Biomes, heightmap and more for mods

[burli]

This should be a feature discussion, not a request! I want to write a "mapgen" that collects the data and stores them to disc. But I hope that it will be implemented in C++ one day

A huge problem for mods is the lack of information about the map. Mods have to "guess" what's around by parsing the environment, which is not very fast and precise.

I want to define what kind of information should be available and how they should be presented to the mod.

For me the most important informations would be the biome and the height, but heat and moist are also interesting. What else should be stored?

The next question is, is it necessary to store the biome, heat or moisture for each node or is it enough to store an average value for each mapblock or maybe a subset of 8x8 or 4x4 nodes? Is there a use case where biome, heat or moisture per node is important?

I would suggest to store climatic informations as a set for each 8x8 or 4x4 area and heightmap as separate map per node

Another information that might be useful is about the underground. Currently the only available information is the center coordinate of a cave room. But I want to know more. I want to know the size of the rooms and the type of stone the dungeon is made of. And I want to know where caves are. I know that this is difficult for noise generated tunnels, but it should be possible for large caves.

Any suggestions?

[Gael de Sailly]

You can use minetest.get_mapgen_object : here but only on the on_generated callback.

Biome information can theoretically be calculated again. But there aren't the required functions in the core.
See issue 3685. Apparently the devs are interested in this feature.

[burli]

You can use minetest.get_mapgen_object : here but only on the on_generated callback.

Thats how I want to collect and store data. For the first version I want to store the data in a simple file per mapchunk with the minp coordinate hash as filename.

Biome information can theoretically be calculated again. But there aren't the required functions in the core.
See issue 3685. Apparently the devs are interested in this feature.

I hope that my new PC comes tomorow. With my old laptop is developing a pain. Then I think that I can upload a first version at the weekend