Is it possible to blend biome Y borders?

[Milan*]

Hi again, i wonder if it is possible to blend the Y borders of a biome since it can look very odd to define max and min Y.

[firefox]

yes, you can =(^.^)=

if you make the min and max height overlapping, they will blend like the horizontal borders.
of course this is more effective if their heat/humidity parameters are closer to each other ;)

i used this technique to blend beaches. the normal and the beach version of a biome had the same parameters and i altered one of them by + or -5 (closer towards 50). this blurred the line and made a nice blend.
if you increase the difference, it will get less blurry and generate more straight lines, but be careful not come to close to other biome's parameters or you will get unwanted surprises :P

[Milan*]

This is very good to read, thank you very much, i'll give it a try asap. :)

[paramat]

Wow i had no idea of that method, i did try to code this type of blending into the engine but ran into some problems and gave up on the idea.

[paramat]

On trying this it doesn't work so well, it needs to work for biomes which are vertically stacked and have the same heat /humidity points.
The reason i gave up on the idea is because it would add blend where you don't want it, for example at sea level where you want grass on the water's edge and dirt underwater, if this type of blend was optional that would be better.

[firefox]

On trying this it doesn't work so well, it needs to work for biomes which are vertically stacked and have the same heat /humidity points.
The reason i gave up on the idea is because it would add blend where you don't want it, for example at sea level where you want grass on the water's edge and dirt underwater, if this type of blend was optional that would be better.

if multiple biomes have the same parameters, only the one registered first will be generated.

i used this for my mossy biomes:
the "warm ocean" goes up to +4, biomes begin at +5.
the "venus" biome has the same parameters and goes down to +1, so it will not get a sandy beach at all, since i registered it first.
it's neighbouring "neptune", "sun" and "uranus" biomes have different parameters, so they will blend with the "warm ocean" and have a sandy beach.
to get dirt underwater, i added a "venus_beach" biome from 0 to -5 with the same parameters as "venus" and "warm ocean". it will ignore the ocean and generate only dirt in "venus" biomes and it blends with the sandy beach in "neptune" and "uranus" biomes.


this is the border between "venus" with dirt underwater and "neptune" with a sandy beach.
in the background is "uranus" and "moon" which don't blend with the beach, since i didn't implement this for all biomes yet.

beaches are difficult...
but on higher ground it's simple and easy =(^.^)=

[firefox]

i did some further testing and it turned out to be more complex than expected :P
my simple approach with only 4 oceans for 9 biomes didn't work out.
apparently you need to make an extra ocean and beach version for each biome and give them all the same parameters.
then make them overlap where they should and alter the parameters by a small value.

Edit:
unfortunately i can't reproduce my results from previous attempts :(
the mapgen prefers straight borders, even if i make it overlap 10 nodes up and down.

regarding my previous screenshot, i found out that this is actually the horizontal biome blend bewteen biomes and beaches that have the same top layers :P
so maybe it is possible to imitate blending by duplicating the biomes above and below their min/max height so they work like extensions and the horizontal blend makes it look like they would blend vertically.
the problem with this is, that it will also create unwanted other biomes inside the "blend area" which will dispel the trick. (this happened with my beaches, i got random spots with snow in tropical areas)

the best you can do is to make "valley" and "mountain" versions of each biome so that it may appear at any height and not just in restricted layers. this will still create straight horizontal edges, but at least you can avoid "striped mountains" :P