I know the world is supposed to be all sorts of messed up and crazy, but is this intentional?
http://img192.imageshack.us/img192/9800/avwwcaveissue.jpg
My theory on AVWWs story:
Someone slipped The Doctor exotic space drugs and he went berserk.
Yes, that's intentional, although there will eventually be more of a forest background as well.
And to add to that: there's no way to ever get the same world twice. The RNG isn't single-seeded.
Surely you could get the same world twice. It would just be extraordinarily unlikely.
In the same sense of the Monkeys typing shakespeare... although millions of times less likely than that, honestly.
Millions of times less likely than that? Are you sure??
Pretty sure, yeah. I'm not sure how many words are in shakespeare, but I imagine it's not more than 200,000. And they all have to be in the right sequence, obviously. And they're each composed of 1-10 characters or so, most likely. Each of which only has maybe... 50 possible values if you include all the exotic punctuation and spacing and such.
In an AVWW world, you've got the world map, which has one random factor and maybe 100 possible distinct values per tile if you multiply all the various attributes together. Then in each region you have the dungeon map for the surface, with a random factor and really only maybe a few thousand overall permutations there, at most, for the dungeon map itself. But you have to multiply that versus the value for each world tile, for instance, since this could vary by each region. So now we're up to 10,0000 as our number of permutations, conservatively.
Then you get into what is in each dungeon node, what all the sub-dungeons look like, what each building looks like, where the monster nests are seeded, how the terrain is seeded, where each tree and such are seeded, what the bosses are named (and there are a about 250,000 permuations of them as it is).
To get the EXACT same world twice involves so much multiplicative complexity that a few million times more complex than the works of shakespeare is probably undershooting it. The reason is all the nested procedural algorithms: there are tens or hundreds of thousands of possibilities at each level, if not more, and there's levels within levels like russian dolls. Minecraft is hugely random enough, but it only has a few levels -- terrain, caves, and mob placement, so far as I can tell. That's going to give ridiculous amounts of random as it is, but our system adds on a lot more in terms of what would really be randomized.
I'm not making a value statement against Minecraft, or Shakespeare for that matter, but the fact of the matter is this has more constituent parts that would need to be placed properly if you've got a world of any substantial scope -- say if you reached level 80 or 100, for instance. If you're just talking about the very starting map seed when you start the game, obviously that has way lower complexity than Shakespeare, or Minecraft, because most things haven't been generated yet and we're only talking a few dozen tiles. There's still hundreds of thousands of possible starts, so it's still unlikely, but once you start moving around more, that complexity literally compounds.