The first question would be whether GC is doing anything. My preferred test is to set up an extreme ocean world - no start continent, small islands about 15, and all other landmasses at 0 - and see if I start in such an ocean world. If it is I can create a partial biome package (the way to get outside biomes in) and see if I can pull in the biomes.
Edit: with that system you'll probably see no Biome Bundle biomes. You could try forcing some in with external biomes if you know the IDs.
Well, I've been pursuing a different tack on this. I have a couple of questions, and depending on the answers maybe a feature request.
My idea was to "fake" the biomebundle biomes by adding them as vanilla/BOP/etc (supported mod) biomes by choosing one that was similar terrain-wise, using BiomeTweaker to add any with no counterpart. Would GC properly climate-sort those biomes if I pulled them in with external_biomes? And then could I generate them with RTG successfully? Then I could use Recurrent Complex to populate the decoration structures and at least have a version of the biomes even if the terrain is not equivalent.
If that process would work, then I would request a couple of climate tags be added to GC if that's not too big a deal; one that equates to WARM,HOT, and one that equates to SNOWY,COOL. There are several edge-type biomes that would actually span climate zones in that way, and for them to be able to generate against either source biome in, say, a latitudinal world, they need to belong to both groups.
If the BiomeBundle biomes can be placed, then the external_biomes will work. CC will create configs for all the biomes in the main config, and you can set the IDS, climates, etc. They will not work in RTG worlds because they aren't written as RTG biomes - you'll just get plains where they're supposed to go.
What do you mean by "edge biome"? A WARM/HOT climate biome would generate all over in both WARM and HOT climates. Something only on a WARM/HOT boundary wouldn't be just there. If you mean an "edge" biome like Beach or Extreme Hills Edge those are all hard-coded and additional code would have to put them in specific biomes.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Yes, I understand that about the climates. What I meant was that in TC/biomebundle they are literally border biomes, but for my purposes they are biomes that could appropriately be grouped with either the WARM or the HOT biomes because they are a transition between the two. For example, a biome that transitions between desert, which is HOT, and jungle, which is WARM, would look appropriate in either group but could only be seen in one or the other with the current tags.
Yes, it had occurred to me that RTG would be a problem unless there was some way to write compatibility for the biomebundle biomes. Which probably isn't an appropriate thing to do to anything but a private version, since they aren't really biomes at all outside of TC worlds.
I guess really what I'm trying to achieve is a way to insert custom biomes without having to program my own biome-adding mod. That's basically what TC provides, and biomebundle takes advantage of, and I'm trying to hack together a way to backdoor that into RTG generation instead of TC. Probably futile, but the powerful combination of BT+CC/GC+RTG makes it seem like it's just out of reach, needing only that one final step to be taken.
I guess in my dream version of things you would create biomes with vanilla parameters in BiomeTweaker and have Geographicraft pick those up and provide the climate framework (ideally with humidity also), and then have config options in RTG where you could say, "generate this with the xx algorithm, and decorate with these (RTG or non-RTG) objects and this ore/resource spawn." Then it's all controlled by scripting without having to program BiomeGenBase's and all that hassle. Decoration could even be split between RTG and RecurrentComplex if necessary and/or possible.
What you're talking about would be nice, but pretty hard. We are working on a system to meld RTG and non-RTG biomes, and we have a test branch that can do it. Performance is bad, though, and the test branch is diverged from our current systems, meaning it's work to merge it in. TC and BB would have to make their terrain functions available outside of TC worlds as well. Currently AFAIK there's no way to get them if you're not in a "TerrainControl" world.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Yes, I'm sure that any attempt to make general-case script-run world generation would run into performance issues pretty quickly. You can't make any assumptions about shortcuts, and so are forced into a brute-force or worst-case approach too often.
See, I think about it completely backwards from your point of view. I would gladly give up TC and BB generation. I'm not trying to achieve block-for-block fidelity. I just want to capture the essence of the terrain character. In my view what would be needed is for RTG to make their terrains externally available so that a biome config could specify generator=rolling_hills or generator=snowy_mountain or whatever names you use internally. Then the surface/filler/mix blocks and decoration objects create the variety over that basic terrain shape. Essentially, instead of team-RTG choosing the realisitc biome, the config would tell RTG which generic realistic terrain algorithm to use for a given biome. How do-able that is depends a lot also on how much has to be hard-coded for a given terrain algorithm to work with smoothing, transitions, beaches, etc. It's certainly a lot of work either way, and I don't know if that sounds like where you guys want to take RTG. I think it fits within the scope, but may not be the right direction. Certainly performance would suffer, and might make it all unworkable regardless.
Really I started investigating BiomeBundle looking for an alternative to BOP biomes, which I have begun to find tiresome over the course of their development. It seems like the unique ones were dropped or their generation parameters were changed to the point that they feel interchangeable rather than distinct. Dunno. Maybe it's just color choices. I can't really put my finger on it. They do seem a little preoccupied with dead stuff.
Anyway, I'd much prefer to use RTG terrains than TC if I could somehow get TC's biomes into RTG. But I'd need realistic versions of the biomes somehow, and I don't even know if TC puts them into the vanilla biome array at all. I'm not clear on how it handles biomes <256, but not vanilla. Obviously it has to convert biomes >256 to something <256 for saving to the files, but it's not clear if something like 125 is accessible to a mod like Geographicraft if TC isn't generating the terrain. The number is valid, of course, but a TC terrain doesn't really have any generation parameters outside of TC worlds, so I'm not sure how vanilla would generate 125 if it existed in the normal biome array. Maybe it just adds it to the biome array, but not the generation groups, so it would never be generated in the world except by TC.
So, after all that, just want to say that i LOVE Geographicraft and Underground BIomes. They are an indispensable addition to any sort of worldgen. Maybe somebody will find a way to make my dream happen. It could even be me. :-)
We are looking at making some of the RTG terrain routines available to outside mods. A lot of the Biome Bundle biomes, and probably most of the ones you'd really want, would require some customized terrain routines, which could also be done from outside, although I've found making "good" terrains is a nontrivial learned skill, and different with the 2D noises of RTG than with the 3D noises of vanilla and TC. The last issue is that even when you know what you're doing, making 400 biome terrains is substantial work - similar to writing BB itself.
If your complaint is that BoP biomes in RTG are too similar, that might be something to take up with me. The terrains are my work, mostly trying to mimic the BoP terrains, of course. There are quite a few that use stock RTG routines, generally because the BoP terrains didn't seem to be anything special - frequently the point of the biome seems to be the biota. The biota is basically theirs.
That said, a relatively small set of biomes just gets too familiar after a while and that's not easily avoided. I am working on making biomes vary more spatially but it does take work.
If you are interested, it is quite possible for an outside mod to add biomes to RTG. The RTG team Appalachia mod does it. You have to directly access some of our internal code, but while it's not officially part of an API it's relatively stable.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Yeah, it is a massive amount of work, even if it becomes possible. I think perhaps the biggest problem with terrain in general is scale. Mountains IRL look great because they're 3 miles across. When you try to cram the same effect into 300m of space it's going to look forced. So I agree about it being a learned skill. What is mathematically correct and what is visually pleasing are sometimes curiously at odds with each other, unless you have the time and computing power to do everything. Good visual shortcuts are often quite unintuitive.
No, I have no problem with your terrains. Truth be told, I haven't even run RTG yet. My only experience with it is through pictures. I was referring to normal BOP generation. Perhaps the problem is just the small variety of terrains and not really anything inherently wrong with BOP at all.
I might be interested in writing an outside mod that adds to RTG. I'll have to look into it and play around some more, but realistically I'll probably never get around to doing it the hard way. I have too many features I'd like to include in a personal modpack already that will almost certainly never see the light of day. :-) I've already spent too many years trying to track down a combination of mods that will tweak the game the way I'd like it, and I end up tweaking and testing and configuring so much that I never get around to actually playing. I'm trying to cut back my expectations a bit so I might actually enjoy the game, and anyway my main focus is building right now, rather than survival. I'll probably just go with whatever seems good enough, but without TC being affected by Geographicraft it's most likely I'll end up using RTG. Though it would be nice to be able to include your 1.10.2 port of Highlands and not just BOP.
You desperately need to work on your documentation. I don't understand how to use this mod at all. After install forge loads it properly(mod options and such), but nothing changes? no menu, no messages? Where's the FAQ or or even a how to video? You claim to help us change how the world is generated but I'm seeing no changes.
Ah, so that's why some people on my server were going crazy trying to find a brushland biome, which is where the ebony trees spawn. Can I re enable it in the configs or will that cause problems with an already created world?
If you haven't turned off the chunk wall prevention by changing I:biomeRingsNotSaved then you should be able to change configs without trouble. I do it all the time. I would recommend testing just to make sure - you can test on a copy and then throw it out. You will usually have to go about 1000 blocks further out from where you've gone before to find new biomes.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Coral Reef and Kelp Forest show up as sub-biomes of Ocean, and I don't currently have a way programmed in GC to stop that. But if you disable the biomes in BoP that should stop them. Did you try that?
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Is it at all possible to incorporate theOverworld biomes from AbyssalCraft into the terrain generation for GeographiCraft? Not sure if this has been asked before but a search of the thread turned up nil. Asking, since you kinda need the components of that mod's biomes to even begin to properly make use of AbyssalCraft's offerings.
The first question would be whether GC is doing anything. My preferred test is to set up an extreme ocean world - no start continent, small islands about 15, and all other landmasses at 0 - and see if I start in such an ocean world. If it is I can create a partial biome package (the way to get outside biomes in) and see if I can pull in the biomes.
Edit: with that system you'll probably see no Biome Bundle biomes. You could try forcing some in with external biomes if you know the IDs.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Well, I've been pursuing a different tack on this. I have a couple of questions, and depending on the answers maybe a feature request.
My idea was to "fake" the biomebundle biomes by adding them as vanilla/BOP/etc (supported mod) biomes by choosing one that was similar terrain-wise, using BiomeTweaker to add any with no counterpart. Would GC properly climate-sort those biomes if I pulled them in with external_biomes? And then could I generate them with RTG successfully? Then I could use Recurrent Complex to populate the decoration structures and at least have a version of the biomes even if the terrain is not equivalent.
If that process would work, then I would request a couple of climate tags be added to GC if that's not too big a deal; one that equates to WARM,HOT, and one that equates to SNOWY,COOL. There are several edge-type biomes that would actually span climate zones in that way, and for them to be able to generate against either source biome in, say, a latitudinal world, they need to belong to both groups.
If the BiomeBundle biomes can be placed, then the external_biomes will work. CC will create configs for all the biomes in the main config, and you can set the IDS, climates, etc. They will not work in RTG worlds because they aren't written as RTG biomes - you'll just get plains where they're supposed to go.
What do you mean by "edge biome"? A WARM/HOT climate biome would generate all over in both WARM and HOT climates. Something only on a WARM/HOT boundary wouldn't be just there. If you mean an "edge" biome like Beach or Extreme Hills Edge those are all hard-coded and additional code would have to put them in specific biomes.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Yes, I understand that about the climates. What I meant was that in TC/biomebundle they are literally border biomes, but for my purposes they are biomes that could appropriately be grouped with either the WARM or the HOT biomes because they are a transition between the two. For example, a biome that transitions between desert, which is HOT, and jungle, which is WARM, would look appropriate in either group but could only be seen in one or the other with the current tags.
Yes, it had occurred to me that RTG would be a problem unless there was some way to write compatibility for the biomebundle biomes. Which probably isn't an appropriate thing to do to anything but a private version, since they aren't really biomes at all outside of TC worlds.
I guess really what I'm trying to achieve is a way to insert custom biomes without having to program my own biome-adding mod. That's basically what TC provides, and biomebundle takes advantage of, and I'm trying to hack together a way to backdoor that into RTG generation instead of TC. Probably futile, but the powerful combination of BT+CC/GC+RTG makes it seem like it's just out of reach, needing only that one final step to be taken.
I guess in my dream version of things you would create biomes with vanilla parameters in BiomeTweaker and have Geographicraft pick those up and provide the climate framework (ideally with humidity also), and then have config options in RTG where you could say, "generate this with the xx algorithm, and decorate with these (RTG or non-RTG) objects and this ore/resource spawn." Then it's all controlled by scripting without having to program BiomeGenBase's and all that hassle. Decoration could even be split between RTG and RecurrentComplex if necessary and/or possible.
What you're talking about would be nice, but pretty hard. We are working on a system to meld RTG and non-RTG biomes, and we have a test branch that can do it. Performance is bad, though, and the test branch is diverged from our current systems, meaning it's work to merge it in. TC and BB would have to make their terrain functions available outside of TC worlds as well. Currently AFAIK there's no way to get them if you're not in a "TerrainControl" world.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Yes, I'm sure that any attempt to make general-case script-run world generation would run into performance issues pretty quickly. You can't make any assumptions about shortcuts, and so are forced into a brute-force or worst-case approach too often.
See, I think about it completely backwards from your point of view. I would gladly give up TC and BB generation. I'm not trying to achieve block-for-block fidelity. I just want to capture the essence of the terrain character. In my view what would be needed is for RTG to make their terrains externally available so that a biome config could specify generator=rolling_hills or generator=snowy_mountain or whatever names you use internally. Then the surface/filler/mix blocks and decoration objects create the variety over that basic terrain shape. Essentially, instead of team-RTG choosing the realisitc biome, the config would tell RTG which generic realistic terrain algorithm to use for a given biome. How do-able that is depends a lot also on how much has to be hard-coded for a given terrain algorithm to work with smoothing, transitions, beaches, etc. It's certainly a lot of work either way, and I don't know if that sounds like where you guys want to take RTG. I think it fits within the scope, but may not be the right direction. Certainly performance would suffer, and might make it all unworkable regardless.
Really I started investigating BiomeBundle looking for an alternative to BOP biomes, which I have begun to find tiresome over the course of their development. It seems like the unique ones were dropped or their generation parameters were changed to the point that they feel interchangeable rather than distinct. Dunno. Maybe it's just color choices. I can't really put my finger on it. They do seem a little preoccupied with dead stuff.
Anyway, I'd much prefer to use RTG terrains than TC if I could somehow get TC's biomes into RTG. But I'd need realistic versions of the biomes somehow, and I don't even know if TC puts them into the vanilla biome array at all. I'm not clear on how it handles biomes <256, but not vanilla. Obviously it has to convert biomes >256 to something <256 for saving to the files, but it's not clear if something like 125 is accessible to a mod like Geographicraft if TC isn't generating the terrain. The number is valid, of course, but a TC terrain doesn't really have any generation parameters outside of TC worlds, so I'm not sure how vanilla would generate 125 if it existed in the normal biome array. Maybe it just adds it to the biome array, but not the generation groups, so it would never be generated in the world except by TC.
So, after all that, just want to say that i LOVE Geographicraft and Underground BIomes. They are an indispensable addition to any sort of worldgen. Maybe somebody will find a way to make my dream happen. It could even be me. :-)
We are looking at making some of the RTG terrain routines available to outside mods. A lot of the Biome Bundle biomes, and probably most of the ones you'd really want, would require some customized terrain routines, which could also be done from outside, although I've found making "good" terrains is a nontrivial learned skill, and different with the 2D noises of RTG than with the 3D noises of vanilla and TC. The last issue is that even when you know what you're doing, making 400 biome terrains is substantial work - similar to writing BB itself.
If your complaint is that BoP biomes in RTG are too similar, that might be something to take up with me. The terrains are my work, mostly trying to mimic the BoP terrains, of course. There are quite a few that use stock RTG routines, generally because the BoP terrains didn't seem to be anything special - frequently the point of the biome seems to be the biota. The biota is basically theirs.
That said, a relatively small set of biomes just gets too familiar after a while and that's not easily avoided. I am working on making biomes vary more spatially but it does take work.
If you are interested, it is quite possible for an outside mod to add biomes to RTG. The RTG team Appalachia mod does it. You have to directly access some of our internal code, but while it's not officially part of an API it's relatively stable.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Yeah, it is a massive amount of work, even if it becomes possible. I think perhaps the biggest problem with terrain in general is scale. Mountains IRL look great because they're 3 miles across. When you try to cram the same effect into 300m of space it's going to look forced. So I agree about it being a learned skill. What is mathematically correct and what is visually pleasing are sometimes curiously at odds with each other, unless you have the time and computing power to do everything. Good visual shortcuts are often quite unintuitive.
No, I have no problem with your terrains. Truth be told, I haven't even run RTG yet. My only experience with it is through pictures. I was referring to normal BOP generation. Perhaps the problem is just the small variety of terrains and not really anything inherently wrong with BOP at all.
I might be interested in writing an outside mod that adds to RTG. I'll have to look into it and play around some more, but realistically I'll probably never get around to doing it the hard way. I have too many features I'd like to include in a personal modpack already that will almost certainly never see the light of day. :-) I've already spent too many years trying to track down a combination of mods that will tweak the game the way I'd like it, and I end up tweaking and testing and configuring so much that I never get around to actually playing. I'm trying to cut back my expectations a bit so I might actually enjoy the game, and anyway my main focus is building right now, rather than survival. I'll probably just go with whatever seems good enough, but without TC being affected by Geographicraft it's most likely I'll end up using RTG. Though it would be nice to be able to include your 1.10.2 port of Highlands and not just BOP.
You desperately need to work on your documentation. I don't understand how to use this mod at all. After install forge loads it properly(mod options and such), but nothing changes? no menu, no messages? Where's the FAQ or or even a how to video? You claim to help us change how the world is generated but I'm seeing no changes.
There's some documentation is in the configs, and in the OP.
Generate a world without GC, and then re-generate it with GC installed, and you'll see a difference.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Mangrove is a sub-biome and Quagmire used to be disabled in BoP. Orchard is a mistake, and Brushland is a newer biome I haven't looked at yet.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Ah, so that's why some people on my server were going crazy trying to find a brushland biome, which is where the ebony trees spawn. Can I re enable it in the configs or will that cause problems with an already created world?
If you haven't turned off the chunk wall prevention by changing I:biomeRingsNotSaved then you should be able to change configs without trouble. I do it all the time. I would recommend testing just to make sure - you can test on a copy and then throw it out. You will usually have to go about 1000 blocks further out from where you've gone before to find new biomes.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
OK, thanks. I'm still seeing kelp forest and coral reef ocean biomes despite those being set to 0 as well.
Coral Reef and Kelp Forest show up as sub-biomes of Ocean, and I don't currently have a way programmed in GC to stop that. But if you disable the biomes in BoP that should stop them. Did you try that?
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Ah, OK. I didn't want to disable them, but I was wondering why they were spawning and brushland wasn't. What would happen if those were set to 1 also?
You mean -1? They should go away. You can't do that with an existing world, though, because it'll probably crash if you go near one.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Nah, 1. They're currently at 0. If I did a find and replace for incidence=0 to change it to incidence=1 will it do anything weird?
No, not the incidence. There's a way to shut them off in BoP. Incidences and such shouldn't matter then, they just won't generate.
Geographicraft (formerly Climate Control) - Control climate, ocean, and land sizes; stop chunk walls; put modded biomes into Default worlds, and more!
RTG plus - All the beautiful terrain of RTG, plus varied and beautiful trees and forests.
Is it at all possible to incorporate theOverworld biomes from AbyssalCraft into the terrain generation for GeographiCraft? Not sure if this has been asked before but a search of the thread turned up nil. Asking, since you kinda need the components of that mod's biomes to even begin to properly make use of AbyssalCraft's offerings.