Mountain Biome... We Need To Talk. It's not you, it's me. Okay maybe it's you.

It's not that you're not pretty Mountain Biome, it's just that there are so many other much prettier biomes out there, and so much an eroticburrito can take.
I'm sick of you showing up when I'm trying to get it on with a 0 height Tropical Biome, Mountain Biome. It's weird, and quite frankly off-putting. And what's worse, this isn't the first time you've just turned up unannounced!
You totally ruined my game with that hot Desert Planet the other night. I mean what was that? The Desert Planet wasn't wet enough, so you arrive with your snow-capped mountains? That was so awkward, Mountain Biome. Where did you even get the water for that?

Do you know what, Mountain Biome, I don't even want to know. I've had it with your nonsense, I can't keep going on like this.

Now would you please just leave before I start to cry? And take... take your chessboard with you. I don't want that rubbing up against all the other pretty Biomes on my planet. Please, just leave.

... Get out.

I SAID GET THE HELL OUT.
*throws chessboard at Mountain Biome as it rolls out of the room*

Edit 3... or 4.: When I ordered you from the catalogue, you looked a lot more shapely... If only...

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Edit:
A few Biome Threads and Polls showing what people like in their Biomes:
The Biome Crossover thread. - This one has a suggestion of how the different variables could be altered to grant more control in the editor and allow for Biomes to overlap.
The Coastal Texture thread. - This one suggests a Coastal Texture Slider for creating anything from swirly sandy coastlines (or broken up island coastlines if that's not do-able), to straight beaches to cliffs to jagged, rocky continents.
Those are the Aesthetic ones...
There is the Environmental Effects thread too

Edit 2:
This is a post from the Biome Crossover thread suggesting how the System Editor could be changed to make more sense (e.g. height = mountains, humidity (water+height) = types of vegetation) and allow more control/crossover biomes:

Best of all, this system could use the CSG and Art already in place; we already have some grey Mountains in Jungles - none of that would need to be scrapped.
It'd open new opportunities like Mesa Jungles and Flat Deserts, and grant a lot more control in the editor.

Obviously this would be more work for Uber, but it'd lead to a huge variation in biomes which would create some really pretty worlds. We already have the individual biomes with their CSG/trees - it'd just be a case of making sure they overlapped properly and colouring some CSG differently if there was enough water/heat for grass/pines/jungle.

I love using the System Editor, I just wish we had more control/variation

I see biome with no....mountains.

Can we rename it Shiny Hill Biome?

Remove it until it can be improved as the lava planets were removed for a time.



Or: TA OP. PA UP.

I don't normally like liking things, but I really would like to like this, like, maybe seven more times.

I liked the fact that you'd like to like it
FYI Mountain Biome is now back on the market.

Agree with you on every point there. high altitude = mountain biome doesn't make all that much sense to me either, and I think the settings for it should be independent of water height.
I'm not sure how the terrain texture is decided, but right now the frequency of light and dark patches occurs over a single octave. Lava planets and ice planets to a lesser extent have the same issue in places as well. It's really ugly. Not sure if it's possible to give it multiple octaves of noise, but if it is, it would improve the appearance drastically.

I've made a couple of threads in the past suggesting how Planet Generation controls could be altered to give us more control/allow for mixed biomes.
Let me see if I can dig them out.

Edit:
The Biome Crossover thread, which shows how popular these would be.
The Coastal Texture thread, another popular one.

These are only the Aesthetic ones. There is the Environmental Effects thread which we (sort of) saw canned despite like 80%+ of people wanting some form of environmental effects.

I should create a thread for polls...

Yeah... I'm not a fan of the mountain biome either. :-(

I've seen them I think. I've got my own ideas for it as well, thought about making a thread before.
I'm almost certain I will soon, because there's a pretty big issue with terrain height generation that I think needs to be addressed, and the sooner the better because it will probably require changing all the seeded outputs for terrain height. It's the one I mentioned in the "similar seeds" thread; turns out it's extremely common, and the only reason I can think of for that is if seeds affect the gradient values and that the simplex noise algorithm uses the same permutation table for every planet. What that means is that planet generation is deceptively limited; there are far fewer "different" planets than there are seeds, because there are only a few gradient values to change. If there are 10 gradients, that means the terrain of every planet can be described as a linear combination of 30 different terrain maps (for planets of that size). Chances are there aren't many more than 10 gradients, as within 30 or so planets, you are very likely to find a pair that are nearly identical.

Edit: forgot, 2 dimensions => 2 basis vectors each. So that's actually a linear combination of 20 height maps if PA uses 2D gradient noise to generate terrain height.

Dump it and get yourself a nice artificial Metal Biome. You know exactly what you're getting - two holes and some pretty trenches.

There's still so many issues with pathing on the metal biomes though. I really want to use them, but using land units on those are so difficult.

Merh er herh. Yes but it's improving. I host 10-player FFAs on them.
Nukes and Catapults are an issue as ever of course. Quick buildspeed/Lack of counter.

*English student struggling to learn basic Ruby/MSQrL nods his head.*
Yes, of course.

Think of it like this; you have a set S of, say, 300 vectors. Each one will represent the gradient at some point on a map, but the specifics are not very important.
Now, you want a selection of possible gradients to use in that series of vectors. So, you have 4 different possible vectors (the number you can have is arbitrary), which you generate with a pseudo random function. These will be vectors a,b,c,d
What the permutation table is, is a way to set each of the 300 vectors to one of the 4 we calculated. It should also be pseudo-random. Basically, it's
S={a,d,c,b,d,a,c,b...}
And that's where the problem lies. If you have a random table S and reuse a,b,c & d, then you will have similar gradients in different places in different maps. Overall planets will look different, but there would be some common features on occasion. You have 300^4 possible combinations with no self-information.
Having random values for a,b,c,d but reusing the same S for each planet will have more obvious consequences. The chance that 8 values will be fairly similar to 8 other values is fairly large . And when that happens, the two planets will have an overall terrain layout that is just as similar.

I agree, I always have a small fight with the planet creator because of the mountain biome popping up at the worst places.

reads op
me: "da fug?"

so i take it mountainbiomes == limited buildspace ?

Plus they don't blend with the planet or biomes around them. A desert planet with mountains will have snow on the peaks. The gray from mountains also looks weird on lush terran planets.

I like mountain biome

Burn the heretic!!!



(just kiddin')

Maybe "mountains" should be an on/off toggle.

There are times when I'd like them but other times when I wish I could make a particular type of earth-type biome without mountains showing up. One reason I switched to lava biome was just that it doesn't get those mountains.