Biomes

[Diotic]

I'll start with making something clear: I'm not a programmer; I'm a user. When editing the JS for the wiki I used to manage, I unfailingly copy-pasted other people's code. I make use of Explain XKCD whenever a programming joke comes up. The one skill for that field I'm proficient in is Google, and tutorials are my best friend.

When Worlds came out, I decided I wanted to help with wiki work. (The wiki in question is legoworlds.gamepedia.com, and really doesn't have much at the moment.) Wikis work because people like having explanations written out by those with more knowledge/experience/free time. I had the free time to use QuickBMS on the Worlds .dat and to try and make sense of what I could. My problem is that I don't have the knowledge and experience to understand much of what I'm looking at.

For the wiki in question, I'm trying to get started with pages on biomes. I looked in STUFF\TERRAFORM\THEMES, and I can see what spawns in which biome, which audio tracks are associated with the zone, and such. Good for me, but obviously I have no idea how the computing magic all works, so confusion sets in when I look at STUFF\TERRAFORM\BIOMES\DEFINITIONS. When there are obvious connections (Hey, this ground type is mentioned in this other file!) I can sort of figure them out, but I have hardly a clue of what the terrain generation stuff means. For example, there are hills and mountains in STUFF\TERRAFORM\BIOMES\GROUPS\NORMAL.TXT, but their status as blend biomes is unclear, and I don't know when I'd see those in the game world.

I guess my question is "What are the hills and mountains biomes?", but if someone could tell me what I'm looking at when I read those text files, that would be nice as well. Again, I'm clueless.

Edited June 7, 2015 by Diotic

[lol username]

A lot of it is uncharted territory at the moment - I've personally been looking more at minifigures and props than terrain generation. But from what I have looked at...

It seems that "themes" define things like ambient audio, characters, props, and special landscape models (like, say, volcanoes) to go in an area.

Then "biomes" have a default theme (for example, the "volcanic" biome makes use of the "defaultvolcanic" theme), and specify the landscape generation. The shape/topography of the landscape, and what materials it's made out of (grass, snow, etc). In theory, you could change the default theme of the volcanic biome from "defaultvolcanic" to "spookywoods", and the result would be volcanic areas having vampires, gravestones, etc instead of warlocks and volcanoes, but retaining their lava rivers and such... But I haven't tested that yet.

Then finally, "groups" include a bunch of biomes to go together in a world. It seems the game only uses one at the moment, "normal". (I tried using the superflat group, it didn't seem to work - but I think I may have done something wrong, so I'm going to try again.)

As for mountain and hills biomes, they don't have themes tied to them, and as you noted they're "AdditionalBlendBiomes" - so I'm assuming they're added on top of/blended into the normal biomes, just to add some variety to the shape of the landscape. It could use some testing though - maybe remove them, and see if the resulting worlds are generally flatter?