Terrain Control is a Fork of the original PhoenixTerrainMod/BiomeTerrainMod open sourced project. It has been continuing to develop and improve PTM over the last year and is fully supported and up-to-date with the current Minecraft and even bukkit releases. - See it's Wiki.

I have recently checked in on TC again after a long while and found that it is now very well suited as an Integration candidate for EBXL with where EBXL is heading in version 4.x and beyond.

Terrain Control, by itself, may not be able to already do everything desired by EBXL 4.x but it could prove to be a valuable modifiable Foundation upon which to further develop EBXL and whatever it becomes.

• I can see EBXL acting as a sort of User-Friendly Integrated Front-End for both Terrain Control and EBXL's own extra custom feature-set plus who knows what else? This would allow for easy player access to a central massively powerful 'World Features Control System', features that can be easy to select but consistently complex and incredible in their results.
• Hopefully the point can be reached where people will be able to just make some quick adjustments in a World Creation GUI or download a well known favorite settings file and enjoy an entire endless world of rich variety and beauty instead of just settling for a 2k x 2k pre-generated world with bedrock borders in order to get a truly fantastic world to play in. This is what I believe EBXL has the potential to become.

Here are some specific reasons why Terrain Control is an excellent Integration Candidate for EBXL:

1. Both projects are Open Source these days (EBXL was not originally), and both are supported and have dynamic communities.

2. As of the Minecraft v1.4.5 Terrain Control versions; TC now uses Forge just like EBXL now does. The newest TC versions even have Forge and bukkit support built into the same single universal file. This also is inline with the direction EBXL has been going in with support for universal type builds.

3. Terrain Control custom worlds are now made as a separate World Type, preserving compatibility with Vanilla world use by a client. This is also a stated goal of EBXL 4.x.

4. With v4.x EBXL is now moving into Intelligent Terrain control; TC will offer a massive pre-built and supported complementary Terrain AND Biome manipulation tool-chest to draw upon which should end up vastly speeding up Feature/Biome/Terrain dev and implementation, allowing more time to instead be spent on creative detail and other features that TC cannot natively implement by itself.

5. Terrain Control has far better custom Biome manipulation ability than the old PTM did. It can alter vanilla biomes or allow creation of custom biomes and even define Border Biome rules or custom Biome Heights. It's terrain manipulation is no longer only on the global-scale, though it does have global settings too, but can also be implemented on a Biome by Biome basis. Using custom Biome Heights + Border Biome rules it is possible to create entire Regions that build up to greater or lower elevations and such. These abilities could be a very useful complement to EBXL's already existing and future Biome tools.

6. Terrain Control supports BO2 and BO3 terrain objects, which might be useful for EBXL.

7. With Terrain Control being open source it may be possible to achieve some of the future goals of EBXL by modifying some of TC's already existing code and/or merging it with already existing EBXL code. There are definitely features desired for EBXL 4.x which may not be directly implementable by TC itself, but it's tool-set could be very helpful in developing these new features.

8. This:

9. There is a long history and entire communities worth of explored PTM and TC config settings to start with when researching how to manipulate the Terrain and Biomes with the TC system and settings. Same for pre-existing BO2 objects. Plus it now has a User Interface for editing those config files.

10. Terrain Control is already able to affect vanilla structure generation; either by turning specific types of structures on or off, or by even replacing vanilla village houses with houses of your own design. EBXL could use these abilities to great affect and build on them.

11. Mega-sized terrain features can be altered too, like: Adjustable Ratio of ocean vs land and even continent size. A true desert or ocean world could be created that would still have varying biomes within it. This is in-line with long-time held goals of mine from back at the start of the Cubic Chunks Mod era and also Scotts with Intelligent Terrain for a continental-sized Terrain manipulation layer/aspect.

Love point 8, my friend!

You can be sure I'l be taking a look at this!

Thank you!

👍

Points # 9, 10 and 11 have been added as well as a second paragraph above the points. Point # 5 was edited a little to emphasize that there are still global scale settings in addition to the Biome-Scale settings.

Thanks again, MC!

Thanks Scott. :)

Wow on point #8.

Are they, by any chance, filled with tunnels that might be appropriate for giant ants, without random openings poking to the outside ruining the whole effect? You know, like a 3d maze of tunnels, rather than randomly running into and intersecting each other like vanilla caves do?

I'd love to see this as well... i really like both projects.

@MineCrak I'm trying to nail down the license on this...any help you can give would be great!

@MineCrak integration is done. It is everything you said. thank you, my friend!

oO.. Already? Scott, you are a miracle worker! You sneaky genius. :)

btw: I wouldn't mind if some day I came across a mountain in my EBXL world that bore a striking resemblance to you. ;)

Ohh ...

So when do we download this new great stuff?

Oh yea, version 4, real soon now :-).

(And, will those mountains have internal trails that look like giant ant trails that don't poke out of the hillside? And is there a giant ant mod?)