Adding Biomes to Voxelworld/Other Terrain Generation Upgrades

Recently I’ve added biomes and made some upgrades to the terrain generation of Voxelworld. You can check out a demo video on Youtube. Don’t worry, the old world generation is still available as “Old” style generation.

I’ve mostly made two changes: updating terrain generation and adding biomes.

Terrain Generation

A large mountain.

Terrain generation now has three parameters: base elevation, elevation, and steepness. Elevation is added onto the base height based on steepness, if steepness is close to 0, not much is added, and if it is closer to 1, then more is added. This creates the potential for some hilly regions, steep mountains, and flat plains at varying heights (allowing for oceans if base height and steepness are low enough). Another independent noise function determines mountain height, if the mountain height exceeds the terrain height by a sufficient amount, the terrain turns from grass into stone and if the mountain generates high enough, then the surface block turns into snow. One interesting quirk about the mountain generation is that sometimes the mountains don’t generate that high above the terrain so you will end up seeing the occasional “stone hill” which looks a bit odd but I like them so I intend on keeping them in the game.

All of this combined seems to create a fairly diverse set of terrain features.

Biomes

A snow/arctic biome.

A desert biome.

The main parameter that controls biomes is temperature: if the temperature is below 0.25, then it is an “arctic” biome, and if the temperature is above 0.75, then it is a desert biome. Arctic biomes have snow and ice generates on top of bodies of water. This does create an interesting effect where if an arctic biome generates above a large body of water (an ocean if you will), it creates an “icy ocean” which is kind of fun. In deserts, the ground is made up sand and you can find cacti and dead bushes.

There is also a tree generation noise function which determines how many trees should generate in an area, this creates areas with high densities of trees (like forests) and areas with few/no trees (kind of like plains).

A thing to note is that mountains will override whatever biome generated in a location.

This added on top of the terrain generation creates for some nice looking and diverse worlds, which I like a lot.

Conclusion

A nice view from a mountain.

Anyway, this post was a quick update on the development of Voxelworld. One of the issues that I currently have with the new generation though is that it can be rather laggy at times so I am trying to think of ways I can optimize it. Once I manage to get that sorted out, another feature that I want to add for the v0.4.0 update for Voxelworld is a survival mode test, which I think would be a lot of fun.

Anyway, that’s it, have a nice day!