Restore mapgen v5 ?

[MTDad]

I wish you luck Paramat, I never got the biome system to give me results I was satisfied with in Simplev7, but you are both smarter than me and have a better understanding of its inner workings.

I had wondered if perlin noise would give better results than fill ratio, so I find it interesting that you've gone to that.

I did notice a couple things, and I apologize if you've already caught them;

You use default:sand for the fill for papyrus, but papyrus won't grow on default:sand, so imho that should either be changed to default:dirt_with_grass or the growth ABM for papyrus modified as that will be counter-intuitive for new players.

Don't forget the flowers! Since you blocked the "old" mapgen from working in v5 and v7 they'll need registered as well. :)

[paramat]

Heh yes flowers are coming soon, also i'm rethinking papyrus and will probably make it grow on dirt/grass, or maybe make it sit in the water. Please let me know your problems with the biome API, as i have been given the job of improving it, i am already planning to adjust heat/humidity noises to reduce the amount of tiny biomes, and plan to make those noise parameters player-adjustable through minetest.conf.

[MTDad]

Well you are the man for the job, as i found myself wishing the biome API behaved more like Paragenv7 while I was working with it, ie, more consistent and predictable. For lack of a better term its just too "fiddly". Incremental parameter value changes yield no visible changes over a wide range, until some threshold is crossed and drastic changes result. I'm sure if I understood C and spent some time studying the internal code I'd get better results.

Decoration distribution using fill ratio works well for simple items, but fails on schematics. I'm unsatisfied with the forests and jungles in Simplev7. Trees are in rows, there are large areas that should have trees, but for some reason don't, especially on hills. No amount of fiddling could seem to fix it. I've been meaning to try perlin noise instead, but wasn't sure where to start.

I like the idea of being able to adjust the noise parameters. Yes, the current noise produces far too many micro biomes, usually in clusters near mountains, with huge monster biomes between. Personally, I like an occasional microbiome to break up scenery, but not clusters of them.

edit. Just thought of something. With minetest_game gaining v7/v5 biomes, will there be a way to override/deactivate it for mods? Simplev7 will no longer have a purpose, but I'm thinking more of Ethereal. I'm not sure if there are any others that rely on minetest_game not having biomes. If not it seems like it could be quite a mess, or they'll have to become sub-games rather than mods.

and further edit. duh.. I'm half asleep. Seems like it would mess up paragenv7 as well, and I'm sure you realized that.

[Jordach]

MTDad: BFD does not have issues with hilly areas failing to generate trees. Have you tried looking at /mapgen/mapgen.lua ?

[MTDad]

Jordach: Yes, I looked at BFD's mapgen, studying it and Ethereal's was how I learned to use the biome API :)

Actually, I do see the same things in BFD, it just doesn't stand out and look bad as there aren't open fields of jungle grass between the trees, which just looks wrong to me. Maybe I'm just picky, but here's a pic to show what I mean.

[paramat]

The biome API is a little broken at the moment, needs improving, you'll find surface nodes are placed underwater if under an overhang or floatland. Biomes are chosen using a voronoi diagram (search it) of heat against humidity, make sure your heat/humidity points for each biome are roughly evenly spaced across the diagram, this helps to create similar sized biomes. I'll look at your code, decoration 'sidelen' should be set to 16 or 8 or 4 (finer resolutions use more processing so balance it), 80 is too low a resolution.

> With minetest_game gaining v7/v5 biomes, will there be a way to override/deactivate it for mods?

I'm tackling that issue now, currently newly defined biomes do not override the default ones, resulting in a mess only avoidable by creating a subgame instead. Although players know mgv7 and the biome API are unstable i want to minimse the breaking of mgv7 worlds and ethereal etc.

[paramat]

Yes your sidelens are 16 or 80, try 16 for the more scattered low density decorations like flowers, and 8 for trees and grasses.
Heat and humidity have a typical range of 0-100 (in no particular units) but often exceed that range, so you could spread out your biome points more such that the extreme points are out at around -20 and 120. Drawing your points on graph paper helps.