Tech: New grass and world builder changes

Devlog
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The two big semantic changes with the long grass in Oort development is the addition of varying height long grass (not just a visual thing), and that the long grass is now driven by the grass blocks themselves, rather than long-grass blocks that are put on-top of the grass like flowers.

This means changes to the world builder and generation process!

These changes boil down to there no longer being a LONG_GRASS block at all, and instead of adding a smooth-decoration in the world builder that produces patches of long grass blocks, we instead use a GRASS substrate, which allows defining extra parameters and noise functions that control how tall the grass is around the biome.

To visualise this, there will be a new toggle in some of the visualisations that darken the world, and show foliage height in terms of brightness (brighter grass = taller grass).

longgrass.png1757×936 980 KB

As usual, loading old world configurations will have them automatically migrate so that you should only need to tweak things rather than creating worlds from scratch.

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Bumping the post for new readers.

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That’s a really cool addition! great work!

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Will the old worlds have the new grass too?

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There is a migration in place that seeds the grass blocks based on the location of the long-grass blocks before removing them so old worlds will have new grass. Of course, ‘brand new’ generated worlds will have much ‘nicer’ new grass since they have much more freedom on how the grass is generated (eg meadows of medium length grass, or tall grass, or short patchy grass, rather than old worlds which will always be long grass where long grass used to be, and then a very short gradient of long -> medium -> short patchy -> tiny patches)

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