaping the terrain to fit, the reverse of observing terrain and creating a chart to describe it.
