More Biome Types

[msteiger]

Currently there are 5 biomes: MOUNTAINS, SNOW, DESERT, FOREST, PLAINS. There's an ancient GitHub issue requesting different forest biomes and I'm currently porting a worldgen that supports many biomes:

OCEAN,
LAKE,
BEACH,
SNOW,
TUNDRA,
BARE,
SCORCHED
TAIGA,
SHRUBLAND,
TEMPERATE_DESERT,
TEMPERATE_RAIN_FOREST
TEMPERATE_DECIDUOUS_FOREST,
GRASSLAND,
SUBTROPICAL_DESERT,
ICE,
MARSH,
TROPICAL_RAIN_FOREST,
TROPICAL_SEASONAL_FOREST,
COAST,
LAKESHORE,
RIVER

This list is based on the Whittaker diagram - taken from Red Blob Games (source):

I suggest to extend the current list of biomes to those above (currently defined in an enum in WorldBiomeProvider). There are (at least) three issues with that:

• Would it make sense to make the set of biomes extensible to support exotic biomes for certain worlds or is it better to have a consistent fixed set of biomes everyone can rely on?
• Does this change break some of the existing world gens? A question for Marcin Sciesinski maybe. Does it affect Immortius ' world-gen restructuring?
• "Second-Level" generators such as flora/tree gens are defined for the existing biomes. These need to be extended.

What do you guys think?

 

[Cervator]

Certainly we need more biomes, and I'm pretty sure we need to make them extensible too. Last time we tried to add a biome it didn't go too well as the changing values would affect each world generator, rather than just the one made for it. I think it would heavily depend on the world gen overhaul and might be better to delay until right after that goes stable ?

 

[Immortius]

Ultimately I'm not sure whether biomes are needed or not. In principle, if you use things like temperature, altitude, humidity, distance from ocean, soil type and so forth to determine what to generate where, then you should get "biomes" naturally falling out without having to define them explicitly. Plus they would smoothly transition into each other.

Very dependent on the specific world generator though - if a generator wants to use biomes then that is fine, but it is up to that particular world generator to provide any extension mechanism. Biomes will not be a core part of the world generation framework.

On second-level generators specifically - I want them gone.