Organizing Biome Attributes

Hello everyone!

This isn't going to be a very interesting post, but I spent most of my time today re-organizing various biome attributes. Previously, I had a system that looked like this:

Example

I had a script with a ridiculous number of arguments - and GameMaker has an argument limit... and I don't like limits. I wanted to do more biome improvements (among those improvements biome transitions).

The transitions between biomes aren't particularly smooth. While the biomes are aligned by temperature, there's no smooth transition in blocks between biomes. If a desert is next to a mountain, the sand will instantly change to stone. I wanted to fix that today, but I found that I had reached the argument limit with my chunk generation script! The solution? Enums (enumerators)!

​I set up a huge list of enums for all of the different biomes, and then modified the generation script to only require 3 arguments (allowing me to set an indefinite amount of parameters for biomes without using any more arguments).

Now, I can reference parameters of any biome like this:

Example

This allows for easy manipulation and easy accessibility of the biome's parameters. With me now having access to an indefinite amount of parameters, I can now work on things like the biome's transitions, which I hope to have done by tomorrow. Sorry for a boring coding devblog today... I'll have a more interesting one tomorrow!

Until next time!